Yan Pritzker photographer, entrepreneur, software engineer, musician, skier

How to land a job 2.0

Yesterday 37 Signals announced they were hiring a new designer. How did Jason land a job at a place hundreds of designers are dying to work at? He didn’t just send them a resume, he started a conversation by creating a tailor-made website just for 37 Signals. Not only did the site explain exactly why [...]

Hulu’s long form ads and the future of pull advertising

Hulu is testing a new feature which lets you select whether you want the regular 30 second spots spaced throughout the show you watch, or one long (2 minute) clip from one sponsor. Here’s why I think this is a great move:

30 second spots interrupt you right as you’re watching a show so your annoyance [...]

Just good enough

I recently finished Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers , a really interesting look at some of the most well known success stories including Bill Gates, the Beatles, and Jewish lawyers, among others. The book covers a range of topics but one of the central premises is that what we perceive is talent is more like an affinity [...]

Identity photo project: casting call

I’m starting a photo project this month that will investigate the concept of identity by looking at your hobbies. I want to take two shots of each person. The first will illustrate you in the personality of your favorite hobby. Whether it involves a particular costume, set, environment, props, we will capture this identity. The [...]

Leading from the bottom – Seth Godin’s Tribes

I just finished the new Seth Godin book, Tribes. The book talks about the idea that humans like to cluster around ideas, and they like to have someone to follow, and that a great leader is a facilitator, who helps connect the members of a community and fosters communication.
When I was telling my friend about [...]

Storing your stuff online is not cloud computing

I’ve noticed people have been saying things like “I am cloud computing because my mail is now on gmail ZOMG”. Storing your mails on the internets is not cloud computing, it’s just online storage. Uploading pics from your phone directly to the web is not cloud computing. Google docs is not cloud computing. Just storing [...]

Does cold calling actually work for you IT firms?

I got another cold call today from an Indian IT outsourcing company, despite that it says not to cold call me on my linked-in profile (which I’m sure is the place they harvested my contact information from). Besides being extremely annoying, I wonder if this strategy actually works for them?
How many times have you cold [...]

Followers lost in twitter failstorm

Many people report lost followers on twitter today. Numbers range from a few to hundreds. I seem to have lost about a hundred followers and a hundred from my following list. Hopefully they were all spam bots :-)

Why do developers ignore alignment and padding?

Imagine you walk into a room and there is clutter everywhere, things all over the floor, the walls are covered with random artwork hung at every height imaginable. You would start feeling uncomfortable and overloaded very quickly. Yet we do this to our users every day by not paying attention to the very basics.
There are [...]

Bluehost stores your password in plain text

This is a public service announcement to users of bluehost.com hosting. They store your account password in plain text. During my long drawn out battle where they refused to own up to database problems, one of the support calls resulted in the support woman asking me for my password. When I refused to give it [...]