Abe Burmeister is co-founder of Outlier, a web-based performance clothing company based in Brooklyn. He’s part of a crack team that made my favorite pants.

So, to start at the beginning, I’m interested to know what you were doing before you started Outlier, and the path you took to starting the company. So what’s that story?

I was an information designer making interfaces for real time stock networks. I was doing that freelance, but it was Wall Street, so there was money there. It was a great gig, basically. It was ten blocks from the garment district, so I would zip back and forth all the time. And, I could set my own hours because there’s basically nobody on Wall Street who knows anything about interaction design, or anything at all.

Did you already have the beginnings of the Outlier idea in your mind at that time? Or, did that come later?

There’s a lot of steps to it actually. I ran an animation company before this, in the early 2000’s. There was a certain point where my partners were in San Francisco, and I was here. My lease was expiring and I wasn’t able to renew it, so I had to leave my apartment. It was sort of a messy situation, but I realized I did all my work on a laptop and a cell phone, and I really didn’t need another apartment. I was going back and forth across the country all the time, so I was like, “I don’t need an apartment. I’m just going to get rid of everything I own and live out of a carry-on bag, no checked baggage.”

I did that for four years. The experience really educated me when it comes to clothing problems. I was already tuned to reduce my clothes. Half my bag was electronics, sometimes (those chargers were huge). So, it meant as little clothing as possible. I started really paying attention and figuring that stuff out. So that was the real seed for the idea. Then, there was actually a point for about a day when [Adam Greenfield](http://urbanscale.com), who is now more of an urban designer but was an interaction designer for a while, and has a bit of a name for himself, sat down with me and talked about starting a company to make clothes for business travelers. That went nowhere, but that was the initial stab, and then it was a long retreat.

How long ago was that, do you remember?

That was probably 2002, maybe.

So, what happened to get you across that gap?

I think it was cycling. I was cycling with jeans. When I started riding bikes all the time, I wasn’t wearing jeans. I was wearing much more durable pants, actually. Like, Army surplus. I wasn’t using it to get to meetings, I was just riding around the neighborhood in these Army pants that were actually really durable and an incredible fabric. Then I would go to a meeting and I would put on the meeting clothes. Then I started wearing jeans again, and they started falling apart constantly.

It’s weird to realize jeans are like 90% of our urban uniform.

Yeah. Jeans are some sort of pants that you don’t really care about. I think it’s shifting a bit right now, but in the middle of the 2000’s, forget about it. You wore jeans everywhere. Except when working with Wall Street clients, I couldn’t wear jeans there. It’s like, if you eat every day at the same place, you kind of figure out your routine, and your co-workers know “There’s the bike guy.” If you’re jumping from place to place and trying to figure out how you can walk into that door…

And change clothes?

Yeah, exactly. So, that was a huge part of it. This is a more subtle aspect, but when I was living out of a carry-on bag, I had a pair of these first Prada sports Gortex pants. There were one of three pairs of pants I had, or something. They were black Gortex. And they were really freaking loud, because Gortex is really loud. I would only wear them if I knew it was really raining, and then they started falling apart. I got them on sale, but I think the list price when I got them home was like $400. So, I decided to suck it up and replace them, but they didn’t make them anymore. They were totally gone. Not even a chance. I thought it was a core item and I’d just go get it. That really took it to the point where I had to figure out how to make something like them.

So, then, you mentioned that it’s rooted in your cycling. It sounds like you were addressing your own problem. Did you think about it as something that other cyclists were going to be into? Did you think about it as a cycling brand?

No. It was definitely not conceived as a cycling brand. I only briefly flirted with starting a company more for business travel. I knew that that was there, too. We didn’t think of it as a cycling brand, but we really wanted to keep the problems defined. As a designer, I wanted to think “This is the problem we’re trying to solve.” Bicycle commuting, for example. There’s a whole secondary market there. Really, anybody wearing clothes is almost like a secondary market. But, I very explicitly knew that people who were flying around and want to look good, and have to go to meetings or nice restaurants, that whole market was there, but we very explicitly didn’t want to lose the focus when we started. It was like, “Let’s just build these pants around urban cycling,” but we were very conscious from the get go that there was more to it. Then, as we went on, cycling started to feel more like a restriction, so we started moving away from it. But it’s still there.

It’s interesting because if clothing fits the requirements of riding a bike, it’s flexible, it’s lightweight, and it looks good. You can apply that to a lot of other things. It looks very good in photography, too.

