Speaking with Jon over the holidays between Thanksgiving and Christmas about the Qworky brand and what its plans are as a startup company really intrigued me. Those conversations alone enticed me to become a part of its diverse and energetic team and assist Qworky to achieve its company goals and aspirations.

At our first official Qworky meeting between Jon, Brandie and I, Jon demonstrated a quick but thorough rundown of the ongoings with Qworky and the engineering side of things. Wow, there was quite a bit of information to soak up! However, I was determined to tackle the abundance of information and I took it in stride. Once Jon recognized my determination and go-getter attitude, he gladly welcome me to the team and it was then and there that I knew it was my duty to get up to speed with the rest of the team, especially engineering, and document my every step of the way.

I’m the first Qworkineer (Qworky Engineer) to join this wonderful company “in stride.” Getting up to speed with the rest of the engineering team was a new experience for myself and Qworky. As a Qworkineer in my position, it was my responsibility from the get go to get up to speed to help with open source development and document my experience in order to make it a very fluid process for onboarding future Qworkineers.

If you think about it, the task that was on my plate could have been considered very overwhelming. However, I took it a step at a time (thank you Google!) and enlisted the assistance of Alem and Jon if there were technical problems I just couldn’t troubleshoot successfully after spending hours trying to figure it out on my own. One of the toughest examples was when it came to creating the feature that displays the time remaining until a meeting starts. Initially the mathematical logic took some time to implement but after some research and trial-and-error, I was able to create the feature successfully with some help from Brandie and Jon during our problem-solving/brainstorm session. Although the entire process was very time consuming and frustrating at times, I was able to successfully push through and accomplish my goals with my persistence and gung ho attitude.

With new team members like Andrea getting involved in the open source project, and Josh joining the team as QX developer, the documentation I produced is already proving useful. Of course there are still plenty of questions, and the documentation will improve over time. Our goal is to have a very fluid onboarding process with minimal hiccups while sparing people from the technical hardships I encountered along my journey.

Sitting in on meetings can be overwhelming at first because there is a lot of exposure to new information that you may not be familiar with. During the week we had two meetings overlap, but we are using “Qworky Meetings,” so I was able to access notes and refer to the minutes of the meeting, both of which helped me stay up to date and involved throughout the week. One of my other main goals has been to engage our followers on Twitter. I have found that, since tweets are only 140 characters or less, the words chosen are vital to our success. I have been working with people that are involved in the #meetings hashtag as they will be part of our target audience. I was able to find some articles to post that were relevant to meetings and social media. The objective is to get people in the meetings hashtag to read the article and then follow Qworky to see what else we have to say.

Another project that I have been working on is a time capsule for Qworky. Our goal is to document the different trials and tribulations experienced as we get closer to launching our first product. The time capsule is comprised of thoughts and ideas that led up to our first product release in the future. Some of the early contents that will be added include these blog posts and the interviews with some of the Qworky staff. It is exciting to think that twelve weeks from now I will be able to look back through the time capsule and see how much progress I have made.

In this role, you’ll

• Help define and implement our first product
• Lead deployment, including selecting and managing an XMPP server, defining an operations strategy, and adminstering the hosted Linux environment
• Work with a technically reknowned CTO and a great design and engineering team using technologies like Ruby, Cucumber, Javascript, XMPP, Capistrano
• Participate in the building of a startup and architecture through rapid growth

Skills and experience

• XMPP (openfire, ejabberd, tigase, etc.) or IRC development or administration experience highly preferred
• Self-managing, responsive, and quick at discovering information online, and good at learning by doing
• Open-source or commercial programming experience. Ruby or PHP preferred
• Experience working as part of a distributed development team
• One to three years years experience administering a user-focused web application on a Linux environment

More details

Compensation: Negotiable; possibilities include “contract-to-hire” and/or equity. We see this as a great opportunity to get to know each other, and envision this role transitioning into an employee joining our startup team.

Location: Qworky is based in Seattle, and most of us live in the Pacific Northwest or the San Francisco Bay Area. While welcome applications from anywhere, we have a slight preference for those within driving distance of either of those hubs.

About Us: Our name is Qworky and we’re out to create a better world through better software.

