Nick Loui

I have a new addiction.

Thumb is an iPhone app that allows you to ask and receive an answer in a simple thumbs up/thumbs down fashion.  What makes it even better is that it’s insanely fast.  The first question I asked, had 99 answers within 10 minutes.  Find me a market research firm that can get answers that quickly, free.

The interface on the iPhone is beautifully designed (the web interface could use some brushing up) and the built-in social features are addictive.  It looks like the audience skews younger, my guess would be a similar demographic to Formspring, and you never know what kinds of questions you will receive.

I’m excited to see where this company goes in the future, but you can absolutely count on me playing with it some more.  It’s the bizarrely perfect answer to social insecurity…

There really are too many cloud file storage services.  Dropbox is, what I consider, the industry standard but there’s also Box.net, Amazon, the popular Google Docs, and many others exist.  Until now, accessing all of these services meant bouncing around from one to the next, using separate usernames and passwords.  Otixo, a service that recently completed its beta and launched (congrats!) aims to fix all of that.

I’ve used the service throughout the beta period, and I’m happy to say that it’s awesome.

Once you’ve created an account, you simply tie together your different services (similar to how Mint.com ties together bank accounts)

For example, I’ve setup:

• Box.net
• Google Docs (personal + work)
• Dropbox
• Picasa
• FTP

Once that’s done, you can share files directly from Otixo, create Workspaces, which brings files from different services into one singular folder, and most importantly: Access the files online from Otixo and mount the Otixo drive on your computer.

Things I’m in love with: Being able to literally drag files from my memory card into a folder on my computer and have it automatically upload to my Picasa and being able to make changes to my website (via FTP) 10x faster.  Combined with Transmit FTP (which mounts Webdav folders better than the built-in Mac OS X Webdav client [just an opinion, not a fact]), I think I’ve found a perfect solution to a problem I didn’t necesarily know I had.

Consider yourself a cloud warrior?  Check this site out.

YCombinator is one of the largest and most successful incubation groups around.  Someone took the time to create a handy chart showing which web hosts, email hosts, DNS hosts, etc… each company used.  Pretty interesting results, and it’s a great page to pair with my recent hosting article. I wonder how the chart has changed since 2011, with GoDaddy’s SOPA debacle at the end of the year.

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As a long-time supporter of Grooveshark Premium, this is great news for the website.

Grooveshark now offers a mobile version of its web application, which allows any smartphone (even without Grooveshark Premium) to listen to its large library.  Previously, it had an Android app but iPhone users had to either jailbreak their phones or not use the mobile service at all.

I tried it, and it works as advertised… it’s definitely still bare bones, but it’ll be exciting to see it develop.  We’ll see what this means for Spotify or iTunes Match.

http://html5.grooveshark.com to try it out

With the exception of choosing an actual product, one of the toughest decisions you will inevitably face when launching a company is choosing its name.  We’ve struggled with that at Divide Nine recently for a new project, and I thought I’d share a few of thoughts that have come up throughout this process.

Past the traditional approaches of choosing a name that is not already registered and one that reflects your business in some way.  Last year, Fast Company wrote a great article on Lexicon, a company that specializes in this practice and gave some insight into the naming process that they use.

It’s broken into these steps:

1. Use the product and find its core value. Get not just to what it is, but the why.
2. Use these words and come up with metaphors, sounds, and words that relate (In the case of Lexicon, a team of linguists).
3. Separately, ask a group to come up with metaphors, sounds, and words without knowing what the product is to create new products based on a fictional mission.
4. Consider these options

Two other things that teams I’ve worked on have considered in the past…

• Hard C and K sounds have better brand recall
• Consider checking the numerology of the company to see what it denotes.

For example, Apple’s numerology is 5, 8, and 6.  5 – Expansion, change, visions, growing evolution, 8- ambition, power, production, money, security, materialism, and 6 – harmony, creativity, art justice, balance, love, protection.

So, are you sure that non-profit you are starting should be a 5?  Consider that Toms is a 4, 7, 6… 4- stability, security, objectivity, 7- philosophical, understanding, inspirational, 6- harmony, creativity, justice, balance, love, protection community, sympathy

Maybe it’s a mix of voodoo, practicality, and luck… but what other tips do you have for naming products and companies?

Two startups that have got a fair amount of attention lately are ifttt & Wappwolf.  Essentially, both glue together various cloud services and do things that you would normally do, automatically!  They’re designed to work in the background so that you don’t have to think about them.

While the two services do similar things, they “glue” together different websites and my gut is that the two, for now, they can be used simultaneously to make your life easier.

ifttt has been around for about a year. It has a beautifully crafted interface that frames everything in the form of “If… This… Then… That…” . To give you an idea of the kinds of things I’ve setup:

• If I mark an article in Google Reader, send it off to Instapaper
• If I send a text message to ifttt, then add it to Evernote
• If someone sends me a #FF on Twitter, thank them
• If I’m tagged in a photo on Facebook, download it to Picassa
• If I check in to somewhere, add it to my Google Calendar so I can track where I’ve been
• Send me an email when it’s going to rain the next day

BMW has always been known for being a leader in crafting a lifestyle within the luxury automobile market.  It’s also been in an innovative company in marketing, being one of the first major companies to use branded video content online, and in technology, as one of the first companies to really integrate the iPod well.

So, it’s no surprise that they are head-to-head with Mercedes this year to best-selling luxury car of 2011.

Anyone that knows me, knows that I’ve always been a supporter of the brand.  Today, I received a welcome kit because I purchased a new car from BMW earlier this year and it’s just another great example of why they have successfully developed such great customer loyalty.

The welcome kit is simple enough, it comes in a black box with a white wrap and a personalized letter welcoming you to your new car.   In the center of the box is a USB drive, in the shape of the iconic BMW key. Plug it in, and you are redirected to the BMW online portal.

This is great for so many reasons.

First, it encourages its users to sign up for their online portal, which provides a way of organizing brand loyalists and allows drivers to reach a wealth of content (such as videos, the car manual, and lease management). BMW is now able to collect huge amounts of information from its drivers and form a two-way dialogue, which otherwise would have been impossible.

Secondly, the key itself reinforces key BMW brand symbols– the logo and the key.

Finally, it’s a great practical gift!  A USB flash drive is a product that enough people know how to use now in everyday life because it has become so ubiquitous in the office and in school.  And, it doubles as a great key chain accessory.  Together, these should have improve brand recall in the future.  Along with this, it’s an introduction to the BMW lifestyle products catalog– BMW also creates jackets, apparel, accessories, etc… sold online, in-store, and at dealers… and this small token is a gateway drug, so to speak, into other products.

So, all in all, hats off the BMW for creating a simple but effective promotional tool.  I’m curious, what do other kits look like from similar companies? (Audi, Mercedes, etc?)

A great Levi’s ad

Great article by Servint on SOPA and what it is

A pair of bills in Congress called the Protect IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act were drafted to address these very real problems. Depending on who you ask, these bills will either “kill the Internet as we know it” or “save the music and movie industries.” Let’s get to the bottom of what these laws are, and what impact they might actually have.

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Since (almost) all of my 2012 Emerson friends will be coming to LA in two weeks(!), I’ve decided that I’ll spend some time jotting down all of my favorite places in LA… Starting with a new favorite: Umami Burger