My Role: Agile Project Management, Graphic Design, Q/A & Testing, Wireframing, Information Design
Techniques: Agile Project Management, Distributed Resource Management, User Interface Design, DNS management, Social Marketing, iPhone Provisioning, and Submission to Apple App Store.
Launches: 11/27/09 and beyond
Sites/Apps: 17 iPhone Apps, 5 Websites, and counting

At the midpoint of 2009, the economy crashed, and while hotelicopter.com (the startup that I was working for), survived the recession, unfortunately the Product Manager position (that was me) did not.

While going through the usual job-searching one does when in need of employment, I came to see that the rest of the world and not just the startup companies were in pretty serious trouble as well, and weren’t hiring.

SO, I thought, “what if I lowered the bar for them” and instead of going for full time positions that require a company to put up much more than a salary - they could hire me for an immediate need and when that need was met, we could part ways. This seemed to work, as I’ve been up to my ears managing a wide range of development projects from apps for the iPhone (thanks Steve) to websites for education centers in Doha, Qatar, India.

Here’s some of the highlights. As I have time, I’ll fill in the details.

Select iPhone App Clients:

• Crutchfield
• Christian Computing Magazine
• Game Show Network
• J&H MedSoft
• Little House Publishers
• Relevant Magazine
• SBNation (launching 2010)
• Sylvania (launching 08/2010)
• WNRN

Select Web Clients

• My Education City
• OpenQ (launching 08/2010)

My Role: Graphic Design, Wordpress Installation, Product Management
Techniques: User Interface Design, Project Management, & Resource Management, DNS management, Social Marketing.
Launch: April 1st, 2009
Site: aprilfools.hotelicopter.com

At the beginning of 2009, VibeAgent (the company that I work for), decided that we needed to rebrand the site to make the site more memorable, and stand out from the crowd. After some brainstorming, beer, and some more brainstorming… we came up with hotelicopter.com. As we began to make plans for the rebranding the site, one of the items on the list was to gain visibility in the market, and not lose ground in the traffic arena. So, we went back to the drawing board (read bar), brainstormed (read drank) some more, and asked ourselves the question, “what if there really was a flying hotel?” Just like that, The Hotelicopter was born.

A little Wordpress Wizardry, some fine 3D modeling, and a little help from one of the teams 15 year old son on the video front, and we had a pretty convincing site heralding the launch of “the world’s first flying 5 star hotel”. The site featured tour dates, and exhaustive list of amenities, images of the hotelicopter, and cabins (courtesy of yotel.com), and a video of The Hotelicopter in flight.

The site peaked at 1.5M visitors, and on April Fools day, we were the #5 most watched video on YouTube. Well, the hoax worked, and hotelicopter.com launched amidst a frenzy of media attention including articles on Wired, CNet, Business Week, and Gizmodo.

It can be very time-consuming to find the right hotel at the best price online.  VibeAgent solves this problem by aggregating rates, availability, and content from over 30 travel sites, and adding a layer of intelligence to match each traveler to the perfect hotel. We do the searching for you, by consolidating rates, availability, and hotel content on over 140,000 hotels, providing you access to the largest hotel selection and best room rates available online. You can use VibeAgent’s real-time price, location, and category filters to determine which hotel best suits their needs, and then see consolidated room rates from all the searched sites.

This saves you from having to visit multiple sites to find the right hotel at the best available rate. In addition, VibeAgent allows registered users to post and share hotel reviews with their own network of friends and colleagues.  We just launched the Hotelier Suite, which allows hotels to post or claim their hotel and manage their content directly on VibeAgent’s search engine.

Read the full press release on TechCrunch.com

I’m cruising along at work today, and I receive an email from my mother containing a link to the Wired blog stating that McCain is learning to use the Internet. Now lets be clear - My mother is not a computer genius, nor she does not work in an office with constant access to the Internet. Still, she has the knowledge and skill (partially imparted by yours truly) to get online all by herself, search for articles and news, and communicate instantly with the ones that she loves. Knowledge & skill which Presidential Candidate John McCain apparently lacks.

