Some more videos from a Dallas to Portland road trip my father and I took this summer.

Yosemite

Crater Lake

Arizona

For 5 years now I’ve been making music. Sweet drum and bass music. By myself. In my basement. I’d like to make music again. With people.

I’ve been a drummer for a while. Played out in a band in Boston. I’m looking for some good people to do a once a week or so thing. See where it goes. Hopefully make up some songs and have fun doing so.

Let me know if you want to be one of those people.

We’re looking for an experienced web developer to help build the next iteration of Sell Simply.

We’re building the first Twitter commerce platform enabling individuals and businesses to transact on Twitter. As such, we have some creative and challenging problems to solve! You should at a minimum be down with OOP and PHP, frameworks such as CodeIgniter, and comfortable interfacing with API’s. Even better, you’d know about multiple queue processing with Redis and php-resque.

We’re rebranding, building a new web app, new website, and our own API. We’re looking for a solid teammate to help us as we launch the aforementioned and scale up to support a lot of excited users.

The position is contract to start. Please email hello[at]sellsimp.ly.

A response I wrote to my Dad who sent me this NYT article, in which the op ed writer describes Ron Paul as conspiracy theorist loon.

One man’s conspiracy theory is another man’s truth. I don’t doubt that the Trilateral Commission doesn’t have the common man’s interest in mind. I don’t doubt that there are missing pieces to the 9/11 puzzle. The issue becomes that people jump to an extreme opinion about Paul when ideas like these are offered to the public. For example: because Paul has said we should have all data related to 9/11 released to the public doesn’t mean he is anti-american, a paranoid conspiracy theorist, or any of the other hyperbolized smear words that the media has trumped up. It means he’s questioning why we haven’t been told the entire story, and we definitely haven’t. There is a vast space between logical questioning and crazy conspiracy theorist. It’s just that people are too simple to find that space between. It’s much easier on the brain to call someone extreme. The issues are more complex than media headlines.

Paul didn’t write racial slurs. End of story, right? Should be. But if you needed more, and in fact, if you go by his rock solid record he’s voted more progressive on race than his opponents. This repeated drum beat that he’s a racist is preposterous. Again, digging deeper than the media headlines his record is so rock solid on race that people should be questioning the motives of the accusers, not Paul’s morals!

The way I see it, the establishment, in coordination with the media they control, is railroading him. He speaks the truth about complex issues. It’s difficult for America to hear that our foreign policy agenda may have contributed to 9/11 happening. Does this mean that Paul hates America? Does it mean he’s saying we were behind 9/11? That’s what the media will tell you it means, but of course it doesn’t. It means our foreign policy of occupying countries, murdering civilians, unjust wars and hegemony may lead to some blowback like 9/11.

The media is controlled by corporate money, and thus is paid to skew the messaging against a potential leader that wants to rip apart the system that feeds them. It’s so obvious it hurts, or is this a conspiracy theory too?

I invite you to dig deeper into his record than the media has. It won’t be difficult given they’ve done zero actual investigative work. Read his manifesto. Look at his record. And please… don’t send me NYT corporate funded bullshit again

Finally getting around to post some video’s from a Dallas to Portland road trip my father and I took this summer. My father and I sat and watched the sun dip behind the mountains while strong gusts from a thunderstorm sweeping left to right sent bolts of lightening through rays of sun down to the sand in Mesquite Flat Dunes. It was the most surreal nature experience I’ve been a part of it. As an atheist, the feeling of being alone in the middle of Death Valley with all hell breaking loose was as close to religion as I’ve felt. These videos, as usual, do little to convey the feeling of being there in that moment.

Here’s a still from one of the videos.

Devpreneurs, I have some side projects that I’m no longer able to tend to.

Some of my favorite quotes.

“It’s like Square, but you don’t need an extra device (a Square) — or a credit card. Pretty cool.”

“Obviously, for brands, the value proposition both for Sell Simply’s current offerings and the marketplace features that will be launching by the end of the year could be huge.”

“Just as brands hope that using Facebook as a social commerce platform can help create scale so that a larger audience will see cool products or sales because users post those items on their wall or share them with friends, Teso said that he sees a similar opportunity for eCommerce on Twitter.”

“If one happens to be selling their bike on Twitter through Sell Simply, there’s a good chance that a user’s friends will re-tweet the listing, and their followers may follow suit. If those people then, in turn, re-tweet to their followers, well, you get the point.”

Read the entire article here.

Chirp lets you accept payments quickly and easily from any device. Whether you’re a wedding photographer, store owner, taxi driver or hairdresser, customers can pay you money from anywhere using what they already have in their pocket: their phone. To accept payments you don’t need a single device.

Wow. So Flickr just invited me to give free rights to some of my images for a “weather product” Yahoo! is creating.

You’re Flickr for Zods sake! You cater to photographers! Who make a living off their photos!

Pay the people!

To say that brands are trying to figure out the best way to use Twitter to drive commerce would be an understatement. The massive opportunity the Twitter platform presents for commerce has not been lost on Twitter CEO Dick Costolo.

Currently the extent to which brands drive commerce on Twitter is limited to broadcast advertising. Brands send out Tweet based ads designed to lure consumers from Tweetdeck to the brand storefront. A transaction is then still multiple steps away as consumers must pass through a traditional e-commerce checkout process.

Semil Shah has recently written a lot about discovery based commerce. In his TechCrunch article How Discovery Will Drive Transactions he discusses the changing landscape in social commerce from search to discovery based following. He actually mentions Sell Simply in the article as a payment system. But, we’re much more…

The transition from intent-based search on Google, to discovery based commerce, is absolutely occurring, and is a perfect example of how we take Twitter to another level in the commerce context. Since we enable transactions on Twitter (one can Tweet an item for sale — followers can buy simply by replying), we actually complete the circle from discovery (you’re following a brand selling something) to action (“reply to buy” payment)… all with two Tweets. Consumers do not have to leave the Twitter platform to transact. Brands sales percentage exponentially increases as frictions decrease.

In other words, we not only drive social commerce from a discovery standpoint, we go one step further and close the loop by enabling transactions on the same platform the discovery is taking place. With us, Twitter is no longer confined to just a broadcast platform for brands. When brands Tweet about a sale through Sell Simply their followers can purchase directly from the Tweet. This combination of social commerce with “reply to buy” transaction capability is what makes our platform so powerful.

The transition from search based commerce to social is on. We’re happy to be a part of it.