Someone around here broke “My Places” yesterday. I’m not pointing fingers (but he is being taken out to the woodshed while the rest of us put it back together). In the meantime… sorry. We’ll have it fixed and pushed to the website in the next day or so with a handful of additional interesting features. Sorry.
Sometimes you just can’t fight the 800lb gorilla. Anyway, it’s not our style.
And so: PlaceBook is now TripTrace. Officially. Which means, we’re shutting down this blog and hauling everyone over to blog.triptrace.com.
Over there you’ll see what we’re up to, hear musings on start-ups, user interface, and get the latest release notes and discussion. More than you could ever dream of!
(And as for this space? Maybe we’ll leave this here as the fanpage for PlacéBoök (plah-kay-buuk))
Dear Friends: I need your help and ask your advice. The product we’ve been building is a new way to approach travel. It’s got a simple interface which looks and works like a book. It’s a little like Myst, if you’re old enough to remember Myst, it has linking books. It has no scroll bars. It’s not quite a game, but it’s really a nice way to deal with information online. Anyway, we all felt that the right name for this product was Place Book. It is a book of places. It is for booking trips. It feels like a book. Your Place Book sits amongst other connected volumes: your Photo Book, Travel Book, Fitness Book, Eco Book and so on… the newest logos we came up with looked like this:
We felt the logo could give it a vaguely international flavor – it was for facilitating travel and exploration, after all. But there’s an issue of whether this name infringes on another companies trademark, and whether it would dilute the value of theirs and/or potentially confuse the public. I have heard the arguments, and I have my opinions; I think this is a cool and unique name and would be distinct – I also feel it is an “apt descriptor” as they say, of what we are.
But I’m too close to this matter, and the product we’re making is for the public –anyone who was reasonably frustrated with researching vacations, and booking trips online. I don’t want this name stuff to get in the way of the product, which is really all that matters.
So I want to know what you think. Should I drop the name? Do you think it infringes on other brand names? Post or email your comments. I really want to know. Thanks.
People ask me all the time: “What’s it like at a start-up?”
I’ve only been in a few, so my experience is limited, but they are always idiosyncratic: each pretty unique. At Sonic Solutions there were four of us in a little apartment in the Sunset District in San Francisco. Thick cables ran down the hallway past the kitchen, connecting the workstation we set up (we had only one) to the Sun server in the first bedroom. I remember that the freezer was packed full of frozen burritos and we had day shifts and night shifts to keep the workstation running all the time. It was 1987.
It’s nicer today. Look at us all, each with a supercomputer on our laps… The days are unusually long, but it never quite feels like it because its so not-officish, it’s so homey… My dog Bodhi joined the team (advisor, mostly) which was a nice comic element to throw in the mix. And there we are, working away in the heat of the day. It wasn’t a meeting – but it was beautiful outside and we all found ourselves hanging out for awhile. We did notice that even sitting around each other working, we still Skyped back and forth; it was silent out there, except for the clicking of keys, but you could hear everyone’s voices in your head while typing. It reminded me of a Star Trek episode (the original seasons) where a race of telepathic beings were doing stuff to Kirk, et al. We were like those telepathic beings. Bodhi was Kirk.
