But the advice most startups outside silicon valley need is to do things that scale [2].

There are hundreds of dev shops in emerging markets as well as across Europe and USA. Entrepreneurs running them make a good buck capitalising either on lower wages in their vicinities or competent talent they have or both. What they miss out is the joy of developing their own products.

I have heard many entrepreneurs telling how easy it was to work in b2b. Comparatively, while working in b2c domain, you have to run after small customers who’d pay less, complain more and there’s all the wait until you go profitable.

The cruel fact here is, b2c businesses scale, b2b ones don’t [3].

Automate

The very first step towards scalability at your dev shop is to do little automations. Writing code from bottom up for every client works; but object oriented approach can be applied to projects too. If you have two clients in the same domain, having similar requirements, write the code that works for both. If you get to work over and over again on the same thing, write a little app that generates your required code as per the given parameters.

Most companies working in the value added services domain are used to writing code from scratch for every new service they do. While working as a product manager at Noetic [4], we noticed that there were a lot of things common in every other service we created for our clients. There was a team of one and a half dozen developers who wrote code from scratch for every service. It worked but it wasn’t made for scalability. We felt that there was a lot of room for efficiency. So we sat down and created a set of rules and coded them into something we call SDP (service delivery platform) [5]. It automates our work and is made to scale. Whenever we have a new project coming in, we log into SDP, define all the rules and are ready to go in a couple of minutes. As a bonus, we now only have one developer maintaining SDP, the rest of the team can focus on bigger things.

It was tedious in the beginning but in retrospect, the time and money we spent on developing SDP was worth it.

Innovate

You need to do new things, the things that haven’t been done at your company before. The best way out for that is to gamify. Reward the innovators with recognition and appreciation, put them in key positions and they will make things smoother.

Intrapreneurship

Google allows 20% of the time for employee’s own projects, you need to do the same. Appreciate dumb ideas, failures and honest mistakes. Spot the creative guy in your team, make him the boss of his own idea, assign some resources and you are all set. You’d see your products coming out one after the other. 37Signals was just another design shop in Chicago, they made basecamp for themselves only to find out it was their future.

The best way to get your products out fast and to transition from a services company to a product company is to reward intrapreneurs with the stake in their own idea. You’d find them working their heads off to make it a success. Your supervision and counselling would make their dreams come true. At the end of the day, they’d be happier than ever and yours would be a much better, more profitable business.

Tiny Customers

Here’s a second mention of basecamp: the maximum amount you can pay for basecamp is $149, either you are IBM, Microsoft or a work from home freelancer. This allows them to keep the control over their product, no single customer can consume their energies so they can focus on getting more and more small customers and making ~$25m [6] that they could have never made when they had many customers paying them $10,000 each [7].

You need to find small customers and lots of them. The day you have found your first customer willing to pay you $20 a month, you have unlocked your scaling effect.

Risk

Being an entrepreneur, you are applauded for taking risks but face it: you don’t take risks. You tap into safe markets and work with the clients that minimize the risk. Once into the product market, risk is everything. The higher the risk, the better path you have adopted. Customers would scrap most of the products; there’s only one facebook, Google+ is just hanging out. But there was no facebook if Mark didn’t put his heart and soul in it.

Most great ideas look dumb in the beginning, don’t scrap them early. As far as you are solving a problem people have, go for it. Launch and wait until you find someone really solving their problem using your product.

[1] Do things that don’t scale | Paul Graham

[2] Paul wrote a piece on growth too but that advise is for new startups only. This article focuses on transition from a services business to a products one.

[3] By b2b, I mean dev shops and by b2c, I mean companies focusing on end user products.

[4] As of September 2012, I am working as a product manager at Noetic, and really enjoying it. I am given the chance to shape their product strategy and create a bump in their sales graphs using my experience with online reputation management, social media, SEO and SEM. It has been a year working on the same and they have witness very good results in their leads generated through the web.

[5] SDP is Noetic’s flagship SaaS product for delivering SMS, MMS and WAP services for operators and enterprises.

[6] 37Signals doesn’t disclose their earnings but this thread on Quora makes very careful guesses.

[7] It’s just an assumption for the time when they designed websites for their clients. Apparently I have exaggerated the number to make it make more sense.

It is a general perception that a single mistake can ruin your entire carrier.

There’s no denying of the fact that serious mistakes affect your carrier but the world is no short of the people whose mistakes
put them in the right direction. In fact some of the very smart minds in business would advise you to try to get fired.

I am not going to tell you how to get fired, rather if you have already messed up, I have some tips for you to get over it.

1) Reboot

All mishaps come with a bonus right out of the box: a great learning experience. Give your attitude a thorough look, ask yourself what you did wrong and why and what could have you avoided. Tell yourself not to be jerk again and start over. Be a humble cooperative colleague who does things for everyone’s good rather than his ownself.

Then find a new job, tell your new employer that you were a jerk and regret that. You are only going to be a better person after admitting your mistakes, your employers would respect you and it’s only a matter of time that you’d on awesomeness highway once again.

