Capesquared

Capesquared / Qurly — No Comments
20
Aug 10

Capesquared in the News

Even though we only got a one line mention, it’s still worth posting this link to the Syracuse Post-Standard.

Capesquared: The Web services company focuses on Web design.

We also got a stealth mention for our new product:

Qurly: This business developed an online engine that allows people to shorten and share multiple weblinks.

Even though Qurly is technically the flagship product of Capesquared, we’re glad to have the word getting out.

If you haven’t tried Qurly for yourself yet, hop on over to http://qur.ly and shorten up a bunch of links.

Capesquared — 1 Comment
18
Aug 10

New on Twitter: #2forTuesday

If you’re following either Shay Colson or Andrew Farah on Twitter, you may have noticed either of the following Tweets this morning:

“@ElizabethGall, @jadabumrad is a master storyteller. #radiolab#2forTuesday cc: @shaycolson”

“Hey @andrewfarah, @marshallk does a great job covering tech with no fluff and a NW feel. You’d dig his work.#2forTuesday.”

You may have also noticed the common hashtag: #2forTuesday. What is #2forTuesday? Read on to find out.

Start with #FollowFriday

To get to the origins of #2forTuesday, you must start at another popular Twitter phenomenon: #FollowFriday, or #FF for short. “Follow Friday” evolved as a way for Twitter users to share with their followers the accounts of some people or companies that they enjoy following. The creation of Follow Friday can be traced to a point in ancient Twitter history (several months ago) when Twitter stopped displaying mentions (messages that begin with an @username) unless you were also following the person being mentioned.

This dramatically reduced the ease with which you could find new, interesting people to follow on Twitter. Used to be that if someone you already followed was talking to someone else about something you were interested in, those conversation snippits would make their way into your timeline, and you could choose to follow nor not follow. With the change, however, the majority of these messages were cut out, and Twitter became much less open. Unless you were following both sides of the conversation already (i.e. a debate between your friends), you were likely to not see anything at all about the conversation taking place.

To solve this problem, #FollowFriday was born – allowing people to point out others who they enjoy following, and share them with their own followers. #FollowFriday has grown since then, and has become a common practice amongst Twitter users. So common, in fact, that many people push similar or identical groups out to their followers each and every Friday, adding to the massive amount of noise already so common on Twitter.

Capesquared has developed a solution to cut through the noise, and discover users worth following.

#2forTuesday

The idea behind #2forTuesday is that rather than following a group, it’s more valuable for a Twitter user to put in the time, thought, and energy to connect two people whom they follow, but who don’t follow each other.

By suggesting they connect through a tweet mentioning both users, the likelihood of quality content and follow-through with following goes up dramatically. What makes the difference? The addition of human curation.

Humans are excellent at sorting, processing, and categorizing information. Much better than computers, in fact, especially with complex information and multiple inputs. Think about all of the information processing your brain is required to do for your to walk, bike, or run – coordinating your muscles, looking, listening, feeling, thinking, sweating, dodging traffic, etc.

All of this, and more, is possible while using only a fraction of your computational potential. Put a little bit of that potential towards pairing two Twitter followers up each Tuesday, and you’ll generate some great matches, and maybe get some great recommendations in the process.

Stay tuned for more Twitter-based tools and products from Capesquared in the near future.

Capesquared / Upstart — 2 Comments
5
Aug 10

The Value of Community or Power Through Distribution

Capesquared has had a busy summer working in the Syracuse Technology Garden’s Student Sandbox. Two-thirds of the Capesquared team has also relocated to California this summer, one to Los Angeles and one to San Francisco; both to take on full-time positions and bask in the sun on the Golden Coast. Also, the basking part is complete BS – it’s never sunny in San Francisco.

What we’ve learned though this process, however, is that the value of being able to connect to others who are in a similar position is huge. For us, this means meeting up with other entrepreneurs who are driven by the idea that they might be able to make the world a better place through their work. There is some strange exchange of energy that seems to happen when you get these type of people together in a room. It can be seen at events all across the world, including Austin, Texas‘ SXSW, at technology incubators like the Student Sandbox, YCombinator, or TechStars, and in the basements, garages, and backrooms where many of these ventures begin.

In that vein, Capesquared is actively pursuing a larger, more engaged (and engaging) entrepreneurial community. Stay tuned to this space to learn more about this project, and to become a part of it. We will be seeking active, bootstrapped, and profitable participants in the not-too-distant future to pool resources, talents, and abilities with the goal of making our world, and each other, better.

Onward, together.

-Capesquared

Capesquared — No Comments
1
Jul 10

[Fiscal] Year In Review

As July dawns, and the days of summer truly begin, Capesquared is proud to celebrate a great 2009 Fiscal Year.