The way we look at it is that nobody starts a clothing company with clothes you can’t wear on the subway, or in your car. It just doesn’t work. So why make clothes you can’t ride your bike in?

You look at photos of men in the 30’s, and everyone had a hat. Old photographs of Manhattan are just a sea of hats. Then all of a sudden everybody started driving, and you have to take off your hat and leave it in your car. You forget about it, and don’t know where you’re supposed to put it. Then, all of a sudden you just stop wearing hats. I can’t prove that that’s what happened, but as a designer, I like that story.

It sounds like you’re very much following your own path. As a designer, I’m interested if there are particular trends or products that of the past, or even present, that inspire you.

We stay aware of the market. There’s a whole world of technical clothing. These guys are making clothes so that you can go out into nature and basically be a loner with your crew of five people and it’s anti-social, essentially. We really took technical clothing, like what’s going on in the outdoor world, and allow another function there, which is the social function. That’s what fashion is. Sometimes it can seem extreme, but it’s a social function. We’re just trying to make clothes that are incredibly functional and that means not only functioning when you’re alone in the woods on a rock cliff, but also when you want to go eat and don’t want the hostess to look at you funny when you walk in the door. Part of comfort is feeling like you belong where you are, not to have everyone looking at you because you have Spandex on or whatever it happens to be.

Can you talk about where the desire to find new fabrics comes from, and how you go about it?

It was really rooted in the initial design problems. Can we make something that is more durable, moves better, and is water resistant? The first solution, all of that was in the fabric. So we had to figure that out. Then, what happened was that we rapidly discovered that there’s this whole world of unused fabrics. I had assumed when we started that companies like North Face or Patagonia are going to be using the best stuff, because those are the best outdoor brands. As soon as we got into it I found incredible fabric and thought “This is amazing. Why isn’t everybody using it?” It was a simple answer: it’s too expensive. Big brands are very price conscious. So they don’t use the best stuff. It’s crazy. There’s all this amazing fabric. They don’t get used. You have to hunt and find them. Like the fabric these pants are made of is an equestrian fabric. It’s what really special riding pants are made of. I don’t even really know who buys it, but that’s the market.

So, you found the best fabric for the job, and the found that the people out there were just not using it?

Yeah. We got really into it, because it’s incredible what the stuff can do, and how untapped it is. There’s technical brands that kind of shop by numbers, like “We need a fabric that passes this test, and this test, and this test,” and they forget about what it feels like, looks like, and sounds like. They think they have great numbers, and then they’ll test it with really extensive testing. “This stuff is amazing. It doesn’t snag on trees, and you can slide down rocks for twenty feet and get up, and it’s still waterproof.” For their use case, it’s great, but for our use case, it wasn’t relevant. The fabrics we’ve found was like finding a bag of gems and deciding “Okay. I’m going to learn about gems, and try to use them.”

What do you have to say about starting a company in a field that you weren’t already an expert in?

I’d never had a salary job in my life. I’ve always been a freelancer, or owned my own company. So, I had a natural inclination, there. But, I had a full-time freelance gig. For the first two years I was doing Outlier, and Tyler had a full-time job for the first year. We would run it at night. With the internet, nobody can check to see if you’re in the store. You can answer e-mails remotely. So, with Outlier, we were putting money into it, but it wasn’t that much. Just whatever we had kicking around. So I was working in the daytime and running the company at night.

So what was the path to finding customers?

Well the internet was important because we couldn’t sell the goods for a reasonable price with if we went to a traditional wholesale structure. That goes back to what I was saying about the reason why top outdoor brands aren’t using this stuff. When you wholesale it and it gets sold again, it ends up being $300, $400 dollars more. When we started out, we actually encountered a handful of people who said they were thinking about starting a company using these materials, but it seemed too expensive. So, the internet is key.

Luckily, I had experience building websites and hosting blogs. So, it was natural to me. I had actually built a site for a client that they never used, and it was literally a blog-driven store. They wanted a really rudimentary commerce, and I said to do it as a blog. That was a great site, and they never implemented it. So, I had that. And I said “Okay. We’re just going to take this product and put it on a blog, and then see what happens.” Sure enough, other people blogged about it, and all of a sudden there was an audience before we even had a product to sell. It’s very different than starting a business at almost any other time in history.

For a lot of this, when you design something that doesn’t exist on the market, it becomes a communication problem. You’re not really selling, you’re just communicating why it’s different. If it resonates with people, they’re going to pick up on it. If you’re solving a real problem, then you just have to communicate that you solved that problem, which is not necessarily easy.

