The most interesting startup, web, technology and generally relevant new stuff I read this week. Some of the stories are older than the past week but have resurfaced because of their quality. Most links were discovered via Ycombinator’ Hacker News. If you want to keep an eye on the startup tech world news during the week, drop by the IA feeds to see a aggregation of some of the best web, startup and technology blogs.
Last week, I camped out at Sequoia Capital on Sand Hill Road and did rehearsals with most of the 50 companies that are presenting–in fact, launching–new products at the TechCrunch50 event next week. These 50 represent the top 5% of the companies that applied to our demo-style event. Truth be told, the top 150 companies were all qualified to be on stage–if only we could have a five day event with two tracks.
- Read the whole story at TechCrunch
Why do people still use IE6? This is a browser that’s been released in August 2001 — that’s over 7 years ago. It’s old, it’s got hundreds of compatibility issues, it’s not particularly secure and neither does it have many features we come to rely on today in modern browsers. It doesn’t even have tabs. But statistics show, that a sizable chunk of the internet is still surfing on IE6. There are a few reasons why…
- Read the whole story at The Usability Post
Which startup odds do you prefer? 50% odds of making $1 million or 20% odds of making $20 million. Assume the work involved is the same, and that in both cases that the alternative is a complete loss. If you’re economically rational, you’ll compute the “expected value” of each investment.
- Read the whole story at Some French Guy
…this irrational love of development can be worn down by all of the institutional BS that we have to deal with, and it can be rather, how you say, “soul-crushing.” So, how to rekindle the love of coding and avoid the burnout that is the otherwise inevitable consequence of the software engineering process? Start a side project!
- Read the whole story at Ekinoderm
A few years back, we wrote a post debunking the ridiculous notion spread by some that Craigslist was somehow “anti-capitalist” or not “maximizing profits” because it actually offered most of its services for free. As we noted, much of Craigslist’s long-term success was because of these decisions — which in all likelihood did increase overall profits for the company in the long run by building up further trust in the company. It may not have maximized profits for this quarter, but it most likely was doing a pretty good job in generating profits for the long haul by keeping customers happy, rather than trying to squeeze them for every immediate dime (and who was just saying that Silicon Valley doesn’t have a long term view?)
- Read the whole story at TechDirt
We’re all familiar with the “OK” and “Cancel” buttons you get on dialog boxes. Simple labels that ask us whether we agree or disagree to the next action the application wants to take. The interesting thing is that using exclamations like “OK” and “No” isn’t all that usable. Instead, you should use verbs. Let me illustrate this with an example.
- Read the whole story at The Usability Post
Today marks DreamIt Ventures’ first Funding Day, during which the new startup incubator will introduce a dozen new companies to a collection of founders and venture capitalists. DreamIt is a program in the same vein as Y Combinator and TechStars, offering startups seed funding, guidance, and connections in exchange for equity. We’ve written brief introductions to each of the startups…
- Read the whole story at TechCrunch
Computing: In the future, most new internet users will be in developing countries and will use mobile phones. Expect a wave of innovation…
- Read the whole story at the Economist
In the next day or so you’ll probably find yourself hearing a lot about how Google started 10 years ago, and, well, isn’t it remarkable that a company that started in a garage has survived that long and become a household name? I’m not going to do that. Hell, that’s what Wikipedia and the official Google history are for… I’m more interested in Google’s next 10 years – because that could define what life is like in 2018 and beyond.
- Read the whole story at the Guardian
Besides the slick and probably expensive editing designed to make Jerry Seinfeld look like the more awkward of the pair, there’s not a whole lot of special effects in this clip. In fact, there’s not really a whole lot of anything, including laughs, information or pimping of Vista. It’s kinda like Seinfeld’s really long, really rambling Superman ad for Amex he did a few years back. We hope the rest of the campaign is better.
- Read the whole story at Gizmodo
How do you recognise good programmers if you’re a business guy?… It’s not as easy as it sounds. CV experience is only of limited use here, because great programmers don’t always have the “official” experience to demonstrate that they’re great. In fact, a lot of that CV experience can be misleading. Yet there are a number of subtle cues that you can get, even from the CV, to figure out whether someone’s a great programmer.
