Discuss on Twitter is a WordPress plugin that uses Twitter as the commenting system for your blog. I’ve been developing it over the past few weeks along with Fred Wilson and Kirk Love as part of the launch of AVC 3.0 which went up yesterday. It’s currently live on this blog, as well as AVC… Continue reading
Category: Projects & Portfolio
Introducing Quackpad – simple collaborative docs for teams using Slack
Every month at USV we have an internal hack day, where we work on various fun tech projects. We hack on USV.com, we build internal tools, we play with fun new hardware, try out new APIs, etc. It’s a nice change of pace, and an opportunity to get a little closer to the tech we… Continue reading
Failure is the tuition you pay for success
I couldn’t sleep last night, and was up around 4am lurking on Twitter. I came across an old friend, Elizabeth Green, who is an accomplished and awesome education writer — you’ve probably read some of her recent NYT mag cover stories, and it turns out she has a new book out, Building a Better Teacher.… Continue reading
Backing into your network
Today, we announced that USV is investing in Hailo. I am psyched about this for a number of reasons, but primarily because it’s infrastructure that connects people to their city in new ways. What’s most fascinating is that we almost certainly don’t yet know what those ways are. I want to point out one quote… Continue reading
Hacking todos: daily review for Wunderlist
I have had a hard time finding the perfect to-do list system. I am a light implementer of GTD — I haven’t read the whole book, but I get the basic idea — capture; focus; do. Stop working from the top of your inbox. Amen. A few years ago, I started using Things for Mac, which… Continue reading
Highrise Chrome Extension
Last week, I wrote about wanting a Chrome extension for Highrise. This week, I built a first pass: https://github.com/nickgrossman/highrise-chrome-extension Here’s a quick video demo of how it works: Continue reading
cibi.me
The Civic Works team at OpenPlans just launched another sweet micro-site: cibi.me — for NYC’s forthcoming bike share program. The site is notable for a few reasons: First, it’s beautiful and fun to use. The OpenPlans team has been putting out a ton of these small, beautifully designed and really fun sites recently (see change.st,… Continue reading
Digital Power Tools
This past week, I spent some time cutting a hole in the wall in between our kitchen and our family room. It’s a project we’ve been talking about for a long time, and we considered lots of different ways of doing it before we actually got down to it. We were concerned about the cost,… Continue reading
The Wheels on the Bus…
As of 11am this morning, buses in Brooklyn are telling the internet where they are. And I’m proud to say that our work is behind it. For the past several months, we’ve been working with the MTA on this one-line pilot, to demonstrate that it’s possible to achieve a workable bus tracking solution using existing… Continue reading
Time to Get Singing
I opened my talk at last week’s Times Open event with this little video plugging Phone Idol. It got a few laughs, which was the point, but unfortunately no new songs sung just yet. Derek Gottfrid from NYT made the great suggestion that I print up some stickers and put them up in… Continue reading
Say hello to Civic Works
Thank you so much to everyone who helped us think through our re-name of TOPP Labs yesterday. Your feedback and insights were absolutely invaluable to our process. After a long night and day of deliberations, we’ve settled on our new name. Drumroll please… (and this is obviously unnecessary since it’s in the title of the… Continue reading
TOPP Labs needs a new name
For the past year or so, the group at TOPP that I manage has been known as TOPP Labs. TOPP Labs was originally chosen not because it was the best or most compelling name, but because as we were dialing back work on the OpenCore project, we needed a name that was better than “The… Continue reading
Phone Idol: an experiment in web-enabled telephony
At work recently, we’ve been exploring the idea of integrating voice and/or SMS into our applications. Much of what we do has to do with people responding to their physical environments — their neighborhoods and the streets and public spaces that constitute the bulk of our public experience. So, I decided to take on a… Continue reading
Introducing The Board
A few weeks ago, I created a small web app for scheduling project teams at TOPP Labs. At any given time, we’ve got anywhere between 10 and 20 active projects, so keeping track of it all is difficult, and planning ahead requires a good clear overview of everything that’s happening. Why create something new? Good… Continue reading
Goldilocks and the RSS Theme
For your reading pleasure, the Broadsheet Wide theme for the Vienna RSS reader. Continue reading
Same Bat Blog, New Bat Look
This week, we launched the new, improved GothamSchools. GothamSchools is the latest media / advocacy initiative from The Open Planning Project, and our first foray into the world of education. We’ve got a great team of reporters in Philissa Cramer, Elizabeth Green, and Kelly Vaughan, and the new site website was put together by the… Continue reading
Coming soon: Park(ing) Day 2008
In the spirit of blogging all the cool stuff we’re doing at TOPP, I’d like to announce the launch of a new website: Park(ing) Day NYC. Park(ing) Day is a global event, originally conceived by awesome SF-based arts collective REBAR, where for a single day, regular parking spaces are “leased” for use as temporary public… Continue reading
Streetfilm about Bastille Day
Bastille Day on Smith Street is one of my favorite days of the year. It’s great fun: the streets are closed, sand is trucked in, and a giant Petanque tournament is held. But the tournament is just an excuse to be there: the real fun is the great food & drink put out by… Continue reading
New TOPP Website
Over at The Open Planning Project, we’ve always had a bit of a hard time explaining what we do. That job just got a little bit easier, with the launch of the new-and-improved TOPP website last Friday. Reactions from within the staff have been remarkably similar: something along the lines of “Phew, now I can… Continue reading
Slip-n-Slide Photo Gallery
A few months ago, I wrote up a simple javascript photo gallery viewer for a side project, so I thought I’d offer it up to the world. It’s unobtrusive javascript, and it takes a simple list of photos and turns it into a slidey slide show. It’s built on top of the Ext Javascript Framework,… Continue reading