Apple just announced its new baby, the iPad, basically a big iphone with a strong note to not call it an iphone or a laptop.  Now this thing is going to be analyzed from head to toe on what it could be, should be, and what not but the real message here is that the iPad represents potential plain and simple.

It’s a whole new, bigger, spacial user experience.  What’s that mean for BKL?  Well you can sure as hell bet we’ll be developing for it.  In fact every developer on the Apple will dev for it.  The landscape of development just doubled.  Your apps now have two lives, two experiences to live up to, the small screen on the phone and the new 9 inch wide experience on the iPad.

A large new niche is exposed.  All us developers have to think about how our apps transition into this new ux, while we maintain foothold on how the smaller iphone ux plays out.  Your potential for revenue doubles because now you have two outlets to cash in on.  Of course this is all provided your experience fits/connects on both contexts but regardless if it does- huge huge potential here folks, massive.  So pay attention.

The biggest message in all of this is not the new physical device, its really the extension of the app store to another field, folks that down play that are not looking at the big picture.  In some ways all the technical specs are not the big idea here, in fact, all of that we expect..

There will be alot of “its not for me” flying left and right on this new venture for Apple, it starts at a decent price point for tech luxury which is less luxury these days and more general neccessity in that today people thrive on their connection to the source of newness- leave me on desert island will ya, give me water and my cell phone etc.  People are slaves to technology and the source of newness, Apple knows that, this product fits that category perfectly.

BKL is very excited, the extension of the app store platform to a new larger screen opens up new ideas big time, stay tuned.

Well 2009 is almost over and the big kitty is looking back at a smashingly awesome kittytastic year.  We hit the ground running in late February with one product rolling around in our a noggin- a better way to bookmark, a hunger to play with API’s and a desire to learn the dark art of outsourcing.  We conquered all of that  and much much more this past year.  We built ParsePlz our bookmark analysis app, it connected to a whole suite of other tools that we used like twitter, delicious, instapaper, tumblr, posterous and more.  We learned how to analyze text, dive into the world of text and content analysis, sniff out locations, stocks, recognize books, rich media, tags, who tweeted, bookmarked it and more.  We continually look back on ParsePlz as our ground zero app, we learned a crap load of stuff building that thing that went through 3 major code iterations.  I spawned as a simple command line app, evolved into a quick and dirty proto and slowly took on a more organized skin.

On the outsourcing front we learned to work India, the UK and our good friends the Ukrainians. Our outsource adventures weren’t all gravy, we built some ideas that just didn’t fly like SQWK, our twitter question service.  We also got beat up on various coders, some really clicked with us, others not so much.

We jumped head first into iPhone dev, not taking no for an answer and ignored the wisdom of the herd.  We cranked out simple ideas to start, getting our feet wet, learning where we could go with ideas, where we could go with our talent.

By June we were on a roll.  Ideas began to manifest faster and faster.  2 month gigs turned into 4 week gigs, and then we turned ideas around in less than a week.  Energy is, and remains high.  We really prided ourselves on knowing what you could do.  Internally we’re not developers, not really coders, but we know enough of what is possible to say with confidence that we think it is possible so go build it.

By August we were sitting on a small empire of tasty ideas.  ParsePlz was on its 3rd iteration, powerful and vast in its capabilities.  TimeCoder our first iPhone app was done and ready for more idea improvements.  We’d completed a few rounds of various experiments,TagStuff a photo tagging concept, Beaker a collaging app, Stimulus an RFID database for Lextant, and Whisker a phone survey app that leveraged the twilio API.  In October we broke new goodness with Boris a text analysis app for Lextant too.  We also cranked out two new concepts that would propel BKL further than we imagined- HashParty a twitter trend explorer that exposes the social graph of tweeters and SourceCow a twitter why/follow app.  Both apps were cranked out in full proto-zero form in less than 5 days.

By mid november I was getting married and was given the coolest update of them all.   My partner Tushar had moved the puck forward and managed to manifest not one but two iPhone apps for me to review.  ParsePlz and HashParty were now mobile and wickedly delicious, we now had 3 iPhone apps up our sleeves.

