Standford Study: Glowing Rectangles

This is a brilliant article that is sure to give you a giggle if not an outright chuckle.

Report: 90% Of Waking Hours Spent Staring At Glowing Rectangles

PALO ALTO, CA—A new report published this week by researchers at Stanford University suggests that Americans spend the vast majority of each day staring at, interacting with, and deriving satisfaction from glowing rectangles.  Read full article here.

Lessons Learned

We all talk about lessons learned, and mean to keep track of these things, but the unfortunate thing is, we rarely do. I know for myself, I always think….”Oh, I will definitely remember this!”. Then, a couple years go by and we hit up against the same issue, and the familiarity is there, but the solution is long gone. So we end up searching our files for the exact place where we encountered and solved the issue in the past, and going online to find the solution….again.

In programming, this can be a disastrous waste of time and energy. Hours upon hours can be spent trying to fix the smallest of problems. And yet, we still fall prey to this problem.

So, in order to attempt to keep up with these things, we have created a sub forum on the MutinyWare forums to log this type of information. Not only will it help us to keep these issues and solutions in a place where they can easily be found, but hopefully, they may help others who encounter the same problem.

You can view the Lessons Learned forum here.

An economic article worth reading

Due to a Twitter post from Chris Brogan, I read an article called “Why the Present Depression Will Be Deeper than the Great Crash of 1929“.  While I am certainly not an economist, there are a great many points made in this article that make sense, and should be considered by individuals and business owners going forward.

Many of the problems indicated in the article are reasons why MutinyWare was started and how we are commited to doing things differently.  Working off our own steam, empowerment, honesty and responsibility are keys to our philosophy of doing business.

Tags: business, economy

QuarterMaster Introduction

We have a product in development called QuarterMaster Property Management.  It is a system to help property management firms manage their websites for their main company, as well as for each individual community.

QuarterMaster came about when a Cambridge Partners, Inc. requested a basic content management system to manage some facets of their websites.  This is a client that I have had for several years, one that I manage the regular maintenance on and last year, had completely redesigned and rewritten all of the sites.  Needless to say, as we were working out the details for their requirements, we ended up creating a system that was much, much more than they had bargained for.  We can’t be accused of doing things half-assed!  Thus, QuarterMaster was born.

The system is being used by the Cambridge Partners site right now, and has been for the past several months.  Currently the system is only handling portions of the website data, those that are directly related to the properties and their details.  The textual content and layout of the site is still being maintained manually.  Ultimately QuarterMaster will manage all of the content on a site.

Currently, QuarterMaster handles the following features:

• Create and manage individual properties
• Create and manage individual models (floor plans)
• Create and categorize all of your amenities
• Manage pricing
• Manage locations, contacts, URLs
• Create and manage custom neighborhoods
• Amenity value assessment
• Create, manage and schedule specials
• Apartment search functionality
• Leads management
• User management
• Changes to the QuarterMaster system updates your site immediately
• Integration with your existing site

If you have any questions, or are interested in using QuarterMaster for your own property website(s), please don’t hesitate to contact us.  As we move forward with development, and have a public demo and beta system in place, we will post updates here.

Tags: community website, development, property management

Some details about Software-as-a-Service

I was forwarded an excellent article from a Twitter friend the other day, called The Next Wave of SaaS.  The article does a great job of explaining how SaaS functions, its benefits and why it is becoming so important to business large and small.

Excerpt:

By Jim Frome – CIO.com

Mon, May 25, 2009 — Network World — Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has gone from a curiosity to the mainstream in just a few years as businesses turn to the technology to take advantage of the inherent economies of scale. Yet that’s only the beginning.

Tags: article, saas, software