April 2012
1 post
Apparently, I'm poachable
Surprise, surprise…this morning I found myself on an estimable list: Betabeat’s Spring 2012 Most Poachable Players in Tech.
Well, I’ll admit, I’m flattered and excited. Not specifically because it’s nice to be desired or considered such, but because I’m on a list with some frakking awesome people (BSG fan here). Like this guy, Justin Isaf. I work with him...
January 2012
1 post
Watchtest
November 2011
1 post
Reinventing Liveblogging; or Go Team! →
Congrats to everyone involved in the latest improvements to Liveblog and especially cool that our #Occupy coverage is being highlighted here.
October 2011
3 posts
“markcoatney via Tumblr washingtonpoststyle:
Pukin’ Punkin.
Anyone know who...”
– Photo post
blahblah
Beyond the Battlefield: great series about... →
Such an important series. I’m proud to be a part of an organization that has paid so much attention to veterans and veterans’ organizations like the IAVA whose founders and members found an early home for their message on our platform. While other media companies have ignored or marginalized veterans’ point of view, HuffPost has given them a voice.
I think we’re able to do...
3 tags
New Catalyst report debunks some myths about... →
From Joan Williams on the Huffington Post
The Catalyst report takes aim at the claim — now almost taken for a truism in business literature - thatwomen don’t ask for promotions and salary increases at the same level as men. According to the Catalyst report, women were actually found to ask more than men for both increased compensation (63% of women to 54% of men) and a higher job...
September 2011
2 posts
What starts as a toy... →
1) get rejected more 2) climb the right hill 3) create an amazing toy 4) grow that toy into something big that transforms an important industry
5 tags
DE:NATURED: Jonathan Stark's Social Experiment... →
clemauyeung:
Sure, I majored in the sciences during college but you didn’t have to be a scientist to participate in the social experiment, Jonathan’s Card. What started as a local project amongst friends quickly blew up to become a national barometer of generosity and collective sharing.
The man behind…
August 2011
4 posts
7 tags
Life-spanning the app
Most consumer-facing apps are not built with longevity in mind. Instead, they are built to engage enough people for the few months or years it takes to either lose the audience and flame out as a startup, or to succeed by selling it and its community to a larger company.
However, there is another form of app emerging—a life-spanning, or long-form app if you will—that is less focused...
3 tags
All you refugees out there →
Dude. I don’t know what’s wrong with my name (because I think it’s awesome!) but you have great insights into the design community and obviously understand the antispec perspec. So thanks for engaging in ye old diablogue. I hereby link out to you in good faith.
And for those of you without principles…you know where I am. ;)
5 tags
The little anti-story that could
I am constantly struck by the fervor with which media outlets pick up anything that remotely resembles a story about The Huffington Post. Take the latest HuffPost tempest in a teapot.
Check it out! Apparently, as a part of our overarching plot to get everything for free, we’re trying to exploit designers. Never mind that Business Insider hosts caption contests on a regular basis. Good...
Surprise! Starting a business means working... →
The New York Times posted an article yesterday about several entrepreneurs who quit (or were laid off from) their corporate, high-paying jobs and started small businesses. To a person, they were astounded to find that running your own business means working longer hours, stretching your skill-set, worrying about money, thinking about customers, and (gasp!) not always doing exactly what you want to...
June 2011
4 posts
Fantastic post by Stowe Boyd: What Twitter Could... →
stoweboyd:
Twitter is on a fast growth path, as shown by recent data, but then the same data show Tumblr growing even faster.
What’s the story?
Twitter and Tumblr strongly diverge in their treatment of tags. Tumblr has implemented tags as first class metadata, explicitly supported by the Tumblr…
5 tags
Study of Amazon reviewers reveals the perils of... →
Really interesting study (in summation here) of the Amazon reviewers culture, specifically the how the culture has changed with the increase of product types Amazon has on offer, the initial motivations people have for reviewing items and how those motivations change as the reviewer’s reputation increases.
I’ve never gotten particularly involved in reviews communities although I do...
7 tags
Risk, failure, and other mystifying startup tropes
In my previous life as a graduate student in the humanities, we used to talk a lot about tropes—the modern usage being a reoccurring rhetorical motif or device (in short, a cliche born and over-used within a particular genre of literature or a set of critical works).
Tropes however, are in full display everywhere. For example, in the startup literature, we use “risk”,...
Balls, beer, and other alienations
It has struck me recently just how alien the VC culture can be to one such as myself. Myself not being a sports fan, though not completely against sports (big love for water polo and futbol just not a hobby). Myself also not one to conduct a lot of serious business over beer.
I am, however, the sort who tends to think investors should invest in things that exist and have traction in the...
March 2011
2 posts
Unions' role in workplace safety over the years →
February 2011
4 posts
Watch
Tim Fitz: Three problems of continuous deployment →
there are three big problems to solve: the software update user experience, the collection and interpretation of quality metrics, and surviving the chaos of the desktop environment.
Etsy's approach to development →
developers are divided up into a number of small teams, usually 3-7 engineers. These teams are paired with a product manager and a designer, and there is some movement across teams as needed. All designers at Etsy code and product managers code at various levels, too. Ops and dev work really closely together, and we have one development team that is very ops-like and straddles both...
Deciding on an idea
Product ideas have been popping into my head lately. Lots and lots of them. In fact, right now I should be asleep, but my brain is busy. It won’t shut up. Products…silly one-off projects, really useful apps, games…I’m preoccupied with these ideas. These ideas…plural. Too many! I can’t decide.
I want to identify a few ideas from the growing list that will be fun...
December 2010
2 posts
7 tags
Hacking in bulk; or how to turn your hack into a...
