Fantastic talk given by Steve Blank from Startup Lessons Learned conference on the need to create an “entrepreneur school,” to help one understand the process of keeping the lights on and finding initial customers, instead of conventional business school, which assumes you have already attained the state of large company.
Now the problem is, you [...]
From an article over at Silicon Alley Insider:
Where did 2009’s $500 million come from? Self-service ads, which appear on the right side of the screen on Facebook, accounted for about $250 million to $300 million.
The rest is split amongst engagement ads, a deal with Microsoft, and virtual goods.
Here’s a good overview of OAuth over at Hueniverse. Choice quote:
There are many reasons why one should not share their private credentials. Giving your email account password to a social network site so they can look up your friends is the same thing as going to dinner and giving your ATM card and PIN [...]
This past weekend I had the pleasure of being a mentor for a team competing in the USC SS12 competition.
SS12 is a weekend long coding event, organized around the theme of software aiding the disabled. There were 8 teams working on 8 projects (a few teams working on different instances of the same project) [...]
On security issues with cloud computing:
You give your credit card to a waiter at a restaurant and they go in the back room with it. They could be running copies! If you buy something at Amazon, it’s pretty damn safe, way safer than giving your credit card to somebody who you don’t know, and them [...]
Here’s an article on software developed by Ray Kurzweil for the mobile phone which snaps a picture of text, deciphers the text, and produces audible speech:
On how far his technology has come:
Kurzweil released his first reading machine, developed in partnership with the National Federation for the Blind, in 1976; on the day it was unveiled, [...]
A collaboration between Univ. of Washington, Cornell, and Microsoft has created a system that searches public photos of cities, and uses that data to extract a 3d model of that city.
Our experimental results demonstrate that it is now possible to reconstruct cities consisting of 150K images in less than a day on a cluster [...]
…and report form Microsoft’s last MIX conference
User experience (UX) is more than just visual design, information architecture, interaction design (what most experience design folks used to call it), UI development. There’s a fifth role: User Research (it puts the U in UX!)
Check it here.
From Jason
OMG clips from new Nevermore album
Page contains clips of Warrel Dane breathlessly telling us about the new album and then playing audio of the album into a microphone.
Warrel Dane has a delightful speaking voice.
StartupSchool 2009 event starts in about an hour right here:
Speaker list:
Chris Anderson
Paul Buchheit
Jason Fried
Paul Graham
Tony Hsieh
Mitchell Kapor
Greg McAdoo
Biz Stone
Mark Pincus
Evan Williams
Mark Zuckerberg