Week in Review: January 20-26

Hey there Van Patten Media fans!

Inspired by Harvest‘s weekly “Playback,” we’ve decided to start sharing more about what we’re doing, reading, and learning on a week-to-week basis. It will be a healthy mix of business and pleasure, so be sure to read through for the full experience.

This week…

  • Friday, January 20: We launched 35mmTheMusical.com, the official website of “35mm,” a multimedia musical by composer Ryan Scott Oliver and photographer Matthew Murphy. We’re thrilled to be above-the-title, supporting this incredible production. Stay tuned to the blog for more details.
  • Saturday, January 21: Peter open-sourced VSPB, or the Very Simple PayPal Bridge. From his post at Van Patten Media Labs

    The Very Simple PayPal Bridge is a PHP class that, as the name suggests, provides a very simple interface for the PayPal NVP API.

    In any situation where you need to interface more directly with the PayPal API, the VSPB provides a clean interface for the other layers of your code[…] It is great as a lower-level component of a wider PHP e-commerce solution.

  • Tuesday, January 24: We got into the thick of feasibility testing for an upcoming project. Hint: it involves WordPress multisite, and will be totally awesome.
  • Wednesday, January 25: Paid a visit to Buffalo OpenCoffee, Suburbs Edition (the inaugural event, no less). We’re thrilled to have the chance talk tech and startups with the Buffalo community.

We liked…

Chris:

  • Laura Marling’s “Sophia” was on repeat pretty consistently throughout the week.
  • Lifehack.org’s article on becoming “clutter-free” is a must read, especially for those of us who are, well, let’s say… organizationally-challenged.
  • Jeff White of Kula Partners posted a lengthy summary of his talk on “Starting a business,” a talk he just gave at Podcamp Halifax 2012. A lot of the specifics are geared toward Canadian readers, but the overall themes apply to every would-be entrepreneur.

Peter:

  • Cloud productivity provider Zoho experienced a major outage at the beginning of the week. Ultimately, it was their response to it — open, honest, and in refreshing detail — that reflected really well on the company.
  • The BBC reminds us of the human cost of our shiny electronic gadgets, and that we could all be doing more to put pressure on the manufacturers on the issue of conflict minerals.
  • Once again, Ubuntu shows some real innovation in user interface design for their upcoming 12.04 release. It remains to be seen how well the new HUD works in practice, of course.

See you next week!

Thanks for stopping by!

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