Would you like to say anything about the direction the company is headed in?

We just keep trying to make better stuff, and that’s kind of it. We’ve learned a ton, and have people that know how to make clothes involved in the company now and things like that. We move quick. Actually, a lot of what we’ve been doing in the last three months is focusing on the design process. As we’ve gotten bigger, we need to go from just “I have a good idea. Let’s make it happen,” to “Let’s figure out how to make sure this works.” There are too many ideas in this world. Good ideas. Great ideas. The problem is figuring out which ones you want to execute. Which ones are actually distracting you from executing other things well.

Neil Carlson (together with is wife, Erin Carney) runs Brooklyn Creative League, a coworking space in Gowanus that caters to independent professionals, small-shop companies, and nonprofits. I spoke with him over coffee in the BCL’s downstairs kitchen.

So, can we start with the story behind Brooklyn Creative League?

Sure. I’m the co-founder of Brooklyn Creative League which I started about three years ago with my wife and business partner. We offer shared workspace for freelancers, small-shop companies, and non-profit organizations. We developed about 15,000 square feet of green office space, and we have about 150 members from a variety of different creative professions.

And what was the genesis? What came before BCL?

So the genesis is my wife, my business partner and I were both freelancing, both working from home, which was great when we had our first- born daughter. I could come out and play with her on the rug. Then it got to be a problem as she got older and she’d be knocking on the door during conference calls. So as I started looking around for office space in Brooklyn, the only thing I could find was a desk in the back of a real estate office. So I was like, there’s got to be a better solution.

So I started talking to other freelancers and started looking around at the market and we really realized that there are all these small, creative, entrepreneurial firms and independent professionals in the neighborhood. What we wanted and what I was looking for was a community of professionals and a well-designed, well-functioning workspace where I could ply my trade. So as we talked to people, we got some research through freelancers union, looked at the economic data and some census data and realized that there was really an opportunity to create the space and the professional community that we wanted to work in.

In your research I’m sure you came across lot of other people starting coworking spaces. It seems like it’s a growth industry in New York, and I’m interested in how you found or created a niche.

It is. I think coworking and shared office space is a growth industry. When we started it certainly wasn’t because the field hadn’t matured to the point where it is right now. I see Brooklyn Creative League as really threading the needle between a creating a community and the feeling of shared enterprise you get in a traditional coworking space (which are typically more informal than what we have here).

It’s typically café-style seating, not a whole lot of money put into the build-out and design of the space. So that’s one piece of it. That’s the kind of the coworking angle. Then the other side is more traditional office suites. What we really wanted to do was create the kind of community and culture of the coworking space, but combine it with the design and functionality of a more thoughtfully designed office space. At the end of the day, it would be tough to bring a client to your coworking space. You would be like, “Oh, here’s and my 20 buddies who are sitting around a table. That’s our printer over there by the coffee machine.” It just seems like it wasn’t professional enough for the kind of members we’re trying to attract.

I understand there’s more of a structure and a process for engaging with other people in the space here than is perhaps true in other coworking spaces. Was the community aspect was part of your original plan?

That was absolutely part of what we had in mind and that kind of came out of our own personal desires. But it also came out of some focus group work that we did in talking to other freelancers and talking to other small companies. I think people are really eager to connect with other smart people in ways that are really authentic.

What we try to do here is realize that people really have a personal desire to connect and collaborate, and also it makes a lot of sense from a business perspective to have day-to-day relationships with people. It’s going to make you smarter because you’re going to talk informally with people and pick up a lot of tacit knowledge that you can’t get alone and is lackign from traditional forms of networking. It’s just that sort of informal interactions with your peers that really have a lot of value I think.

That sounds cool. Do you know any examples of people or companies in BCL collaborating on stuff that came out of meeting with each other here?

Yes, there’s a start-up called StoryKeep. These two women who started a company to do documentary style audio family histories and they do a really great job of combining them with family stories and heirlooms and that kind of stuff. So they create this audio portrait of either family members. They did one for us where we tell the story of our small business.

So as they were getting off the ground, they found an attorney here who helped them worked through some of their intellectual property issues. They found an accountant here who did their books. They presented at an internal forum that we have, where they were able to sit down with a dozen other BCL members, talk about what their idea was and then have these people from different fields and disciplines give them feedback and advice and guidance, and “Oh, have you thought about this?”. That’s really valuable, having people from all these different disciplines giving you their insight because these are your potential customers.

It’s interesting to me that BCL hosts people from such a diverse array of businesses.