I’m working on an interesting problem right now for a friend who shall remain unnamed, whose project will remain undescribed. The problem is one I’m sure many hardware hackers face at some point or another.
In my first company, I had a lot of technical and business questions I had to answer. They were pretty basic at first. How to set up a company. How to bill clients. How to sell...
3 tags
Wisdom and entrepreneurship. What does it all...
I watched an episode of Supernatural this morning as a kickstart to the day. I know…it’s not a great show, but my mom got me addicted early. Remember the old WB? Buffy, Supernatural, Felicity, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Charmed, Smallville, Roswell. It was this amazing moment in high school when all these shows were on that tackled fantasy as a genre that had serious insights into the...
August 2010
10 posts
Seven Reasons Tech Start-Ups Are Setting Up Shop... →
Shout-out to Chris Wiggins who advised Adaptive Semantics. It’s great that he and his colleagues are encouraging students towards joining the startup scene. Startups are certainly more volatile than the financial industry, but they are much much more fun!
A short tale of family entrepreneurship
For about five years of my life I actively contributed to the development of a board game. At first, it wasn’t my idea of a good time. But, as with many family projects over the years whether it was confronting cows or angry dogs on rural Illinois farmland properties my parents had bought to fix up and sell, or touring my way through another Civil War battlefield in a quest to...
Amplify and Postling do the same thing
so far not sure which service I like more.See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/8khe
“The store will put on a brief light show every hour. First, visitors will “get...”
– Pop-Tarts Brand Plants Its Times Square Flag - NYTimes.com
Possibly the greatest example of marketing as spectacle that I have ever seen. Because who doesn’t want to go through a lightshow simulation of what it might be like to be processed into a breakfast snack?
http://scraperwiki.com/ →
This is a great tool. I’m actually writing a scraper right now, and would post it to Scraperwiki, but they don’t support Ruby yet. Will post when they do.
“Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of...”
– Eric Schmidt: Every 2 Days We Create As Much Information As We Did Up To 2003
Founder Interview: Life After Acquisition : The... →
My interview with The Next Women, a Business Magazine for Female Internet Heroes went up yesterday. I feel a bit shy about it, but it would be silly not to post.
From Survival Mode to Growth - Business Growth -... →
Knowing when, how, and whether to grow is key to surviving the recession as a startup.
July 2010
24 posts
Group health insurance is the key to diversifying... →
I have been following the coverage of Tereza Messeranyi’s excellent post about XX Combinator. I actually met with her a couple days ago over lunch to discuss the idea.
Fred Wilson just posted to Business Insider, a call for people who are interested in pursuing this idea. With Fred involved, this idea is bound to have wings.
I posted a comment, which you can read in the article (linked),...
XX Combinator, and adopting the engineer's mindset
My friend Anjali Shenoy, who runs a startup in Chicago called What’s in Your Hive recommended I read a post by Tereza Nemesserani here: http://terezan.tumblr.com/post/816358389/xx-combinator
I’m glad I did, because Tereza proposes a really interesting idea, that a Y Combinator-like incubator be formed for women-run startups which she quite aptly and playfully calls XX Combinator. I...
PayPal's culture of entrepreneurialism →
“If you take away one insight from this list, make it this one: The citizens in...”
– 5 Innovative Websites That Could Reshape the News
Robot news monkeys →
No mention of JuLiA here, but it’s clear that there are quite a few editorial and operational processes that can be automated successfully by machines.
Fact-check triggers →
Politifact’s about page definitely gives us a starting model. I think with some modifications, we could train JuLiA to recognize a lot of the semantic triggers mentioned here.
Fact-checking using machine learning, first... →
Last night, I was thinking about JuLiA and how we might apply her to traditional newsroom tasks. I thought…’what about fact-checking?’
What if you could fact-check in real time? What if you could flag stories that need fact-checking by humans using a machine learning solution?
You could use a combination of text mining and sentiment analysis techniques. The key would be...
Stay hungry; stay foolish →
I remember thinking that I would be a great startup founder because I was so good at navigating small, startup-like organizations. I thought that since I had accomplished a lot with minimal resources and a lot of responsibility in two jobs after college and knew how to manage teams of designers, marketers, and developers that running a startup would be really easy.
After all, it would not require...
Osmos for iPad →
Adding this one to the future download collection.
I Can't Have Enough Samurai: Way of the Warrior... →
The graphics for Samurai: Way of the Warrior are really amazing…just like manga. Really excited to download this game based upon the graphics alone.
iPad apps: games that stand out -- Engadget →
In theory all the controls should be accessible with just your thumbs, but in reality you have to do a lot of moving your hands to reach the gun reload / swap control at the top of the screen, or to pull off the slightly gimmicky two finger grenade launch swipe.
Endgadget likes: nuanced but intuitive touch controls; good use of accelerometer; easy to learn; ability to switch between single and...
Robert E. Litan: Entrepreneurial Stimulus Package... →
Most research universities have a technology commercialization department. The office usually advises professors on commercializing their research. Their mission should be extended to nurturing an entrepreneurial spirit/tradition within the students as well.
It’s really a win-win for universities since they can share IP rights and revenue with the entrepreneurs, and give students real-world...
Everything You Need To Know About The Fragmented... →
Based upon learning curve and performance of emulators and debuggers, it seems development for Android is the easiest, with iPhone/iPad coming in second.
Startup acquired, the before and aftermath: part 2
There is nothing like coming back from a successful pitch when you’re the mongrel pup and they’re the big dog…watching as the skyline recedes on your sticky subway ride back to some cheap ass neighborhood where the rents are affordable on a startup budget…and thinking…’I am fucking awesome. I own this city.’
There is nothing quite so depressing as getting...