Closing to the end of the year we’re working on a refined version of TimeCoder and two more iPhone apps making our rollout for the Apple iPhone next year very impressive.  All from a “what the hell” startup mentality of just making for the sheer love of making something faster, better, the realm of good enough projected onward.

BKL is going to enter 2010 with a huge bang.  Our dev process is solid.  Our skills at manifesting ideas continues to refine and get better.  We’ve gone through the ropes of acquiring talent, keeping them engaging and giving them a piece of the prize, the art of creation.  We’re crafting new alliances and enabling others with our BKL build it methodologies.  Yes you’re reading that right, we’ll help you crank out proto-zero if you got an idea you’d like to manifest.

I personally have learned a ton about the biz/creation process of development.  I’ve learned to manifest faster, iterate continually and if in doubt make it first then tear it apart.  Most ideas need some momentum before they can be understood completely, and often even the idea generator itself is pretty clueless on how things could work, should work especially.  Beta testing opened my eyes to many ideas- like the value of data, you can never have too much data on the front/back end of your apps.  Stats can tell you alot about whats happening when your beta testers go quiet as they often do.  Listen like mad but implement with caution, iterate on a set agenda of what that iteration brings to the table.  Throwing new features at proto-zero’s can get them lost fast.  Don’t doubt your inner “YEAH”, its screaming YEAH at you for a reason, hear it out, shape it, toss it around as many other potential YEAH accepters as you can find.  Don’t build for everyone, build for niche.  Sure we all want mass adoption of our big idea but often that means you make your product/service more suck and less passion.  I don’t mind many folks don’t get it.  It keeps me alive and jazzed about it.  In time, the curve catches up.  The more crazy the idea is the sticky it is at times.  Stuff you think, who would want that, finds users, fans and advocates faster than you might think.

SO BKL will rock in the new year and in 2010 we’ll see lots of newness on the table.  Can’t wait! - Dan

All us cats  at BKL hope you had a great thanksgiving!  It was an especially amazing thanksgiving for myself (Dan), because I finally married my sweetheart- Mary this past weekend as well.  She’s my drive and she puts up with all my whacky ideas even, what a gal!

Let’s talk HashParty!

So far so good, its cranking along at a good pace.  I should of made a search engine type app years ago cause its fascinating for me to see all these people all over the globe access HashParty, you name the country and odds are someone there used HashParty, that’s amazing!  Alot of times ya think you know your potential reach but then something you make just blows all that away.

One thing the big kitty is still pretty green at is getting the word out, and we’re working on that.  HashParty snatched up a Mashup of the Day award from Programmable Web, very nice and then went on to get a few props on other sites, OneForty and KillerStartups.  We’ll take any and all press we can get.  We’re happy with were HashParty is going.

We’ve always had the majority of our toes in web development, cranking out concepts like ParsePlz, HashParty, and oh have you seen SourceCow yet?  But did you know we also dabble on the iPhone too?

Actually BKL started with iPhone development and then decided to play the field and get into everything.  But recently, we said, hey lets get back to the iphone and started to invest more seriously into real learning not just developing but learning what all we could do on the iPhone side of things.  Which brings us to HashParty for the iPhone.

HashParty for the iPhone is pretty simple – its a hashtags, keywords, and stock ticker explorer for twitter.  Pretty much the same stuff we have on the web side of HashParty with a few cool tricks.  Here we’re looking at tweets surrounding the #supernova trend.

When you first fire up HashParty on the iphone you’ll see Trending (trending hashtags), Saved (hashtag/keyword/stock-tickers you want to keep an eye on), Search.

When you’re on a tweet you like you can do alot of things.  Reply, Retweet, View all tweets from that @person, view their social profile, parse a link (with ParsePlz!),  visit a link briefly in HashParty’s web viewer, or take the link to mobile Safari.  Retweets and replies happen in the app so no going off to the web, Parsing a link sends it to your ParsePlz account if you have one.  Its good if you have one cause from there not only is the link analyzed for more social patterns, its auto-tagged, stored for revisiting, and it could be passed on to Instapaper or Delicious or even emailed to you in newsletter form if you like.

