HMO: Know anyone interested in analyzing consumer EEG data? The product I'm working on is developing a solid dataset: http://www.threepound.com
How I can help: I'm a former startup data analyst and strategy consultant. I can give a few hours to help with making sense of the data you're collecting or think about how to start capturing 3rd party data.
I can give you a good EEG story, told to me by an engineering professor who was studying EEG data back in the 70s:
Some researchers set up an EEG hooked up to a computer that could display some analysis to the user (basically magnitudes of various waves). The idea was to see if biofeedback (people trying to control their EEG output in realtime) could lead to any benefits. All they got was positive feedback (no pun intended): people would tell them how it helped them focus, relax, think clearly, etc. Then at some point, one of the researchers realized a cable was unplugged and the values shown to people were just random noise...
Regarding EEG, that's what we're working on at Three Pound. We're providing tools for mindfulness based stress reduction paired with consumer EEG devices like the NeuroSky Mindwave Mobile http://threepound.com
I tried it a couple of times too. First time I figured it was basically a slightly better stumbleupon. Next time I tried it was still the same thing and never went back.
I find this emphasis on simple information storage and retrieval way to prevalent in our schools. Courses entirely based on reading and regurgitating facts made up a sizable amount of my education, including college. After a while it becomes hard to care, since the random facts are worthless to remember, sometimes even when going on to the next level course.
Upvotes for first 2. The window resizing game is agitating, and window snapping should be a native feature, if there is keyboard shortcut space for it.
I'm looking forward to testing out porting one of my Django apps to GAE, particularly since the Heroku clones for Django are not yet ready for public consumption.
Calls to action in emails is not much different than calls to action for landing pages: Give people just enough information to take the action you want them to, and little else. Political campaigns and non-profits (at least from successful organizations) are pros at this. Most of the time it is a short teaser and a prominent call to action button. Back to the similarities, paragraphs with off direction sentences are not seen in landing pages, the trendy style is short content blocks of icons and a sentence, for an email the equivalent are bullet points/numbered steps.
Each email should have a well defined, ideally singular purpose, unless it is something like a newsletter, where the reader is more accepting of less relevant content before reaching the more valued information (and even that is not guaranteed.)
How I can help: I'm a former startup data analyst and strategy consultant. I can give a few hours to help with making sense of the data you're collecting or think about how to start capturing 3rd party data.