Blog


basics
  • June 15, 2014

Turn Detroit into Drone Valley

Very interesting article by the ever so brilliant Mark Andreessen on how best to address the problem we have with cloning silicon valley. We’re either going top-down by focusing primarily on infrastructure—plunking down an office park next to a university—or bottom-up by focusing on just the networks. None of these efforts successfully pursue both paths […]

google
  • June 14, 2014

Google’s Push Past Search

Google’s answer to solve the ‘search’ problem on mobile. In short, traditional search (pull method) is not working on mobile. So Google is moving towards content curation based on context, using highly sophisticated algorithms and extensive machine learning (based on information we inadvertently give up about ourselves when using google products) to predict what a […]

pricing
  • May 16, 2014

The Price is Right

Some good points on pricing strategy: One reason for this [saying the product can save the customer hundreds of thousands, yet it is priced as if it is saving thousands] is assuming the need to price and program similarly to competitive products. With a potentially disruptive product, however, falling into the trap of pricing like […]

startups
  • April 25, 2014

The Most Valuable Startup Compensation

If you look at the expected rate-of-return for each of these (salary, benefits, stocks) and benchmark them against the market, they aren’t dramatically different from what you could get working at the stereotypical big company. In fact, they are worse on average—with one exception: Rate Of Learning (ROL). Rate-of-learning is the velocity at which you […]

www
  • April 21, 2014

Things I Learn from the Internet – 5

Note: Things I Learn from the Internet is a series of post containing snippets of wisdom collected from stuff I read on the WWW which do not warrant a post in itself. Awesomeness Fest: An event for entrepreneurs from around the world to connect with world-changing leaders. Patreon: support and engage with creators (writers, artists, […]

users
  • April 17, 2014

How to Run Live User Testing

The more neutral the location, the better. As tempting as it might be to use your company’s conference room, I’d recommend not bringing users into the corporate office. Use a friend’s office or co-working space. Use Craiglist to recruit testers: we posted a job opportunity to the jobs/et-cetera section of Craigslist. In this relatively short post, […]

753c7f6e-00ae-431d-a93c-816f5017f097
  • April 15, 2014

Indie Phone

Besides Blackphone, Fairphone, we now have Indie Phone, a phone where people own the tool and data. I heard Aral Balkan speak at Drupal Con in Prague a few years ago and he was brilliant. There are two types of entrepreneur, the visionaire and the builder. Aral is definitely the former. My favourite quote from […]

youth
  • March 18, 2014

The Problem with Silicon Valley’s Youth

An exceptionally thought-provoking (albeit long) article on virtually everything about the Silicon Valley tech scene. The Web 2.0 checklist: cloud-based, scalable, mobile-friendly. (They are buzzwords, but they are also true) In pursuing the latest and the coolest, young engineers ignore opportunities in less-sexy areas of tech like semiconductors, data storage and networking, the products that […]

startups
  • March 6, 2014

The Unicorn Club: Billion Dollar Startups

We found 39 companies belong to what we call the “Unicorn Club” (by our definition, U.S.-based software companies started since 2003 and valued at over $1 billion by public or private market investors). That’s about .07 percent of venture-backed consumer and enterprise software startups. On average, four unicorns were born per year in the past […]

indian
  • March 5, 2014

The Indian Sanitary Pad Revolution

This story is so inspiring! A school dropout from a poor family in southern India has revolutionised menstrual health for rural women in developing countries by inventing a simple machine they can use to make cheap sanitary pads. His wife left him, people in his village scorned him, and then his own mother left him. […]

innovation
  • February 25, 2014

Waves of Innovation

Innovation comes in waves, and as it has been apparent for quite some time now, we are in the age of Social Media. Investors swarm to put big bucks in startups that can return hundreds of millions of dollars (latest example being WhatsApp’s purchase by Facebook) in less than three years. But is this the […]

big data
  • February 21, 2014

Big Data Marketing

We now have a new word for businesses that sell data – data brokers. Third-party data brokers sell all manner of information to businesses, e.g.: Turnstyle, a company that has placed hundreds of sensors throughout businesses in Toronto to gather signals from smartphones as they search for open wi-fi networks. The signals are used to […]