To so bili najbolj zanimivi startup projekti ki sem jih videl letos.
Srednješolci imajo res prednost na trgu zaradi svoje neobremenjenosti z avtoritetami in filtri. Lucidno znajo prepoznati resnične probleme v resničnem svetu, ustvarjalnikov program jim pa da jezik in metodologijo za prevod teh idej v poslovni načrt. Nekaj genijalnih primerov:
To je samo nekaj primerov podjetniških zamisli šestnajstletnikov, ki so povsem izvedljive, premišljene, in rešijo resnične probleme.
Najljubša letos mi je bila sicer ena se bolj skrajna – tretjina odraslih se “ne počuti cisto po uporabi navadnega toaletnega papirja po veliki potrebi”. Vlažen papir ima nekaj slabosti, ampak kaj pa če naredimo vlažilnik za toaletni papir? Ideja ki je nora samo zato ker smo v kulturi, v kateri je to tabu tema. Taki biznisi so vcasih zelo uspešni pa se družbeno koristni.
Seveda bojo vse te ekipe v kratkem šle na univerze in bojo zelo težko nadaljevale te projekte, a izkušnja ki so jo imeli, iz učilnice do problema do ideje do načrta jim bo ostala za vedno.
Kar nas pripelje do drugega dela tega članka. Ustvarjalnik je letos objavil tudi da po petih letih bistveno zmanjšuje število krožkov. Enostavno pretežko je v Sloveniji vzdrževati operacijo ducatov šol, mentorjev, lokalnih sponzorjev. Spremljal sem jih od začetka, videl kar nekaj ekip ki so izgorele ko so poskušale drzati zadeve skupaj brez spodobnega plačila, videl sem kako ministrstvo naroči izvedbo enakega programa drugi organizaciji brez izkusenj, in kako Matija začenja razumeti razsežnosti slovenskega steklenega stropa
Tretje dejanje tega članka je enako pomembno. Ekipa ustvarjalnika bo pretvorila svoje izkušnje v spletno platformo za poučevanje. Sprva podjetništva, kasneje upamo da tudi še drugih sodobnih predmetov. Platforma bo omogočala ambicioznim šolam in učiteljem, ki jim je mar za prihodnost svojih varovancev, da na enem mestu dobijo vrhunski program in gradiva potrebna za izpeljavo podobnega predmeta, skupaj z vajami za razvoj podjeniške miselnosti in prakse.
Slovenija po mojem mnenju s tem izgublja izjemno pomembno gonilo prihodnosti družbe, a najbolj žalostno je da najverjetneje čez pet let noben ne bo več vedel, le jamrali bomo spet da Slovenci nismo dovolj podjetni.
Hvala vsem ki so Ustvarjalnik poganjali doslej in veliko sreče pri novem projektu.
i vaguely remember someone calling me some time ago and wanting to schedule a visit in the middle of the following day. i forgot to call him back, and they never followed up either. so i guess it is fair to say they tried and that it’s completely my fault that i’m leaving them.
and just before we dissect the letter, let me make it clear – it’s about renewal, i don’t owe the company anything for the contract that was valid.
but the letter. it appears they let financial and controlling department communicate with customers directly, so i had to read it three times to make sure they are not suing me for something. here are the key components:
am i overreacting? is there something about insurance business i don’t know? why wouldn’t i expect them to make me feel nice and fluffy as they take the next big chunk of my money?
probably because they are incompetent and several people involved in this letter should be fired.
]]>1) three out of the 11 people present had laser corrective eye surgery done. that’s almost a quarter! it’s amazing how widely spread this procedure was in the group, which is of course not representative of the whole society, but at least indicative of a decent portion of it.
2) and 9 of us have kids, but four of us had kids with some kind of developmental disorder. one had cross eye issues, one had minor asperger syndrome, two had dyslexia. nothing dramatic by modern standards, but that’s only because our health system is able to detect them early on, and fix them before they even become real problems. that’s another quarter of the population represented at the table!
i can imagine even just a hundred years ago, all these problems just developing into a grow up age, rendering a decent chunk of the society somewhat impaired.
we should feel fortunate we live in a time where such problems are fixable, in society where they are systematically detected early on, and we should feel good about paying the taxes that make both of these points possible in the first place. full stop.
]]>of course i understand where this came from, specially given that the candidate was coming from a completely different, conservative work environment, but it was still so far out of my world view that i needed two days to parse it completely.
so here’s the short answer i should have given then: “pregnancy is just another life milestone, and we are proud to enable and help our employees through any of them.” we have had a lot of our employees get first or second child, but even more often they start working with us before graduation, and the company has to put in some effort to get them over the finish line.
one of our core values in the company is personal growth. this means we feel good if our people grow, even if it has nothing to do with the company. flip side is, that we strive to enable them to grow within the company as well. we like to work with each individually to understand their ambitions and do everything we can to present them challenges that are aligned with where they want to develop.
sometimes that also means the employee leaves the company, because we can’t match their ambition. when that happens, it’s a very sad but honest moment, where the only one benefiting is the employee – they gain the freedom to pursue their dreams.
unfortunately not many people in slovenia understand that and want to cling to their jobs no matter what. we are not interested in them. we only wish to employ acomplished individuals who will leave us if we are not good enough for them anymore.
all these are just different angles of the same thing – respecting the pregnancy is the same as respecting one’s education, respecting their individual aspirations. it’s all just about respecting their freedom as a human being, and acknowledging that the employer is not in any position of power anymore. we are all partners in one stage of life.
]]>“the articles and words on this blog do not necessarily represent the position of their author. strong sentences, especially such that describe people or companies or events are here to express an abstract point, and not to pass or enable or encourage judgement. please refrain from taking them as facts, but rather as building blocks of a story. author accepts feedback and complaints under comments and on email.”
mladina je pred nekaj tedni objavila cudovito predstavitev najvecjega presenecenja zadnjih volitev, in po pricakovanjih javnosti naslednjega kandidata za odresitelja druzbe. z zanimanjem sem ga prebral, ce drugega ne se povsem strinjam da moramo nehat volit ljudi ki ne zmorejo vec energije da bi bili karizmaticni. t.i. ‘mladi’ ki to niso so vsekakor boljsa izbira, ker delajo za (svojo) prihodnost.
kakorkoli, zelo zelo naklonjen portret se je zakljucil z odstavkom, ki me je izrazito negativno presenetil:
“Luka Mesec je vodja poslanske skupine Združena levica. Živi v Novih Jaršah v enosobnem, podnajemniškem stanovanju. Ko je bil mlad, ni rad hodil po domačih hribih v okolici Železnikov, recimo na Ratitovec, zdaj je drugače, ukvarja se s tekom. Pred dvema letoma je vpisal magistrski študij ekonomije. Rad gleda televizijske serije, Hišo iz kart in Borgijce. Vozi osem let star fiat stilo.”
se pravi da najboljsi kandidat mora biti izjemno skromen, ker to je druga plat postenja? ne vem no, meni se zdi da iz navedenega sledijo samo sledece moznosti:
zdi se mi da so pri mladini luki naredili bolj medvedjo uslugo s tem portretom.
]]>there was the carnival this week on tuesday. there are two things slovenians do for the carnival: we walk around in costumes, and we eat doughnuts.
not everyone wears costumes of course, but everyone does eat doughnuts. even people who never eat them normally have one for the carnival.
now imagine walking into a bakery in the centre of the capital at 750 in the morning which advertises it sells doughnuts on the street already:
let me restate some facts before continuing:
so what’s wrong in this picture:
she just said no.
…
a goddam computer wouldn’t say no in that situation.
not doing those actions is essentially the same as stealing from the company she works for. biting the hand that feeds her. she just doesn’t care if her employer is doing a good or bad job, if it’s making or loosing money, if it’s growing or reducing staff. she probably believes these things have nothing to do with how she works and are all “up to the management”, that same management that proverbially steals from the company as well.
and there’s thousands, tens of thousands of people like that in the services sector. you meet them everywhere.
and in the meantime, there is 125.000 people unemployed in Slovenia.
But she should get fired, her manager should get fired and his boss as well. Each of them for a different type of negligence.
Bah. All i wanted was a doughnut.
]]>let’s look at the utopian approach first, let’s count how much money should the government disseminate to satisfy everything that the society produces. let’s break it down:
This means that we will have 200k active projects, which will need capital to pay for 10 member’s living expenses, and the projects’ material and program expenses. let’s say this cost structure is something like:
this means, that if the country wanted to pay for everything, the budget would have to be:
Slovenian budget is $10 billion, and the total GDP of the country is $50 billion. So this obviously won’t work.
Every time some new project expects public funding, it implicitly expects that if everyone did the same, the society would require $300 billion to function. Every time a new project is publicly demanding public funding, they are broadcasting this expectation into the general public. Every time a new project succeeds with this pressure, it sends the message that the society can afford $300 billion worth of public funding.
I believe it is crucial we form a broad agreement about what to do with this gap between ‘implied expectations’ and reality. We’ll look into that next time.
]]>
Years ago I did an exercise in reading and presenting a dataset as complex as a national budget. Back in 2012, this included learning a lot, as well as a lot of arm-wrestling with strange PDF’s.
Right after that, our government started publishing the budget in machine-readable formats, so now I could update the page with three more years of data in an hour. Yay for open data!
So anyways, the 2015 Slovenian budget is available in human-readable form, thanks to machine-readable export of accountants-readable original.
It’s still ugly, so take it as a mockup, and send me your ideas for how you wish the budget would be presented.
standard answer is ‘do it yourself’ of course, but that’s actually not correct or efficient.
as entrepreneur, you have to find ways to scale yourself / delegate. if you want to still believe tasks will be done well, you have several choices:
btw, all of these apply to yourself as well as a 3rd person – you will only be successful if your background can be explained in one of these three narrative styles.
