It is with great pleasure and excitment that I announce that I will be joining the Music Mastermind team at the beginning of the New Year. Last night, I was lucky enough to have the great pleasure of meeting many of the people I will be working with at the company holiday party last night including the very talented art director Davidicus Schacher. Truly, it’s an honor to be working with a team that has already made efforts to make me feel welcome even before my time there has begun.

This opportunity is a chance to realize a personal dream of mine  to work in the music industry, and with innovators of such great proportions. During the final interview process, I was allowed to tour the facilities and get a demo of Zya, which did not fail to impress. I am anticipating Zya to be hugely successful and can’t wait to be a part of that future success!

I am honored to have been selected as a finalist for Code for America out of over 550 applications they cut it down to fewer than 60. I know my friends and family were probably more disappointed than I was that I wasn’t selected as a fellow, it was a good experience and I learned a lot. I wish Code for America well and hope they are successful in helping make Government work better.

On Thursday, September 29th I had the honor of participating in an event to honor the 40 under Forty nominees

hosted by Santa Clarita Valley Jaycees and sponsored by the Santa Clarita Business Journal.

Not only was it an honor to be nominated but I pleased to be one of the class of 2011 honorees and share the evening with my good friend and local teacher Lyzetth Rios.

40 Under Forty Nominees

It was a little over three years ago, that I sat in a conference room inside the City of Santa Clarita’s city hall looking at Ryan Drake, Sgt. Darren Harris and Ryan Resella sitting on the other side of a huge table. On that day I stumbled and bumbled my way through an interview to get my current job and the rest is history. Today, I consider these men my friends and know we have accomplished many great things for the City of Santa Clarita and Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department

Today, I received the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Star Scroll from Sgt. Darren Harris for volunteering my services for 2009 Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Year in Review publication last year. Truly, I am honored and privileged to be a one of a very few to receive this honor. Also, I can’t help but be thankful he spared me the pageantry of a big ceremony.

Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons. ~R. Buckminster Fuller

I am always amazed when I see how little we as a society are using the technologies so readily available to make our lives easier and more productive. I am a firm believer in using technology to leverage the things in our lives and society that are most important to ensure the maximum amount of impact.

Personally, I couldn’t think of a better area to utilize technology to get that maximum impact then our educational system. A system which has swirled with controversy over the past few years with everyone scratching their head looking for solutions on what to do about low test scores, budget problems and class sizes.

Being a person who doesn’t have any children I really hadn’t given it much thought. That is not until a few conversations with my fellow 40 Under Forty nominee Lyzetth Rios who is an english teacher at Golden Valley High School here in the Santa Clarita Valley. This fall Lyzetth will be teaching all the freshmen honors english classes and was looking for a way to both encourage her students and keep in touch with parents. At that juncture, I told her about the company my girlfriend Deanna has been working for edRover, which is a location based check-in mobile application similar to foursquare, however instead of just checking in to let the world know you made it to coffee shop and are moments from a latte, edRover works with Classwish.org to help raise money for education and defray some of the cost teachers pay out of pocket just to do their job. Many people don’t know that teachers pay upwards for $1200 a year for supplies.

After our chat, I volunteered to help put together a website that would help Lyzetth do things differently and help catapult her freshmen into high school on the right track. Personally, I believe teachers are the heroes in our society and we should do what we can to help them. If you have a chance stop by Missrios.com and drop Lyzetth an encouraging word or maybe got to her classwish profile and buy her some post its.

Miss Rios' Website

After reading Rework by 37Signals’ founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, I could not help but think of the Pablo Picasso quote “Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.” This is exactly what Rework does to everything people have learned about business. Fried and Heinemeier remove the standard excuses, destroy the old paradigms and give a simple easy to read instruction manual on how to start and run a business in today’s fast pace, cluttered marketplace.

Rework rejects business fads and common held beliefs, by putting the focus back where it belongs and that is innovative thinking, user experience and making well thought out ideas into successful solutions. In the age of growing transparency, a business’ actions and brand are one and the same. Today’s consumer simply refuses to believe a company when they express the value of their patronage in a pre-recorded robotic message while being kept on hold for an hour simply to achieve basic customer care needs. The behavior of a company and its marketing are one and the same. Solving business problems requires a holistic human approach in order to attain a quality consumer impression on the services and guarantee repeat business.

Business culture being what it is alludes to saying that bigger must mean better. Many companies attempt to be all things to all people, by stuffing feature after feature into products all the while detracting from the user experience. Rework rejects this recipe for disaster and says, draw a line in the sand, stand for something and under do your competition! Stay away from trying to imitate others success’ and compete for a jump ball, rather create your own success by filling a gap or need that hasn’t been filled.

