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Hi. My name is Adam. I am the co-founder of Pure Adapt, Inc in Albany, NY. We own Detailed Image, LockerPulse, and a bunch of other websites. I write about our company, entrepreneurship in general, work-life balance, and whatever else interests me.
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Category Archives: LockerPulse
Embrace Those Constraints
Today I deployed a small feature on LockerPulse: keyboard shortcuts. This is one of those power user features that we’ve had a few customers contact us about. Most people won’t use it, but the people who are used to using keyboard shortcuts on Gmail and Google Reader will find it extremely valuable. I had a pocket of time before the chaos of the holiday shopping season ensues next week. Rather than digging in to a large project that I’d have to put on hold for a few weeks, I decided to make the most of my time and just release … Continue reading
LockerPulse Fantasy Player Tracking Launched!
On Saturday we wrapped up and released one of my favorite projects I’ve ever worked on: LockerPulse fantasy player news tracking. My partners and I have all been avid fantasy players for years (I was in leagues where Barry Sanders and Emmitt Smith were the consensus top 2 picks!) and like all fantasy football players, we’re looking for any informational edge that we can get to help us win. Especially Sunday mornings, and especially when injuries are involved. There’s nothing worse than starting a guy who isn’t going to play. After launching LockerPulse it didn’t take us long to realize … Continue reading
LockerPulse Launches in the Toshiba App Place
A few months ago I received an email from SnappCloud, a company that builds cloud app stores, on behalf of Toshiba. They were interested in including LockerPulse in an app store that Toshiba was launching. Now, I’ll admit, I was a little skeptical at first. I mean, just how many app stores can there be? Then again, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to schedule a call with them, so I did. And I was really impressed. They had “soft launched” the app store, named the Toshiba App Place and had some pretty impressive results. They came with hard data that … Continue reading
The Benefits of a “How Can We Get Better?” Box
When you’re starting a new site, especially something like LockerPulse that doesn’t fit into an existing category with an existing set of “rules” (like say e-commerce), you really have no idea what people are going to love about your site and what they’re going to hate, what they wish was better and what they wish was the same. Studying analytics is one part of the conversation, but equally as important, maybe even more so early on, is just talking to users. The problem becomes how to go about talking to your users in the most authentic manner. I want to … Continue reading
Check Out LockerPulse on Google’s College Basketball Page!
Updating my last post about LockerPulse and college basketball, Google has had us on the homepage of the Chrome Web App Store for the past few days: I thought that this might be the extent of their “promotion”. Then I read their blog post Baseline to baseline, we’ve got the basketball games covered and saw that they’ve added LockerPulse to a special College Basketball Tournament 2011 page where you can check scores, schedules, use Google Maps and Google Earth to explore the cities and venues, and of course use Chrome Web Apps like LockerPulse to keep up with the news: … Continue reading
College News on LockerPulse: Start to Finish in 5 Days
On Tuesday morning I received an email from two people at Google asking for some vector graphics for LockerPulse. They said that they were going to be featuring it in an upcoming March Madness promotion, presumably for the Chrome Web App Store, although they didn’t specifically say so (“March Madness” refers to the NCAA basketball tournament that starts this Sunday night with the selection show, with play beginning Tuesday). This would be an awesome opportunity to promote LockerPulse, especially because we haven’t really started our full-fledged marketing campaign. There was just one problem: LockerPulse didn’t cover college sports, something that … Continue reading
LockerPulse Ads Up & Running, Version 0.0.0.1
OK so we really don’t version our projects like that. The point is that this is a really early stage project. From the very beginning, prior to even deciding whether or not to have a paid version, we recognized that there was a lot of opportunity in targeting ads to sports fans. SportsLizard does this in a very basic way. On our Price Guide we target eBay ads based upon what card/collectible the user is valuing. Search for a Michael Jordan card, and we’ll show you a banner ad of Michael Jordan cards. It’s worked really well for us over … Continue reading
Why We Made LockerPulse Completely Free
We’ve done away with the Premium Accounts on LockerPulse and have instead moved to an ad-supported model. This was something we had discussed for a long time, even prior to launch, and knew might be the best path for success for the site. The #1 factor in the decision was simply that the limited ads that we’ve tested out have performed surprisingly well, while the Premium Accounts have tailed off after a promising start. Being featured in the Chrome Web App store gave us an additional wave of data and feedback to help make the decision easier. We anticipate launching … Continue reading
Chrome Web Store Launches, LockerPulse “Popular”
Earlier this afternoon the Chrome Web Store launched as part of Google’s Chrome Event. As soon as I went and checked, LockerPulse was listed as a “Popular” app in the news category. Very cool. If you are a Chrome user (US only unfortunately) I’d very much appreciate you taking a few minutes to install and review LockerPulse by going to the LockerPulse app page. Hopefully we can ride the wave and get as many people as possible to check out LockerPulse during this initial rush to test out the Chrome Web Store. Now, the not-so-cool part is that there are … Continue reading
New LockerPulse Features – Search Engine, AJAX Crawling, and Custom Wallpaper
Over the past two weeks we released a couple of important features for LockerPulse. As I touched upon when I returned from my trip, we’ve got a few interesting opportunities in the works so I’m spending as much time as I can building out the software. The first thing we tackled was a custom wallpaper feature. Users can now upload a background image of their choice, or choose from our various background images. This is one of those things that doesn’t appear to be that important, but when you’re using the site multiple times per day it adds a nice … Continue reading