I am a big fan of Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz and now Sparktoro, not only for what he built at Moz but primarily because of his openness in sharing his experiences and learnings. His recent book, “Lost and Founder” is a great read and an example of candidness, warts and all. Very few books bring that to the table.
If you are using apps for weather, news or local information ( finding petrol station or ATM) the data is available to anyone willing to pay a price and then analyse your daily habits, over days, accurate location recorded as frequently as every 15-20 minutes providing a detailed snapshot of everything you do.
Today I attended a TiE meeting in Bangalore, featuring Prashanth (PV) Boccasam and Madan Padaki. The Topic was “Leveling Up about StartUps and Upstarts”. In the initial part of the program Prashanth narrated his choice of first job out of college, between IBM (offer of 76K) and Microsoft (33k).
Continuing on my Previous Blog – on addiction templates in apps, I was wondering if there is any basis to our large scale social behavior of New Year Resolutions. Why some carry them through and most don’t. Well it seems there is some basis.
I was amazed when I learnt that Zapier actually had no office for their (then) 140 member team and everyone works remotely from all over the world. 37 Signals, now Basecamp championed the idea in their 2013 Book – Remote : Office not required. Written by @Jason Fried co-founder of Basecamp it is a must read to understand the changing dynamics. I highly recommend this.
This one is for iPhone users. All of us know that it can be difficult to land the cursor exactly where you want it, using a finger. Sometimes a whole word gets selected, sometimes it lands a letter away making it tedious to move it a step to the left or right.
Can Entrepreneurship change the fate of a country ravaged by mindless war and unending conflicts? Seems so. This Redherring article on the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Yemen and the unwavering optimism of entrepreneurs like Ibrahim Saleh who believes “…I think there’s a good future in Yemen” warmed my heart.
How do you stop the data monopoly of The Four (Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook)? It is important to ensure that we co-own and have total access to the co created data that has given The Four a near monopoly of the currency of our times – our data.
Many of you would have come across this post by Tomasz Tunguz, Managing Director of Redpoint Ventures. His frequent posts are primarily data driven and are pointed and succinct. In this post and one after that (where he does the math) he points out to the maturity of the SAAS companies where a “…a small fraction of an incumbent is a billion-dollar company. If you start a business tomorrow that is able to cleave 1% of revenue from Salesforce, you will have built a billion-dollar business.”
Casinos of Las Vegas provide the addiction templates to digital products designers who use similar trigger based variable reward systems to draw users back to their applications.