]]>unique ability of product people is their imagination that allows them to see the whole product even before any of the parts are built or even designed. that’s what we call product vision.
if you have product vision, you can communicate it, you can rally the troops behind you, you can fundraise, you can architect the solution, you can design and build the product. if you don’t have the vision, you can still do all these things, but you will never end up with any meaningful results.
but let’s go a step further, and claim that ‘a product’ is always a compound of parts, yet it behaves as a separate entity. a product is a whole, that is greater than the sum of its parts. users like or hate the product and their experience with it, not it’s components. that’s why a product with all same or even worse components, but slightly better product marketing, usually wins, because it communicates the vision better, which enables the users to identify with it better.
because the product is a whole it’s really important to communicate the whole. especially while still in the process of building it. when i work on products, be it in my job, or for hobby, if i work alone or with a team, i always try to keep the product at “some stage of completeness”. this means that natural milestones of development could be described as ‘mini mvps’ – functional end-to-end experiences with rough edges are much easier to demo, than polished sub-components.
engineers sometimes complain that this type of simultaneous development is inefficient, because they need to switch contexts a lot. arguably, you loose some engineering speed of parts, but gain significantly in communication and understanding of the whole.
the mantra “dont ask for permission, ask for forgiveness” speaks and relies on this trust. if team mates can’t forgive you for trying to do the right thing on your own, than you have bigger issues.
however, there is a flip side that is completely ignored – you do have to ask for forgiveness! if you just do something out of the ordinary, you most probably knew you will need forgiveness, and if you wait until others discover it and ask you about it, you are actually just being arrogant.
]]>I believe the most problematic concept of all is the MVP – minimum viable product. everyone is pretty sure they know what MVP is, and yet, they continue to deliver either dysfunctional prototypes, or confusing ‘betas’.
sometimes, what people call the ‘lean mvp’ is actually just an excuse for sloppy design and coding. these i hate the most, and explain the fallacy with an engineering comparison:
MVP of a bridge is not made of two ropes, connected with occasional rotten wood planks that happened to be lying around. this lethal construction would serve only as a practical illustration of a concept, a sketch on the napkin, not even demo-ware yet.
MVP of a bridge is a healthy trunk carefully mounted over the river. you can use it to cross the river; you might have to learn how to walk it, but you can be sure it will carry your weight.
designing and building MVP is not a shortcut, it should take notable time and effort to do it.
]]>after observing his style for a while, i realized his emails follow a pretty rigid form. i’m not sure if even he is aware of it, but I believe he would agree nevertheless. let’s look at an example and dissect it. this email was sent years ago to john battelle:
John
please meet Bostjan, co-founder and CEO of Zemanta
he’s returning to the US shortly and will be on the west coast in early June
maybe he can swing by Federated and spend some time with you
one notices several key elements:
so a very efficient email to a board member should have three sentences, clearly separated, where each communicates one part of the message. for instance:
after i realized this pattern, i started using it more and more as well. it makes your thoughts and communication sharper, which some people find offensive or rude. incidentally they are usually the ones drowning in unread emails.
]]>these questions describe the essence of entrepreneurship. i ask them myself every day.
happy to discuss any of them in more detail, vote for them in comments
]]>“the articles and words on this blog do not necessarily represent the position of their author. strong sentences, especially such that describe people or companies or events are here to express an abstract point, and not to pass or enable or encourage judgement. please refrain from taking them as facts, but rather as building blocks of a story. author accepts feedback and complaints under comments and on email.”
i had to defend adria’s airplanes again. this happens a lot, against people who find the embraers ‘crap’, not fancy enough, obsolete, not real airplanes. i totally dissagree and tell them everytime that regional planes in USA are far worse, and that i find adrias’ planes cute. that usually shuts their mouths.
there is however a different list of complaints i have after using adria service for several years now. i had to write them up eventually as they don’t go away by themselves…
… i fly enough to know that adria is no worse than any other airline really. but being a small company in a small country sounds like it might be an opportunity to be better, if only they tried harder.
oh, and in case someone relevant reads this – if there is any way i can help, i will.
lots of entrepreneurs in slovenia want to work with slovenian market first. nothing wrong with that, as long as you do your homework. marketing and go-to-market in slovenia must be very different than it would be in a larger society.
most important excersise of the go-to-market is always the sizing. and sizing a small market is particularly tricky – usually at least one of the important numbers is large enough to give you some slack, but in slovenia you must be careful.
i use a rule of thumb to quickly asses two variables:
in slovenia, i believe that we have rule of tens.
for luxury items, this means:
and for everyone else:
so you have to know your potential appeal with the product, and then cross check with the pricing you had in mind, to see if your customers can afford it at all.
then you take those targets, and start devising detailed operational plan of activities that will get your product / service in front of those exact 10/100/1000/10.000/100.000/1M people.
and then you can come raise funds to execute the plan.
“the articles and words on this blog do not necessarily represent the position of their author. strong sentences, especially such that describe people or companies or events are here to express an abstract point, and not to pass or enable or encourage judgement. please refrain from taking them as facts, but rather as building blocks of a story. author accepts feedback and complaints under comments and on email.”
how awesome, we have sushi truck in slovenia!
every wednesday it goes from maribor to piran and dispaches sushi that customers have ordered a day in advance.
great idea, poor execution imho. let me explain why:
i think it’s great that they started doing this, but in a normal market economy, these points would be huge weaknesses that would immediatelly create competition that would try to leverage doing it right, through better product and better marketing.
in slovenia however, we have 200k unemployed who can’t be bothered to think about such everyday details.
“the articles and words on this blog do not necessarily represent the position of their author. strong sentences, especially such that describe people or companies or events are here to express an abstract point, and not to pass or enable or encourage judgement. please refrain from taking them as facts, but rather as building blocks of a story. author accepts feedback and complaints under comments and on email.”
under our office is a parking lot. or better put, it is a long and narrow courtyard, used to park cars in two rows. it’s great, because it reduces costs for some of our colleagues who drive to work, and makes it easier for the visitors to find us.
however, it has a downside – since cars and in two long rows of five cars, inevitably everyone who parks here has to get up several times per day to move their car because the car before them need to get out. annoying, but doesn’t surprise anyone.
i believe there are three lessons to be learned here:
in slovenia however, we have 200k unemployed and 200k public servants who can’t be bothered to think about such everyday details.
“the articles and words on this blog do not necessarily represent the position of their author. strong sentences, especially such that describe people or companies or events are here to express an abstract point, and not to pass or enable or encourage judgement. please refrain from taking them as facts, but rather as building blocks of a story. author accepts feedback and complaints under comments and on email.”
at a networking event recently a startup founder walked up to me and in a very shy manner asked if silicon gardens knows how to set valuation of his company. this burning question was preventing him from starting to fundraise, and with all honesty, it’s a great question that founders for unknown reasons don’t want to ask out loud.
my answer roughly consisted of three parts:
very basic question, but important nonetheless. founders, don’t be afraid to ask basic questions. ever.
anything to add to the answer dear readers?
]]>“the articles and words on this blog do not necessarily represent the position of their author. strong sentences, especially such that describe people or companies or events are here to express an abstract point, and not to pass or enable or encourage judgement. please refrain from taking them as facts, but rather as building blocks of a story. author accepts feedback and complaints under comments and on email.”
i work with a lot of startups and startup organizations in slovenia and abroad. not long ago, a group of entrepreneurs even visited the president, who wants to help.
we were a diverse group, and first surprise was, that each of us had completelly different set of operational challenges that made it hard for him to develop their startup in slovenia and thus create more jobs.
this is an example list of ‘small’ issues that we identified, and while it looks huge and diverse set of problems, everything boils down to two fundamental facts:
these two facts combined result in unprecedented void between the leading and the coming, which has no rational reason to cure. it’s unprecedented, because only now the borders are gone and people and businesses are more free to move around then every. young people have no rational reason to stick around in an environment that calls them “the lost generation”, their energy is more efficiently spent elsewhere.
new york is a fabulous example of government that extended their hand and proactively works with new generations to form policies to make new york better for them. and when i say proactively, i mean all the f**ing time. one month after i moved to new york five years ago, i received a call from the NYCEDC, asking when could their head visit me for a chat on my experience with establishing the business there and how they can help. i told him many things, including that for a european the streets feel dirty. the director of a public agency was performing a on-the-site customer interview, not because i am so important, but because that’s what he does – he knows the people who will shape the future of the city better than anyone else.
in slovenia however, we have 200k public servants who can’t be bothered to think about such everyday details. and we have 20k people who left because they weren’t heard when it was time.
]]>“the articles and words on this blog do not necessarily represent the position of their author. strong sentences, especially such that describe people or companies or events are here to express an abstract point, and not to pass or enable or encourage judgement. please refrain from taking them as facts, but rather as building blocks of a story. author accepts feedback and complaints under comments and on email.”
coming home from the web summit early this year, watching the closing remarks and announcing the winners ceremony on the tv’s around the dublin airport. paddy looks great, relaxed as ever, as he announces the cto of coca-cola, who announces their programme of support for entrepreneurs.
the web summit and the founders conference are amazing achievements by paddy & the team. they started 4 years ago, bringing 500 tech entrepreneurs into dublin for a get-together. this year, they brought 20.000. in the years in between, they had the most amazing lineup of speakers and participants, like elon musk, bono and mark.
so far, nothing new, everyone knows this is happening. even some slovenian vc’s were noticed in the crowd this year. what struck me when i saw paddy on TV with the guy from coke was, that paddy has probably the most impressive rolodex on the planet. his personallity and his vision and lots of hard work have given him access not just to PA’s of most influential and smartest leaders in the world, but even more importantly, for these events to work, he had to invest time to really understand each of their motivations and goals and visions and activities.
i expect paddy to have better understanding of where the global business is going than the nsa.
let’s meditate about this for a second, and repeat the logic – in just four years, he got best of the best to speak on his stage and support his cause. he didn’t bribe them. he trully got them on his side, with charm and with facts. he knows these people and organizations they represent personally. that’s power.
and what does he do with this power?
he organizes a party.
let’s meditate on that – yes, a f**ing party. a 4-days long pub crawl on the streets of dublin. an excuse for 20k of most productive people on the planet to get away from their routines of changing the world and … get drunk!
a lot of good comes out of these parties of course:
obviously, this is a good thing. great thing even. getting 20k people on a remote island means you are doing something right for the planet. but i can’t help but ask myself, is there anything better that could be done with all that power?
every society needs connectors, people who facilitate connections between individual players, because of their unique abilities to make personal connections with various and diverse actors, accumulating social capital, and converting it into trust between the introduced parties.
one of the ways you can do this, is by throwing a party, and hope that the right people will connect by pure luck. completelly different approach is performing surgical strikes with direct introductions. in between these two is the third way – playing a good host – organizing the party, and intruducing the ones that showed up between eachother.
after this year, i feel that we only had the party, and absolutely nothing else good from paddy. i wish he would spend his time connecting the best startups with the right brand executives. the planet would be better off.
i noticed that i often get ideas to write on this blog, but after thinking about them i realize that they might be misrepresented and thus decide not to write them. i’d hate it if this blog was the reason for any particular person or company to be misunderstood and damaged, but at the same time, i feel that each not published thought is lost opportunity for me and for the readers. so i’ve decided to write up a general disclaimer, that will be part of every provocative blog posts i publish in the future. i hope it will manage to frame my context well enough, to prevent readers from jumping to conclusions and judgements. here is the wording i’m thinking about, and i would very much welcome any improvements or feedback.
the articles and words on this blog do not necessarily represent the position of their author. strong sentences, especially such that describe people or companies or events are here to express an abstract point, and not to pass or enable or encourage judgement. please refrain from taking them as facts, but rather as building blocks of a story. author accepts feedback and complaints under comments and on email.
i hope this will relieve me from worrying too much, and to start writing more aggressive and controversial pieces, that will stir the conversations more. not because i would want to convince anyone of my points, but because i feel that not enough people are contributing to public debates, which gives unfair advantage to media and politicians and trolls. so bear with me, specially when you disagree.