Diversity: We view diversity as a vital ingredient to our strategy for sustained business success as well as being important for social justice. We value unique perspectives and traditionally under represented view points in the software design process. We welcome collaborators from every walk of life. We welcome people of any gender identity or expression, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, experience level, education background, culture, or political opinion.

To apply: Please contact us on Twitter at @qworky or via email at recruiting@qworky.net

I believe its a loss for both.

The higher price point of $12.99-$14.99 (same as paperback) doesn’t respect the trade offs of ebooks vs. books.

Lets think about it:

Physical books: durable, collectable, universal, can be loaned to others, are easily gifted, portable in small quantities, natural spacial memory (can be layed out physically, highlighted)

eBooks: as durable as formats- and user’s hard drive, no obvious collect ability of books, no-where near universal, a lot of complications and issues regarding loaning (not possible with kindle), are not easily gifted, quite portable in small and large quantities,

So while eBooks get a

‘Of Sprints and Marathons’ indeed!

The amount of progress that can be made when we all pull towards a common goal is astounding. Qworky, working as a distributed team has tackled quite a few ’sprints’ on multiple fronts. Establishing our presence in social media during product development, reaching out to our community for feedback – proactively, documenting both our engineering processes and our team time capsule,  and making rapid progress on all aspects of product development.

Now on to the next sprint!

Thank you Qworky Followers, Fans and Community members- and special thank you to the entire Qworky Team- you make this Chief Executive Cheerleader proud.

On your mark.

Today I wanted to restart my PC (running Win7 which I looove). No particular reason just to keep my PC healthy- well, I’m one of those people that has 30 browser windows or tabs open at one time- which makes my shutdown experience one big stressful window of decisions. What to keep, what to save, where to bookmark, a nomenclature that makes sense. In the past delicious has helped some- but overall I still struggle with these types of decisions. This time around- I took note of my emotions. I felt extremely pressured, and a bit stressed at the weight of this entire experienced- this got me to wondering am I alone?

And what do you think the cause is of this and other stressful software experiences? I’m beginning to think software causes me stress by an army of small decisions- many of which seem unnatural.

What do you think?

Starting a new job is always stressful because everything is new, and because I am the first Social Media Intern at Qworky we are actively establishing the blueprint for my role. Using social media and Qworky has allowed me to organize my tasks which prevented me from being overwhelmed. To get started, I sat in on some meetings and have been interviewing the team. I was able to get a better feel for everyone’s role within the company through the interview process. So far I have been able to speak with Jon Pincus, the company’s Chief Technical Officer as well as Harry Waisbren who is the Community Manager. I still have more people to interview and look forward to talking about them. I am learning about broad concepts as well as step-by-step instructions on how to execute the technical aspects of social media and the programs that go along with it. The first week here has opened my eyes to a whole other world that I didn’t know existed. Looking forward, I am excited to work with everyone at Qworky and gain experience using Qworky Meetings, Twitter, Google wave as well as learning about the new innovations that are on the horizon.

You can check it out by visiting http://dev.qworky.net/meetings/6. Please take it for a spin!

- log in to Qworky (you can choose whatever name you want)

- join the meeting

- leave a comment in the chat room

If you run into any problems (did I mention that it’s version 0.01?), here’s an screenshot of what it looks like after you log in.

And about that feedback … the more the better! Please fill out our short survey — or, if you prefer, leave a comment here, tweet it to us, write on our Facebook wall, or send via carrier pigeon.

Thanks much!

jon

Before I was able to click the drop down. UPS started to translate their greeting into international languages.

Could UPS be implementing a deft tactic in branding?

By doing a simple drop down, such as choosing my location, I am actively engaging with their brand, and selecting my location from their plethora of global options. This reinforces UPS’ brand message “UPS is Global”.

While I was mildly annoyed, in hindsight I think this is genius- they only make you choose your location once, and the payoff is you encounter and engage with their business (to see how it works try visiting UPS.com in the ‘private browsing mode’ of your browser).

I’m impressed by the way they communicate their brand positioning through multiple touch points.

Lessons for small businesses: Defining your brand characteristics, and brand positioning is vital to articulating a clear brand message.

Question: Beyond your logo, and color scheme, what are the vital ingredients of your businesses brand? How do you communicate them in innovative ways to your clients or customers?