March 2010
27 posts
2 tags
Boston-Bound: Leaving USV and Next Steps
I’m leaving NYC for Beantown.
My fiancée Lisa and I just found out last week that she matched into an excellent residency program in Boston, so in June we’re going to pack up a UHaul, barrel along I-95, likely pass a monument or two along the way, and park it in Boston.
I write this post with bittersweet enthusiasm for the future. On the one hand, Lisa and I are excited to start...
Opera Mini Implications
I read with interest today that Opera Mini is being submitted to the App Store. I’ve been thinking about competition in mobile browsers, and this is a great step forward. Here are some of my quick initial reactions:
I hope Apple has enough confidence in their own product development of Safari to approve Opera Mini in the app store. I can’t remember the last significant feature change...
Animal Collective - “My Girls”
I know...
5 tags
Metric-Driven Design
Back in mid-2009, Douglas Bowman left Google for Twitter, and in the process a small meme developed about his exit blog post. He semi-famously wrote:
Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to...
3 tags
Design at the Board Level
Whether you’re a VC, independent board member, or member of senior management, one subject that’s particularly tricky to discuss at the Board level is interface design.
Some board members will say, “I don’t like X about the site’s design, and we should change it to Y.” That’s a fair comment to make; however, it should be taken for exactly what it is: a...
3 tags
Feature Request: Disqus Number in Tumblr Dashboard
Can someone take a couple hours out of their week to build the following for all us Tumblr addicts?
I’d love to see a Greasemonkey script that uses the Disqus API to put the number of Disqus comments a given post has into the Tumblr dashboard.
Just a little text link that says “X Comments” right next to the existing link that says “Y Notes”.
Right now I’m...
4 tags
Facebook Credits (SXSW panel insight)
I attended a panel on social gaming, and the best insight in the panel came from Sebastien de Halleux of Playfish.
Sebastien said that the most innovative thing going on in social gaming is Facebook Credits. It was a surprising comment… I thought he was going to name a specific game or gameplay dynamic. The tactics of payments don’t seems that interesting to me on the surface, but...
4 tags
Banking 2.0 at SXSW
I went to a session on banking 2.0 at SXSW yesterday. The panelists were Rob Garcia (Lending Club), Kenneth Lin (Credit Karma), Aaron Forth (Mint), and Bob Weinschenk (SmartyPig).
The most interesting comment of the panel came from Bob Weinschenk… I don’t have a direct quote, but to paraphrase: Look at the way you bank today, you likely have a credit card from a separate institution,...
2 tags
Competition from Parallel Paths
If you were asked to enumerate the competition to Google Reader when it first launched, you would probably list products like Bloglines and NewsGator… in short, other feed readers. I don’t think anyone would have pictured Twitter as being competitive to Google Reader originally, and even today the two products are very different from each other.
Yet, Twitter has completely ended my...
3 tags
Formal HCI Training (and It's Holes)
While at undergrad, I took a bunch of classes that taught Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) as a formal discipline. We read all the relevant texts from Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen. The intro class in the series was taught by an industry leader, Terry Winograd. The text for that class was terrific, and I still keep it on my bookshelf at work: Interaction Design by Helen Sharp, Yvonne Rogers...
“Sadly, unless it’s a very well kept secret, there’s no such rival event and this...”
– Funny intentional hypocrisy from Paul Carr.
The Business of Code, The Code of Business →
Albert has a great post on the Google Code blog that’s worth a read.
3 tags
The Definitive SXSW Restaurant List
Last year during SXSW, one of the commenters of Fred’s blog (JLM) left a comment with the definitive SXSW Restaurant list. It’s a scavenger hunt of epic proportions. There should really be a Fousquare badge for anyone who hits up 50% of this list.
Anyway, for convenience, I’m reblogging the list here. Looking forward to tackling a few of these myself.
Also, one place...
2 tags
Seven on Seven -- April 17th
Ok, this looks seriously awesome. It’s an event called Seven on Seven. The site describes the concept concisely:
Seven on Seven will pair seven leading artists with seven game-changing technologists in teams of two, and challenge them to develop something new —be it an application, social media, artwork, product, or whatever they imagine— over the course of a single day. The...
Bing Quintupled Its Facebook Fan Base By Bribing... →
This is a fascinating blend of virtual goods and advertising.
Inside of a virtual goods-based business model is a media model that can accurately quantify the value users’ actions using virtual currency.
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The Future of Internet VC
Every product requires distribution. How are you going to get your product in front of customers? The Internet has been a profoundly disruptive distribution model, but, the Internet is only a distribution model.
If you think about the way in which venture capital has been segmented in the past, it’s typically by market, not by distribution model. Some example markets: Clean Tech, Life...
3 tags
Owning Your Online Presence
Fred wrote a great post last week about owning your online presence. I wrote a comment on it that I’m upgrading to a post here. It’s best to read Fred’s post first, but you can get the gist in this key quote:
“[Y]ou can’t control what other people do (tag you in photos, post pictures you’d rather not see online, say awful things about you), but you can...
Broad-Coverage News Reporting Quality
Broad-coverage publishers of news, such as the CNN, NYT, WSJ, Wash Post, etc are in trouble. Of course, there’s the classic costs question (Their business model is still selling ink on dead trees?), but I don’t want to beat a dead horse with this post, so I’ll put that issue aside. Instead, I want to talk about quality of coverage.
Every time I read a mainstream news piece on...
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Online Conferences
I noticed that O’Reilly is hosting an online conference on Gov2.0. Has O’Reilly hosted these online conferences before? If so, how do they work?
I just registered and plan to “attend” a session or two. But, I don’t know what I’m getting into. I wonder which live streaming tech they’ll choose? I wonder if my experience will be better if I make sure to...
4 tags
Games and The Real World
The game production community is buzzing about a talk at DICE 2010 by Jesse Schell which talks about the future of gaming. I don’t want to recap the talk because smarter people than me have already done that. Rather than spending 2 minutes reading a summary, I strongly encourage you to spend the 30 minutes to watch the complete talk.
Ok, so now that you’re up to speed, here’s...
