I thought I’d share.  Here are 20 of the best TED talks we’ve seen, in no particular order.  Did we miss any?  Let me know in the comments!

Larry Lessig: Laws that choke creativity

Rob Reid: The $8 billion iPod

Amanda Palmer: The art of asking

Kevin Allocca: Why videos go viral

Bruce Feiler: Agile programming — for your family

Hans Rosling: Stats that reshape your worldview

Hans Rosling: Global population growth, box by box

Bobby Umar: School-Learning to Fly

Vijay Kumar: Robots that fly … and cooperate

Neil Pasricha: The 3 A’s of awesome

Richard Dawkins: Militant atheism

Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action

Ze Frank’s nerdcore comedy

Jamie Oliver’s TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food

Gary Kovacs: Tracking the trackers

Aimee Mullins: It’s not fair having 12 pairs of legs

Ed Lu: Deflecting Asteroids

Bruno Maisonnier: Dance, tiny robots!

Derek Sivers: How to start a movement

Erik Johansson: Impossible photography

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How about this:

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The long-awaited Pebble Watches are arriving soon! They have been trickling out since January 23, and if you are one of the 85,000 kickstarter backers of the Pebble Watch, then like me, you are obsessively checking your email for a shipment notification.

They have said that the watches will be shipping out in order of backing on Kickstarter for the most part.  Black ones will be shipping out faster, but you can still come up with a pretty good idea of where you are in line, with a bit of digging.

How Early Did You Pledge?

First, you’ll need to know exactly when you backed the project. Check your back emails for an email with the subject line:
 Thanks for becoming a backer of Pebble: E-Paper Watch for iPhone and Android by Pebble Technology.

It would be somewhere between April 12 and May 18, 2012.

You’ll also need to know how many watches per day were sold. Kicktraq offers some great statistics on activity for Kickstarter Projects. Take a look at their stats from the Pebble project to figure out how many backers are ahead of you.

Unfortunately, they only list the Pledges Per Day (dollars), and the number of Backers, not the number of watches, so to do this, you’ll need to do some crude math. If you add up the amount of pledges and the number of watches, the average watch is $115.  The color ones were more expensive, the early-birds and bulk orders were a bit cheaper, but it averages out.

Using that number, and the stats from Kicktraq, you can calculate your “number in line”.

You can take it a step further, and estimate that if you backed early in the morning, you’ll be closer to the beginning of the range and if you backed in the evening, you’ll be closer to the end of the range.

So When Do I Get My Watch?

So, what does that mean? Well, at a basic level, you should have a general idea of where you are.  To get a better feel for when you’ll actually see this thing on your wrist, follow the Pebble Updates to see how they’re progressing. They also have a great status site to show how many units have actually shipped so far, and they have said that they’re working towards a goal of shipping about 15k units per week.

Keep in mind, these are all wild estimates. You’ll get your watch when you get it.

In the meantime, keep checking your email!  I know I am!

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• Liberia
• Myanmar
• United States of America

Well, that would be the “official” adoption.  Smart people in the USA (doctors, physists, etc.) have been using metric for years.  It’s just the unwashed masses.

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Not many sites need an infrastructure like this, but it’s important to have a roadmap in mind and stay one step ahead of your growth.

Caching:
WP Super Cache
WP Cache
Batcache with memcached

WordPress Codex Resources:
WordPress Optimization
High traffic tips for WordPress

Web Server Software with load balancing:
nginx
Pound

Splitting DB Reads and Writes in WordPress:
hyperdb

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Everyday, there are new tools that show promise, but many are tried once and forgotten about. Some are clunky or get in the way of collaboration. Others are a solution in need of a problem. Here are some of the best ones that have gone past the trial, and turned into must-have tools that we use every day.

Skype
www.skype.com
Cost: free
Skype is best known as a telephone replacement. Sure, being able to make free skype calls anywhere in the world is nice, but that isn’t the real killer app from a collaboration perspective. The best kept secret about Skype is its use in Instant Messaging. Just like Messenger, AIM, or Google Talk, you can create a text chat bewteen people. You can even create a group chat within your team. The one feature you won’t find elsewhere though, is the ability to bookmark these conversations. This means that if someone is offline, when they return they will see the entire conversation they have missed and are able to catch up. With a team spread over multiple timezones, this is really useful, and you never have to worry about being left out of the conversation because you happen to be offline at the time.

Tokbox
www.tokbox.com
Cost: free
Video conference calls add that human touch to a remote team. If everyone has a webcam installed, Tokbox is a really elegant interface to show a “Brady Bunch” style display of your team during a meeting. We’ve used it with up to 6 people, but in theory, you could have many more. With folks scattered around the continent, being able to talk with them face-to-face makes a big difference! We don’t use this for every call, but from time to time it’s really nice to remind us all that we’re all people working as a team.

Teamspeak
www.teamspeak.com
Cost: free
Skype is great for a short, purpose driven call, but Teamspeak turns voice chat into more of a virtual office. It is client/server software, which means you need hosting, but most Internet companies already have access to servers with extra capacity. Load up the server and you can now have a “push-to-talk” style conversation with your whole team. Have the team hanging out in a Teamspeak channel, and hitting a button is the virtual equivalent to poking your head over the cubicle wall for a quick question. It allows those quick, informal, water-cooler conversations to happen despite the distance. Since it’s a push-to-talk setup, you won’t be burning up bandwidth having a skype call active all day with mostly silence.

Yugma
www.yugma.com
Cost: free
There are many desktop-sharing applications out there, but the good ones like WebEx or GoToMeeting cost a lot of money. Yugma is a free solution with all the features of the commercial solutions, including multiple viewers, and both Windows and Mac compatibility. A software download is only needed for the host, not for clients. Desktop sharing is useful for everything from viewing a powerpoint presentation to having several people doing a code review. One person hosts the meeting, and shares his screen, and everyone else can see, in real-time, what is on that screen. Combined with Teamspeak or a Skype call, and you can really see what we’re talking about.

Google docs
http://docs.google.com/
Cost: free
Google Docs are a great, free way of maintaining your documents or spreadsheets without using Microsoft Office, however there is also a huge advantage to having documents existing online in the cloud instead of within an application on one computer. Collaboration with Google Docs, specifically Google Spreadsheets, is as easy as inviting others to the document. If two (or 5.. or 50) people open a spreadsheet at the same time, they can all edit individual cells and others will see their changes immediately. If your team needs a common checklist, or you need to get information from many people, this is the easiest and most real-time way of setting this up. Google Documents can also have multiple people editing, but the experience isn’t as slick as the cell-locking based system in Spreadsheets.

These are the five that we use and have stuck with over time. There are many others that we have tried, and haven’t found as useful, but other organizations may. Which tools do you use within your work environment?

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