Farm Fresh to You: Great veggies & scurvy protection

We’ve been using a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) service for the last several months called Farm Fresh to You. It was recommended to us by a friend when we moved to the Bay Area earlier this year. We get the “regular” box of veggies delivered to our doorstep every two weeks which costs $30, home delivery included. We signed up for the convenience of getting tasty fruits and veggies delivered on a regular basis but I priced out our most recent box on the Safeway grocery delivery site and found that we’re also saving 50% on cost.  If you think this writeup is useful use promotional code 378 when you sign up. You’ll get $10 off your first order and we’ll get a free box.

Trade shares of players and teams on OneSeason

My friends Mike and DJ launched OneSeason about two months ago and have built a very interesting platform for buying and selling synthetic ownership interests in sports teams and players among friends. Think playing cards merged with an online industrial strength trading platform.

Good reads

Lots of good reading material recently. A few good ones:

Is it a Terrible Time to Move? (Kedrosky) The Daily Beast

Anatomy of a Meltdown The New Yorker

Hitched to Someone Else’s Dream (Stonyfield Farms) Inc

The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace Rolling Stone

Thinking Outside the Box (Costco) Fast Company

Complete airline luggage cost data

I think I’ll be shipping my luggage this winter. Data from WSJ report.  A separate CNNMoney article here with a nice Liftopia plug.

Email deliverability hacks

Email deliverability is a big deal…and unfortunately it’s as muddled as transaction processing. There are hundreds if not thousands of service providers who will tell you whatever it takes to get you to buy their product and ungodly amounts of marketing materials. At the end of the day, blacklists are nearly impossible to get off and email plays an integral role for nearly every web app in existence (sidenote: check out Product Planner for great visuals of email/signup process flows). Ted Rheingold of Dogster has written the best best list of email deliverability best-practices that I have seen yet. Auren Hoffman built on Ted’s post with a great list of email deliverability troubleshooting suggestions. Unfortunately I found these post via Noah Kagan only after I had spent countless hours wading through email service provider jargon & propaganda. Hopefully this post will save others some pain…

Obama and Chicago economics

The WSJ ran a short but interesting piece this weekend which focused on how Obama is perceived among Chicago School economists given his background with the University of Chicago. The piece focuses on the thoughts of Richard Thaler, one of the leaders in the school of behavioral economics which has largely examined the efficient markets theorized by the old Chicago School crowd and identified scenarios in which actors systemically fail to make efficient decisions. This line of study is an interesting glimpse into human behavior and is very important in the context of efficient market arguments which all assume decision makers behave in efficient ways (e.g. a person will take $2 in exchange for $1).

Mary Meeker/MS Tech Trend Outlook

Very interesting presentation put together by Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley and presented yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit.