The tagline for Amazon Mechanical Turk is “Artificial Artificial Intelligence”. As in, faking your AI by using humans. Mechanical Turk is named after the contraption in the title image, which was a seeming chess-playing automaton from the late 1700s that was secretly operated by a small human hidden inside....

It’s hard to believe it’s been 5 whole years since we were slamming red bull on dirty couches in a college-town garage, with our friends Sergei and Mark, moving fast and breaking things on our scrappy little startup, dreaming big about how we were going to change the world(wide web) with … Oh wait. I...

It’s been a few weeks since we launched the Big Beeminder Redesign of 2016. For those of you who are web design nerds or just can’t get enough peeking inside the beehive, we’re proud to have the creative force behind the redesign, Josh Pitzalis, tell us how it all went down. In April this year I began...

Today marks the beginning of the 17th annual NaNoWriMo. For the uninitiated that’s NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth. For 17 years folks have been joining together on the internet over the month of November to pen their own 50,000 word novels. This year they expect half a million participants. That’s a lot...

Remember back in the day (yesterday) when Beeminder’s interface was all cluttered and intimidating and looked like it was made in 2011, by kernel hackers and accountants? Or computer scientists and behavioral econ nerds who gradually agglomerated a multiheaded beast of a system to implement their crazy...

Big news today: we have grown! We’ll leave it to Lillian to tell the backstory but we are pretty over the moon about this. We’ve been courting Lillian forever, even before it was financially realistic, since it seemed pretty clear she’d be able to whip our marketing and advertising and social media-ing...

First off, what do we mean by derailing? We mean you pass your deadline — midnight by default — with today’s datapoint in the red. Here’s an example of a goal right at the end of the day. The countdown has run out, and I still haven’t done my flossing: (Hover or long-press the graphs for more commentary.)...

This is a guest post by Oliver Mayor, an avid Beeminder user for going on four years. He’s a software developer who’s interested in human-behavior-shaping technology and often has pretty deep insights related to Beeminder. We were especially impressed with his thoughts on the different modes of beeminding...

UPDATE 2018 July: We raised the price of the Infinibee plan from $4/mo to $8/mo.UPDATE 2021 January 1: We raised the price of Beemium from $32/mo to $40/mo.UPDATE 2021 November 26: We raised the price of Beemium again, to $50/mo. Turns out we don’t really want people to get Beemium! To paraphrase Teen...

If you spot one cockroach in your kitchen you can rest assured that there are hordes of them sneaking around not making themselves noticed. Or maybe possibly it was just that one passing through, but if you see another one you’re very probably supporting a colony with the biomass of a blue whale in...