march 2008

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This is probably the most important point: hang around with smart people. If you live among monkeys, you might have a good life, but you will not earn a Ph.D. (except if you are studying monkeys!). Happily, you can easily hang around with smart people whe

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I’ve been reading a few blogs lately, particularly posts entailing the costs and procedures of a new start-up. There seems to be a growing trend of minimizing start-up costs and times, and I think it is great that entrepreneurs are finally learning of t

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How do we learn? What exactly do sleep and stress do to our brains? Why is multi-tasking a myth? Why is it so easy to forget—and so important to repeat new knowledge?

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There is no official standard for what makes something “Web 2.0”, but there certainly are a few tell-tale signs. These new sites usually feature modern web technologies like Ajax and often have something to do with building online communities. But eve

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Jason Calacanis talks about being an entrepreneur and being cheap

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If you have not read Jason Calacanis's post on "How to save money running a startup" - you should. Its a good read. Mostly money saving tips for software / internet startups alone. I know more entrepreneurs who do a much better job of 11. Fire people who are not workaholics. Come on folks, this is startup life, it's not a game. don't work at a startup if you're not into it--go work at the post office or starbucks if you're not into it you want balance in your life. For realz.Not sure I agree with this 100%.

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SEO Survey from more than 3000 SEO consultants

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Mathew Ingram has a good piece on media consumption and the digital generation (its from a piece from New York Times). There's a great quote he excerpted -

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Most blogs including mine make it extremely hard to comment, which explains one reason why only 1% of your audience comments. If most blogs ask for your email address, website or blog anyway, why cant we make it easier to comment?My ideal solution is to get the comment feature working in my Google reader. So when I am reading something, I can just comment right there instead of clicking on that post, going to the blog site, then entering my information (for the 1000000th time) and then taking care of the captch stuff.If you can comment directly from Google Reader (or any other reader) you know that the person's authenticated and you dont need the captcha stuff.Google Reader team can you please add that feature?

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Rohit Bhargava's new book "Personality Not Included" hits the shelves in 2 days. I have read the first chapter - so I technically cannot give you a book review, but first my basic philosophy of buying/reading books is:a)

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Updated with photo from EricI had a chance to meet some folks I have only talked to on Twitter. Last night thanks to Ryan and Jennifer, who organized a TweetUp, I met a great group of folks at Nola's in Palo Alto.We were joined by Eric Gonzalez, Lingling (Eric's wife), Ryan Kuder, Jennifer Leggio, Joel Postman, Rachel Luxemburg, Chris Asad, Leora Zellman, Martin Mckeay and Randy Ksar.The thought that struck me when I was driving back late last night is "

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You have to pay for content like this. I wish Marc would put a donate to Stanford Children's hospital paypal button next to his blog post.I highly recommend you read this at least 2-3 times. I have read it once, but too tried to read it too quickly, which is a shame.

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Bill Johnston of Forum One hosted an excellent Unconference on Mobile communities. The venue was the Sheraton Palo Alto. You can read more about the unconference at the wiki. Great event overall since I met some really wonderful people. Here's what I remember as my top takeaways:1. SMS & voice is the least common denominator for all cell phones. Since 90+% of all phones currently in use are not smart phones, both Utterz (Simeon) and 3jam (Cathy) were focused on services that support every phone user. If you are aiming for the iPhone camera or SDK, realize is a small (but growing) market.2. SAP (Mark, Pratima) and HP (Jamie) were all very interested in Enterprise applications for Mobile communities - internally. They seemed to universally agree that this market was about 3-5 years out for mobile. There are a few plays in the "security" space, but limited was their impression.3. Alta Partners (Robert) questioned that even though the ringtone market is large (apparently over $5 Billion currently) is it going the way of the Berkeley toaster screen saver? - we all seemed to be dating ourselves. 4. YouTube (Tim) had some great information to share about localization - they are doing it in 10+ regions and in EACH region they negotiate with EVERY record label / music company to get rights to include their music in videos uploaded to their site so they dont get sued. If they did not do this, they would get sued by local providers if their users uploaded movies that included any copyrighted music.5. MobiHand (David) talks about how they are spending more time with developers of mobile software asking questions and details on their "revenue" model. Unlike the web, mobile advertising is still very small, so even though there is a lot of interest in mobile marketing, very little advertising is being done.6. You have to understand the dynamic of the local market before you decide a business model. Nokia (Niklas) had a great comment, that in North America the carriers had all the control, in Europe it was shared 50-50 between the carrier and the handset maker, in Japan, carriers again rule whereas in other parts of Asia, the handset makers pretty much call the shots.7. There is no "global strategy" for UI, usage and development of communities. AOL (Erin) had a great comment about the 3 most important factors that went into consideration for distribution of mobile content - user behavior in the country, carrier control and handset capability. E.g. Users in Korea spend an hour each day using their mobile while traveling - to watch video, play games etc.8. Cyworld (Catherine) is a great example of mobile in Korea. About 30+ Million users are on the site to "dress up" their virtual home, buy gifts and create "mini-homes, mini-me" (sic) etc. Users spend hours and days on the mobile doing this when they use mass transit (they commute via train, bus, etc) to work / school. This is very different from ...

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One of my favorite analysts and a great friend Rachel Happe invited me to an event hosted by Jane of SixApart. This was a mixer and positioned as an open discussion.I really admire and like Anil Dash, and having met him several times, already have a very favorable opinion of the company.The discussion started at about 6pm with several folks from the senior team at SixApart including David Tokheim

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There are over 100 Million view of YouTube videos monthly. Every media company (look at CnnFn, Fortune, etc.) is now providing video content for viewing online in addition to their text. A good percentage (undetermined but at about 40%) of this video is user generated. Now these users are passionate, happy people, but the big need is to monetize all this video watching & production. Users who create these videos would LOVE to be paid for their fruits of labor. There are several mechanisms ranging from OLD to NEW.