]]>wednesday was a particularly heart-warming day for me – healthday.si happened, an event in ljubljana that got 180 local participants together to talk about what they are doing to change health industry for the better. startups, enterprises, doctors, beaurocrats. the organizers even published a ‘health book’ – showcase of the the community that was officially born there.
but really it all started in july already. gaja and I had some friends from NY visiting ljubljana. by coincidence two of the four worked in health-tech in the big apple, and we decided to drum up a themed tech meet up.
the email blast went out in the morning, 40 people and 12 startups showed up in the evening. after few hours everyone was excited to have met a number of likeminds they didn’t know existed in our town.
this turn up was an indicator that there is a community waiting to happen, all it needed was a catalyst. the organizers and key sponsor of the later healthday.si were there as well, saw it and started planning next steps.
i hope the community will continue, through such events, meetups, or simply direct contacts, but most importantly, by helping eachother at marketing the next revolution.
building a company is incredibly hard. so hard, that it often drives some of the smartest and most capable people i know mad, because in the spur of the moment they dont understand what is wrong with them that they are still ‘unsucessful’. truth is, they are pretty sucessful comparatevily, and they are doing all the right things, but building a company is just hard.
it takes 5-9 years to build a company said eric 7 years ago. i was shocked, because i lived in a techcrunch bubble, just like 80% of young ambitious entrepreneurs i meet. i guess this bubble actually enables creation of at least half of the startups, because it fills them with optimism.
2 years later, after blind optimism wears out, all you are (hopefully) left with is groundworks for the actual future company and the burning ambition to prove everyone that you weren’t wrong. in reality, if you survived 2 years, that probably means you have a team or some market validation or some traction, or some angels, or some advisors, or any combination of them, and you are actually light years ahead of where you’ve been. but it still feels dissapointing.
dissapointments is a function of expectation often said my brother and our first ceo ales. and he was right, entrepreneur must at some point in time suspend her expectations and face the reality – your company will be something else than what you imagined on that cocktail night, but it’s going to be real, and shaped by thousands of interations of other people with it, where you are merely a sheppard. observe, react, nudge, endure.
if the only thing that’s missing is ‘success’, you’re probably on the right track. forget your ego and enjoy and learn.
Slovenia has incredibly healthy startup community, with probably largest amount of global startups per capita. Most of the public is still unaware of how different (and healthy) work environments these young and fast-growing companies are.
After super successful first startup crawl amongst Ljubljana startups (last October), when literally hundreds of people came to visit some of us, the InternetWeek.si team is rallying us together again, in an even more awesome all-day startup festival.
As of today we have 24 super interesting startups opening doors for visitors, ranging from global super stars like Outfit7 and Celtra, to most ambitious newcomers like Sqwiz, Dietpoint and Oculus.
Let me rephrase this – this Friday you have an unique opportunity to see how Outfit7 and Celtra look like from within and talk to them in person!
A totally unique chance if you are looking for a better job (in various roles, not just engineering), if you are a journalist, consultant, or just a worried parent of a high-schooler that likes internet a lot.
This year we are also not only limited to Ljubljana anymore – we have startups from Ptuj, and Kranj participating as well.
So, here’s a recipe for you for this week:
If you are a startup as well, and are wondering why you are not on the list, all you have to do is send an email to the internetweek team!
these days i’m under a strange combination of feeling victorious and nostalgic over challenges that used to make me seriously irritated and frustrated. tasks that i used to do much more frequently and really hated the convoluted way in which they were implemented.
several relatives asked me to help with different problems each:
so much for the ancient technologies that still don’t work as expected. but there were some bleeding edged ones as well:
all in all, it was a good week for science everything magically works, and it seems there is some progress in the art of UX – these days most problems are actually solved by rebooting everything and letting the defaults kick in. ten years ago you had only 50% chance that would solve it.
The author is Terrence Kawaja, an investment banker in NY, who knows everyone and in spare time creates more or less funny spoofs of popular culture.
This is his latest video, which is essentially a rewording of the famous ‘sunscreen’ song. I find it incredibly accurate, chaotic and sincere description of everyday life of a startup entrepreneur.
aspiring entrepreneurs, angel investors, employees, their families, everyone should understand the ups and downs that we go trough, and this video de-mystifies it appropriately.
Lou is the first rock’n’roll legend I cared about to die in my lifetime. I feel lucky I have at least heard him live once, in Ljubljana. Sadly the friend that was with me then is not here anymore either. So that concert only exists in my head now.
Sometimes I wish he was my idol, because that would mean I was a musician, hopefully one of the 30.000 that bought the Velvet Underground‘s first album and went on to create their own bands.
Also, I would have to have been growing up in New York, to really appreciate his ways of navigating that particular urban jungle. I had a glimpse of that decisive city in the recent years, but the previous five decades live in his songs.
Cynically speaking, and I’m sure Lou would get a great laugh out of it as well, the great thing about being a rock’n’roll legend this century is that you don’t have to worry about your close ones. Immediately after you die, the new sales of your works make up for a great inheritance. iTunes and digital distribution made that really easy, even for the indie bands. If the Velvets were just starting now instead 50 years ago, and Lou died, it wouldn’t make much of a difference for him.
I hate cynicism. But I love Lou Reed.
You should all take time between October 23rd-30th, and go visit at least a handful of the events, and get to know the community better. At Zemanta we will be hosting startup crawl next friday, when everyone is welcome to stop by for drinks and chats about the future of the web publishing.
I was fortunate to see how Internet Week NY developed, from it’s modest first year 2008, to an overwhelming festival of entrepreneurship it is now. I hope Ljubljana will follow a similar path, as it is the only way to the future.
Oh, and if you want to promote your event as well, give me a shout. happy to add it to the list.
Join us. Move on.
After searching around for a solution, I stumbled across SaneBox. It does what it implies: bring sanity to your inbox. It uses an algorithm to understand my past behavior and move less important emails out of my inbox and into a folder named SaneLater. If something’s in the wrong place, I just drag and drop it. That being said, it’s right almost 100% of the time.
It does way more than just filter though. As an entrepreneur, my favorite feature is SaneReminders. It lets me know when a contact hasn’t emailed me back, so I can be sure to follow up at the right time. It also has one click unsubscribe and snooze folders, which are an added bonus. Best, it works anywhere I check my email – phone, laptop, tablet, etc.
If you want to join me in the Inbox Zero revolution, you should definitely check out SaneBox.
]]>after two months, i’m finally starting to see the other side of the new windows.
as a bonus let me just add that everything else that used to be good at windows is still good, and more stable. my next step is to get a windows phone and see how they work together.
Economic crisis is still the dominant topic in Slovenia, with worrying news and indicators popping up daily. At the same time, Zemanta has never been better, and is actually growing fast. Of course, because we are active on global market, rather than dependent on local economy. Except in one aspect – hiring.
We are looking for several new exceptional colleagues in our Ljubljana office. brilliant, smart, ambitious software developers. It’s not surprising that a lot of people are applying for the position, and I’m very happy to see that many of them actually fit the profile we are looking for.
I’m starting to call it ‘startup engineer‘, to differentiate it from other software development jobs, like traditional IT, systems integrations or website development. many students coming from the universities here are not aware of the difference, and I think we, the startups, have to be very loud about how differently we work. here is a short list of the type of differences, would love to compile a longer one with your help:
there are several practical challenges that we are facing when trying to communicate why working in a startup should be attractive option:
I wish we could make this, ‘startup engineer’ a formal post-graduate university program. there are practical skills they could learn, to accelerate their growth, but these will change from year to year. more importantly, by having it as an option within formal educational system, we would be raising the awareness and actually giving some of the students a fair chance to realize their potential. creating it in collaboration with the actual companies would make sure the students end up with a bit more practically useful knowledge built on top of computer science fundamentals, and give them direct access to a pool of employers, that have been doubling every year.
Statistical office of Republic of Slovenia has announced that we had a terrible brain drain in 2012. Surprise surprise, who would have known.
We have been seeing signs of it for the past 18 months. First by people temporarily living abroad, deciding they are not coming back. Later people living in Slovenia, who started seriously thinking about leaving. And finally, when we started hiring a lot of engineers, and a lot of people ‘just started’ working abroad.
Of course, a year from now, Statistical office will report that the brain drain was even higher in 2013, all the media will write about it then, and the country will have lost another 12 months when it could have done something.
I have several issues with this situation, which worries and saddens me a lot. But I want to write about just one today – opportunism vs rational thinking.
Yes, the crisis is annoying, yes the economy is still winding down, yes you lost ton of job last year or the clients you’ve been calling on for the past decade have stopped ordering or paying. All very true and solid reasons for looking to change something, in order to defend the quality of life you got used to. And I understand completely that working abroad is a rational option in this decision-making process. I’ve done that, and the decision isn’t easy.
After all, constructing a nice way of life took you a couple of decades, right?
