Happy Birthday Candy!
One year ago today, OpenCandy was born. To say much has changed in Candyland and the world around us the past year would be an understatement.
For further evidence, please reference this OpenCandy office accessory circa 2008:
2009 is indeed about Change (yes, we have even upgraded our office and accessories).
What has not changed, though, is our continued focus on empowering developers to increase distribution of and/or make money from their applications. Both goals have become much more challenging for developers to achieve on their own, especially in today’s screwed up economy. So, we’ve been trying to do our part to help.
In the past few months, OpenCandy has powered millions of recommendations of great apps and cut real checks (some as large as a developer’s Google AdSense or donation check) rewarding developers for recommending apps they love. What a concept!
Alas, one other point that hasn’t changed is how infrequently we update this blog. We promise that is because we’re currently too busy making sweet candy; candy you will be able to taste soon. :-)
I Never Knew How Much I Needed You
With the holidays right around the corner, I’m sure some of you are like me and that means spending way too much time stressing over the perfect gift for friends and family. (If you’re not, Bah Humbug to you, too.)
Here’s a tip: Get a gift that makes someone say,
“I never knew how much I needed this until I opened it and started using it!”
Easier said than done you’re thinking? Damn right.
However, I am happy to admit that three times this year (and it’s not even Christmas yet!), an app on my desktop, browser, and phone has caused me to proclaim that aforementioned, and oh, so rare outburst.
And here they are:
The first app is on my desktop, Dropbox.
When I first received my Dropbox beta invite, after waiting patiently for almost a year, I was a bit skeptical about how life-altering yet another online storage option could really be.
Two months later, though, Dropbox is one of only a handful of applications I allow to start up with Windows (Startup Manager helps me nuke the rest!). I even let Dropbox infiltrate my system tray. In exchange, I receive efficient access, sharing, collaboration, and of course, synchronization of files on my PCs and on those of the rest of the OpenCandy crew.
The second app is on my iPhone, Shazam.
As a kid, I would listen to the radio for hours upon hours with a notepad in my hand, hoping to jot down the artists and names of my favorite songs. As a slightly older kid, Sony came out with a device and service a decade ago that let users push a button and log on to a site to see what song was playing. After the product was quickly discontinued (and apparently eliminated from everyone’s memory as I can’t find any record of it), I gave up hope.
Then along came Shazam, which I frequently use now to identify music I like within earshot. (BTW, if anyone remembers the name of that Sony product, please post a comment and I’ll send you an OpenCandy t-shirt or schwag if/when we have such available.)
The third app is on my browser (but also found its way to my phone and desktop), Twitter.
Although I signed up for Twitter a year ago, I didn’t really give it a try until this past March, and my first tweet of the year emphasized that I really had no clue as to why I needed Twitter and what I’d use it for.
Tim O’Reilly, one of my favorite “twits” to follow (right up there with Shaq Daddy) sums up the value of Twitter well in this post. Since then, I’ve figured out my own Twitter identity crisis and realized I “tweet” primarily for 5 reasons:
1) Keeping tabs on the latest news since RSS readers are so 2005.
2) Recommendations and advice on anything from recipes to vets to CRM.
3) Marketing, aka shameless plugs. If you don’t like them, don’t follow me.
4) An alternative to blogging, since I don’t have time to blog.
5) Killing time when I have time to kill, but not to blog.
Alright, time to plug this blog post via Twitter. Any apps make you feel the same way?
OpenCandy Recommendations and Privacy
Thanks for all the responses we received this week post our funding announcement and related stories. We received a few privacy related questions in regards to how we make our software recommendations. Here is a high level answer which we’ll add to a future FAQ.
1. Each developer in our network hand picks the products they want to recommend. We make our recommendation based off of the pool of products each developer has selected.
2. We determine your country, language setting and operating system to help us target our recommendations. This way we don’t recommend software to you in a language you don’t understand or for an OS you’re not running. Much like a website will report on through whatever web analytics tool they use.
3. We use your past participation to make better recommendations in the future. When you interact with OpenCandy we leave the equivalent of a “cookie” on your system, which is an anonymous identifier. The only data we associate with that cookie is what we’ve recommended to you, and if you chose to download it. That data is stored on our servers, only the cookie is stored locally. This is how our recommendation engine learns and makes better recommendations in the future.
4. We validate the software we’re about to recommend. We don’t want you to receive a recommendation for software you already have, or for a plugin to software that you don’t have. We then perform a validation check with our installer plugin. The validation check uses the registry (like any installer would) to make sure you’re applicable for the recommendation and that you don’t already have it installed. We then tell our servers if a recommendations is “valid” or “invalid”, and we use this only for statistical analysis.
5. We display a software recommendation to you (not spyware, malware or adware – ever). We make a single recommendation to you, which is the best recommendation (as determined by our recommendation engine) that validates in Step 3. This recommendation is always optional (and clearly presented that way) – so you can choose to download it or not.
6. We tell the server what you chose to do. We let the server know if you chose to download or pass on our recommendation. Again, as mentioned in Step 2, we use this data to improve our recommendations so we offer more of what users want, less of what they don’t. If you did choose to download the recommendation, we launch a download manager which facilitates the download and tells you when it’s ready to install. Our servers collect data around this process, such as “download complete”, “install complete”, etc for statistical analysis just like typical web analytics.
If you have any questions, concerns or recommendations you can email me directly at darrius at opencandy dot com.
Create More Value Than You Capture
Tim O’Reilly is one of several people that I’ve admired for a number of years. Several months ago Chester and I had the opportunity to make the trek to Sebastopol to meet with him. Little did he know I was so excited about meeting him that I had to refrain from asking him to autograph my forehead. Yes, I’m that big of a fan.
Tim was one of the first individuals we wanted to tell our story to. He cares about the potential of technology and products created by developers to change things for the better. He cares about the now and the long term. We hope to play our part in changing things for the better, to help fuel innovation, but to do so requires we build strong relationships with individuals who can help us ensure we understand the consequences of our decisions.
The goal being to “Create more value than we capture”. I borrowed that quote from Tim. It’s a beautiful, simple and powerful decision making framework.
As we sat in a conference room staring through the windows at O’Reilly Media we were certain we had just seen Tim floating out of some tree’s from a hill behind the building. It was perfect. I’ve heard a few people call Tim “The Oracle” and seeing him float toward us set the stage. If you know me, you know I can ramble on, and despite this Tim worked his way to the core of our concept and it’s value and challenges faster than anything imaginable (Moore’s law somehow got applied to his brain). As impressive was his ability and wanting to help us think about solutions on the fly.
I would guess our meeting was an ordinary moment that Tim will barely remember, beyond perhaps my excited rambling, but for me it was extraordinary.
We released our funding announcement yesterday and with great pleasure we were able to include a quote from Tim.
Thank You Tim,
Darrius (aka Fanboy)
Press Release Here:
A Couple of Recent Stories Here:
P.S. We thank Bunnie, hardware engineer extraordinaire, for making the original introduction.