You know, it’s funny, the traditional incubator model is typically structured horizontally, where you have people in one particular industrial sector, whether it’s technology or food or something like that. So you may have people along the supply chain in those kinds of things, like someone working on food distribution, a new piece of technology, whatever. I think that that’s valuable for a certain type of company with a certain type of business model and growth plan.

But for the kinds of companies here it’s much more valuable to be in sort of an ecosystem of other businesses who have overlapping interests and values and different business models. The reason to be in that ecosystem is that people here are not aspiring to be the next Google. They’re aspiring to grow their businesses sort of organically, to develop customers. So it’s a different business model. It benefits more from having that plurality of people and that plurality of perspective.

We call ourselves Brooklyn Creative League, but we take a fairly ecumenical view of what constitutes creativity. So I think a lot of our members, even if they’re working in industries that at first flush wouldn’t appear particularly creative-oriented…

You can’t run a creative company without an accountant though.

That’s right. That’s exactly right. And even the accountant who’s working here - they happen to understand how creative firms work and can talk to them in their language and talk to them about their business model and their growth plan and their strategies for tech planning.

What we’ve seen is that there are these sort of industry clusters within BCL. So we have a big cluster of architects. We have writers and literary agents, which includes novelists, non-fiction writers, a couple of journalists from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have come here to work on their books. Design and technology is another big cluster. Sales and marketing as well. Then we have business support services, attorneys and accountants. Every business needs a good business attorney and a good accountant. So if you can find those people within the BCL community, you’re much more likely to develop a rapport.

So, if you have kind of a one-off question…

Instead of emailing them and waiting a day and a half for a response, you can walk over to the desk and say, hey, I have this tax question. What’s the answer?

BCL is apparently doing very well, but I wonder if you and Erin miss your previous, freelance lives at all?

No, no, no. We were both looking to sort of make a career transition. For a while I was still doing some communications and policy research while BCL gained traction and got up and going. But this is a full- time job for both of us at this point. And I think part of that also comes down to how we approach our business. We’re very hands-on and we really put a premium on customer service and being around and being responsive. I think that our business model allows for that, but I think that’s also one of things that we do really well that other coworking or incubator spaces may not. You tend to take things a lot more seriously and be a lot more diligent about it when it’s your capital at risk and you own the business and you’re responsible for it.

So if BCL is near capacity, do you have any plans for growth beyond the current space?

We are almost full. I think there’s two avenues that we’re looking at for growing. One is to take this model and to do it elsewhere around the city. The question is are we going to be able to create the same culture in different spaces because a lot of this has to do with the fact that Erin and I are very hands on. A lot of it has to do with the fact that we’ve just got awesome members here. I assume that there are awesome people elsewhere in the city. But most of the people here live within a 12 or 14 block radius of where we are now. So it’s a question of really finding a neighborhood with the right density and the right mix of professions to support a business like BCL.

The other option would be to look at doing BCL on sort of a building-wide scale because I think that some of the lessons that we’ve learned and the value that we’re able to add to our members are able to scale up to companies that maybe have 20 or so employees. So if I’m running a production studio or a small technology firm or an advertising agency, or something like that, I would still get value out of being in the broader BCL community, even if I’m not in the same sort of shared space we have here. So I think there’s an opportunity.

A BCL building sounds awesome. Presumably all you need is a big pile of cash.

Yes. All we need is a giant pile of cash, some very forward- looking real estate equity partners and then an awesome building to do it in.

Caroline Woolard is an artist and the founder of OurGoods and Trade School. I spoke to her in person at the Cuchifritos Gallery at the Essex Street Market in Mahattan, one of the locations where Trade School is currently taking place.

So let’s start at the beginning: where OurGoods and Trade School came from, how you decided to start these projects, and then you can sort of explain how things stand now.

Caroline: Sure, so the story is different for each co-founder. For OurGoods there are five co-founders, but I came to it because I started a studio space with a bunch of friends around 2007 and we built out this 8,000 square foot space. Suddenly it became my family, and I realized that most of my friends that were artists were feeling kind of isolated and in competition. I had just been looking for cheap rent. That’s why we started this live-work space. It was really moving to start pooling our resources and committing to each other on that scale because it was a five year lease.

That’s a big space, too.

