Rendition X

One more one word change

Kevin McDonald — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 19:34:17 +0000

I’ve posted many times about my love affair with Amazon Web Services but Amazon is often missing the mark by just a little bit with its marketing. It may seem like a small thing but changing one word could make a world of difference.

Check out this page for Mechanical Turk.
Amazon gets the headline correct with ‘Make Money’ but I mean really, who wants to “Learn more about being a worker”? I want to smack AMZN upside the head when I read copy like this. Marketing copy is clearly not my strongest skill (rev. 1 sausage making proof here) but any of these would be better. “Learn more and become an entrepreneur.” Or something about working for yourself…from home…anything but ‘worker’.

Naming a new company or product

Kevin McDonald — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 14:39:29 +0000

Naming a new company is one of those processes that can touch the broad spectrum of emotions in entrepreneurs and founders. One of my favorite sources for inspiration on the process of naming is Igor.

“That’s all I have to say about that.” – Forrest Gump

So I went to DrupalCon last week

Kevin McDonald — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:52:03 +0000

Drupal has been on my radar screen for about 18 months now. The open source content management platform has appeared in some areas I’ve been diving into like Open Calais (semantic markup), Solr (faceted search), and MongoDB (NoSQL). When an invite to a networking event at DrupalCon SF arrived it was a great excuse to dive deeper and take the pulse of the Drupal community.

Take aways from the event:

Wow, this is larger than I had expected. 3000+ attendees from various countries representing a wide range of industries- Double last year’s event AND take a look at this graphic of Drupal downloads growth.
If not every, nearly every company at the event was hiring. Maybe I should repeat that – Nearly every company was looking to hire experienced Drupal developers.
Impressive number of contributors to the core open source offering. While I couldn’t find the data from the keynote it was something like 40% of the development commits are done by 25 of developers and there are something like 4000 total contributors. (I’m going from memory if you know the slide I am referring to pls post it to the comments.) You could tell from the Twitter stream that this is a pretty happy/healthy community. I’m not certain what the proper measure for an open source community tipping point is but it sure feels like this one has passed it…
Acquia (a company founded by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert et al) is generally viewed as a positive force for the community rather than a competitor. I learned there are 67 boutique consulting services firms that specialize in Drupal and a couple of the big SIs were mentioned in the keynote as starting projects with their clients using Drupal. Acquia’s business model looks a bit like RedHat’s. As far as I could tell they were the only venture backed company exhibiting at the conference. Rackspace & Microsoft (Yes, Microsoft) being the only two public companies (again going from memory here). It will be interesting to see where the community leads the feature set of Drupal and how that compares to the needs of Acquia’s paying customers.

Bottom line – Drupal is hot.