Blake Callens

Blake Callens is CEO and co-founder of PencilBlue, and co-founder of the Raleigh Entrepreneurial Acceleration Lab. He’s a regular contributor to ExitEvent. Every software engineer has experienced a job interview in which he or she was forced to act more like a dictionary than a human being. There’s a prevalent misconception that, in order to properly develop software, one must know all the minute details of any programming language listed in the job requirements. It’s a remnant of the days when developers received their knowledge from physical manuals. It’s common for today’s experienced developers to disqualify a company the...

Blake Callens is CEO of online publishing startup PencilBlue and co-founder of the Raleigh Entrepreneurial Acceleration Lab, a non-profit incubator with the mission of creating profitable, self-sustaining, technology startups in the Triangle. He is a DEMOgod and Webby award winner, and writes regularly on the subjects of software startups and UI/UX development. One of the most common stories I hear from founders is that of the wayward software development contract. It’s so common that the top post on the entrepreneur subreddit last weekend was from a business owner who is missing a sales cycle because a contracted project went...

Earlier this month, we launched the promotional website and developer blog for PencilBlue, our foray into the world of online publishing platforms. It was not only a public relations milestone for us, but a massive technical one as well. PencilBlue.org going online was the culmination of many months of extracurricular work and the first in many tests of our company’s vision, for when your product is a tool to build websites, every detail of your own website is up for debate. This scrutiny is magnified even further when PencilBlue’s key value propositions are based on the premise that other...

In the week since Facebook announced plans to purchase Oculus, the general consensus among early adopters of the company’s popular virtual reality headsets has been a combination of anger and dismay. Many were frustrated that a project they funded less than two years ago on Kickstarter was being taken out of the community’s hands. Among them was Markus ‘Notch’ Persson, the creator of another nontraditionally-funded gaming project, Minecraft. In a March 25th blog post, Persson said he found Facebook “creepy,” and was no longer going to build a version of Minecraft for the Rift, Oculus’s headset. Persson was one...

Disclaimer: I’m an advisor for the Wake Tech Web Technology Department. My opinions are my own and do not reflect those of Wake Tech. As a front end developer trained in California, I notice things about the software developed in the Triangle that others might not. For example, the user interfaces designed and developed here—especially for web and mobile—often lack the polish of those developed in Silicon Valley, New England and Austin. Software here, regardless of the application, tends to be geared toward the enterprise, making apps that are meant for the consumer more text heavy, inanimate and difficult...

Late last month, Chinese computer manufacturing giant Lenovo, whose U.S. headquarters are in Morrisville, announced that they would be acquiring Motorola Mobility from Google for $2.9 billion. Motorola’s smartphone unit had only been under the ownership of Google since May of 2012, when it was acquired for $12.5 billion. While Google is retaining the patents and much of the research and development arm of Mobility, it still represents a huge, ten figure loss from Google’s attempt at bringing smartphone manufacturing in house. Perhaps part of the blame for Motorola’s lackluster performance in the last 18 months lies with how...