- Read the whole story at inter-sections
Clients pay big bucks for sexy frontend designs but don’t want to be lost in ugly and unusable backends. Historically, many an administration interface had awful table-based layouts with complicated menus and unreadable data. It is time to reverse the trend: UX goes beyond frontend, and if we can code beautiful frontends, we should build beautiful backends too, all the more as backend designs are reusable. After Wordpress, Basecamp and the likes, here is an inspiring list of 10 sexy, though probably less-known, backend designs.
- Read the whole story at Nemetral
New startups can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars racing after a dream: a giant splash on launch. Just imagine… a big spread in Time Magazine, a feature on all the relevant blogs, a glowing review in the Book Review. Get this part right and everything else takes care of itself. And yet…
- Read the whole story at Seth Godin’s Blog
So how does one sustain a balanced hacker lifestyle yielding successful (by your own metrics) side projects that don’t devastatingly detract from your work and your life (if you have / want one :))? Well, I haven’t quite figured that out, but I do havhttp://blog.logicalrand.com/2008/9/5/sustaining-a-hacker-lifestylee some lessons learned / takeaways from failed attempts.
- Read the whole story at logical.rand
These videos are my recent attempt to explain the art of raising venture capital. They are part of the Montgomery & Hansen online learning site and conference. For example, to learn about financing agreements and the term-sheet process…
- Read the whole story at How to Change the World
My most memorable Oklahoma wedding was eight years ago:
Just seconds before the celebration of love, passion, hard work, and hope, a gentleman stepped up and confessed his relationship with the groom. I was just as surprised as the lady in white was at this revelation. So, what happened? And more importantly, how can you prevent this from happening to your startup?
- Read the whole story at Under the Radar Blog
Two things: first, I am a “vulture” capitalist. Second, I’m writing using one of my portfolio company’s accounts. I’d like to reach out to you because you are the reason we thrive. You’ve already got the odds stacked against you, and the last thing you need is a bully VC with confusing, illogical screening processes…
- Read the whole story at The Funded
Nobody at Webmonkey expected to wake up and experience an internet game change today, but with Google’s semi-accidental launch of the Chrome browser Sunday, that’s exactly what we got. We barely had enough time to clean up the coffee spittle on our monitors….
- Read the whole story at webmonkey
When we were just 3 people trying to get Wufoo launched on a limited budget and timeframe, we felt that it was necessary for us to work 7 days a week and expect 80+ hours out of each member on the team. Obviously, a grueling schedule like that can’t last forever and now that we’re a 6 man operation that’s expanded outside of the passion of the founders, it’s been necessary for us to find a balance between productivity and happiness. The following is what we’ve learned after spending some time experimenting with your typical 5 day workweeks and the much hyped 4 day workweeks.
- Read the whole story at Particletree
There was interesting talk about venture capitalists and their role in Internet startups last week. It started with a post by John Casasanta of Taptaptap simply entitled “Fuck the VCs.” Responses from Hacker News and John Furrier, among others, led to a lot of heated debate over the role and significance of venture capital… Although I clearly cannot provide justice to the topic of venture capital in one or even a thousand articles, I did want to talk about the changing face of venture capital for Internet startups.
- Read the whole story at Mashable
Creating online communities of customers and workers has been one of the hotter topics in business and technology this year. Whether you’re on the business side, in IT, or are just trying to build virtual teams around shared goals, online communities are rapidly becoming a popular way to organize people and accomplish work in a highly collaborative manner.
- Read the whole story at ZDnet
Last week I wrote about the 7 things I did wrong with my start-up. This week, I hash out what I think I got right.
- Read the whole story at LendingClub
When Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google Inc. on Sept. 7, 1998, they had little more than their ingenuity, four computers and an investor’s $100,000 bet on their belief that an Internet search engine could change the world. It sounded preposterous 10 years ago, but look now: Google draws upon a gargantuan computer network, nearly 20,000 employees and a $150 billion market value to redefine media, marketing and technology.
- Read the whole story at The Industry Standard
The current advice for a web start up seems to be: Get something up and running ASAP, listen to your customers, iterate, profit. However, if you are making games an early release it usually death as a game that is 90% complete is often on 10% fun. So, if your startup is games based should you still release early?
- Read the whole story at Hacker News
Enjoy your weekend reading and I’ll see you next week for another smattering of useful or entertaining links.
Launch Well.
-D