But moving or working abroad shouldn’t be your default answer. It doesn’t have to be. I humbly call on you to try hard to find options to work for globally focused companies in Slovenia. By relocating yourself and your family you are risking as much as you are hoping to gain, but only the ‘gain’ is visible in the offer you have on your desk.
This is one of rare situations in which I’m arguing that it’s smart to be a bit more conservative. But fact is, that if you are deciding between bad past in Slovenia and shiny one offer from somewhere else, you are comparing human fish to dolphins. Try harder to add the lynx and the salmon to the table, and then evaluate you options.
In other words, companies like Zemanta, Celtra, 3FS and similar, are amazing, global, product companies. We are unlike anything you have worked for before in Slovenia. We are all looking to hire a lot of talent. We are all paying well above average and we are all growing. Consider applying for jobs with Slovenian startups, before you decide to change everything in your life.
And dear readers, please tell your friends that as well. I know 20% of them are thinking about moving right now.
I bet you’re instinctive answer was yes. how cynical of you. it seems everyone’s favorite sport last two years in Slovenia has been complaining about life and politics, without having any broad perspective on the state of the world.
Slovenians seem to live in a mental bubble, where they compare their own poor fates and lives with the imaginary paradise.
Foreign Policy actually does a proper analysis of all countries in the world every year, and ranks them from most failing to least. they even create a color-coded interactive map of failing states for all the cynics and others, who like to complain a lot.
Short answer to the question from the headline is no, Slovenia is 16th least failing in the world, based on indicators like quality of living and such. read the methodology if you care.
I love datasets like this one, if you assemble them with care and if you actually make them complete, they have the power to perform reality-check.
Apple‘s new HQ build site opened this month, after some delays and quite some rise in costs. A lot has been written about it since Jobs gloriously unveiled the plans in Cuppertino last year, and all articles seem to gravitate towards one of the two conclusions:
Everyone agrees with the first point, but the cynical second point sounds like a stick in the mud. Sure Jobs wanted to build a monument for himself, but how can people possibly assume he was at the heights of his intellect, reinventing the whole home computing industry, and at the same his judgment clouded by a simple human sin of vanity. I don’t believe that Jobs would approve such an expensive project without a very deep and in Jobsian manner convoluted brilliant plan.
I was reading a very in-depth article covering more details of the story in Bloomberg Businessweek that exposed much more details than any before – about the builders, the challenges, the approaches. They even performed interviews with employees to shine some more light on how this spaceship is really going to be built and how it’s going to look like from inside. These interviews give a new clue about the possible real reason for the project that’s more expensive than WTC.
Supposedly all the insides will be assembled with a pre-fab modules for “bathrooms, utility closets, and banks of offices complete with carpets and window treatments”. nothing special, except that Jobs wanted high precision and attention to detail everywhere, so these pre-fab modules will be supplied by a purpose-built factories. At the same time, the building will have one of the largest private arrays of solar panels and a number of other technical advancements in construction and furnishing.
What if Apple’s new headquarters is not just a beautiful monument to the creator, efficient way to house 13000 employees and homage to HP labs and California, but also a pilot project for the next grand stage in Apple’s business expansion? After successful move-in, they will be left with a lot of public attention, a tested supply chain, solved first set of technical challenges to leapfrog one of the largest industries on the planet.
So to all you cynics out there, what do you think Jobs would do? Waste $5B and risk the success of his life work to build a building, or leverage it to expand business?
I am proud to be part of a group of enthusiasts, who have 10 years ago started systematically collecting and exhibiting computer history in Slovenia. the pinnacle of this first decade was the recent exhibition Goto1982, prepared in collaboration with MNZS, that covered the cambrian explosion of home computers extensively.
Today, we are hosting a closing event for this exhibition, which is moving on to be hosted by Technical Museum of Slovenia for the next 12 months. We are extremely proud to be recognized and trusted by both institutions, and by thousands of visitors who left very optimistic comments, like “omg, this was my first one!“, and “this is confusing, i feel young and old at the same time“. thank you all!
We are more sure than ever, that technology is not just part of everyone’s lives today, but essential ingredient in everyone’s personal story. Each and every one I talk to these days doesn’t feel intimidated or bored by the idea of this Museum, quite the contrary – with glitter in the eyes, everyone starts listing objects from their past that they have been safely storing until now.
We are opening a new chapter today – we will be announcing the founding of Computer Museum Society, and inviting new members and supporters to join. Our plan is to build a different museum – one that will not only educate about the past, but also think ahead, educating the youth and bringing together professional communities.
To do this next step, we first need your help. We need you to raise your hand in support and basically say: “yes, computers and other contemporary technologies have made me what I am today, I don’t want this to pass by unexplored.”
You can support our efforts by:
Thanks!
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Slovenia is a small country. it’s a fact, but unfortunately this realization is too often used as an excuse to not do something right. In my opinion, this means two other things:
I don’t see enough efforts on either part, and I’m pretty sure very few people in slovenia are actually aware of the actual distribution of human potential of the country, which results in lots of ungrounded frustrations and much ranting about “too big government sector” or “too little economic growth“, without data to back it up.
So i wanted to get better sense of what our high level structure is. here is first draft of a breakdown of slovenian population:
… every slovenian resident can find herself in exactly one of the squares. now we can observe some interesting facts, some that we have known before, and some that might be a surprise:
complete data table is:
sector | group | headcount | percent |
---|---|---|---|
slovenija | 2,050,000 | 100.00% | |
pre-active | slovenija | 430,000 | 20.98% |
active | slovenija | 940,000 | 45.85% |
inactive | slovenija | 680,000 | 33.17% |
kids under 15 | pre-active | 250,000 | 12.20% |
young students | pre-active | 90,000 | 4.39% |
student | pre-active | 90,000 | 4.39% |
government | active | 40,000 | 1.95% |
public sector | active | 110,000 | 5.37% |
pseudo-private | active | 330,000 | 16.10% |
real private | active | 340,000 | 16.59% |
unemployed | active | 120,000 | 5.85% |
other | inactive | 110,000 | 5.37% |
retired | inactive | 570,000 | 27.80% |
i’m imagining next steps for this visualization will be:
thoughts? what else do you see in the chart?
every western media seems to be talking about slovenia these days…
Slovenia cuts growth forecast as bail-out fears grow
Fears that Slovenia will become the next eurozone nation to need a bail-out have been fuelled by a sharp cut to the country’s growth forecasts by the government’s economic institute. Slovenia has become the first victim of contagion from Cyprus as its borrowing costs rocketed last week in the wake of a punishing bail-out deal.
via: www.telegraph.co.uk
as an ‘insider’ I feel obliged to comment:
Books are coming this year, discussing it from various angles – comparatively with .com boom, the rise of entrepreneurship Europe, new entrepreneurship as a lifestyle, … It is no surprise to me, that the first book to actually publish is the one specifically celebrating NY tech community and agility and resilience.
Tech and the City became available on Kindle two days ago, and hardcopies are coming in April. I received the notification from the authors this morning, and already I’m half way trough it. It’s that good.
It starts with an amazingly inspiring foreword by Fred Wilson, which alone is worth the $2.99, as it perfectly outlines the mental model of the greatest city on the planet. After that, the book only gets better, weaving the story trough fragments of conversations with participants in the ecosystem, rather than lazily throwing together yet another series of interviews. This enables the book to read like a travel diary, rather than a self-hype-help business manual.
For the finish, the authors have collected a very comprehensive list of the NY tech ecosystem institutions – vc’s, events, co-working spaces and competitions. They have also published them on the official blog of the book.
It’s cheap and it’s short, and it’s awesome. Go read it and learn how you should be thinking about helping entrepreneurs in your cities / countries.
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Beware SXSW Networking Syndrome | TechCrunch
“Wow! I’m wanted!” I thought to myself upon receipt. But after basking in narcissistic glory for a few seconds, my pride gave way to bemusement. For one, I’ve never met the sender. We’ve exchanged a couple of LinkedIn messages, but I don’t think that qualifies me as a close friend. And on balance the @Garyvee namedrop as a hook to entice the invitee felt more sad than enticing. But most striking, to me, was that this sender is not a PR person or event planner who trades in building social connections, but rather an entrepreneur whose startup I respect.
via: techcrunch.com
I have a problem. I totally grew tired of networking events recently. I just want to be in the office and talk to my team and occasionally help them close a challenging deal. but then i sometimes feel guilty for not spending every evening ‘networking’ and mingling on VIP events and such. how can that be?
whole industry flocking to SXSW for spring break is the greatest symptom of this mentality. forced fun i call it.
So i asked myself, why do entrepreneurs really go to these events? there must be a finite list of possible motivations, and i’d bet each of you, if being really honest with yourself can pick one that is the main driver. I could identify 5 phases in my own history:
so these days, I don’t go to events if I can help it and I don’t go to SXSW, even though I know it would feel special, I would meet awesome people there and that I would do business. I still prefer working with my team on day-to-day challenges above all that.
]]>I have been a blogger since 2004, ever since i installed my first WordPress, version 1.0 if i recall correctly. it was the hottest thing online back then, and one could argue, it still is. Also, the first product we ever released at zemanta was a WordPress plugin. of course we uploaded it to the directory, and rejoiced when we saw bloggers discover it, starting to use it, leave reviews and ratings.
one of the best features wordpress had, and still has, is it’s extensibility trough plugins. there is a plugin for just about anything you could think of, more possibly, there are several. for every wordpress-based site owner, testing various plugins is a regular, and fun activity. wordpress.org directory is like an app store for website owners, built in a true open-source fashion as an ever-growing and ever-improving repository of blogging goodness, where developers across the globe are building on top of previous efforts of likeminds.
with thousands of plugins available, it’s not always easy to find the best one for your needs. it’s easier if you know just how popular it really is, so we have built an algorithm that estimates the actual number of active users of each plugin. plugins also become more or less popular over time, so we started tracking their popularity rank and show you how it’s changing. both of these informations are available now for all the plugins for the first time.
all these great plugins are built by people, and most developers publish more than one. we are happy to expose most successful developers based on the aggregate number of users of all their plugins. of course automattic’s own developers have a clear lead, but of the independent developers, Yoast is a clear winner. I’ve shown him an early version of this project and he was kind enough to say a few words for this announcement:
“For users to find new plugins, or better alternatives to plugins they’re already using, is really rather hard. RankWP seems to be a very good step in the right direction of allowing people to see what other people use, which plugins get installed and uninstalled more often and which developers tend to have good plugins. I hope they keep developing this as the community could really use this.” – Joost de Valk
you’re all cordially invited to take a look, send me feedback, suggestions, corrections. if anyone feels like helping, either coding or editing the content, you will be very welcome.
reading a great summary of 17 equations that changed the world. great stuff, go check it out.
