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Greg

Greggles, Gregorybeans, Frijoles, Beans

IKEA Colorado Set to Open Fall of 2011

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.

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Proposal for pricing on professional photos: prices that are reduced over time

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.
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Slime Sandwich - Denver Technology Revival

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.

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The real Google Phone (Nexus One) - for sale January 2010 (Hat tip: anonymous at Hubdub)

I'm always curious about technology products and product launches, but an interesting thing happened recently with the launch of the latest Google Phone (i.e. the Nexus One).

Release date prediction market on Hubdub

I created a Google Nexus One Release Date market on Hubdub. Hubdub is a play-money prediction market system, a wisdom-of-the-crowds tool to help gather ideas about the outcome of a specific event. The market was created on December 15th and almost immediately it was showing a 94% likelihood of release in the first quarter of 2010.

Hubdub lets people make predictions on a question and when they do so they choose whether that prediction will be public or private. In the case of this market there is currently over $18,000 of play-money at stake and just over $3,300 of those positions are public. So 80% of the play-money is hidden, but the effect of those positions is totally public. While hiding their identity is possible the world still can quite easily see the sentiments of the people involved: early 2010!

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Ikea store near Denver, Colorado - Construction update for 2010

You may be wondering what's going on with IKEA in Colorado. I know I am. I was in Los Angeles for Thanksgiving this year and visited an IKEA out there and was reminded how nice it is to have high quality, reasonably priced household items within driving distance.

According to this article in the Denver Business Journal

"This is a very complicated project, and will take some time," said Joseph Roth, spokesman for IKEA Group’s U.S. headquarters near Philadelphia. "There’s still no time frame for groundbreaking or opening, but we are committed to the project and moving forward."

Once a construction timetable is fixed, the store will take 18 months to build, according to Roth.

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Contributors to Drupal 7.x - End of Code Freeze Edition

Last week was the amazing Do It With Drupal conference and Angela Byron wanted some updated contributor statistics for her presentation. So, I analyzed the commit messages for Drupal core to find who has been helping out and once again the process and the data are getting better and better.

This time I'm using direct database information from the cvs commit log tables and using PHP to parse it which means that it's easier to create rules for fixing usernames or eliminating bad data. I also pulled in company information from groups.drupal.org to get a rough sense of which companies, as a group, are contributing the most to Drupal core. AND, thanks to Dreditor the commit messages are getting cleaner and include information about the person who has done reviews on patches.

Remember, none of this data is really perfectly accurate, but it gives us a tangible sense of what is going on.

Attached are a CSV file and an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet with the data. They show the uid of the user from groups.drupal.org, their name, their organization (if they specified one), the number of times they were mentioned as an author of a patch, the number of times they were mentioned as a reviewer of a patch, and the commit ID where they were mentioned. The commit ID is useful when chasing down bad data so that I can improve the parser. So, if you find a problem please let me know the CID value so I can improve the parser. There's a chance that this could eventually make it onto drupal.org itself, but I'd like to improve the process first to understand whether or not that makes sense.

Enough with the process - it's time to name names!

Top 10 patch contributors to Drupal 7 core

Username Patches
catch 267
sun 238
damien tournoud 213
chx 159
yched 150
dave reid 145
pwolanin 141
boombatower 113
c960657 93
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