Yeah, so now there are thirty people there. We don’t all live there. Only eight of us live there, so it’s pretty big. I was working this job, the night shift at an art studio, and I applied for a grant about a resource sharing network for artists. I got $5,000 and that’s when I started talking to Louise Ma and Rich Watts, who became other co-founders, about building a beautiful website that could embody this philosophy because they’re really good designers. They were like, "Yeah, we’re interested in that." They started building the site. At the same time, this woman Jen Abrams came in. She’s from dance and choreography. She’s been doing a sweat equity system, where when she helps her friends produce their theater shows, they help her produce hers. There’s a space on 4th Street that does this. So she was talking to a lot of people who were feeling really strapped for cash in 2009 about using her model to continue making work.

So we were all understanding that even though there was less money out there, we still had a lot of skills and we just needed to help each other make our work. The one person we didn’t have was a computer engineer to really write the code in order to scale the project the way we wanted. So just through talking to a bunch of different people, we met Carl Tashian who is the fifth co-founder (previously he built Zipcar).

Oh, cool.

He was team member nine or ten or whatever. He saw it grow from a very small network to a huge company. He was like, "Yeah, I want to do this for artists. I’m a programmer who believes in this." He’s done Code for America. He really sees it as a creative pursuit. So we were all aligned in terms of resource sharing for a creative community. It would be artists, designers, crafts people and activists, anyone with an independent project that doesn’t have market value. And the way we work is we talk about what the most important features would be and then we each go into our area, whatever our area of expertise, and work on it. So Louise does the front end, Carl does the back end, and Rich ties them together. And Jen and I do a lot of the social events and write grants.

So after doing OurGoods for a year into it, Rich Watts had a client who wanted to negotiate for a particular project and they had a storefront. And he was like, "Well, I’m doing this barter site, what if you just give me the storefront for a month? I’ll use it to do something." That’s how Trade School started. We had this storefront and we didn’t know what to do with it but we knew we wanted it to be about barter. So Rich basically gifted it to the group. Jen Abrams was too busy. Carl had moved to San Francisco. It was just me, Rich and Louise and we talked to the group, they’re called Grand Opening. The other stipulation was they had to like our idea, so they brainstormed with us and after talking about a lot of horrible things like a barter Christmas present exchange (because it was in December) we were like, "Let’s wait until February, really develop the idea, and make a school." Because a lot of our friends were doing thing related to alternative education models.

So the Trade School idea hadn’t even happened yet, it came out of that opportunity.

We were like, "Let’s do this learning system because we see people on OurGoods that we want to barter with, but we don’t know whether they’re actually good at what they say they’re good at and we also don’t know if our personalities will work well together." This is a way to meet someone that you might want to barter with in a class setting where the stakes are a lot lower. It’s just one to fifteen versus one-on-one.

I saw it filled up really fast.

Yeah, I think we just invited a wide range of teachers the first week. Everything from this guy Gary Lincoffthat I know from another project, who is a big Audubon field guide mushroom forager who is like 65, to someone who does event planning in Bushwick. We tried to get a range of classes and communities, because each person then told their community about Trade School and we encourage students to become teachers, so it kept spreading by word of mouth. By now it’s the third year and we’ve moved from organizing it as me, Rich and Louise to having ten organizers. So we have a huge event at the Museum of Art and Design this time, so it just keeps spiraling and getting bigger and bigger.

Now it’s still run as a pop-up event where it happens and then it’s over until next time. Has there been feedback from people wishing that it was around more?

Definitely, it’s an internal crusade. We want it to be around all the time, but some people feel like we’ll all burn out. Since this is all volunteer, we raise money for rent because the second year we had to pay for rent. We wanted to open for longer. This year we’re in a gallery so it’s free this month, but next month it will be for money. I can talk about the global possibility, too. The other thing I know is that Trade School is now available for anyone to use in any city or area worldwide - it can be customized in any community that contacts us. This summer we’re going to open Trade School in Spanish in New York (Christian Diaz, who is an organizer who helped out last year, has been pushing for that for a while.)

Maybe a better way to ask that question is, "What about OurGoods has worked well and led to other initiatives?"

"What is success for OurGoods?" is still a question that’s hard for us to answer. It seems like the answer should be the number of completed barters that have high ratings, but, since we’re artists, I think we also are really interested in deep change for a few individuals and we don’t want to look only at scale. It’s really hard to know how effective OurGoods has been. I think if anything, it’s a model that people are conscious of in the creative community as a possibility. That’s something that I think is powerful, but we still need to grow it. I think we only have something like 2,000 people and there are way more artists and creative people.

