Interested in marketing, PR, digital media or web development? Do you read blogs when you should be doing work? Have an unhealthy relationship with Facebook and Twitter? Excellent writer?  We’d like to hear from you. We are looking for a few interns to join the Cloudbrain team for the summer. Our internships are project-based (you won’t be fetching coffee) – you will manage a blog, build a website or design something that will be on the front lines of what Cloudbrain is doing.  If you are interested, send a resume and cover letter to jobs@cloudbrain.com.  Feel free to email with any questions as well.

Past interns built text-messaging-based games, wrote blogs, designed iPhone apps and managed Facebook marketing campaigns.

Questions and Answers:

1. Is this a paid internship? Yes
2. I have summer travel plans, is that OK? Yes, we are flexible. We understand people have plans. We’ll work with you – just let us know.
3. What are the hours? Can I have another job? Yes. This will be 10-20 hours a week. You can set your own schedule.
4. Can I work from home? No. You will be working out of our office in Charlottesville. We want to hang out with you.
5. What if I still have questions? Email jobs@cloudbrain.com

Above pictures from a video shoot we did last week in the office with Cramer Photo. That’s Becky, our Marketing Content Director, Jenn, our Content Director and Will our Multimedia Guy.

To most people, “browser” = “google”. This is why building applications and user interfaces is so difficult – details that developers take for granted (like what a browser is and how to use the address bar) are complete mysteries to the average user. Here’s an even better example. Don’t make your website / application pretty – make it usable.

Here are my rules for web apps for the average person:

1. No one reads anything. If it takes more than 5 words to say it, don’t bother.
2. Don’t be fancy. Users expect web pages to work a certain way: the default browser behavior. Fancy javascript, slideshows, animations, buttons and styles are confusing. This is why Craigslist works.
3. Design for scrolling. Users like to scroll. It’s easy and it keeps them in control. Users don’t like clicks, it forces a decision. Instead of a slideshow or a confusing list of categories, just put your content out there. Let the user scroll through it. This is why blogs are affective and newspaper websites aren’t.

I didn’t go to Yale.  I went to UVA.  There’s a reason Thomas Jefferson considered The University Of Virginia one of his greatest achievements.  But I give credit where credit is due:  Not bad Yale, not bad.  Bonus points for the Brian Williams cameo.  Who knew going to Yale was like an episode of Glee?

If you have ever moved your iTunes library (say, to an external drive) or rearranged your music folders than you have run in to this problem.  iTunes maintains its own database of information about your music files and expects you to make all changes to songs via iTunes.  Moving song files outside of iTunes causes iTunes to “lose” your songs – it thinks the songs in the new location are completely new songs and it can no longer find your old songs (because they were moved).  Lame, I know.

TidySongs make it easy to remove iTunes duplicates.  A duplicates feature is built in to iTunes – but it only finds songs with exactly the same information and won’t remove them for you.  You have to click and delete each one by hand and your out of luck if you have duplicates that are spelled slightly differently.  TidySongs makes all this easy.

People have no time or patience anymore.  If you want to succeed, make sure your thing isn’t confusing.

What button do you push for the UP elevator in the picture above?

If you are new here or are reading this in a Feed Reader you should know that we just re-designed the cloudbrain.com website.   Thanks to Kyle for knocking the design out of the park.

For the curious:  This is still a Wordpress powered blog / site.  Kyle designed everything in Photoshop and we used the PSD2HTML service to slice everything up in to html / css / images.  That same service also did the final Wordpress theme coding.  (Yes, we could do all that ourselves, but why?).  Once the theme is installed, it took an hour or so of tweaking to get everything the way we wanted it (making sure the widgets worked, small design details etc. etc.).

I’d love to hear your thoughts.