Sequoia

Sequoia, the guys who funded Apple, Google, and YouTube, have a no-frills site. It stands out from the typical flashy, fancy, or salesy VC firm site.

1-800-GOT-JUNK

Vincent Hubert writes:

Have a look at the bottom of the page here: 1-800-GOT-JUNK

You want to have a clue on how much clutter you have? Just click on the truck ratio, and you will see the amount of junk it represents.

Blockbuster

It’s always a challenge to deliver bad news to customers. Don Wilson spotted this Blockbuster account change email and sent it in. The compay is downgrading customers on this plan from unlimited in-store exchanges to 3 free exchanges per month. The note is a little long winded — the main point: You no longer get unlimited in-store exchanges — but at least it clearly explains what’s going on and shows all the options available to customers.

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Have an interesting link, story, or screenshot for Signal vs. Noise? Contact svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Great Campfire tips (and more) from New Leaders

“New Leaders is a team of designers and developers working all over the country focused on building high quality, Rails-based web applications for our customers. Talent knows no boundaries — we have team members that work from many different places and Campfire allows everyone to communicate on a regular basis. It acts as our virtual office and provides a centralized place for us to talk and make sure everything is on track.”

Basecamp permission system improved

We’ve made some significant, oft-requested improvements to the Basecamp permissions system. These changes should speed up your workflow and make giving/removing access to collaborators simpler, easier, and more consistent.

Use Basecamp as a sales tool

Basecamp customers often tell us the product is a great sales tool for them. Some pitch potential clients by showing them Basecamp and how they use it to collaborate effectively. Others go ahead and set up a client project before they’ve even won the account; Showing a live, functional project site helps build momentum and gives a leg up over slower-moving competitors. Basetwo Media goes a step further: The company’s new site promotes Basecamp as part of its marketing strategy.BiggerSmall says Campfire leads to fewer meetings

“We just opened a second office of our small business IT support company, and it’s about 2000 miles away from our first office. The first thing you notice when you do this is that you have to really make an effort to keep communication flowing and keep a sense of being “one team”, which is critical to our service model. Campfire makes this a lot easier to do.”

How Backpack reminders can keep your email inbox uncluttered

“I have a lot of tips and tricks for using reminders and “e-mail this page’ in combination with Gmail. I like to keep a clean inbox (per Mark Hurst and Merlin Mann), so I use Gmail’s search feature almost every day. Here’s a typical reminder: Follow-up with Mark ‘[ Subject of Mark’s e-mail ]’ or Post content for Client A ‘[ Client A’s e-mail request ]’. Those reminders may come back to me tomorrow or 2 weeks from now, but I know to search gmail for the subject listed in the reminder. Plus, I get to archive the e-mail immediately and not look at it everyday. I also abandoned the Outlook to-do list when I started using Backpack.”

Snooth uses Highrise to run the world’s most comprehensive wine database

“Snooth has a multi-location team (New York, Boston and Belgrade) and Highrise allows simple multi-user access. Highrise contains all our company contacts – each tagged. We cc the dropbox on all (well, most) correspondence so copies are electronically filed by contact. This is a big, and unexpected, feature for us as it makes finding the odd email simple. Highrise also makes it simple to oversee the flow of information across the whole organization.”

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This is the fourth in a series of posts showing how we use Campfire as our virtual office. All screenshots shown are from real usage and were taken during one week in September.

This time we’ll take a look at how we use Campfire to help us write copy for our apps, marketing sites, blogs, etc.

Collect ideas for copy

Jason asks for suggestions about a blog post he’s writing. Ryan, Mark, and Sam offer up some ideas.

Suggest a copy change

Jason suggests adding a message to an app that says, “Upload photo, one moment…” Kickstart a blog post

Ryan points to a link at a site. His comments lead to a blog post on the subject.

Highlight smart copywriting by showing it in context

Campfire is also great for pointing out smart copy elsewhere. Here, Ryan shares a thoughtful phrase spotted inside an iPhone app.

Related

Behind the scenes at 37signals: Design

Behind the scenes at 37signals: Coding

Behind the scenes at 37signals: Sysadmin and development

We’ve been working with and on Rails for the past four and half years here at 37signals. The sum of those efforts just got a new label today: Rails 2.0.

It contains a ton of good stuff. Lots of things regarding our love of all things HTTP. The RESTful angle. Multiviews. Security improvements. Lots of speed tweaks.

It’s been a joy extracting all these features from their origins in Highrise, Basecamp, and the rest of our applications. Deriving frameworks from production code really is a pleasant way of arriving at something useful.

Early products by James Dyson

“James Dyson’s first product, the Sea Truck, was launched in 1970 while he was studying at the Royal College of Art. A few years later came the award-winning Ballbarrow that can go where no wheelbarrow has ever been before. Then there was the Wheelboat and the Trolleyball. Even the integral hose, seen on most upright vacuum cleaners, is a Dyson invention.”

Building loyalty with the long wow

“True loyalty grows within people based on a series of notable interactions they have, over time, with a company’s products and services. No card-carrying programs are necessary: Apple doesn’t have a traditional loyalty program; neither does Nike or Harley-Davidson. These companies impress, please, and stand out in the minds of their customers through repeated, notably great experiences.”

Joel on installable software

“Making an elegantly-designed and easy-to-use application is just as gnarly, even though, like good ballet, it seems easy when done well. Jason and 37signals put effort into good design and get paid for that. Good design seems like the easiest thing to copy, but, watching Microsoft trying to copy the iPod, turns out to be not-so-easy. Great design is a gnarly problem, and can actually provide surprisingly sustainable competitive advantage.”

Turtles all the way down

“For Hawking, the turtle story is one of two accounts of the nature of the universe; he asserts that the turtle theory is patently ridiculous, but admits that his own theories may be just as ridiculous. ‘Only time will tell,’ he concludes.”

The "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks

Pretty self-”explanatory.”

Nike’s Phil Knight at Stanford

“But it was around that time that Mr. Knight was surfacing anew in the classroom. Though not registered as a student, Mr. Knight has periodically taken classes with Stanford undergraduates over the past three years, swapping homework assignments and even going out with fellow students for a few beers at Palo Alto bars. He has told fellow students that he is writing a novel.”

About blogs on the Kindle

“If Amazon charged a monthly connection fee for the Kindle and made blogs free, instead, no one would complain (about the blog part). Because that’s the pricing model they’re used to.”

Global open-source car design summit

“Each team contributes a different set of parts or designs. I thought writing for my college newspaper was cool. These kids are building a hyper-efficient car, which, they hope, ‘will demonstrate a 95 percent reduction in embodied energy, materials and toxicity from cradle to cradle to grave’ and provide ‘200 m.p.g. energy equivalency or better.’ The Linux of cars! They’re not waiting for G.M. Their goal, they explain on their Web site — vds.mit.edu — is ‘to identify the key characteristics of events like the race to the moon and then transpose this energy, passion, focus and urgency’ on catalyzing a global team to build a clean car. I just love their tag line. It’s what gives me hope: ‘We are the people we have been waiting for.’”