I love how each of these formulas captures en entirety of a part of our world into a simple 2-d graphic
however, there is one formula missing here, a rather important one. it’s an equation, that sums it all, well, almost everything. everything that we could have summed up so far in the history of science. the grand, unified theory of everything.
GUT is a theory that connects three of the four forces that shape our world. Only gravity is missing in this connection, before we can claim we really can model the world. and my mind was blown when i first realized that we can write it up into a single page-long formula. here it is, in all it’s glory.
they observe correctly, that plugins are becoming real businesses, however they feel that it’s not as serious as the themes business, nor that it ever will be.
while this is probably true if you consider only ‘custom plugin development’ and ‘premium plugin’ models, however there is another significant business model that emerged in the last years, that they are ignoring here.
for us at Zemanta, wordpress plugin has always been a core driver of adoption, and we’ve built a real business around it. but our business is actually software-as-a-service offering built on top of the plugin, rather than the plugin itself. the plugin is essentially a delivery mechanism, that is very efficient because most publishers are using a modular CMS, predominantly WordPress.org. but the real business value lies behind the scenes, in the cloud, where we can afford to process large amount of data.
I see business like ours grow tremendously over the past few years, and I see a lot of WordPress.org plugins being leveraged in this way – to deliver real value for the publishers, and enable diverse business models from utility, advertising and agency work, scale.
WordPress.org has built an impressive ecosystem, it’s tight integration of the CMS with the plugins directory enables SAAS models with almost frictionless infrastructure to customers (auto-updates, integrated discovery, security guidelines), but at the same time it’s sometimes limiting. it’d be great if WordPress.org was more aware of the needs of all constituents.
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last year, i’ve spend a couple of days reading our national budget. the purpose of the exercise was to find ways to create something not unlike the famous ‘death and taxes’ infographic. i was pleasantly surprised with the fact, that our budget is actually very well designed, with fascinating inherent structure of programs and spenders, but unpleasantly not-surprised, that it was published as PDF.
to create an infographic with such complex data, that should be rebuilt every year, one needs programmatic ways to process it. so i ended up parsing the pdf, with many silly problems on the way. but it worked, and i’ve published the broken-down version for the years 2010-2012.
that was in spring, and ever since i’ve been waiting for the new government to finally publish the budget that was supposed to govern us this year, so i could compare it with the old ones. i really resent the fact that the budget was kept unpublished all throughout the legislative process. i really feel it’s an insult to the citizens.
but, they finally published it last week, and to my great surprise, they’ve really made an effort – they published detailed explanations of each section, and, ta-da-da-da, we have machine-parsable CSV files as well!
i realize it’s not perfect, but it’s light years ahead of what we used to have to deal with. so, who’s up for some info-charting now?
So, you’re starting a startup with a couple of your good friends? there are only two ways you could have ended up in this situation:
I sure hope you’re of the first kind, or that you are at least smart enough, to recognize yourself in the second description and give up while you still can.
If you’re still reading, I guess you really want to know what it takes to run a startup. For explaining startup management issues, I really like the Platonic metaphor of a Sailboat. I might explain this some other time in more detail, because for today, we just need to be aware of the Guiding Star – when you are in the middle of the sea, without GPS, and with a couple dozen crew member who’s fates depend on your judgement, it clearly is important that you know which direction to sail to reach the destination.
It is no different in a Startup. you start a startup, because there is something tangible in your mind, that you need to make tangible for everyone else – a vision / an idea, that you see clearly, and can imagine how to do it. that’s your Guiding Star. thinking of that idea gives you strength to move forward, and to think creatively about shortcuts. discussing that idea makes other people join you on the journey, because of your ability to paint it so clearly for them, that they can see their role in getting to the end.
so here’s the heart of the advice for any first-time founder of a startup: never ever loose your Guiding Star. if you stop being obsessed with it, just stop.
Robin Klein taught me a version of this statement: “the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” the flip side of this statement is, that it is better to kill the startup, than to keep working on it without the inspiration of the Guiding Star. Here’s why: as Fred says, a startup CEO has only three jobs to perform:
I would argue that if you have your Guiding Star – if you can really feel your vision, if thinking of it is making you do things rather than sit still – only then will you be able to communicate the vision. and if you can do that, you will assemble the team, and convince the investors needed to succeed.
inevitably you will choose the wrong direction sometimes. and you will be running short on cash. you will have to do hard practical decisions. but if you have the Guiding Star in front of you, the decisions will make sense, so they will be infinitely easier to make. even if you run out of cash completely, and you are forced to kill your company, if you do that while knowing what you believe in, it’s not a failure, it’s just a learning experience.
and lastly, one thing that has nothing to do with you or your idea. Odyssey needed 10 years to return home, and that’s exactly what you are signing up for – assume your startup will consume you as a whole for 10 years. keep that in mind while you are deciding to start it, and while you are doing your everyday decisions. only if the idea is such, that it would still make sense for you in 10 years time, than you can consider it.
good luck.
Demonstrations in Ljubljana: Carnations, Neo-Nazis and a Water Cannon
Bob at Piran Café blog in Slovenia shares this photograph in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool. On his blog, he explains: This [photograph of a policeman behind a riot shield] was taken at about 6 pm last night, shortly after protesters were giving carnations to police officers stationed in front of Parliament.
via: boingboing.net
these demonstrations have nothing to do with neo-nazi’s, political disagreements or economic recession. they are just about people finally understanding that disillusionment is nothing without action. so far we assumed that politicians are paid to do a job of managing the country, just like profesional managers.
one thing that foreigners can’t understand from reports about neo-nazi groups in the otherwise quite city is that slovenians are normally very serious about in-activity. they should have protested any number of times in the last decade, or at least vote for different people the last 5 times they had a chance.
but they didn’t. they know the democracy doesn’t work, so they don’t bother with elections. neither they would bother with coming forth with plans to improve parts of it. instead they would complain a lot, and look at the most promising new european country flounder. slovenians have proven to be very good at feeling helpless.
we didn’t have corrupt elections yet, people actually voted for corrupt majors. some voted for them because they don’t know better. the others didn’t bother going to elections, or engaging in actions / conversations that would raise the profile of counter-candidates. it’s a pattern we have seen over and over again in our history of elections – rule of thumb is 30% voters turn-up is guaranteed, and 60% of them will vote for the commonly recognized worst option. dare to count how many times this was deemed ‘majority’ ? dare to guess how representative this sample is?
so getting 10k people on the streets is a great success, and hopefully a sign of changes to come. this post is more intended for fellow readers in slovenia, who are very good at amplifying opinions, but i’d like to provoke you to actually fucking do something. vote, vote more carefully, talk about issues when there is time to do something about them.
i wouldn’t even ask the next complaining slovenian: “and what did you do to make things better?” – they wouldn’t get it. the right questions is: “and what have you not done to contribute to this mess?”
]]>“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” Harry S Truman, 33rd president of US (1884 – 1972) source
I heard this quote a while ago, and was shocked by how accurate it is, and how overlooked it is most of the time.
One reason is probably, that everybody likes to be patted on the back. But if one needs it all the time and publicly, it creates some friction in the system, that slows everyone down. That friction comes in the form of envy, being secretive, not helping ‘just because’. In short run it gives some emotional satisfaction, but in the long run, the one’s vicinity is slowed down compared to other communities.
On the other hand, there is a trap for those who don’t pay attention. This quote reminds me somewhat of another one:
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?“
Which I think sums up the fear of the person affected quite well – if I don’t take credit, I’ll never have anything. A naive response to this is the one that we described earlier. Smarter response is being humble, but keeping a close watch on actions of others, and preempting situations in which the reality might become permanently distorted.
Clarity and transparency is what everyone should be fighting for, not individual’s achievements.
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i whole-heartedly agree that this particular gender inequality should be fixed in the future, but are all women really so fond of wearing knee-long dresses that they can be the only representative of the ‘business dress’ ?
Happy Labor Day: Celebrating Women Entrepreneurs!
This weekend, we celebrate women entrepreneurs for all their hard work! By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0) In the past 15 years, women-owned businesses grew by 54% – there are more women entrepreneurs than ever. The 8.3 million women-owned businesses in the United States account for nearly 30% of U.S. businesses!
via: www.women2.com
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Startups Have Gotten Very Boring
In the wake of the Facebook IPO, something funny has happened to the world of startups. Suddenly, startups feel very boring. VCs and entrepreneurs say they feel it too. “I do feel a bit like that, but then again that could also just be the startups I’m happening to see,” one investor said.
I find that to be bollocks. There are still things on the world that can be improved or fixed trough web-based technologies, and that will never change. Sure, bio-tech and similar are emerging and creating new exciting spaces, that will bring improvements to our lives, and might generate bigger returns for investors in the next decade, but if returns are all that makes something exciting for someone, well, why don’t you go live on an island somewhere.
Every blogger writing about technology and/or startups knows how important Hacker News is for promoting good, quality articles. The effect of being published there is comparable to more general sharing sites like Reddit and Digg and StumbleUpon.
Unfortunately, unlike it’s bigger cousins, this service is not supported by WordPress.com as an option for sharing buttons, after the post. Luckily we have an option to add custom sharing button, that makes it really easy to create a custom button yourself. Here’s how.
and you’re done, now you have a shiny new HackerNews sharing button under every blog post. relax.
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I’ve had an amazing blogging week last week.
I published a post about startup not being a job, that I’ve written in a very short moment when I was overwhelmed with disappointment over founders of a certain just-born startup that were not available for what could have been a life-changing meeting for them. we’ll never know now, but it made me realize just how different startup world I live in is from other forms of employment.