So here’s what makes HashParty really stand out, we’re not just curious about hashtag trends, we want to know more about the people that push those ideas to the surface.  Looking into a persons social graph gives us the opportunity to discover more about them, find new content and new things to get jazzed up about.  Whenever I find a great tweet the first thing I always do is wonder- who is this person?  Well HashParty helps me connect all the dots to get that answer.  We can see a users twitter profile, twitter lists they belong to and their social graph spanning across the web- all the networks they’re all about.  And this is just the fraction of where we intend to go.

The social graph helps you understand a hashtag/keyword trend from a people perspective.  It lets us look into the patterns behind the people that tweet these trends.  What are they like, what do they have in common or don’t have in common in terms of social network usage.  Say your biz is all about X trend, reading the tweets will tell you one story, reading up on the people that tweet that story will tell you where to go next.

HashParty started out all about hashtags, we love them so we drilled into that passion.  The other thing we love, well, ok I love is stocks.  I love stock tweets, people talking about the stocks they love, great idea and its simple, mark your tweet with the stock in reference $SBUX talks about starbucks, and people do that, everyday.  So why not dig up those tweets as well- so we did, and we added them to the app.

Lastly we added Twitter and ParsePlz to the app.  I didn’t want to go off into mobile safari to parse a link or retweet or reply to a tweet.  I wanted it all in the app.  So we managed to do just that.  Fast parsing right in HashParty is really really nice.  Especially if you have ParsePlz iPhone app.. ha!  Yep, that’s coming shortly as well.  All of these bits are just nice accelerators that make our lives easier and more fun.

Get ready folks cause BKL has MASSIVE ideas that are about to break big time.  You’ll be seeing a lot from BKL very very soon.

BKL brewing up some serious magic this month.  We banged out a redesign of ParsePlz and then on a crazy whim we green lighted a twitter hashtag explorer concept called HashParty.

Looks like Cotton Candy doesn’t it?  Its perfect, cause it tastes like cotton candy man, its tasty!  HashParty is different than other hashtag explorers in that its focused more on the people behind a tag and less on the tweets regarding it.

The idea is that people hold the data goodness.  People cause the data to be there in the first place, let’s get to know these people.

HashParty is another example of why BKL rocks.  A massive rapid over the week what if sketch, originally just an experience map of what it could do, connect to, be like, etc manifested into a complete testable, playable experience in mad rapid fashion. Love that.  Our dev team thrives on rapid dev, and todays web and accessible API’s make all this possible.  The data is out there, the question is, what do you want to do with it?

So I can hear most of you asking me now, who uses HashParty and why?  We’re still ironing that out, in fact, its not totally clear, does that bother us, not really because it was an idea that formed up around a need, that need exists, the need to know who is standing behind that tweet about a product/conference is still pretty clearly and evident.  HashParty, you got the hash, we’ll identify the party!

Hola folks, what’s new?  LOTS, we’ve completed a redesign of ParsePlz, our phase 2 build.  Basically we ran into a performance wall and we had to adopt a new skin otherwise we wouldn’t be able to grow any further past the alpha sketchcode we initially started to bake.  Phase 2 gets us one step closer to rolling out the big beta for all test.

ParsePlz didn’t exist 3 months ago, it was an idea on a napkin, a pet peeve, a little jingle in my mind, something I wanted to see get made because I knew there’d be at least a few people, especially me really into the idea.  And most of all it served a specific purpose and had real tangible use today.

What started out as a simple bookmarking tool as gone full speed into useful pattern analysis of links.  Its pretty damn cool and gets smarter and more fun to play with weekly.

Some things we’ve added that we’re pretty excited about

• tag based recommendations
• twitter friend squatting (you can auto-parse a persons twitter feed for links, even yourself )
• like minds global map
• popular links & stats page
• iphone mobile safari support
• faster, better, stronger code
• and much much more!

