A photo of the Sentiment Mothership.
Reviving Digg with a Subjective Analysis Engine
A TON of social bookmarking sites have popped up since the rise of Digg. Many have had brief moments of glory followed by a slow death. Some have defied logic and maintained a strong community, such as Reddit, but they are certainly the exception to the rule.
I really believe in the core idea of democratizing content based on a simple voting system. The only major problem I see with these apps is the way they handle new content. A staging or ‘new’ area for content to be vetted before reaching the ‘homepage’ is just not scalable.
Bake Your Rhymes in the Kitchen
Are you a musician? Wouldn’t it be great to get some unbiased feedback on your vocals before releasing a track?
Use the PitchCake kitchen to make adjustments. Just sing variations of your song into your browser mic and get evaluated. We’ll tell you which versions sound best for the criteria that are important to you.
Use that data to write better songs and make more hits!
Get Your Limited Edition PitchCake Tshirt!
Our 1st Edition PitchCake tshirts have arrived! In celebration, we’re giving five away to the highest ranking pitches that come in this weekend. To get your very own PitchCake tshirt, simply browse the open Challenges and share your best pitch with us. We’ve got bacon, coffee, NES and more and even more, so you’re sure to find your passion. Winners announced here on Monday morning.
Guy, Austin & Evy model the limited edition PitchCake Tshirt. That’s pure PitchCake goodness imprinted on an oh-so-soft-and-delicious American Apparel 50/50 shirt.
Brainstorming with PitchCake
Catherine Brown recently wrote an article on some of the problems associated with traditional brainstorming. I completely agree with the general concept. Getting into a group and hashing out ideas can be inefficient in so many ways:
- Only 1 person can present an idea at a time which creates a bottleneck and inhibits free flowing ideas.
- You can’t always force ideas on the spot. I don’t know how the brain generates new ideas exactly, sometimes one idea feeds another…but for me idea generation is a background process that can be fueled by many forms of stimulation. (music, coffee shops, driving, showering, sleeping, the outdoors…)
- I don’t generally like to express ideas verbally in their most raw form as they are come to me. Writing them down first is much more desirable because it gives you at least a few seconds to explore and refine.
Greatest NES Game Ever
The Nintendo Entertainment System was full of amazing games. Zelda, Super Mario 1, 2 and 3, Ninja Gaiden, Final Fantasy I, Mega Man, Dragon Warrior…the list goes on…
Tell us your favorite NES game and why. The best pitch gets $25.
Use PitchCake to Get Past the Secretary
Are you a phone salesman and you can’t quite figure out how to get past the secretary stiff arm? Sign up for PitchCake then go to the kitchen and practice your approaches.
Your overall score is important but pay extra attention to how convincing you sound. Find an approach that consistently scores 8+ and try it out in the real world.
Send your success story to sprinkles@pitchcake.com and we’ll give you free credits to practice your pitches!
PitchCake uses Raphael.js for Data Visualization
We aren’t an anti-Flash bakery but it is too heavy for basic data visualization. This leaves you with 3 common HTML5 options.
- CSS3+JS - This solution is great in many cases. You can easily create bar charts, animate loading bars, even do some creative things with circles and non-rectangle shapes using a variety of techniques.
- Canvas - You have complete control to manipulate every pixel of a 2D canvas. Very powerful but also really painful to do some things like animation.
- SVG - I personally prefer SVG over canvas for pretty much everything I’ve done beyond basic html/css. Creating and animating relatively complex shapes is much easier with SVG.
SVG is only fun if you’re working with a decent library and Raphael.js has worked out really well for me. It abstracts away the tedious work without making too many assumptions and trying to be an out-of-the-box-do-everything solution.
