Strategy & Ideas

For an upcoming project at TOPP, we’re talking about setting up an optional scope contract [PDF] — where we specify the time, cost and quality, but leave the actual scope of work open.  This approach has many advantages, which I’ll just quote from Beck & Cleal’s document: Customers can change their ...

I get way too much spam in my inbox, even just counting things I’ve signed up for myself.  Most of it I delete, but today’s email from CoTweet stood out, and is worth mentioning. A while back I signed up for CoTweet, just to check it out — nutshell: CoTweet lets you collaboratively monitor and… Cont...

I had a great crowdsourcing experience yesterday. Here at TOPP Labs, we’re doing a 6-month check-in on our annual employee reviews.  What that means for me is a 30-minute interview with each of the folks on my team (about 20 in total), where we look back on the past six months to see how we’re… Cont...

Over at TOPP, we’ve been talking recently about the “spectrum of engagement” — in other words, providing a variety of ways that people can engage with a website, ranging from quick & easy (e.g., thumbs-up-ing something) to slow and involved (e.g., writing a blog post or signing up for an account).  ...

This week, TOPP moved into additional, (maybe) temporary office space, to alleviate some of the crowding at our office in the West Village.  We were looking for a place that was convenient, comfortable, and most of all, available immediately (backstory is that we’ve been basically sitting on top of ...

“Release early and often” is a phrase often heard in software development, and is more like a mantra for most web development projects.  The idea being that it’s better to get something “out there” in a simple or reduced form, rather than wait and wait and wait for your grand plan to come together. ...

A few months ago, I wrote up a simple javascript photo gallery viewer for a side project, so I thought I’d offer it up to the world. It’s unobtrusive javascript, and it takes a simple list of photos and turns it into a slidey slide show. It’s built on top of the Ext Javascript Framework,… Continue r...

In addition to being the first day of summer, yesterday was the second annual Make Music New York festival. It’s really an incredible event — musicians of all abilities and genres take to the streets to play free mini-concerts. The event came to NYC for the first time last year, and we had a great… ...

This week, a handful of us from the Livable Streets team at TOPP are out in Portland, OR visiting the 8th International Towards Carfree Cities conference. Tomorrow morning, we’ll be giving a presentation entitled “Street Fight!  Lessons from the NYC Livable Streets Movement.”  So far, we’ve had a gr...

Yesterday, American Airlines announced that it’s going to start charging a fee for checked baggage. Of course, this will draw the ire of frequent and not-so-frequent flyers everywhere. But, perhaps it makes some sense. What’s making flying expensive right now is the cost of fuel. So, if people pack ...