Trade School is really effective in terms of person-to- person enthusiasm. It’s a low threshold barter. All you have to do is bring the thing that the teacher says they want. There’s no negotiation about equality or value, whereas in the one-to-one barter, that’s the conversation. That’s a conversation that nobody wants to have, but that’s part of our project, making people discuss subjective value. We’re asking people to do something really hard.

It’s interesting because there are other themes going on in the collaborative learning, collaborative consumption or collaborative making arena. Some of the commercial approaches are quite successful, and I wonder what you think about how your projects relate to them.

We are in Rachel Botsman’s book, and the way I see it is as a continuum from the more mutual aid, free or non-monetary project, to now it to me is like the solidarity economy. Something activists use to identify that kind of work all over the world. Going all the way to collaborative consumption, which is like, "I have a drill. Rather than lend it to my neighbor, I’m going to rent it." And to me that’s really scary. I understand why some people who are so obsessed with consumerism might only be able to recognize their neighbor in terms of a money exchange. Maybe it will be so weird that since they identify as consumers, they’ll meet their neighbors through this awkward interaction and slowly lend it for free. That’s what I hope.

I guess is is strange to imagine people renting their neighbor the same drill a second time.

Maybe it’s a gateway drug. It’s like a gateway drug for people who want to buy a lot to head back toward a kind of gift community. Yeah, there’s a continuum. In terms of making money, we’re interested in this idea of communities of practice, having resource sharing networks on OurGoods. Since we’re coming at it as artists, there’s the model of residencies, where artists go to residencies and then they could continue sharing with people they’ve met there once they’re back in New York. Those organizations could pay us a fee to set up their circle. We haven’t headed there yet, we’re going to develop that now and deploy it in May, but there’s a lot of room for that with schools. NYU has talked to us about it. The Freelancers Union wants it. A membership model is interesting to us if we can demonstrate value to the members, because we don’t want to rely on grants for ever. We’re trying to get away from that.

So Trade School is actually starting up now. It runs for how long?

It will run in English until May 1st, and then hopefully in Spanish sometime in the summer.

I’m attracted to the Trade School approach because it’s active and interpersonal. It’s not like getting sent a Ted video where you’re just in front of your computer hearing about the things some brilliant stranger has done (while you probably should be working anyway).

Yeah, we say that we value the social nature of exchange. One thing that I hope, I don’t know how much it actually happens, but I think is a real possibility, is most of the time you can find someone who can give you an opportunity on the Internet, but it’s not always the case that they’ll meet you in person. So if you go to a Trade School class, my hope is that a lot of people are opening up their opportunities and seeing you in person helps them trust you and maybe give you opportunities that they wouldn’t feel comfortable with otherwise.

A lot of people talk about all of the online learning as a great solution and I think it’s amazing. I listen to all of the OpenCourseWare stuff while I’m working, but I think that to really break down some class barriers and privilege barriers around learning, you need to meet in person.

Designers and developers feel similarly about user testing. This video makes it abundantly clear how important (and easy) user testing is. It also shows that the longer you put it off, the more insurmountable the problems revealed during user testing will appear.

Time Out New York, on the other hand, pounds their email list with emails from their advertisers¹, and there’s no escaping it. They assume - in my case incorrectly - that if you’re interested in their content you’ll be willing to put up with additional emails from their advertisers. This is the decidedly un-classy way to sell your list. (Note that the example below shows one of these emails in its entirety: it’s literally one big ad from a company to which the recipient has no relationship.)

Alas, if you find this problematic and try to opt-out, you’re out of luck:

¹ Advertiser emails come from a Time Out email address. But when the email contains only an ad, what’s the difference?

This code:

• → includes each item in an order (when there are more than one)
• → shows the prices the way LinkShare prefers
• → checks for a discount and adds it as another line item, following LinkShare’s instructions
• → is wrapped in a conditional using a custom LinkShare advertiser parameter

(Remove line-breaks and replace ‘my_advertiser_parameter’ and my_merchant_id with your own data.)

Of course, after you buy something from a company, they will market to you, so I started getting promotonal emails from eBay. I immediately unsubscribed from the first marketing email they sent me (on Feb 9 - an offer for some sort of insurance on the item I’d purchased).

But the emails didn’t stop - in fact, eBay proceeded to send me seven additional marketing emails over the span of the next twelve days. That’s more than the CAN-SPAM act allows and - even more importantly - it results in a really negative customer experience.

All excuses aside, I’m sure if they can process my credit card in seconds, they can easily scrub me off their email list in less than 24 hours. In fact most companies do.

Related:

Redonkulous unsubscribe delays

What programming issues require a delay in processing a mail unsubscribe request?