I didn’t think about it much more after I’ve written and scheduled it, so it was quite a surprise for me when I realized that another entrepreneur fried published it on Hacker News, and that it was receiving a lot of attention on it, as well as on Twitter.
The responses were amazingly different. While Twitter crowd liked the post very much, HN readership fell into a flame war against me, based on consistent misinterpretations that had one common topic – overworking yourself is hard, and you don’t need to do that in order to be a startup. I wholeheartedly agree with them, but that was not my point.
But a day later, I got this news in my inbox, and it shone an interesting light on the confusion: 50% of readers on HN are under 24-years old. the only other popular site that has younger audience is DeviantArt:
Social media demographics 2012: 24 sites including Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn
If you ever wanted to know the age and sex of social media users on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit, Hacker News, Slashdot, Github, Stack Overflow, Orkut, Quora, WordPress.com, Blogger, Flickr, Myspace, Tagged, Hi5, LiveJournal, Yelp, deviantART, StumbleUpon, Goodreads and Last.fm … you’re in luck.
via: venturebeat.com
Now, this is significant new information, that has an important consequence: HN readership obviously has a different value system than most of the rest of the ecosystem. we should be more aware of it, because it will shape our world in the next 5 years.
or as a friend commented on facebook: “it seems HN is used only by lifestyle businesses”
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it seems the debate about the death of blogging just won’t die out, but this post by Tim Bray is a great. I completely agree with everything:
I don’t know of any way to be influential without deploying some combination of rhetoric and polemic and storyline. And I don’t think you can do that without writing a few hundred words, organized into paragraphs, with a permalink.
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So, everyone is talking about a balloon accident lately, but my Blogspire sent me a version of the report that blew my mind – hungarian project that maps all emergency events on the planet, from major traffic accidents to fly-by-objects.
Here is an example:
Vehicle Accident – Europe – Slovenia
EDIS Number: VI-20120823-36303-SVN Date / time: 23/08/2012 14:30:44 [UTC] Event: Vehicle Accident Area: Europe Country: Slovenia State/County: Capital City Location: [About 6 miles south of Ljubljana] Number of Deads: 4 person(s) Number of Injured: 28 person(s) Number of Infected: N/A Number of Missing: N/A Number of Affected:…
via: hisz.rsoe.hu
and they have another project, mapping all grobal warming events.
Both of them are a great addition to a growing list of real-time global dashboards of differenti aspects of the Planet. I’ve been collecting them for a while now, and it seems it’s time to create a dedicated page for them.
Please feel free to submit any dashboard you know of that I’ve missed in the comments.
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Amazing how we never see opinions like these coming from within Silicon Valley itself.
Does Silicon Valley Have a Public Relations Problem?
Silicon Valley is facing an image problem. Facebook didn’t even leave the Valley to ring the opening bell on its tragic IPO, and that was after spending $1 Billion on Instagram. Meanwhile Zuck’s sister is shooting a “reality” show in San Francisco and calling it… well, reality. Let’s not forget the Angry Birds movie, either.
…
…the media in Silicon Valley needs to stop regurgitating the same stories to the top of Techmeme every day. Secondly, focus on BIG problems – stop saturating the media with acquisitions like Instagram which do nothing to actually change a significant problem in the world. Finally, look to the established giants who are solving the world’s most important problems – from healthcare, to politics, to green energy and education.
via: blog.loispaul.com
I agree almost completely, the valley as a business hub is becoming more about efficiently moving pieces of paper, than solving next greatest problem of the world. They are starting to resemble entertainment industry of south California.
One thing that we should see as their achievement and contribution to the world though, are numerous frameworks and recipes for reducing friction in entrepreneurship. Everyone around the world knows about the lean startup now, and it is helping to unleash new talents in other places.
Not sure why I’m remembering Monty Python right now.
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13 counterintuitive business truths
7 modern workplace myths Here are 13 counterintuitive business truths I’ve come to know, even if I can’t exactly explain why they make sense. The first truth actually relates to that very subject: the how and why of things. To understand how things work, just observe; don’t ask why. This is more or less the Tao Te Ching in a nutshell.
via: www.cbsnews.com
I’m sure most of you think you agree with this statement, but I bet you are making tons of inefficient decisions because you are trained to expect certain things from your ‘work environment’ aka Job.
But the startup really isn’t a job. To build a startup you don’t need an office, until you actually know why you do – for instance after you have several non-founding team members.
And you most probably don’t need those employees, until you actually know to the hour what they need to do so the founders can build the startup.
And you don’t need vacation, because you don’t have a job. You might need time to think about the pivot, but that’s not vacation. You might need to rest your brain, but don’t expect you will actually unplug. Your entrepreneurial brain can’t unplug. You don’t need time off. If you think you do, you’re in a Job and should stop thinking it’s a startup, because it will fail.
Startup is not a job, it’s just you wanting to achieve a change in the world / other people’s behavior, not taking no for an answer, because you don’t know how to stop, and constantly thinking about a shortcut to the next obstacle on the way. Startup is just a group of people and technologies arranged around the founders that represent the currently shortest way to change the behavior of others. It is the founders passion, and in that it’s similar to works of art – you can’t help yourself but make it work.
Everything else is secondary. Specially (fancy) office space, (expensive) employees and (long) holidays.
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The Entire Advertising Industry Is Shifting To This Strategy
Native monetization is a fast growing form of digital advertising that is changing the complexion of the advertising industry in New York. Native advertising refers to ad strategies ad strategies that allow brands to promote their content into the endemic experience of a site in a non-interruptive, integrated way.
I really admire product, technology and design people, who dare to incorporate the findings of psychological science into their work. I deeply believe our whole generation is ignorantly reinventing the wheels all the time.
This is a great article about the layers of great design, where giving the products personality is the final stage.
The Personality Layer
Do something unexpected and new. Uniqueness Differ from other products in an interesting way . Attention Offer incentives, or offer help even if you’re not obliged to. Attraction We all like attractive people, so build an attractive product. Anticipation Leak something ahead of the launch. Exclusivity Offer something exclusive to a select group.
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Roughly three quarters of the webpages of Slovenian startups don’t say who the founders are. Not on the front page, not on the about page, nowhere. Most of the list the tax ID numbers and official address of the company, but not the names of the people running it.
This is a catastrophe! Are you trying to hide your head in the sand until the success ‘happens’, and only after that will you collect the credit? The founding fathers of America wrote their names on the Constitution, before it was a success.
Every young company has two major challenges when it comes to public communication:
The best answer to the first one is – go out of the office and talk to people on events and in their native environment. It’s also a great way to get to know your core audience inside-out.
But for the trust issue, the absolutely best remedy is for the founders to be put up front, essentially saying loud and clear: “Trust Me”. Don’t just trust the words I’ve written (they are wrong), don’t trust the design (it’s bad), don’t trust what you heard on the street about us (it was probably wrong), trust ME, I believe in what we are doing, I believe we are changing the world into a better place, and should something bad happen, I will feel ashamed to death.
So startup founders, please, write your names everywhere you can and be proud of it. There is no other way your startups will succeed.
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What was the most common phrase in English 500 years ago? [Linguistics]
#linguistics With millions of books scanned and digitized by Google, a new type of linguistic analysis has become possible – as people are able to delve into hundreds of years and millions of books’ worth of data.
via: io9.com
… that the research has been done by a fellow Slovenian is not a coincidence – lots of talent over here
This article made me think, that as a young entrepreneur, one has to realize that the big exits that are presented as success, actually require a very specific state of mind, which most of normal people would never submit themselves to.
Yes, if you are a startup entrepreneur and you hope for a billion dollar exit, chances are it’s not going to be smooth like Instagram’s, but convoluted like Facebook‘s, and you’ll have to piss off and disappoint a lot of people on the way.
Was the Social Media Tech IPO Boom a Big Scam?
Was the Social Media Tech IPO Boom a Big Scam? Billion-dollar cash-outs at Facebook, Zynga and Groupon. Abysmal stock performance. Tweet Jake Rajs / Getty Images Over the last year-and-a-half, several of the most prominent social media companies in the country have sold shares to investors in high-profile initial public offerings.
via: business.time.com
Are you sure you want to do it? I’m not.
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I was curious about the total pageviews of the web. It turns out they are not really tracked anywhere, and that they are easy to estimate, so I did a quick analysis.
First I found two sources for ‘global total pageviews’:
Alexa publishes pageviews for every site for free as a % of global pageviews. First thing to do was estimate the grand total, as described in that blog post, by looking at the published data from Wikipedia.
11,600,000,000 / 0.5% = 2320,000,000,000 monthly total pageviews on the Web
… told you it was easy but that just means we can dig deeper. Alexa publishes the list of top million sites in a downloadable text file, so I wrote a script to go trough it, scrape Alexa pages for top 10.000 sites and store their individual traffic shares.
The script also does some simple heuristics to classify sites into some categories, which I then manually completed. Turns out it’s really quick to go trough list of couple thousand sites anyway, I’ve decided to create a super simple taxonomy for all websites. It is based on the frame of mind that a visitor has when she visits the site:
Out of curiosity, I also looked at how many sites it takes to fill the Web. It turns out, that top 20 sites create 25% of all pageviews, and top 250 create 50% already. After that, we are already deep in the tail and the progress is super slow, and is actually still downloading…
So let’s first take a look at the top 50% of traffic and who creates it:
Of the 7% of media, the blogosphere represented 40%.
I’m assuming that Search and Social, that create the majority of the pageviews, are overrepresented in the head fo the web, so deeper the crawl will go, for media and reference will surface. I’ll publish an update with that. For now, here are the estimates of total pageviews based on these shares:
Category | Monthly Global Pageviews Estimate |
Search | 1,125,711,592,824 |
Social | 416,548,737,145 |
E-commerce | 172,000,706,996 |
Media | 159,984,707,266 |
Reference | 106,394,591,704 |
Utility | 75,323,701,823 |
Unknown | 264,035,962,241 |
Total | 2,320,000,000,000 |
I am very happy that the ‘media’ and ‘social’ estimates are very much inline with Akamai’s estimates.
