Archive of posts with tag 'Zoom'

Weekend Reading: Summer Solstice, Zoom Learnings, and TeachOSM

July 6, 2019 • #

📺 5 Learnings from Zoom

Zoom is one of those admirable SaaS companies built on solid product and amazing execution. I love this — not relying on anything sexy or super inventive, just solving a known problem better than everyone else. My favorite bit is their retention; it proves what can be done even in SMB with lock-tight product market fit:

Zoom has 140% net revenue retention. This is similar to RingCentral from our last analysis and other leaders. Zoom also shows that yes, this can be done with smaller customers too, not just enterprises.

☀️ Visualizing the Summer Solstice

This is a great quick animation showing the sun’s path across the globe during the summer solstice. It shows very clearly why, as you move toward northern latitudes in the summer you get such long days, with perpetual sunlight above the Arctic Circle.

🧭 Training the Next Generation of Mappers

The TeachOSM crew has been doing grest work training teachers how to use OpenStreetMap in their classrooms. Geographic education is critical, especially in primary education, to form a baseline understanding of the world. I got to help out at one of these workshops last year and the outcomes were truly impressive.

Since 2016, TeachOSM has trained ~350 teachers and vocational educators in open mapping techniques. So giving open mapping workshops for teachers has become a staple of our programming over the last few years. In this post, I briefly outline what we do in our workshops, why it is vital work, and how you can help us to make OSM available in geography classes everywhere.

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Weekend Reading: Gene Wolfe, Zoom, and Inside Spatial Networks

April 27, 2019 • #

📖 Gene Wolfe Turned Science Fiction Into High Art

Wolfe’s work, particularly his Book of the New Sun “tetralogy”, is some of my favorite fiction. He just passed away a couple weeks ago, and this is a great piece on his life leading up to becoming one of the most influential American writers. I recommend it to everyone I know interested in sci-fi. Even reading this made me want to dig up The Shadow of the Torturer and start reading it for a third time:

The language of the book is rich, strange, beautiful, and often literally incomprehensible. New Sun is presented as “posthistory”—a historical document from the future. It’s been translated, from a language that does not yet exist, by a scholar with the initials G.W., who writes a brief appendix at the end of each volume. Because so many of the concepts Severian writes about have no modern equivalents, G.W. says, he’s substituted “their closest twentieth-century equivalents” in English words. The book is thus full of fabulously esoteric and obscure words that few readers will recognize as English—fuligin, peltast, oubliette, chatelaine, cenobite. But these words are only approximations of other far-future words that even G.W. claims not to fully understand. “Metal,” he says, “is usually, but not always, employed to designate a substance of the sort the word suggests to contemporary minds.” Time travel, extreme ambiguity, and a kind of poststructuralist conception of language are thus all implied by the book’s very existence.

📺 Zoom, Zoom, Zoom! The Exclusive Inside Story Of The New Billionaire Behind Tech’s Hottest IPO

Zoom was in the news a lot lately, not only for its IPO, but also the impressive business they’ve put together since founding in 2011. It’s a great example of how you can build an extremely viable and healthy business in a crowded space with a focus on solid product execution and customer satisfaction. This profile of founder Eric Yuan goes into the core culture of the business and the grit that made the success possible.

🗺 A Look Inside The GIS World With Anthony Quartararo, CEO Of Spatial Networks

The folks over at FullStackTalent just published this Q&A with Tony in a series on business leaders of the Tampa Bay area. It gives some good insight into how we work, where we’ve come from, and what we do every day. There’s even a piece about our internal “GeoTrivia”, where my brain full of useless geographical information can actually get used:

Matt: What’s your favorite geography fun fact?

Tony: Our VP of Product, Coleman McCormick, is the longest-reigning champion of GeoTrivia, a competition we do every Friday. We just all give up because he [laughter], you find some obscure thing, like what country has the longest coastline in Africa, and within seconds, he’s got the answer. He’s not cheating, he just knows his stuff! We made a trophy, and we called it the McCormick Cup.

All that time staring at maps is finally useful!

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