9. The only thing that matters is how good your product is. All the rest is noise.

Note how many more times product or understanding of building products (technology, ux, product design) is mentioned. If you’re a startup founder or CEO with no product building experience or understanding, you’re like a bus driver with no idea where to go. Then it doesn’t matter how fancy your bus is or how good the people are on it. You will never arrive.

(betashop.com →)

The idea with the first Kippt, was to build an easy way to share links between devices. We built it in about 8 hours for the Forrst App Contest (and won), by scraping every non essential feature (including password resets etc). It was received really well and probably my best users per development time used ratio to date.

For the past year, we’ve been frustrated with bookmarking products and decided to do something about it. So welcome the new Kippt. Making your bookmarking simpler, and it’s just the start. We want to built something great to help you to save, use and find great content.

You should give Kippt a try.

Kippt on other sites:
ReadWriteWeb: Kippt: A Bookmarking App to Watch
OneThingWell: Kippt
Brent Simmons: Kippt Seems Cool

“When’s the last time you had a creative breakthrough in a Monday morning meeting? Creativity springs from unexpected places and sources — from a walk in the park to the rare block of uninterrupted time — so thinking more broadly about the intrinsic motivations (autonomy, learning, etc.) that facilitate good work is likely to have a far happier outcome than the “latest” innovation in cubicles.”

— Allison Arrieff

Is there a simpler way to improve quality and responsiveness?
If you can’t sign it, don’t ship it.

— Seth Godin: Put your name on it

Agencies, departments, and organizations don’t do things — people do things. People’s names should be on things to foster both accountability and pride.

— Edward Tufte via Neurocooking

Well, you don’t want to show something that is weak, or poor, so you want to hold off until you get it right. And the trick is to actually stop that behavior. We show it every day, when it’s incomplete. If everybody does it, every day, then you get over the embarrassment. And when you get over the embarrassment, you’re more creative.

— Ed Catmull via Protoshare

And I haven’t seen any evidence that the rate of change in the industry is decreasing. I think it’s increasing. So what you’ll end up finding is those thousand people are the enemy of your next project. They may be able to bang out your current one, but they’ll get in the way of doing the next one.

But, seriously, if fifty awesome people knocked on the door, we’d hire them all.
We don’t hire to specific positions, we hire to standards.

— Gabe Newell on Valve

We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies, those who do not leave their values to empty dreams, but bring them into existence, those who give material form to thoughts, and reality to values—those who make steel, railroads and happiness.

— Dagny Taggard, Atlas Shrugged (by Ayn Rand)

Now our family grows by two people. Welcome our new designers, Antti Salonen and Viljami Salminen.

Antti already jumped in and has been chipping in projects, for example, developing our own web UI framework, called Kisko Compass. Previously he almost single-handedly took care of the whole web design side at Otava publishing. Antti is also an enthusiastic hacker and has participated in several RailsRumbles.

Viljami Salminen will start by the end of this month, and like he says on his site, he loves to design simple and usable interfaces – just what we love as well. Like Antti and myself, Viljami also builds his designs into flowing web mobile interfaces. Viljami likes to experiment with different technologies and projects – take a look at his new mobile gig finding app, called Keikalle.com.

I think it’s really important that our designers can work, and want to work beyond Photoshop screens, since the the user experience gets built on the application. Our goal is always a working application, not pretty pictures or great code base.

So we are not your usual design studio or a code factory. We aim to build the teams that will build your product.

***

Another change is, that right about now, I’ll be leaving my post at Kisko Labs.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been traveling around the Valley, and just got back from SXSWi in Austin. Something I have known since co-founding ArcticStartup, is that I have a passion for startups. Startup people are really excited about what they do, they are towards action and results not just motion and they have a mission and a vision which they need to prove to everyone else.

Kisko is a great place for a lot of these things. We work on new products and with startups, building and prototyping things no-one else has before, and we also aim for results and action, not dwell on planning or waste time on meetings. It was not an easy choice to leave.

Having said that I’m also a gamer in heart and I got a really good opportunity from my friend Ville Vesterinen to join Grey Area. They just recently raised 1.9M EUR to build the company and develop the location based iPhone MMORPG, Shadow Cities, into a global hit.. At Grey Area I’ll take a role in the creative team, and be responsible for designing the web experience of the game.

I will still stay on the Kisko Labs board and help the guys where I can, but I’ll focus my time on helping making the Shadow Cities to an international success.

So kudos to all the guys and clients of Kisko Labs.

– Karri

ThingLink can happily pronounce the winner of the Sticker Challenge to be… (drumroll please)

Karri Saarinen and Jori Lallo with their minimalistic design that you can tag by writing on it.

http://www.thinglinkblog.com/2011/02/17/the-winner-of-the-thinglink-sticker-challenge/

Thanks everyone for your votes!