Gender In Tech: No Longer A Silent Issue
Ellen Pao‘s lawsuit allows our community to discuss these “women in tech” issues as real problems. By Cristina Cordova (Business Development, Pulse) TechCrunch reported that Kleiner Perkins Partner Ellen Pao sued her firm for gender and sexual discrimination.
via: www.women2.com
in a related article, i saw this: “The tech community in general is probably 20 years behind most when it comes to gender issues, and needs every reminder that it’s still got a ways to go.” (gawker)
this article is the most accurate description of New York as a tech hub:
For Tech Start-Ups, New York Has Increasing Allure
Enlarge This Image Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times Doug Imbruce, the founder of Qwiki, an interactive video start-up, recently decided to move his company back to New York. Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times Employees of Qwiki, located on Spring Street in SoHo.
via: www.nytimes.com
in a nutshell, the takeaways are:
… excuse all the quotes this time, they are by various people from the same article.
this story of pinterest before pinterest has many lessons in strategic thinking, that are only attainable the hard way, or by hearing them from someone who got them the hard way.
Wists-ful thinking: lessons from a prelude to Pinterest
Back in 2006, Wists, a visual bookmarking site I had launched a year earlier was gaining traction with women who were into crafts. I showed the website to two whip-smart friends, Shana Fisher and her husband, Jonathan Glick. Like many people, they didn’t buy my argument that collecting thumbnail image links would be a big deal, but they were less skeptical than most. Last year, I got a cryptic Tweet from Jonathan saying, “You Were Right.”
via: gigaom.com
… and most importantly, realize that if anyone else finds the gold nugget in the same pond, and goes on to find the gold mine, he didn’t steal it from you. this author has great attitude.
I’m amused by the US media’s understanding of European geography / economy:
Slovakia’s news payment system going large in July
Piano Media, the joint web news payment system operating in Slovakia and Slovenia, is preparing to launch in a third, larger market this summer, after recently taking funding for globalisation. “The third country we are launching in July will be much larger than the two we already have combined,…
…
There is a question mark over whether Piano can replicate even these small numbers outside its own back yard…
via: paidcontent.org
… to think that slovenia is slovakia’s backyard, or that they are both the same backyard, is like saying US and Panama are the same backyard.
on the other hand, I’m glad Piano did their tests in these two countries, because now maybe more westerners will actually learn to tell us apart.
]]>… I was as surprised to see ‘entrepreneurship‘ there as the designer who had to find a way to put it there. It seems we are merging with Arts and creative industries, which I believe is an underestimated revolution. Of course SXSW and TED did that years ago, of course Wired knew all along, but Brooklyn Northside?
don’t get me wrong, I think that’s great. I think entrepreneurs really are rock stars of this age/generation, I think it’s up to us to solve big problems that this Planet is facing, and leave it to our kids in a better shape. I think we are looking to complete the capitalism’s promise, and upgrading it with what we’ve learned from globalization and new age.
And I think that we need to join forces with Arts and Creatives and Everyone else, to make this happen, because if we are to replace a broken and unfair economic system, we have to breathe the same air. Financial industry increasingly feels like new age bureaucracy, pushing pieces of paper around, detached from reality. It won’t survive the century.
Related articles
Business Insider has a great interview with Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, who has been President of Iceland since 1996, and announced last month he would be running for a fifth term.
It is an incredible read, because he is obviously very smart and very ethical person, a rare gift for politician these days. I wish everyone in Slovenia read this and adjust their expectations on how a public leader should behave, react, lead. He makes several super-insightful points, that clearly come from a lot of experience and thought.
For instance, about the importance of the banking sector:
As everybody knows now, we did not pump public money into the failed banks. We treated them like private companies that went bankrupt, and we let them fail. Some people say we did it because we didn’t have any other option, there is clearly something in that argument, but it does not change the fact that it turned out to be a wise move or whatever reason. Whereas in many other countries, the prevailing orthodoxy is you pump public money into banks and you make taxpayers responsible for the banks in the long run, and somehow treat the banks as if they are holier institutions in the economy than manufacturing companies, commercial companies, IT companies, or whatever.
…
Capitalistic financial markets can exist in many other parts of the world, even without democracy. So in my opinion, Europe is and should be more about democracy than about financial markets. Based with this choice, it was in the end, clear that I had to choose democracy.
… and one positive story on journalism – i wish more media aspired to be this fair when they are judgmental:
One has to hand it to the editorial board of The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, that they supported Iceland’s case all along. And if The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, who have never been special friends of Iceland, saw through this argument by the British and the Dutch government, why on earth didn’t the other European governments do so?
… and a match point for creative industries (which includes startups btw):
the Icelandic banks, like all modern big banks in Europe and America and all the other parts of the world, are no longer banks in the old-fashioned way. They have become high-tech companies. High-ranked engineers, mathematicians, computer scientists, programmers and so on and so forth. And their success depends largely on how successful they are in hiring people with this education and capability, not necessarily those trained in business schools or finance, but in engineering, mathematics, computer science and so on.
…
So the lesson from this is: if you want your economy to excel in the 21st century, for the IT, information-based high-tech sectors, a big banking sector, even a very successful banking system, is bad news for your economy.
… about the inherent problem of all ‘ecosystems’ – clubbing
And I said to myself — I know it’s a mistake now — in early 2007, if all the credit agencies are giving the Icelandic banks a clean bill of health, these pillars of European banking are doing integral business with the Icelandic banks, these critical voices are not really onto what’s happening.
… and an example of true collaboration, going on without the media really noticing it…
Fortunately, during this time when there was very little attention to the Arctic, the eight Arctic countries were able peacefully, almost off the radar, to develop co-operation within the Arctic Council, and to consolidate the peaceful and constructive dialogue among Russia, the United States, Canada, and the five Nordic countries.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/olafur-ragnur-grimsson-iceland-2012-4
it’s what bash and perl were for unix,
it’s what ubiquity was for browser
it’s like pipemania and the incredible machine all over again…
If You’re Not Using ifttt, Then You Don’t Like The Internet
San Francisco-based startup ifttt (If This Then That) has built a framework that lets you harness the full potential of the Internet and your web-connected devices. By “listening” to various channels (weather, stock prices, RSS feeds, SMS messages, and many more) ifttt can carry out actions when certain criteria are met.
… following a point from yesterday, it seems US economy is catching up with Europe:
‘The Golden Age of Silicon Valley Is Over, and We’re Dancing on its Grave’
BLANK: I teach science and engineering. I see my students trying to commercialize really hard stuff. But the VCs are only going to be interested in chasing the billions on their smart phones. Thank God we have small business research grants from the federal government, otherwise the Chinese would just grab them.
via: www.theatlantic.com
Crowdfunding is a great but frightening development.
It’s great, and necessary, and obvious, just like democracy and freedom of speech.
But it’s not frightening because it threatens the VC‘s. I’m worried because the first wave of crowd ‘investors’ will inevitably do mistakes that VC’s have learned to avoid, this might cause much capital being allocated in wrong places, causing rouge behavior from ‘startups’ and render huge disappointments, amplified by media, making entrepreneurship a bad word.
there, i’ve said it. funding startups is a serious thing, not a game of tax evasion.
Will Crowdfunding Crowd Out Venture Capital?
Venture capitalists have been getting a black eye to go with their blue shirts. A recent report from the Kauffman Foundation slammed VCs for “shortchanging” investors, pointing out that public markets deliver better returns.
via: www.readwriteweb.com
somehow all this reminds me of elaborate public grants infrastructure in Europe, that’s causing half of economy to focus on filling out checkboxes rather than listening to customers. not sure why, but it feels like the same instrument in different clothes.
White House taps private sector to help feed world’s hungry By Christopher Doering, Gannett Comments WASHINGTON – President Obama vowed Friday to accelerate efforts to relieve hunger and malnutrition in Africa and unveiled as part of his plan a $3 billion commitment from multinational companies to make it easier for small farmers to grow their…
via: www.usatoday.com
Too hot for jobs
THE financial press went ape this week over the highly anticipated IPO of one Facebook, the Harvard social network turned $100 billion phenomenon. Facebook’s soaring valuation has focused attention on a Silicon Valley that is once again booming, and it has led many to wonder whether social networking isn’t inflating into yet another tech bubble.
via: www.economist.com
this article hits on a very important distinction but their point so short-sighted:
The new business reality: a feature as a business model
It’s almost comical to say there is a new business reality at play. This is because there are so many forces at work lately, that it seems as though new realities are created and killed almost every quarter. Opportunistic turbulence is probably the best term for it. I’d like to call one out for review Features can be business models.
via: www.cruc.es
‘feature’ is just a different way of calling the product’, or maybe, a ‘small product’. but to make it a business, you have to build the business infrastructure around the ‘feature’ – user acquisition, sales, financial controlling, hr, etc…
the only thing that changes is, that you can start with a ‘feature’ and build the rest later. but you better be prepared to do that, or you’ll miss your opportunity.
Iceland the First Internet Enterprise Zone
Iceland has a unique opportunity to lead the world by defining a Internet Enterprise Zone, Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures defined this term to me while he was in Iceland. What do we mean by this IEZ? We mean a Policy framework focused on allowing innovation in the Internet space.
I recently visited Iceland (again) and had a privilege to meet some of young entrepreneurs there. The amount of startups and interest in
entrepreneurship is amazing, specially if you consider that the whole country is the size of Ljubljana, Slovenia Capital.
The locals told me that the financial crisis hit everyday people pretty badly, specially because they actually weren’t doing anything wrong –
normal people were as scrappy as you’d expect from a scandinavian. They have also been very resourceful throughout history, probably a result of
harsh weather and soil conditions.
Oh, and every citizen has Facebook profile, which makes them super efficient at forming a new constitution. The rest of us should observe and learn.
I’m not surprised by this approach:
Online ‘dating service’ for tech jobs launched
In today’s tech scene, matching professionals to job openings may be more of a mating dance than a business transaction. Online dating services such as eHarmony and Match.com employ algorithms to match the compatibility of users, and then facilitates a way for them to connect.
via: www.zdnet.com
… however, I believe that what is essential for a successful match is not better algorithms, but teaching both parties to become aware and dare to spell out requirements and expectations. After you know what you are really looking for, and write it down in appropriate voice, the other party will recognize itself and apply, and everyone else who is not appropriate will look away.
embrace your quirkiness is what i’m trying to say. it will help you. with recruiting and with personal life.
this attitude helped many people find more rewarding jobs, like this community manager story. know what you want from your life, or take vacation / sabbatical.