Here’s why I think this works so well:

1. In a fun, Wes Anderson way, the video invites you to identify with a smart, precocious kid.
2. It shows how valuable features are actually used (eg. accept/deny tasks assigned by another person, comment on assets, etc.).
3. Different “scenes” highlight the interface across devices (mobile, tablet, pc).
4. Fantastic casting (and Adam Lisagor doesn’t show up).

Have other favorites? I’d love to see them: @ryandeussing

In the beginning, there was O’Reilly. They started out publishing Unix manuals, and then recognized the immense potential in “sharing the knowledge of innovators” by producing books and conferences that helped people use, understand, and master the technologies at the heart of what became (with O’Reilly’s participation) the Open Source movement. It was totally revolutionary to be able to pick up a few books on Linux, Perl, and Apache and - with a few weeks and a lot of caffeine - be well on your way to building working software.

Today it all seems obvious. Information wants to be free. Open Source languages and tools are most developers’ first choice. Internet Explorer isn’t winning anymore. JavaScript is the lingua franca of the web - and so on. What’s easily overlooked, however, is that the Open Source revolution is rooted not in technology itself, but in learning. It’s the ease of observing how languages function and how programs are made - coupled with the ability to seek and openly share that information with others - that underpins the success of Open Source.

Now an amazing thing is happening, as the “open” in Open Source is rapidly finding its way into education at large. And it will change everything. Here are just a couple early examples of this trend.

Khan Academy
Free like beer. The brainchild of one man. About 2,600 video lessons (and counting). Infinite exercises. Subjects ranging from Algebra to Art History to Banking. And if the scope and quality doesn’t blow your mind, check out the tools Khan Academy is making available to mentors, parents, and teachers so they can keep track of what a student is learning, what they’re having trouble with, and how they’re progressing over time. What’s more, the way Khan Academy rewards positive learning behavior through badges and points focuses on the value of the process as well as the result.

As they continue to add subjects, lessons, exercises, and tools, I’m convinced that Khan Academy will do nothing less than change the way society thinks about education. In my view, their model is built on three principles that other educational initiatives (and institutions) will ignore at their own peril:

(1) open access to expertise
(2) feedback that’s fundamentally about encouraging & rewarding progress, and
(3) the ability to learn what you want, when you want.

A more radical departure from the way subjects were taught in 20th century can hardly be imagined. (As Singularity Hub pronounced almost a year ago, ”Yes, The Khan Academy IS the Future of Education”)

Codecademy
Don’t watch me code - code yourself, with my help. That’s basically the mantra of Codecademy, which is creating “a better, more interactive way to learn programming by actually coding”. Starting with JavaScript, they’re building a platform to enable anyone in the world to learn how to program for free, and they already have over 200,000 users who have completed over 2 million courses. They’re just getting started, but all signs point to them embracing the best elements of the Khan Academy example, even as they develop a process that isn’t fundamentally built around video lessons.

Two elements of Codecademy’s approach are particularly exciting. First, the curriculum will be crowdsourced, allowing experts to create and share lessons the way developers already write and share code online. Second, Codeacademy understands that they’re building a community around learning, and that to empower that community they need to make it easy for its members to connect, communicate, and share with one another. I realize it’s too early for this sort of comparison, but I can’t help but think that if they execute on their vision Codecademy could grow into something like a GitHub for learning programming. Which is very f*%$@&! exciting.

First, let’s look at the problem. When it comes to storing and sharing your photos, Flickr is still a leader. But man, the bloom is off the rose.

This pop-up still kills me a little every time I use my Flickr account. Because it reminds me that the reason that Flickr is no longer innovating and kicking ass is because it’s basically just a place for Yahoo to show ads. Oh well.

More importantly, Flickr is a silo. Like SmugMug, or 500px, or Facebook is a silo. When your photos are there, they’re no longer really yours (you can’t remove them from one service and/or move them to another without losing tags, comments, etc.). In some cases you can’t even download the originals you uploaded. And none of these silos will be around forever; when they’re gone, poof - there go your photos. If everyone held an original copy of their photos on their own device, that might not be such an issue, but I know from experience that most non-web professionals tend to equate uploading a photo to Flickr or Facebook with saving it for posterity. Doh!

OpenPhoto’s approach is radically different. Instead of uploading your photos to OpenPhoto (the way you would upload them to, say, SmugMug), you upload them to your own storage service using any app built on top of the open-source OpenPhoto API (including the hosted service, OpenPhoto.me). Supported storage services include Amazon S3, DropBox, and RackSpace Cloud - that list will grow as more developers enhance the software to address their own needs - and access priveges are always under your control.

