My father always told me you do two things when you meet someone; look them in the eye and shake their hand. It’s what I’ve done my entire life without a second thought – until we decided at OpenCandy to switch to “fist bumping” to keep our startup healthy. Being the father of an (almost) 11 month old daughter also helped persuade me to embrace skipping the shake, especially now that I’m a frequent-flyer and tech conference attendee.

A couple of weeks ago we received an email through our contact form from someone named John Foster offering us a “gift of health in these troubled times.” He cited a TechCrunch article about how we eliminated handshakes from our board meetings, so that gave some context around the type of “gift” he was offering. Since John left his phone number, I figured what the heck, I’ll give this guy a call and find out what this is about (and whether I was dealing with a nutcase or not).

It turns out that John is not only sane; he’s a really nice guy who wants to do his part to help stem the flow of communicable diseases. John, who’s a software developer (ironically), came up with the idea for a “LiveStrong-like” wristband with the goal of communicating, in a socially acceptable way to others (read: not jerking your hand away), that you’d prefer to “skip the shake”. He spoke of how the idea came to him after his nephew, a healthy 18 year old, struggled to fight off the swine flu (he’s back to health now). He also talked about a TED presentation from 2003 by Marvin Minsky on “health and the human mind” which begins with Marvin stating how handshaking is the largest cause of disease in the West and how NOT handshaking can drastically reduce transmission rates.

John said he’d send the whole OpenCandy team wristbands as long as we were willing to provide feedback (easy enough) and lo and behold a couple of days later my team in San Diego received a package of 20 individually wrapped Skip the Shake, Fight the Flu wristbands (mine came the next day). Not only was the team’s reaction positive, but so far everyone I’ve discussed it with has had the same reaction. I’ll admit that at first I wasn’t sure what people outside of the techosphere/blogosphere would think, but I’m pleasantly surprised that every person I’ve skipped the shake with and shown/explained the wristband to, has said something along the lines of “What a fantastic idea!” followed by “I’m surprised no one thought of doing that before.”

Today, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, the man who got the ball rolling on the anti-handshaking movement, posted about the Skip the Shake wristband. Also, oddly enough, today’s Dilbert cartoon is in on the trend and states “Don’t you follow the news? Shaking hands is so 2008.” Heck even the New Yorker posted a fist bump cartoon today! Right now John is working on getting retail packaging for the Skip the Shake wristbands finalized and is busy evaluating the right charity (or charities) to align with, but you can be part of the revolution today by visiting Skip the Shake and purchasing some for yourself and your loved ones, friends and co-workers. (No, we don’t get a cut.)

Coincidentally, the day we received that email from John, I was one week into a nasty non-swine flu infection, so I’m more than happy to do my part and rock the cool blue wristband. How about you?

Be well everyone!

Dr. Apps
@drapps

Almost one year ago to the day, I was reading a post entitled “Happy Birthday Animoto. You Guys Make Me Happy” by an unusually upbeat Mike Arrington which was as strong a recommendation as I’ve ever read on TechCrunch. Fast-forward a year of serious app-crushes/gushes on Animoto by not only Mike, but a few of the other TechCrunch guys (Erick Schonfield, Jason Kincaid and MG Siegler) as well as some non-blogger, real-life friends of mine; and I was convinced this was “the one” (the app that was going to help me create this special moment).

So, when I started planning the perfect way to propose, I decided to accept the recommendation, fire up Animoto, and created a montage from 133 photos and 2 songs that epitomized the seven years that I’ve known Gracie. I then loaded the “beautifully orchestrated, completely unique video piece from my media” (as Animoto describes so humbly) onto my iPhone. Gracie and I took an afternoon trip to Sea World yesterday and I proceeded to rely on technology to help me close the most important deal of my life… and it worked!

The moral of the story? Apps don’t only solve problems; great apps can change lives. So don’t stop recommending the great ones to one another!

I guess it’ll be like going to your favorite band’s concert, except the rock stars are the developers of the applications you love and recommend. Educators, designers and graphic artists involved in print production and/or web development will also be attending. This is a great opportunity for people to share ideas, success stories and even figure out solutions to problems they may be having.

According to Louis Desjardins, lead organizer of the meeting, for many of the developers attending, this is the one time a year they get to see each other face to face. So, as excited I am to be going for the first (of many) times, I’m sure everyone else is just as excited.

I’m proud to say that OpenCandy is a sponsor of the event and I will be conducting a session entitled “Open Source & Money: Not Mutually Exclusive.” Sponsorships and community donations (through Pledgie) help pay for travel and lodging costs for the developers attending. The Pledgie campaign for LGM 2009 has ended, but when it starts for LGM 2010, I’ll be sure to tweet and blog about it. It’s a nice way to give something back to the people who work hard making awesome software we get to enjoy for free.

This also gives me the opportunity to find out what people outside of OpenCandy think about how well my avatar matches my physical appearance (I think it’s pretty darn close).

Follow LGM on Twitter for updates during the meeting. You can find me here.

Be well! Catch you on the app side. :)

I must admit, I wasn’t looking for a job. In fact, I’ve got a small, successful technology consultancy of my own helping small businesses and home users plan, implement and maintain their computer systems and network infrastructure to keep them running smooth and malware free.