Below is one of my favorite excerpts from Rework…

“As you get going keep in mind why you are doing what you are doing. Great businesses have a point of view not just a product or service. You have to believe in something, you need to have a backbone; you need to know what you are willing to fight for and then you need to show the world. A strong stand is how you attract super fans, they point to you and defend you and they spread the word further wider and more passionately then any advertising could. Strong opinions aren’t free, you’ll turn some people off they’ll accuse you of being arrogant and aloof, that’s life for everyone who loves you there will be others who hate you. If no one is upset by what you are saying, you probably aren’t pushing hard enough and your probably boring too” ~First Paragraph of Chapter 6 “Draw a Line in the Sand”

More About Rework

With a new website comes a new business cards. This was the first time I have used Moo.com for my printing and I was very pleased with the end result. The card stock is a nice thickness, the print quality is excellent, the price was reasonable and delivery was fast. My experience with Moo.com was the classic under promise over delivery. I didn’t take advantage of one of the coolest features of moo.com which allows customers to have up to 50 different images on the back of their cards. I wanted to keep my collateral simple. So much like Jakob Nielsen’s website useit.com I focused on user experience and communication. I believe Good design is good business, and giving my collateral to much personality could detract from my work, which I want to speak for itself. I highly recommend giving moo.com a shot.

Check out Moo.com

The card was featured on moo.com with Graham Smith, David Airey & Jakob Eriksson

Featured On Moo.com

For the past few weeks, I have been singing the praises of Cloudflare. Cloudflare is a service that protects and accelerates your website. Most websites today are in fact wide open and vulnerable to a multitude of threats such as spambots and hackers. The key is to identifying the best and most effective ways to protect your site and its content. Services like Akismet manage to carry the weight of detecting and diverting spam comments into the spam folder, however these spambots are still capable of getting to the website and causing un-need draw on server resources and bandwidth. As a resource, Cloudflare works diligently to prevent threat access to your website. Essentially, putting wanted search engine bots and browser traffic in the fast lane to site, meaning lower bounce rate and faster load times.

Cloudflare stats are by comparison more accurate then Google Analytics or server provided tools. The latter mentioned, require an embedded JavaScript which doesn’t calculate if the user has JavaScript disabled or your site is being crawled by a search bots that doesn’t use JavaScript. Cloudflare stats open the user’s world up to a reporting format with information that they didn’t have before, with accurate human traffic information like page views, unique users, search bots, and threats that tried to access your site. All keeping the user informed and aware of what’s happening with site traffic.

CloudFlare has created a Threat Control Dashboard that is a dream, and works to show all the threats that have been stopped from accessing your site. Also, one can easily block an IP address, which is great for bloggers that pick up a hater or two or an even entire country that probably has nothing more to offer by cheap viagra offers… Looking at you Latvia!

Cloudflare also has the added benefit of keeping your site online for a short time if your server should go down! And best of all it is free and only takes about 5 minutes to setup with a simple change to the DNS settings. Take the time to know how to protect yourself and be in charge of making it happen.

Learn More About Cloudflare

I was nominated for Santa Clarita Valley Business Journal’s 40 Under Forty by the City of Santa Clarita’s Webmaster Ryan Drake and IT Business Analyst Denise Jens

Nate has worked with the City since 2008 where he provides design and support for web development.

Nominee’s achievements: Nate is a great asset to the web development team at the City. He is passionate about his work and prides himself in creating aesthetically pleasing, unobtrusive, innovative and useful design.

He has created award winning designs for sites like the Cowboy Festival, Skatepark, VoteSantaClarita.com and most recently the new Santa Clarita Public Library website. Nate was also instrumental in the re-branding of the SCV Sheriff station lending his design talents for items like the 2009 year in station review that even caught the eye of Sheriff Lee Baca.

Nate is currently nominated for the 2nd class of Code for America fellows. I have no doubt he will be accepted and provide his services to cities across the U.S. to help further open government solutions.

I highly recommend Nate Imhoff for the 2011 SCV 40 under 40. ~Ryan Drake

Today marks three years working at Santa Clarita City Hall. It seems like yesterday I was being introduced to everyone here by Darren Hernandez. It’s been an awesome three years and I am grateful to work with such great people like Ryan Drake, Ryan Resella, Ursula Messick, Denise Jens and of course Kevin Tonoian. The talent stuffed into my department is amazing and humbling, it’s no wonder our team has been top ten in our category in the nation for Digital Cities Survey the past two years (2009 – 7^th, 2010 – 10^th).

Following our country’s 2008 financial meltdown, City Hall and government bodies across the nation saw a massive drop in income. My department experienced significant budget cuts and to this date, we still have four positions open. With such drastic cuts, one would expect a drop in services to the community. But as team, we learned to do more with fewer resources, we became leaders in the public sector for social media and began using more open source solutions like drupal and wordpress.

I count it a privilege and an honor to work with such talented and amazing people.