You can move your photos from one service to another, without losing crucial data like comments. And even though your images have moved, any OpenPhoto app accessing your photos will still be able to access them at the same urls.

I think the true power of OpenPhoto will become more apparant as services built on top of it reveal a degree of interoperability and portability that most web users have never experienced. Imagine firing up a new Instagram-style app and instead of it being empty, it’s pre-stocked with your entire photo history for you to build upon.

And personally, I hope this is just the tip of the iceberg. Photos might be the most obvious social object to build a federated network around, but imagine extending ownership, portability and interoperability to social objects like check-ins, tweets, posts, and reviews? I’m excited by the prospect of a future where services like Yelp or Facebook feel signicant pressure from upstarts who a) play well with others and b) put their users in full control of their content.

The project is billed as “The open-content, open-source effort to share the world’s local knowledge.” What’s not to love about that?

Now the great thing about this extra layer of security is that it’s not second password - it’s an image! Users select an image they like and will remember. A shredded chicken dinner with a biscuit and corn on the cob, for example.

Here’s a good example for Evercube, a DIY media storage solution.

I have a big list of these and refer to it all the time for inspiration.

I especially appreciate this quote from Anil Dash:

What are we going to make? What are we going to be? Who are we going to be when our country grows up?

And the question Dale Dougherty raises:

How will a “long, slow make” transform our society?

It won’t be hard for Gidsy to get a toe-hold with tour-guides. In any big city there are dozens (or hundreds) of tour options available to tourists and precious few ways for people to discover them, rate them, make reservations, etc. But tours are just the tip of the iceberg, and sort of boring - I think Gidsy will start to get interesting when people who have nothing to do with tourism begin to share their expertise.

I’ve noticed recently that people are using Meetup this way, more or less under the radar. An expert hiker in the Hudson Valley runs a Meetup that matches hikers with experienced guides and professionally organized expeditions - for a fee. A woman with a woodworking shop runs classes on Meetup that teach various levels of carpentry - also for a fee. There’s clearly a market for people looking to do stuff and learn stuff, and I believe its diversity makes it a mismatch for existing platforms like Meetup (which is structured around persistent groups) or SkillShare (which is all about instruction).

My girlfriend works at an awesome rooftop farm. Every weekend, they get dozens of visitors from all over who want to climb up on the roof, check out the farm, ask the staff questions, and get their hands a little dirty. Right now the farm welcomes this traffic because they enjoy meeting interesting people and sharing their knowledge and experience, but the work-to-reward ratio is imbalanced. Gidsy could turn ‘Open Farm Weekends’ into a revenue stream, creating scarcity and value in the experience of working at an urban farm for a day. (E.g. there’s only room for 12 participants each day, lunch is included, and customers pay for the unique experience and opportunity to learn about urban farming and get introduced to chicken and beekeeping, cheesemaking, special classes, etc.)

I’m also reminded of the uber-popular Open House New York. There’s no reason Gidsy can’t make this type of special access to non-public spaces as routine as Airbnb has made it to sleep at a stranger’s house. That’d be awesome.

So I was surprised to get a personal(1) email from a member of the HipChat team:

This email is awesome in several ways: it’s from Pete’s personal email account, it mentions me and my company by name, it lists a bunch of service upgrades I might be interested in, and it tells me my free trial account has been reset.

We’re currently using another persistent chat service, but you can bet HipChat will be at the top of the list if I ever consider a change.

(1)The email is actually personalized - it’s automated and all the links are tracked. But it’s still pretty rad.

But when you’re dealing with other people’s work, you’ve got to be careful not to be perceived as getting in the way.

Posterous has a feature that allows you to sign up for email updates to any blog on their platform. This should be awesome, like a little button that activates a service like Feed My Inbox (which is awesome, by the way).

But instead of shooting you an email each time a blog is updated, Posterous’s tool packages updates into a single email containing a bunch of links to “Your Daily Posterous subscriptions”.

The thing is, I didn’t subscribe to Daily Posterous anything - I subscribed to email alerts from particular bloggers whose content I care about. Most of these bloggers have nothing in common, so it’s contextually jarring to have their posts bound up together. And, with all due respect to Posterous, I want email alerts from the blogs I read, not from the particular tool they use to publish those blogs.

Suits call what I want disintermediation. It’s a mouthful, but I think it’s at the heart of what makes the internet great.