Knaddison.com

One measure of the momentum of the fine Drupal project is the number of people who are creating contributed modules on drupal.org.

The Drupal contributed projects are stored in a system called CVS and data about that is stored in some database tables that keep track of each change by each person. At the request of some fine folks who are working on important things, I got interested in the idea of the trend related to people committing code to the drupal.org CVS server. Here is the data graphed by the number of committers per month. It is not the number of commits, which would show how active those people are, but the number of people which shows how big of a group of people is doing this work.

Also, this is only about the contributed module and theme area and not about Drupal core. Drupal core commits are done by a very small group of people after that small group reviews the code contributed by hundreds of contributers. So, this really shows activity of the non-core projects.

I've labeled 4 points on the graph.

1. 2006 through Drupal 5.0 slump

Point 1 shows a peak at June of 2006 followed by a slow down until the trough at August of 2006 and then some small increases until December of 2006. Then there is a huge increase in people in January and February of 2007 which is also when Drupal 5.0 was released.

2. 2007 Follows a similar contribution trend

This just in: The PR folks for IKEA just sent out an e-mail blast alerting folks that plans are still on track for a fall 2011 opening of the IKEA store in Centennial.

IKEA 2009 Plan: it will be a while

Back in 2009 I gave a Construction on IKEA update that was a little depressing. And it seems like that still rings true.

From the e-mail this morning:

IKEA announced that contractors have been hired and a site-work permit
is pending for its future Denver-area store. This progress allows for a
Fall 2011 grand opening in Centennial, Colorado

So...it will be no earlier than Fall 2011.

Fall 2011 IKEA Opening in Centennial Colorado

But, it seems that they've hired folks and are getting final permits to get the show on the road...

Saunders Construction as the construction management firm. Other Colorado firms involved with this future IKEA store include: CLC Associates for civil design; Kimley Horn Associates as traffic consultants during the approval process; Ground Engineering providing environmental analysis and geotechnical services; Otten Johnson Robinson Neff & Ragonetti serving as local counsel; real estate brokerage firm Legend Retail Group assisting IKEA in the site selection process; Geothermal Systems of Colorado installing the geothermal component, and Miller Global selling the land. Atlanta-based GreenbergFarrow is architect responsible for store design, site planning and construction documents.

The actual clearing and prep of the site will start "soon" - I'll definitely try to get some photo evidence of the progress. As they say, it's not started until it's actually started. Given the long history of attempts at progress in the state I really hope this is finally a true start but it may not be.

We recently participated in an event that included photos taken by a professional photographer. The photos are OK and they're of my wife while she's 8 months pregnant - a pretty special time.

Unfortunately, we were only told after the event that the photos would be $125 to get the high quality digital version of the file. Right, one hundred twenty five US Dollars. I have a hard time imagining that any of her customers are going to buy more than one photo. Maybe two...but that's it. We will not buy a single one. I bet a lot of her other customers are that way. So, here's what I propose:

Simple price differentiation for professional photos

The problem is that some of her customers will pay $125 for some of the photos. And for those customers it is worth it and she makes a pretty good amount of money from it. But she is leaving some value uncaptured. We would probably pay $20 for a few of the photos of us. And some of the other people would probably pay $50 for their photos.

The classic econ 101 perspective on this is that you choose a market price and go with it. Supply and demand intersect and there you go.

Graduates of Econ 102 (or marketing 101) should get into the next layer, though: price differentiation. Price differentiation is charging different prices for the same product.

• The current scenario is this: she sells 2 extra photos at $125 and makes a total of $250.
  

My mom is wicked smart. When I was a kid I would often say "I'm sorry" in a manner that wasn't good enough for her. She had a formula for how to apologize and amazingly enough it has proven enormously valid and useful. One drawback for me is now that I've been trained in how to apologize I insist on receiving apologies in this format from other people. They're not always so ready to do this and are sometimes genuine in their apology without doing the whole system, but usually I can recognize that and move on. Usually.

The Photobucket site is a bit of a local Denver phenomenon. Started by Alex Welch who graduated from CSU at about the perfect time to launch a tech startup in Colorado. Photobucket is not nearly as well known among the tech crowd as Flickr and yet Photobucket beats Flickr in a variety of metrics (page visits, for example). Most folks in Denver have some connection to Photobucket through a friend-of-a-friend and people love swapping stories about how great and down-to-earth the guys are regardless of the amazing success of their company.