- Howdy startup!
“how easy it is to look at a marketplace and see nothing more than a list of must-have features. If you’ve got user profiles, you need a messaging system. If you’ve got a site, you need an FAQ, support section, and a blog. If you’ve got activity, you need activity streams, RSS, and all that jazz. If you’re selling stuff online, you need a reviews section, after all, all of the big players have them, right? You’re not a big player. You’re just getting started.”
- HackLab TO, Startups, Pricing, Bosses
Welcome to HackLab TO in the National Post!
The only kind of hacking that HackLab.TO and many of the more than 170 similar spaces active around the world are engaged in is the repurposing kind. Described as the “fourth R” — following reduce, reuse, recycle — repurposing involves “taking existing technology and using it in sort of new or perverted ways,” explains 25-year-old Honeywell. “The focus is on do-it-yourself technology.” Virtual spaces, as popular as they are, simply do not cut it when it comes to reincarnating laser engravers and creating controllable LED signs.
Stewart Butterfield Flickr co-founder “We had it all wrong in the beginning”
“No battle plan survices contact with the enemy“. And that includes your software pricing. Run over and get “Don’t just roll the dice: a usefully short guide to software pricing.”
21 Things that Great Bosses Believe and Do: My favourites:
- (8) Reward success and (intelligent) failure, but punish inaction.
- (11) Eliminate hiring and reward practices that reinforce cultures where “the best you can be is a perfect imitation of those who came before you.”
- (12) Hire people who make your squirm.
- (18) Kill a lot of ideas, including a lot of good ideas.
- (21) Innovation requires selling your ideas. The greatest innovators, from Edison to Jobs, are gifted at generating excitement and sales. If you can’t or won’t sell, team-up with someone who can.
- What’s wrong with this picture?
Speakers for Cyberposium.
Cyberposium is the premier MBA technology conference in the world. Held annually at Harvard Business School, Cyberposium facilitates an interactive network of current and future business leaders to engage in a provocative dialog about technology and its impact on business and society.
The conference is organized entirely by current MBA students at the Harvard Business School and is the primary campus event of the school’s TechMedia Club.
hmm… I guess current and future business leaders don’t include women? OK there are 4. That’s it? 4?
- Empathy
“selfish gene” has discovered that the most successful approach is to behave unselfishly.
- Gameness, vaccines, turtles, life and startups
On Offensive Play by Malcom Gladwell in the New Yorker [...] those who select for gameness have a responsibility not to abuse that trust: if you have men in your charge who would jump off a cliff for you, you cannot march them to the edge of the cliff.
Does the vaccine matter? The Atlantic
The women agenda: NYT reader submitted photographs from around the world illustrating the importance of educating girls. Some great shots!
From Science Friday: Michael Musnick is a citizen scientist who studies wood turtles in the Great Swamp — a stretch of wetland about 60 miles north of New York City. He found turtles dying in the railroad tracks and proposed a solution to New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority: tiny turtle bridges.
There are close to 1.7 billion Internet users in the world. The network by the numbers.
Norwegian photojournalist Jonas Bendiksen spent six weeks living in the slums of Nairobi, then Caracas, Mumdai and Jakarta. His Foreign Policy photo essay is enlightening!
Best young entrepreneurs of 2009 from BusinessWeek and yes the list includes women!
Interview with Ken Segall, the man who named the iMac and wrote Think Different.
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Errol Morris in conversation with Bill Ganzel in the New York Times.
Migrant mother then:
and now:
(Copyright Bill Ganzel)
- You stop moving and you die.
[...] web software is like a shark. You stop moving and you die.
- Bye Bye Nicaragua. Hello Toronto. Weekend reading (late)
I am back after a few weeks of surfing, running and a visit to Nicaragua. Photos to come very soon, but you can get started here.
Have you ever done a daily mug shot for a year, a few months or weeks? I got curious a while back and started it but quickly dropped it – you know how it goes, no time for anything! But this time around I am combining it with my running, so almost every time I get out there I will capture a shot. Daily.What I have been reading:
- Exceptional colour photographs from Russia in the early 1900’s
- What F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tax returns reveal about his life and times. Or living on 500,000 a year.
- One of the few pleasures of going on the Internet on a Sunday is reading Paul Kedrosky’s “Weekend Reading.” In his column, Kedrosky regularly summarizes the business week past, hints at the news to come in the coming week, and lists articles to read to explain what it all means. The MIT Sloan Review is introducing The Pile: a new weekly feature on improvisations (their blog) and the links are worth a visit!
- Google redefines disruption: the “less than free” business model.
- The evolution of Apple Design between 1977-2008.
- Tim Minchin: the best love song ever! If I didn’t have you.
- Speaking opportunities and resources for women in open source (a mailing list).
- Slate: Can crimes and crashes be blamed on bad genes?
- Oh Dear David Foster Wallace. RIP.
- San Juan Del Sur Nicaragua
I am in San Juan del Sur improving my running, surfing and swimming! San Juan del Sur is surprisingly awesome. I did not expect it to be the home of some pretty perfect beaches and great surfing.
Great runs lead to a lot of sweating but much fun. The temperatures here are above 25C daily but typically feel like above 30C. More photos here.
I work for the most amazing image search company in the world: