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If you can name this quote, you’ve worked in a cube farm too long. Or had an annoying boss with poor fashion taste. Or you’ve heard a co-worker answer their phone the same way for 6 years in a row and you want to strangle them with their phone cord and then hanging them in the lobby at a corporate chandelier.

Office Space, stands as the best tech company movie of all time. There is no debate. (I don’t want any comments on why you think Boiler Room is better, that’s a tech stock movie)

But perhaps my favorite scene, (who am I kidding, I soak up the lines like a Mexican sun tan after six margaritas) happens to be completed by two essential props - Cheetos and Tetris.

In my office, there hangs an ever changing screen printout of the latest high score. I have held the title, but Ryan stands supreme currently with a high score of 80,569 and a whooping 128 lines. It won’t stand forever, but it remains the current challenge.

The game is a simple, and a classic. There’s great strategy and excellent combinations. There’s bad luck and faith that “the game will provide” and then there’s just raw, unadulterated talent. The only office rule we have, your tall tetris tale of towering pixel precision must be accompanied by a screencap. (yes, we are designers and could photoshop a fallacy, but we take tetris as seriously as the AP takes their photos.) As a fair example, Ryan posed a claim that he scored over 100,000 but in the process of his last gasp to eek out an extra couple of puntos positivos, he hit the back button and lost his heroic effort. And he willingly does not press us to accept his score.

Now that some tetris integrity.

Luke and I have come up with a great idea for a new consulting business come web application that has the ability to evolve over the next 5 years or so. It provides a service used by huge amounts of people every year, but that has been traditionally handled by a professional. The hook is that we would use SEO tricks, social networking and quality design and style to augment (or replace) the activities of the professional. Let me see if I can explain more clearly with an example…

Let’s say yachting suddenly becomes extremely popular. Folks who already own yachts might see their’s begin to go up in value. To find a buyer for your yacht you can employ a broker for a % of the sale amount and he will track down a buyer, do some negotiating, etc. Because the broker has never really been in a “hot” yacht market before, he only knows his old tricks: calling his friends in the boat business, placing a classifieds ad, etc.

If we were to apply our model in the target industry (sorry, the boats are just a metaphor, we’re not in the yachting market… yet) we would create a stylish one-page site for each yacht, we would make it a thirdlevel domain on our aged and SEO’d website (say TradeWinns.YachtParty.com), and we would make the social/viral elements easy to access and use. The one-page design would also allow buyers to browse a ton of yachts in a day, and because we’ve standardized the photo gallery, the pricing info, the features, etc. it’s all very easy to compare.

Now, a few other ‘YachtParty.com’ ideas have sprung up already, but none of them have been successful. We believe it’s because the first adopters of the idea are trying to hard to replace the Yacht brokers instead of allowing them to gain value from the system too. Also, a lot of these websites list way too many items on the page, when buyers only really want to see pretty pictures and a price first, and then browse a features list and so forth second. They don’t need to know what the weather is like where the boat is docked.

So here’s our hurdle: we can’t think of a name. The industry in which we’re operating is highly saturated with spam and personal sites, and almost every domain name we can come up with is taken or subpar. Here’s a list of how we’ve approached it so far:

1. We’ve tried coming up with 10 names we liked and trying those out, without doing any pre-research.
2. We’ve tried brute force dictionary combinations, using a thesaurus and WhoIs to find unused combinations
3. We’ve tried stepping way outside the boundaries of our idea to drive at the concept of why people buy or sell a yacht.
4. We’ve recently tried to go Web2.0 and drop the ‘e’ off of a fun word (yachtr or sailr anyone?).

That’s where we’re at now. Do you have any tips on how you find a good domain name? We could really use the help.

Nancy Simonson’s marketing and promotional products company, Adfigo Marketing went live today. Their goal in offering high quality service, attention to detail and their ability to find the perfect fit for their clients all played into the clean lines and comfortable blue tones that etch their new site. There’s plenty more in store, including some great gift ideas, so stay tuned.

Congratulations Nancy and Kelly. I think this is a great step forward in your industry in provide quality over quantity, relationships over revenue.

Yesterday I was recalling an article I read about some guy’s rant on up time. It was mocking those sites that claim 99.9% up time. Which made me think, how much downtime is that, really?

So, the basic calculation:

60 seconds X 60 minutes X 24 hours x 365 days

.1% downtime would equal 31536 seconds, or 8.76 hours.
Thats just a third of a day. That may not sound like much, or it may, depending your experience, your IT admin, your servers, but 8 hours in a power failure could mean big money losses for even a small company.

Ryan spoke of a report where they listed the downtime for the top 20 sites on the web.

Yahoo - zero downtown. None. Google, 7 minutes. I wonder what that cost them?

Up time is basically irrelevant. It’s cost per hour or minute in downtime that matters. How much would it cost you to be down, for say a week should be the major factor in the amount of money you put into solving the uptown equation.