I’m not generally prone to political commentary - but this is a man that wants my vote to run my country. A country that is woefully in danger of being left behind in the technology arena (despite W’s promise that no child would be). The article even points to a link where his name on twitter has even been taken over by a prankster.

This is just unacceptable.

So, Yes! My Mother is better than Presidential Candidate John McCain at using the Internet. I couldn’t be more proud!

Love you MOM!!!

NOTE: Please reserve the  moma’s boy comments - I’ve heard it all before.

Picture if you will…

People around the world are lined up in anticipation of the upcoming release of the iPhone 3G. Meanwhile, those of us with our second generation phones are fervently clicking the ‘Check for Update” button in iTunes after spending the previous afternoon browsing the AppStore and downloading our favorites.

Finally this morning around 9AM, the 5th click on the update button caused my heart to skip a beat… Version 2.0 is here! It’s finally here!!! Chants of “Huzzah!” ring through the office as all of the have-iPhones prepare to update and rub all of the iPhone-have-not’s noses in the ease of the update and the cool new toys that we’ll all have (in the traditional iPhone smugness reserved for such occasions). A few even throw the gauntlet down in preparation for a Saber Battle.

Then, a dark cloud descends over the crowd as one-by-one, the horror sets in. Through the din of whispered “WTF!” - we all realize that our phones are BRICKED! I felt like Cindy Lou Who in How the Grinch Stole Christmas watching iPhone-have-nots smugly making phone calls on their plain ‘ol phones.

Way to go Apple… Probably the most highly anticipated software update to-date, and you shoot yourself in the foot… How very Windows Vista of you. Hopefully you’ll figure it out, or at least give us an idea of when we can have our phones back (at the time of this post, this was the top story on Apple’s Hot News.

Sadly, our epic Saber Battle will have to wait.

Back on June 18th, I received an email from Netflix stating that they were eliminating profiles on September 1, 2008 citing that, “this change will help us to continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.” For those of you who do not use this Netflix service, profiles allow you to set up a separate queue for your account, assign a number of your rentals to that queue, and even set parental control for the queue. This was particularly handy for my girlfriend and I, because we were able to put the movies that we wanted to see the most at the top of our respective queues - leaving only the “which one do you want to watch” question [handled easily by the 'pick a card method'] unanswered.

I’m sure you’re asking yourself, as did I, why in the world would you eliminate functionality from a site? I’m sure there is a viable reason on the programming/site up-keep side of things, or this functionality is making it difficult to implement a new feature… but hell - this was one of my favorite things about Netflix. It was a no hassle way to ensure that everyone got a say, and that everyone [based on the luck of the draw] was happy.

It seems that there were quite a few others that were as perplexed, and bothered by this as I was. Yesterday evening, to my delight, I received another email from Netflix stating that they were keeping profiles.

Kudos to Netflix for listening to their users. I’m quite sure that there’s a programmer out there who’s life just got a little harder, but way to go!

C’mon!

The folks over at the Deeds Campaign sent an email this AM apologizing for the problem with the unsubscribe link on the site. So, in all fairness… Thanks for looking in to the problem so quickly.

Mr. Konizer–

We were forwarded a link to your blog where you complain (rightfully so) that you were unable to unsubscribe from our e-mail list, even after three attempts. We searched our list for this e-mail address and came up empty. Also, we were unable to find any e-mail or phone messages from you indicating that you wished to unsubscribe and were unable to do so. Of course, we want our unsubscribe link to work flawlessly. Could you forward a copy of the message you received to [email omitted] so that we can ensure you are removed from the list and hopefully answer the question of why you were unable to unsubscribe yourself?

Thanks and all the best,

Team Deeds

There are more updates to come, and sites to see - so stay tuned.

Thanks to Darren Hoyt for the use of the MimboPro Theme.