All Strabucks aren't created equal

Some Starbucks stores don't have ovens - not sure why. Doesn't seem to be a "size" thing since the one I'm at this morning is as big as others I've been at. Maybe its a ventilation thing. Note sure.

 
But I know that a multi-grain bagel isn't the same when not toasted; at room temperature, its like eating tasty cardboard.

PS: What's the plural of Strabucks?

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More than a weekend project

I composed this post back in July, 2008, but never clicked Publish.

Since mid-Feb, my good friend Tom and I have been working on a web project: ScoobyDeal.com, is a deal-at-a-time social commerce site for cool gadgets and great deals. We're down to the last week of testing and bugfixing. I think of this project as my Guy Kawasaki how-I-built-a-web-site for under $X.

This is a v1 of ScoobyDeal with plans to add other social features. This post lays it all out for posterity.

We started the project Mid-Feb and have been working with an awesome team distributed globally on the implementation while doing the product/project management and testing State-side. So here is the breakdown.

One-time Costs:

• Corporate entity: $115, DIY at the Secretary of State's office in San Francisco.
• UI Design (mockups and flows): in- house with endless hours with Adobe Illustrator and lots of help from good friends.
• UI Development: $935 Web Cake, Cairo, Egypt. Initial concepts State-side $350.
• Web Development: $24,500 Idea2It, Chennai, India.
• Logo: $125 Ukraine.
• Copy: in-house (the typos are my fault).

Infrastructure:

• PayPal Web Payments Pro for credit card processing.
• Google Maps API.
• Google Custom Search Engine.
• Ruby on Rails 2.0 on Aparche and Mongrel plus MySQL
• ImageMagick.

Ongoing Costs:

• Web Hosting: Virtual Private Server $49.99/mo. Server Point.
• Collaboration: $12/mo. Basecamp Personal Edition.
• Credit Card Processing: $30/mo. PayPal.
• Version Control and Bug Tracking: $49/year ProjectLocker Light Angel Edition.

Special Thanks:

• Kamo Asateryan for help with social marketing.
• Brodey Jenkins for creativitiy.
• Suren Markossian for help with instrastrucutre.
• Sanjay Kapoor for help with Ruby and Rails.
• Alex Chee for the initial design.
• Team Viewer for being such an awesome product.

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Octofeed.com and me

I tried out ocotofeed.com the other week. Octofeed is a cleaner way to read your Facebook Wall and Newsfeed. I liked it and turned my wife to it. She quickly noticed some posts from her feed weren't appearing in Octofeed. I emailed hello@octofeed.com and Daniel Chin-Yee responded promptly.

 It turns out that octofeed, like other apps, is at the mercy of the Facebook API's which don't pump all the content out. Plus, what gets pumped out to other apps varies by your friend's privacy settings. So the layout is great but you may not see everything. We've both cooled off Octofeed since. And here is the rest of it.

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