We completed the year by closing contracts with two clients, both located in Central New York. We hope that our work will help them enhance their web presence and provide their users and customers with a consistent place to get pertinent and accurate information.

We are also very thankful to have been offered a spot in the Tech Garden’s Student Sandbox. We are enjoying our time there this summer, finding it to be quite a productive place, and enjoying the interaction with the other companies in the Sandbox.

We have spent time this summer working on several projects – some of which will yield products and some of which will help us refine our own processes:

  1. Working Distributed. This summer has presented us with the challenge of continuing to move forward with our projects when our partners are located in different cities. In addition, schedules have been less than regular, and travel has consumed more of our time than we’d have liked. But, despite these potential setbacks, we have been able to forge ahead by learning new ways in which we can distribute and manage our own internal work processes.
  2. Human Conversations. While we can’t quite spill the beans yet, we are very close to launching the first instance of a tool that will let people have more meaningful, richer conversations with their trusted communities. Our new product will expand the conversation from a singular content addition to an infinite number of content additions – allowing for contrast, comparison, and other human-generated groupings. By allowing humans to group this content together in the course of their own conversations, this product will yield a distilled, concentrated, and human-verified version of what today’s popular search algorithms. This service will be free to use, and we are hoping to launch by the end of August, 2010.
  3. Work/Life Balance. It’s great, of course, to be able to devote some extra time over the summer to the various Capesquared projects that we’re involved in, but it’s also important to realize that the work/life balance that we all seek can be hard to achieve consistently. All three of the Capesquared partners have spent considerable time this summer with their families, in transition, and spending time with those they care about.

We are going to work through the summer, keeping up our momentum, and push hard through August. We are also looking forward to attacking a new set of problems, clients, and projects in the Fall.

Calendar year 2010, though half-over, has been great for Capesquared so far. Here’s to a strong second half, and a great start on FY 2010.

Capesquared — No Comments
11
May 10

Story Time

Anyone who knows me, knows that I love Google Reader. I also love the ease with which I can send articles I think someone might find interesting or pertinent. But my comments on the article are usually short, and a dialogue on the topic is rarely sustained.

So, recently, my partners at Capesquared and I instituted something we’re calling Story Time.

Story Time is a standing weekly meeting, based on the idea that the value of these articles is in reading and discussing, critiquing and applying, and that simply emailing them around fails to do this. These things must be discussed, in-person (or at least in real-time) to be truly worth the effort of reading and responding.

Story Time works like this:

  • Find ‘em, Send ‘em. Collect articles throughout the week, sending them as you find them.
  • Cutoff Times. Story Time articles must be submitted at least 24 hours prior to Story Time (i.e., if they don’t make the cutoff, they go to next week’s Story Time).
  • Rotating Curator. Someone makes a list of the articles that went out that week, and we move through them in the order they went out, oldest to newest. The curator changes weekly, to spread the work.
  • Time limits. Every article must be addressed, so the number of articles is divided by the amount of time of the meeting. We usually leave 15 minutes for the…
  • Bonus Round. Leave time at the end (10 or 15 minutes) to go back to the articles that were most interesting, or whose discussion got cut-off by the time limit.

So far, Story Time is working out great. It gives us a chance to discuss the happenings of the week, their relevance to our company, and also serves as a cornerstone of idea generation time. The reflections we’ve been able to generate even at this early stage have been more than worth the minimal amount of time it takes to stand up Story Time each week.

How do you deal with the daily deluge of digitally distributed discourse? If you don’t have any answer, maybe it’s Story Time.

Capesquared — No Comments
22
Apr 10

Insights On Our Design Philosophy

Some great work on prototyping and the refinement process (and commentary on business schools) from Tom Wujec at TED.

Capesquared — No Comments
3
Mar 10

New Math: Business + Blog = ?

Inc. Magazine has a blog post about the challenges that companies face when trying to use a blog to promote themselves.  The short version: it doesn’t work.

At Capesquared, we’ve read the article, and we agree.  That’s why we’re going to continue the roll out of the Capesquared blog, but with a conscious focus about relevant content.

What would relevant content be?  Well, things that we’re about, but also things that you’re about.  We’re interested in technology and how technology works, but we’re also in how technology changes the way you work.  So, we might post an article about Work and the iGeneration.

We’re interested in design, both aesthetically pleasing and functional.  So, we might post an article about some really cool letter press business cards.

We’re interested in human-driven solutions, collaboration, and innovation.  So, we might post an article about WorldChanging.com – and how we don’t always agree with this approach.

Finally, we’ll talk about projects that we’re involved with – and there are a bunch in the pipeline.

In short, we envision this space to be a place where interesting topics are discussed, where conversations are generated, and where our work, interests, and clients can intersect.

Please keep an eye on this space.  As the blog, and the business, continue to grow, it’s going to be a great ride.  We’d love to have you be a part of it.