If you aren’t subscribed already, I highly recommend listening to the most recent version of Rebooting the News. Dave and Jay talk a bit more about the concept of a virtual assignment desk, something I very much hope the Edit Flow Project can be a foundation for. If we can get newsrooms to manage their story assignments within WordPress, then it’s a more logical step to offer the ability to open that information up and have the community contribute to it.
Monthly Archive for July, 2009
I did a bit of research this afternoon comparing Google Checkout vs. PayPal vs. setting up a merchant account with Bank of America for handling credit card payments from clients.
Google Checkout is relatively straightforward. For monthly sales of less than $3,000, the costs are 2.9% of the transaction and $0.30 per transaction. Between monthly sales of $3,000 and $10,000, the cut goes down to 2.5%. The functionality we’re most likely to use is the ability to send an invoice by email. We make the business deal over the phone and/or email, they send us information on what specifically they want, and then we create a new invoice in Google Checkout. They receive an email, click on the link, make the payment either via Google Checkout or credit card, and then we have the money in our account.
Continue reading ‘Google Checkout vs. Paypal vs. merchant account’
This week’s call will be known as “the call when Daniel got mad at everyone for chatting instead of speaking.” Or maybe “the call when Daniel was caffeinated and giddy.” Or a more celebratory “the call when Adam finally had a job and Internet!” (Congrats, by the way, Adam).
In all seriousness, though, we were really productive. This call marks the end of the profit vs. non-profit discussion as we start to buckle down on big projects that need to be completed by the end of summer.
On the just-short-of-an-hour call today, we had Daniel, Adam, Joey, Megan Taylor, Greg, Andrew and I.
Organization
Thursday was the first CoPress hackathon, or something similar. The day kicked off with an 8 a.m. conference call and everyone dedicated the next eight hours to working on CoPress projects. Feedback, overall, was positive. Although everyone generally likes the idea of working all day, time conflicts make it difficult for everyone to start at 8 a.m. (such as Joey, Greg, Andrew and I). We’re going to continue the CoPress work day every Thursday as a weekly team event.
Continue reading ‘July 26, 2009: Fully-caffeinated, semi-giddy and Adam has a job’
For the next hour or so, I shall scour the internets for inspiration on the redesign and relaunch of version three of our website. I’m looking for headers, footers, ways of presenting content; an all out armada of inspiration. Hopefully this will get us over designers-block as we do a refresh. If something in this analysis seems funny, it’s because I’ve been on the phone several hours today and going since 8 am, much like every day 
I will probably link to Pixelmatrix Design’s website more than once in this post. It’s simple, gorgeous, and elegant. The logo stands on it’s own really well, and I appreciate the smart approach to color. It covers the elements we need in our header: logo and primary navigation. If you check out his website, I think he also does the intro text quite well.
Another beautiful design. This time the logo is stronger, and again can stand on its own, and the primary navigation pops out a bit more. I’m a fan of how the active page is visually distinguishable from the rest, although I’m not entirely sold on square buttons.
Continue reading ‘CoPress dot org version three design inspiration’
I don’t have as much time as I’d like to recap the conversation of Sunday’s meeting, but I’ll do the best I can. It was a super-productive, super-charged, and super-efficient meeting, all powered by a venti chai accidentally consumed by me. Joining me for the conversation were Lauren Rabaino, Joey Baker, Adam Hemphill, Andrew Spittle, Greg Linch, and Megan Taylor, a rockin’ team.
We started off by continuing the for-profit vs. non-profit conversation we’ve had of late. I did a recap of the call Greg and I had with Greg’s mom, Susan Linch. She was really helpful and informed us of most of the logistical things we’ll have to cover if we do the switch. Fortunately, it doesn’t sound like too big of a deal. The bigger/biggest concern is one of PR/branding backlash. From our call on Sunday afternoon with John York, it sounds like even that shouldn’t be our biggest concern. We should instead focus on the business model and business plan; if we can continue doing what we’ve been doing in the harmony of the community, then we’ll be fine. I remember that he also suggested we do a bit of brainstorming as to what we think the worst case scenarios are such that we’ll then be able to generate strategies to deal with them. My goals for this week are to write out a legitimate spec for the Connection Engine, or start on one at least, and start working on this business plan. We’ll want to have it done to a point where we can make a final decision by August first.
Adam didn’t have any redesign and rebrand concepts to show off at the meeting, but said he’d have some to share later this week. Our goals are to push this out by August 5th, although that would be coming up pretty quick.
That’s as far as I can get tonight. Sorry for the incomplete summary; I’ve been writing nearly the entire day it feels like. The audio is a good conversation.
I’ve come to a realization. CoPress has no plans to tackle the mobile space. I’m throughly convinced that mobile is the next wave of UI/apps/UX. I’ve said often that if you want to be in the business of information (we are), you need to not only have a mobile strategy, but be implementing it now if you want it to be able to pay off in time.
I have every recognition that we have our hands full with the Connection Engine (+hosting) and the Revenue Platform, and that the college market is pretty well behind the MSM when it comes to adoption of online technologies, but that doesn’t mean that our customers (students) are.
If anything, students are more mobile-aware/capable than most consumers. Why are we not tackling that problem? Is this mission creep? Does it matter if it is ’cause this is sorta important? How would we tackle mobile? What’s needed in the mobile college market?
- Maps of campus to help you find classrooms on the first day?
- App that auto-detects other phones in the room to auto-generate a class list?
- Sports scores?
I dunno? I don’t have any great ideas, just saying that we ought to be thinking about this.
Today Joey, Daniel and I had a 40-minute call with my former entrepreneurship professor Jonathan Lind York about the for-profit vs. non-profit debate. Jon is a Yale graduate who has served as the CEO for three non-profits before switching to the for-profit world, so he has experience with this stuff.
He brought up a few key points:
- How a business functions isn’t based on whether it’s for-profit or non-profit
- The only difference NP/FP makes is in access to different sources of money and how the money is spent
- We shouldn’t put our mental energy into worrying about a backlash if we go for profit. We’re journalism students, afterall, right? We’re supposed to know how to communicate with our community and explain the reasoning behind the change.
Continue reading ‘Profit vs. non profit discussion with Jon York’
Five different possibilities. I think all of these could be worth applying to in a month or two if we go for-profit. They generally offer a small amount of funding in exchange for equity. Hat tip to Ryan for pointing this out to me.
Susan Linch was kind enough to connect with Greg and I on the phone this evening to talk about the potential financial and legal implications of moving from a non-profit to a for-profit. I’ll do my best to reconstruct my notes, but also encourage everyone to ask follow up questions in the comments. As points of information, we originally incorporated on January 13th and the end to our official fiscal year is June 30th.
Continue reading ‘Update on the possible transition to for-profit’
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