5 Ways PowToon Made Me Want to Buy Their Software

Even though I saw through their tricks at every step along the way, I am now a customer and proud of it. It is worthwhile to look at what they did, because these are simple things that you can do to improve your software business.

It's a dirty job... (comic)

20 lines of code that will beat A/B testing every time

A/B testing is used far too often, for something that performs so badly. It is defective by design: Segment users into two groups. Show the A group the old, tried and true stuff. Show the B group the new whiz-bang design with the bigger buttons and slightly different copy. After a while, take a look at the stats and figure out which group presses the button more often. Sounds good, right? The problem is staring you in the face. It is the same dilemma faced by researchers administering drug studies. During drug trials, you can only give half the patients the life saving treatment. The others get sugar water. If the treatment works, group B lost out. This sacrifice is made to get good data. But it doesn't have to be this way.

O(n) Delta Compression With a Suffix Array

The difference between two sequences A and B can be compactly stored using COPY/INSERT operations. The greedy algorithm for finding these operations relies on an efficient way of finding the longest matching part of A of any given position in B. This article describes how to use a suffix array to find the optimal sequence of operations in time proportional to the length of the input sequences. As a preprocessing step, we find and store the longest match in A for every position in B in two passes over the suffix array.

The strange man reading a novel in the meeting room

Why is a visitor reading a novel all week in the meeting room?

Email Etiquette

If you begin your emails with "Hi, <name>!" then they will seem less rude.

Bending over: How to sell your software to large companies

For a micro-ISV, selling to businesses can be more lucrative than selling to consumers. Instead of making a few dollars per sale and hoping for thousands of sales, you sell to only a few customers, and charge much higher rates. But the rates are high for a reason. It takes more time and money to sell to businesses.

Cell Phone Secrets

How to choose a cell phone in 2006, if you want the best possible radio.

Drawing Graphs with Physics

To my surprise, I found that there is a very simple way to arrange graphs that can be expressed in only a few lines of code, using force-directed placement...

barcamp (comic)