We’re working a few new projects as well, 2 new twitter projects.  One’s an interesting people profiler tool the other, yes our own twitter client.  I  know I know, do we really need yet another twitter client?  Well you’ve have experienced a twitter client like this yet, so yes, we do.

Last note, just cause I think its cool.  I wanted to let folks know, that audio for dev notes is good.  The other day while driving to work I was like screw it, i’m gonna ramble to myself and lay it down on what I want in this next app, and behold it was made, audio podcasts for the dev team.

Its actually a very cool way to get your big ideas heard, so much more immersive than just pen and paper or even this limited blog form.  Audio is fun to listen to, and my dev podcasts come with extra stories like “dude you just cut me off in traffic” or “umm accident ahead, taking this exit now” etc.

Anyway’s keep on parsing, look for new updates from kitty town soon.  Long live the BKL!

You can never have too much data, yet you can can collect too much data.

So just to clarify, data itself is good.  But you can overly stress yourself with the act of collecting too much data.

At BKL we need more data.  In fact whenever we think we got enough, I go look for more.  Data fuels the innovation.  Data comes from everywhere.  Inside the walls of the big kitty lab we find data in internal metrics, performance tweaks, wonderings, pondering notions, its all data to us.  Outside the compound we search for discovery data- data that helps us draw the line from concept to concept, from pain point to potential realization.  And then in the very apps we build we have tastiest data of them all actual throw down experience of our baby.  How’d our baby do? Hated it?  That’s awesome, tell me why.

Sometimes I dream about making really really bad products just to get people to tell me how bad they are.  That discourse and dialogue of “I hate this!!” is awesome to hear because I’ve often found the more polarized and pissed a person is regarding your concept the richer the data “could” be and at least you have someone who is alive and giving you data.   I mean it could be really good data, don’t know yet, its a theory, but it is a good checkmark in that the person giving you the data is alive and talking to you, that’s a big win across the board.

When your product emits a meager “meh” from your customers- that’s never a good place to be.  I’d always be in far more favorable light if I can get you to stand up and slap me or shake my hand, the middle road of “its okay” = death for an innovator.

Consumers are being attacked on all sides for attention these days, you don’t want to be OKAY, you wanna rock or suck and suck hard.  Suck so much that they really remember you cause you sucked so bad!!  That is far more favorable to me that you were ok, I guess, I dunno.

Now the problem with data though is that you usually have to go to it, it rarely just comes to you unless you have a mechanism to capture it easily.  Today’s web performance and web analytics could really teach researchers a thing or two about capturing data easily, seemingly invisible like.  And a lot of it in great numbers can be pretty damn compelling, nearly as compelling as that facial slap gesture I eagerly await some day.

I mean of course we don’t want to make a bad product, we just want to make a good one and above all else get more data that says where we are, that’s where we all want to be.  Where are we in the scheme of things.  Are we on or off, are we rocking or dying, if you’re starting out, bootstrapping the crap out of your idea, go out there and offend someone, get a pulse, get a reaction, turn a head, go collect some tasty data, you need it, your dev team needs it.  Provoke if you have to.  It all goes back to startups and failure right?  Fail faster, to fail faster means go not hmm, go into the beyond of where you are now.  A pondering hmmm is a great way to kill a concept.  Hmmm as you go, thats the key.

So back to this data and the fact its not coming up to my door, knocking and saying I’m here- analyze me plz!  Well that’s the thing that sucks about data, for most of the really good stuff or even the steady consistent stuff, you have to fight for, especially if your app is pulling a “meh” on you, or if its clicking enough that your audience is satisfied but not charged up enough to give you any direction.

Betas tend to go in the space of “meh” i think at times because they are incubating ideas no one knows for sure what to call out as a nasty bit or not, the product is evolving so I think people figure, if it really bothers me I’ll just leave, if it doesn’t bother me, I’ll hang.  GAH!!  Hanging out is not that far from “meh”, must induce some polarized activity.