Aquarionics

A little while ago, we were talking in the office about an app called “Sleep Cycle” for the iPhone. The way it works is that you put it beside (not under) your pillow, and then it uses the accelerometers and such in the device to keep track of your tossing and turning overnight, giving you a handy graph of how well you sleep. This is what the graph looked like the first night I tried it:

It’s pretty typical of the results for then. This is what it looked like for last Monday night, one week later:

Proving that, if nothing else, unemployment is good for my rest.

Yup, me and Skimlinks have parted ways, and I wish them all the best for the future, but it does mean that after a short break for rest (see above), relaxation (see previous post) and the betterment of my soul (er, still working on that bit) I shall be diving back into the sea of sharks that is the employment market.

Not looking forward to that, to be honest. Interviews suck no matter which side of the desk you’re sitting on. Anyone know of any interesting startups/companies in London needing geeks?

So, my first new project for Skimbit has launched in the form of Good.ly, which is a URL shortening service (and what a great time to launch one) with a twist. The twist being that clicking on a link to a product (Pretty much any product sold by any website with any kind of affiliate program) gets money for a charity, or possibly several.

I’m not really willing to get too far into the arguments that “URL Shortening services kill the Internet”, although I maintain they’re not (obviously), and that there is a difference between the requirements for archived and “permanent” articles like some blog entries and the more ephemeral stuff that floats around a group of friends for a while before never being clicked on again, which is how I treat shorturl services (Obviously, these are my opinions and not those of anyone I currently or have ever worked for). Into this latter category I place Twitter and such, anyone mining twitter for non-realtime stuff is possibly missing the point.

But Good.ly’s up, and I’m pretty pleased with it in the end. Yes, it’s blue. Well, it’s blue during the daytime. Maybe you should try later…