Everyone around the world remembers Obama‘s superb grassroots campaign nostalgically, knowing that something so organized won’t happen anywhere else anytime soon.
Well, now at least we are getting a proper campaign management system:
Joe Green and Jim Gilliam, the founders of a new software platform called NationBuilder, envision a world where any campaign — from local school board to issue-based protest movement, without regard to ideology — could access the same versatile, inexpensive suite of software and instantly have at its fingertips the ability to connect with voters and donors online, a capacity that was supposed to reshape American politics in the age of the Internet, but has yet to be fully realized.
Via The Atlantic
next step? NationDashboard.
Instagram’s Buyout: How Does It Measure Up?
Instagram’s billion-dollar sale to Facebook raised eyebrows yesterday, renewing cries of a new bubble. But relative to other major acquisitions of the past, how does it measure up? I crunched the numbers, pulling together data from a selection of 30 notable internet acquisitions over the last ten years, from Broadcast.
via: waxy.org
Lot’s of entrepreneurs are struggling with marketing these days. in fact, I hear that marketing and user acquisition is the single largest bottleneck for new startups.
This is truly remarkable step-by-step how-to guide for kickstarting your online marketing. understanding this is bare minimum that every person should know and understand. if you hire a consultant, make sure you know all this, so that you can asses if (s)he knows more.
Starting
If I were a business person looking to understand how to use various digital channel making tools to build up my business, where would I start? What’s the right mix of tools to make this all make sense and work?
via: www.chrisbrogan.com
Slovenian aventurer ends eco-friendly trip around the world
Matevz Lenarcic, a Slovenian pilot, biologist and photographer, opens the door of his plane after landing from an around the world flight, at the Ljubljana Airport. -AFP Photo LJUBLJANA: Slovenian adventurer Matevz Lenarcic successfully concluded a 100-day eco-friendly trip around the world on Thursday in an ultra-light plane boasting super-low…
via: dawn.com
as I usually say, we have a long and proud history of eccentric mad scientists and extreme sportsmen. cheers to all!
]]>I’m late to the game, probably everyone knows already, but for the record:
TypePad Blogs Get More Relevant With Zemanta Recommendations
Life just got a little easier for bloggers who use TypePad. The hosted blogging platform announced that it is integrating Zemanta’s content recommendation tools into its service, which suggests links to related stories from across the Web. Zemanta also generates in-text links to related information.
via: www.readwriteweb.com
… when we started 5 years ago, we had a list of most relevant blogging platforms of all times. now all of them are our partners it feels empowering and inspiring to make dreams happen, but you have to remind yourself of that achievement, because when you reach them, you have other dream already.
]]>this article suggests that it depends on the type of a business, which sounds like a safe bet.
Entrepreneurs: Do You really Need Virtual Offices?
In today’s business world, working in a location independent manner is possible – thanks to the enabling technologies, such as mobile technology, the Internet, and such. You are now enabled to, say, live in Bali, Indonesia while having your business operates in, say, Canberra, Australia;…
via: www.noobpreneur.com
… however, my experience is that you have to, you really must be close to your clients (or users). if being close means hanging out on their IRC channel then fine, but more often it means at least a local phone number and ability to take them out for lunch/coffee.
if you’re thinking about a startup, assume that you will have to relocate to where your clients are. period.
I find this metaphor of startup steroids very telling:
The dangers of relying on startup steroids
Startup steroids: Pinterest feels the burn of Facebook‘s Open Graph By Ben Popper on May 3, 2012 09:30 am 23Comments A packed room of more than 200 founders, VCs and internet bankers took a moment to look up from their iPhones and listen in hushed reverence as one of Silicon Valley‘s top investors explained what he looks for when choosing the…
via: www.theverge.com
… another buzzword in the valley these days is ‘virality engineer‘. everyone want one, who will save the startup by providing the growth everyone wants to see.
it’s great that we are aware of the users and obsessed with them, but the hockey stick is the end goal. the goal of an entrepreneur should be to create a sustainably growing organization, mix of products, people and processes that ensure continuos creation of value, with or without the original entrepreneur.
Sanebox, this is a startup i really like, because they make my inbox managable. they are for email, what evernote is for notes. they just get it.
Taming Email Overload With SaneBox
Calling email overload “a crisis in communication”, TechCrunch Founder Michael Arrington issued a challenge back in 2008: “Someone needs to create a new technology that allows us to enjoy our life but not miss important messages.
via: techcrunch.com
basically, it’s just a ‘priority inbox’ that actually works – they classify less important emails correctly, and they send me a summary at the end of the day. it turns out, most of unimportant stuff is just spam, or automated reminders that I can just glance over and forget.
simple concept, that makes all of us a bit more productive – how much does the planet gain, if we all save 30 mins each day?
not only it is possible to read anything by auto-translating web pages, now anyone will be able to communicate to anyone else. next step – transparent translations of IM and phone call in real time!
Google launches automatic message translation in Gmail
Now, you would be able to comprehend emails you receive in other languages. Google has just announced that it would be rolling out the automatic translation feature in Gmail over the next few days. “Over the next few days, everyone who uses Gmail will be getting the convenience of translation added to their email,” Jeff Chin, Product Manager,…
via: www.buzzom.com
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Is there a Fully Operational Internet Kill Switch and has it been Armed ?
The Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010 (S. 3480) is a bill introduced in the United States Senate by Joe Lieberman (Independent Democrat, Connecticut), Susan Collins (Republican Party, Maine), and Tom Carper (Democratic Party, Delaware) on June 10, 2010.
it’s the old security measure vs. power abuse debate, but this time it’s extreme and about the internet. I am always amazed how something so new and artificial as the internet feels like a proper human right. let’s hope it actually achieves that status before we break it.
Considering some of the best articles about entrepreneurship these days are comparing us to the forbidden parts of society…
Why entrepreneurship is like playing Poker
Recently, I did a talk at JFDI, a Y-combinator-quality incubator for South East Asia, where I shared how it is like to be an entrepreneur. A lot of people tend to think: Being entrepreneur is about having a $1B+ home
run in the first try. But it’s almost never the case. The best way to describe the life would be through an analogy of playing poker.
via: sgentrepreneurs.com
… this reminded me of my favorite startup advice article: Everything I need to know about startups, I learned from a crime boss
… and if we add the famous UK startups experiment: Techy-types strip for charity
… we are getting really close to the PPP
I find this quote incredibly telling of the revolution we are witnessing now. New generation of geeks is dumping everything the human race learned in the last 500 years and is going back to basics, figuring out new world order as we go.
Laws used to be codification of morals, then they were hijacked by assholes who can't use the internet to control us anymore, which gives us a temproray upper hand.
It's necessary, and it's dangerous.
]]>“I live by morals, I don’t live by laws, laws are something made by assholes.”
I find this quote incredibly telling of the revolution we are witnessing now. New generation of geeks is dumping everything the human race learned in the last 500 years and is going back to basics, figuring out new world order as we go.
Laws used to be codification of morals, then they were hijacked by assholes who can’t use the internet to control us anymore, which gives us a temproray upper hand.
It’s necessary, and it’s dangerous.
]]>Great and important move, that USV probably decided to do because it has to be done right and there is nobody else who would take it on themselves.
Union Square Ventures adds technology ‘advocate’ to its payroll
It’s an established fact that technology and politics are increasingly finding themselves at loggerheads with one another, as issues of privacy, piracy, and copyright, not to mention net neutrality and media consolidation cut a larger profile on the national stage.
via: thenextweb.com
I was actually thinking recently that a different kind of activity would make sense for early stage VC – provide experts in residence for their startups, for instance: cutting edge virality ninjas, scalability/big data experts, startups finance expert… these guys should be seasoned, amazing, unaffordable by a normal startup, but if shared amongst a portfolio, they could really make a huge difference.
and secondly, wow to have it available in slovenia! we are not third digital world anymore!
iTunes Match begins rolling out in Italy, Portugal, Greece, more
Apple has slowly rolled out its iTunes Match service worldwide over the past few months, but today it looks like more countries were added, because the music matching service began rolling out in Italy, Portugal, Greece, Slovenia, and Austria.
via: 9to5mac.com
With the “Blog To Books” program, Hyperink assigns a staff editor to curate a blogger’s posts, structure them into a narrative format, and then create a book in PDF, epub, and mobi formats.
from: Techcrunch
it’s not the amount of work really, but the available supply and demand – there is not much of either:
it saddens me when investors and media pump up the expectations of otherwise interesting startup teams. sure you can argue that if the team is right, they will pivot from this idea anyway. but in b3c marketplace businesses like this, it usually takes a lot of energy to get enough disproof that you can actually decide to pivot.
meh.
San Francisco’s 1958 “Cyclone” Bus Duster [Past Perfect]
The 1950’s were perhaps the peak of American Culture. The Post-War economy was booming and a future of flying cars driven by robot housemaids was all but guaranteed. On the West Coast, one local transit authority even had a bus for cleaning other busses.
via: gizmodo.com
the first time I realized this, was when I read that the 50s were the original golden age for 3D cinema (!).
networking is not about dressing up, mingling with famous people, drinking cocktails or beer or anything else, it’s not about increasing your visibility or clout, or about checking in with other people etc…
networking is working, and that’s working on a very specific set of activities, which is completely different from the ones listed before.
Encyclopaedia Britanica’s Sales Soar With Announcement of Final Edition
Back in March, it was announced that after centuries of being a print staple, the venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica was moving- for better or worse- to the digital realm. It was certainly the end of an era for people old enough to remember when encyclopedias like Encyclopaedia Britannica were the be all and end all of research,…
via: www.inquisitr.com
I’m sure they will reprint them though, at least once per century.
the wild wild web is not a romantic place, it’s just senseless, and here’s another proof:
ComScore: Value And CPMs Are Out Of Whack
Not only are an average of 31% of display ads never even seen , but there’s little to no correlation between the CPMs sites are charging and the value they’re delivering to the advertisers – where value is defined as ads being viewed and delivered to the primary demographic target.
via: marketingland.com
as a geek i’m sad that in a world driven entirely by data and algorithms, well on the way to the promised land of perfection and frictionless and justice, such stories are a normality, rather than anomaly.
meh.