Davide Di Cillo

Get ready for SXSW

Davide — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:49:58 +0000

Finally it’s that time of the year that we geeks all love: SXSW Interactive. On Twitter, everyone is tweeting about it. On blogs, everyone is writing about it. In meetups and gatherings, everyone is talking about it. I actually feel bad for those people who won’t go and will have to survive the next 10 days of SXSW hysteria. But for those who will go for the first time, I fell obligated as SXSW sophomore to write up few tips I learned last year (I’ll skip all those tips like “use Twitter to see what’s going on” or “if you see Mike Harrington fist bump and don’t try to shake his hand”):

Be open to meet new people: If you are going there just to attend to the panels and not be social, maybe you should look for some webinar or books on Amazon. Last year I started meeting new people (@jbrotherlove and @ shanifilms) few minutes after the take off and by the time we took the cab from the airport to the convention center it was five of us. Meeting new people makes things more fun (and if you share cab rides even cheaper).
Party: We all know it: panels are just an excuse to recover from the night before and getting organized for the upcoming one. Here’s a good list of parties you should attend.
Remember people around you are big on social networks: If you decide to get completely wasted, remember that anyone over there will at least a camera and something that can be used to tweet and share with the world your worst moments. Of course I know this because last year I was the one with the camera. Drink (I heard that after 4pm drinking water is not allowed in any premise), have fun, but don’t be stupid.
Tell your family and friends that it’s ok if they won’t hear from you for the next few days: No, the problem isn’t being too busy to make a phone call between panels and parties. The problem is that there are going to be thousands of iPhone crashing the AT&T network. If you have any carrier pigeons at home, this is the right time to take them for a trip.
Use your damn GPS: Last year eight adults men managed to walk right into the hood in search for a party because nobody thought about using the GPS devices (iPhones) that were sitting in their pockets.
Save space in your luggage avoiding to bring t-shirts to wear: You are going to collect so many t-shirts from different companies that you really won’t have to worry about bringing your owns.
Check the weather before you pack: I have no idea why last year I checked the weather the week before leaving and I didn’t double check the day I packed. Check this video to see what happened.

Are you going to SXSW?

SoFla at SXSW

Taste of Ink samples review

Davide — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:17:09 +0000

After being really disappointed with the latest jobs by Overnight Prints, I decided to look around for another printer. Yesterday I received the samples I ordered from Taste of Ink, a Scottsdale, AZ based print shop. I was really impressed by the presentation of the sample they provided, so I decided to make a little video about it.

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Embrace all your users… even the pirates! ARRGH

Davide — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 00:03:08 +0000

On my Twitter client I always have a search running for all the names of the things I build. The other day, looking at the search for SquarePik, something caught my eyes:

So I decided to play along and I posted:

I was expecting to be either ignored or to be insulted in some way for asking money for an application like SquarePik (many people seems to have problems accepting the fact that applications could cost more than free). Instead I received these message:

And not only he’s an active user, apparently he’s also very passionate about it:

What did I learn from this? Simple. What’s done is done, so just try to make the best out if. A user is a user, no matter how he arrived to use your product. Yes, I could have made an extra $1.40 if he paid for the application, but at the end an passionate user is worth much more than that. And maybe now that he sees that there is a person behind this application, he will consider to buy it.

7 good readings for new (but not only) entrepreneurs

Davide — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:39:39 +0000

Lately I’ve been pretty busy, especially thanks to FOWA and the upcoming SXSW, and my RSS reader is literally exploding; so I had to dive in for a little bit and I came back up with these seven pearls. If you are (or you want to be) an entrepreneur, you will learn a lot from these article:

Do you have any article you would like to share about entrepreneurship? Post it in the comments!

Fred Wilson’s 10 golden principle for successful startups (FOWA)

Davide — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 16:27:04 +0000

I took some notes this year at FOWA, and I’d like to share with you some of the things I learned or found valuable at FOWA (Future of Web Apps). This first post is about what I learned from Fred Wilson’s presentation. Wilson is the co-founder of Union Square Ventures, a smaller ($125 million in capital under management), newly formed, New York City based venture capital firm with investments in Web 2.0 companies such as Twitter, del.icio.us, Etsy, FeedBurner, Indeed.com, Disqus, Clickable and many others. In his presentation he highlighted ten points he finds critical for being a successful startup.

Speed: this is a critical factor for growth. Applications that aren’t fast don’t grow as fast as applications with better speed performances.

Instant Utility: your application has to be useful out of the box. Let the user see an immediate return for using your application.

Voice: you need to have a style, a personality. People need to feel like they are consuming a media. Just look at the way Wufoo communicates with their users, with very fun unusual messages.

Less is more: Your application has to be simple. Try to focus on one thing and do it very well. You can always add more features later. This helps speed as well.

Programmable: make it easy for other people to plug or build on top of your application. Your API should always be read/write. This is the reason why we integrated SquarePik with Foursquare only, and not Gowalla. Gowalla has a read-only API, making the applications built on it virtually useless.

Personal: make the experience feel personal. Even little things like avatars or personal profiles make users feel like they own part of the application. Think about how your perception of your Facebook page changed since they changed its URL from a number to your username. Now it’s not just a page in their system, it’s your personal page.