In my spare time, though, my passion was finding the best software to accomplish the tasks I needed to do. In late 2007, I began satisfying my desire to reach out to more people about great software by starting a podcast (The Appsolute Tech Show) and in February of 2008, I started using Twitter. On the podcast and Twitter, I chose the nom de plume “Dr. Apps” because many of my clients call me “The Doctor” and because I love applications. Since then, I’ve built up a nice “following” on Twitter by helping people solve computer problems and recommending software I love.

“Tasting the Candy”

I found out about OpenCandy in November, 2008 when I was updating one of my favorite apps, MediaCoder. I twittered about it and said that I thought OpenCandy was a “cool idea.” Someone named “chest” twittered back “thx for tasting the candy.” At first, I assumed “chest” was Twitter spam or a “Twitterperv” but “chest ” turned out to be Chester Ng, a co-founder of OpenCandy.

Fast forward to February 10th, 2009, I saw a tweet from Chester that said that OpenCandy was hiring and one of the positions was for a “Software Community Guru.” I couldn’t believe what I saw; the job looked like it was tailor-made for me! Without thinking twice, I direct messaged Chester.

Chester and I spoke the next day and I learned that OpenCandy was about much more than cool recommendations in some of my favorite apps’ installers. I learned that OpenCandy was conceived with the thought of helping developers of great applications reach a broader audience. The following day I spoke again with Chester and this time, Darrius Thompson, CEO of OpenCandy joined in on the call. It was as if they were reading a page from the Dr. Apps manual when they stated their belief that there was “a Firefox in every category of apps”, meaning that there is a superstar application in every software category just waiting to break out.

“Um, I Haven’t Flown in 15 Years”

On Valentine’s Day, Chester called and asked me to fly out to sunny San Diego (I’m a New Englander, sun and 60 degree temps in February sounded really nice). I hadn’t flown in 15 years, so the fact that I was willing to speaks volumes about how I felt about OpenCandy’s mission and how excited I was to meet the team behind it. It also gave me the opportunity to explain to the TSA that I was interviewing to be a Software Community Guru, so that they would actually let me board my flight. No joke.

Happy Birthday!

Since I’d be in San Diego for less than 24 hours, Chester lined up a marathon of one-on-one meetings with as many team members as possible. Each meeting confirmed the best case scenario to me, that OpenCandy really was passionate about empowering developers while providing the best user experience possible. I took the red-eye back to Boston and later that day, my birthday, I got the call that I was OpenCandy’s Software Community Guru! I was elated! Darrius remarked that he thought the OpenCandy and Dr. Apps story was way better than one of those match.com success stories. In this case, Twitter was “our match.com.”

My Dream Job

At OpenCandy, I’m tasked with spreading the word about what we’re doing and inviting developers of software I love to participate. Through my years of being a user advocate and educating people on safe online practices and trusted software, I’m living proof of OpenCandy’s commitment to providing a great experience for users. We have a long way to go before OpenCandy is a household name, but I believe that with a team of passionate, dedicated and talented individuals as we have, we’ve got a really good chance.

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. :-)

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?

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.

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:

PRNewswire

A Couple of Recent Stories Here:

CNET
Venture Beat

P.S. We thank Bunnie, hardware engineer extraordinaire, for making the original introduction.

I seem to see it every week on the multiple PCs I use. And it really pisses me off.

First, what kind of “update” is this? I don’t even have either of these products so what am I “updating”? On further research, it looks like I just never noticed that Apple “surprised” me with MobileMe this summer at some point when I updated iTunes.

Second, I appreciate that Apple has changed this to “opt-in” (neither product is pre-selected). Safari used to be pre-selected, as John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla points out on his blog. But still, WTF?

Third, I’ve already declined this exact offer just last week (and the number of times I’ve declined Safari on this machine has to be in the double digits now). So, why am I seeing this again? Surely, Apple is a smart company but don’t they have any smart software that knows what I don’t absolutely don’t want? Doesn’t take a Genius to figure that out.

Lastly, I’m very disappointed in Apple. I’ll disclose that I have a brother that works there, but this isn’t a sibling rivalry. I’ll also disclose that I’m not a heavy Apple consumer myself (other than my love/hate iPhone relationship, which is reserved for a whole other post).

But, I certainly hold Apple in high regard for what they’ve achieved for the consumer (by putting them first, above and beyond record labels, movie studios, and mobile carriers). In fact, Apple was recently named by Interbrand as the nation’s top brand, as well as the brand you’d most like to sit next to at a dinner party.

However, for the past six months, Apple has not only continually offered me software I’ve already clearly stated I don’t want, but has been doing so in a manner that is compromising my trust and offending my intelligence as a technology user. That’s saying a lot since I’m the business dude.

PS – As I was writing this blog post, the Apple Software Update decided to pay me another visit for old time’s sake. This time, MobileMe Control Panel was pre-checked for my convenience (since obviously if I didn’t select to install these items last time, Apple must think I tried but missed the check box). Now I’m definitely not sitting next to you, Apple, at the next dinner party.

Download it here.

By the way, tell us about the apps you love that others might not know about. Use our contact form to tell us about the app and why you think others should know about it.