Restful: Fred used this term in a personal and incorrect way by his own admission. He thinks the entire application should have an easy URL system. You should be able to reach any page of your app via URL. That makes it easy to share and send to other people.

Discoverable: people need to be able to be find your application, via SEO or social media. At the end of the presentation, he also recommended the use of guerrilla marketing because of its cost effectiveness.

Clean: use big spaces, big fonts and don’t add too many functions on a page. It has to be very clear at any time what the user should do.

Playful: the ability to play in an application is very important. The game element can help the success of an application. Foursquare and Gowalla are really good examples of this. Even something as simple as a top contributor chart could be seen as a game.

What other things do you think are key for the success of a web application?

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101 free e-mail newsletter templates

Davide — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:02:37 +0000

Do you need to create a quick e-mail newsletter but you feel lazy and you don’t want to deal with e-mail clients compatibility problems? Don’t worry, check out this selection of 101 free e-mail newsletter templates:

33 Free HTML email templates
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/templates/

17 Design Newsletter Templates
http://www.cakemail.com/newsletter-templates/design

30 Free Newsletter and Email Templates
http://www.interspire.com/templates/free-newsletter-templates.php

11 Free Email Templates
http://www.activecampaign.com/email-templates/free-templates.php

10 Free Email Marketing Templates
http://www.carbongraffiti.com/emailmarketing/emailtemplates.html

Free social media icons for your website

Goodbye bikinis, hello gambling!

Davide — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:59:26 +0000

Apple recently surprised everybody, me included, with its new policy about “overtly sexual content” on the iPhone, taking down from the store all the apps with questionable content. One of these apps was Featured Pinups by PinupLifestyle.com. This is an application we built at 39, in partnership with the owners of Pinup Lifestyle, to showcase the featured pictures posted on the site itself. No doubt there were few mildly erotic pictures, but all very artistic and in a clear pinup style. We can’t help it if pinups are sexy. Geeks aren’t sexy. Pinups are sexy, it’s their thing. For sure it wasn’t one of those “Hot bikini not-technically-naked-but-you-can-imagine-the-rest” apps; pictures were very tasteful and professionally done. Anyway, our app wasn’t the only one to be taken off the store, and some of the other developers actually called Apple and found out what are these new guidelines they forgot to mention to us.

The new guidelines are that Apple will be removing all applications featuring bikinis and lingerie in the next 48 to 72 hours.

Yes, no more filthy apps on iTunes. But don’t worry guys, Apple is great, and while with one hand is taking away, with the other one is giving back. In another very recent change of their guidelines Apple cleared the way to some sort of pseudo-gambling:

3.3.17 Your Application may include promotional sweepstake or contest functionality provided that You are the sole sponsor of the promotion and that You and Your Application comply with any applicable laws.

What do I think about these changes? Well, about the “overtly sexual content” problem, we’ll clean up the app and submit it back. For sure if you have any kind of photography app that doesn’t have to do with barely dressed models, this is the right time to submit them because there is going to be much less noise in that category. About the gambling, I’m sure we will see a large use of it as a tool to promote the applications as well or to collect leads. Will I do that? Maybe.

The secret of happiness

Davide — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:45:58 +0000

Brillant

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SquarePik: building the local tech community for real

Davide — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:14:49 +0000

As some of you may know 39 Inc. (my company) and Pikchur Inc. recently launched SquarePik, the first Foursquare client for iPhone with picture and video support. Users seems to love it, and, even if they are not a big number, most of them are really active users. That makes me happy. What really makes me happy is the fact that SquarePik is the perfect example of how we should cultivate a local tech community in places like South Florida. Yes, meetups and tweetups are important to know each other, exchange business cards and maybe create connections, but what really makes a difference is what we build. The more successful things we build, the more people will realize that there are talents to invest on here in South Florida.

SquarePik was exactly that: a group effort where local startups collaborate on something tangible. It didn’t take months of planning, neither dozens of meeting. It took two weeks of building and doing and making. Not only, we also had the support of other local geeks who helped us with testing, suggestions and trying to find every possible way to give us exposure. Doesn’t matter where we got featured and how many downloads we had since then, what matters is that we built something and now people know about it. Did it make a difference in Florida reputation as far as tech startups? No, but like Romans were used to say “gutta cavat lapidem” (a drop hollows out the stone), and a drop hollows out the stone by falling not twice, but many times. If we stop for a second to talk, and we start to build one thing after another, then we will be able to grow our community and attract those founds and that attention that everybody claim.

Do you want to help the your tech community to grow but you aren’t in the business of building things? Start using Pikchur instead of Twitpic, try Imaneed.com next time you need a plumber or give a shot to JCompare.com for your online shopping. And while you do that, give them feedbacks, talks to them, ask them what you can do to help them. This is how you build a real tech community, this is how you attract investors in South Florida, this is how you prevent the few startups we have to move away. It’s not about having the biggest group on Google or the biggest fan page on Facebook, because remember, even a pickle can have more fans than Nickleback .

How to use Facebook Chat with iChat

Davide — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 14:35:00 +0000

Finally Facebook Chat started supporting Jabber/XMPP, the open standard for instant messaging. Now developers can integrate Facebook Chat with their Web-based, desktop, or mobile instant messaging products.
That also means that we can chat with our Facebook friends using iChat. Just add a new account to your iChat following the settings in the picture below.

How to modify the Facebook Share button