2) Move on

Fire them next time

You know you were right and shouldn’t have avoided doing what you did? You know it was only your boss who was a jerk? Spot on, tell yourself “I am awesome, and I know it”. Spend a whole evening enjoying ‘haters gonna hate’ comics and then let go and move on. It’s time to capitalise on your awesomeness, this time for good instead of getting fired.

My younger brother is a vet, he called his boss a jerk right in his face. He was fired right after, obviously. I noticed some grief in his eyes but there wasn’t any disappointment. Since last week, he is running his own clinic and has made more money in a week than he earned in a whole month when he was on a job.

Life doesn’t end when things get dirty, life actually starts there. Look around and find out what’s next for you and make it big.

1. 3D effect with flat design principles

3D effect with flat design [By Tomasz on dribbble]

2. Flat Design with photos and videos

Flat UI design with photos and videos [Windows Phone by Microsoft]

3. Black & white flat UI

Don’t forget to follow the link as this website has got a lot of free icons for you to use in your flat design projects.

Black & white flat UI [The Noun Project]

4. iPhone music app UI

iPhone Music App [By Scardi]

5. Sophisticated flat design

This one is flat but animated, sophisticated and even non-flat.

Sophisticated flat UI [Big Human]

6. Landing page for iPhone app

Landing page for iPhone app [Spell Tower]

7. Animated Flat UI

Animated flat UI [http://theexperiential.com/]

8. Flat eCommerce UI

Flat eCommerce UI [Svpply]

9. Concept design for notes app

Concept UI for notes app [by Cosmin]

10. Flat Roman typeface UI

Flat Roman typeface UI [by Cosmin]

11. Flat UI for admin panel

Flat UI for admin panel [by Cosmin]

12. Social sharing website

21 Degrees: social sharing website [by Cosmin]

13. Personal portfolio

Personal portfolio [by Cole Townsend]

14. Landing page for lead generation

Lead generating landing page [by Unroll.me]

Things remained smooth for so long. So smooth and consistant that Google forgot to innovate. They kept polishing their product the wrong way. They never realised they were no longer living the Yahoo! world. They kept working on the product on the same lines as it was 1998 when only techies used internet.

Their product is now great at finding great sites. It is simply not great at finding great content. There are no semantics in Google’s land. Google simply does not know what you mean by a search query. It just matches the keywords – in some cases it does a good job and in all other cases it does a really poor job.

You believe if it’s not on Google, it does not exist. You are so incredibly wrong. It is only because of Google’s flaws that we have so damn popular content discovery sites like StumbleUpon and Reddit.

If you needed to find a great web app that solves your problem or does a job for you. Google can’t help. You need to search “Great email campaigning sites” to go to good blogs who know the problem and have created such lists.

Recommended read: Infographic: Google Search VS Facebook Graph Search

The worst is Google is not for the masses. Searching on Google is a science you need to learn. You’d find this skill listed in many job postings these days, not everybody is good at it.

If you look at the crop from this infographic, you’d know how complex it is to get good results from Google:

How to Google – Infographic

This has to be changed though. Facebook search has started to make us feel good, though it is painfully crude at the moment.

This infographic explains how Google and Facebook Graph search stand head-to-head with each other and how Facebook’s Graph Search is the future of internet searching.

Infographic: Google Vs Facebook Graph Search.

[Copyright Notice: You are free to use this infographic on your website provided you attribute it to gggadgets.com. The recommended method is to use the following embed code.]

Embed this infographic on your website:

<a href="http://gggadgets.com"><img alt="Infographic: Google Search VS Facebook Graph Search" src="http://gggadgets.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Google-Search-VS-Facebook-Graph-Search-Infographic.png" /></a>
Infographic via <a href="http://gggadgets.com">gggadgets.com</a>

I’ve got gmail; why try outlook.com? Sure, AOL Alto mail changes everything about email but I’m not giving it a try.

Google+? Lol, what?! I’m good with Facebook.

And the list goes on and on and on. It is the culture of internet community that we get used to tools and technologies and start taking them for granted and even start taking them as de-facto standards. This is the culture that drives Google’s success when Google had gone broken ages ago.

Before you start on me, let me explain my concerns with Google and why Facebook’s Graph Search changes everything about internet searches.

1. Google provides old school ‘keyword search’; Facebook’s Graph Search is ‘natural language search’

Many of us never even notice how Google works, Google ignores your sentence-completing words from your search queries. It doesn’t count if you include ‘is’, ‘and, ‘or’, ‘for’ etc. in your query. Try these two searches and the results won’t change at all: “Marie is young” and “Marie young”.

See the results:

Natural Language Search in Google

Turns out Google only looks for keywords in your query and matches them with the results. There’s only a minor effect on the results (that too in some cases) if you change the arrangement of the keywords.

Facebook’s Graph Search is the future of search. It works under natural language. It silently gets out of your way when you are searching for something. You don’t have to think what to search. You just have to type a sentence you’d ask from your friends. Hey, do you know any ‘good restaurants around that serve Sushi?‘ and you’d get exact results you wanted.

Hold on, isn’t Siri already about that? Hell no! I’d explain that later below.

2. Google is really screwed up at finding great content; Facebook Graph Search is all about meaningful content

Although there are hundreds of signals Google uses to rank results, PageRank algorithm is at the core of the ranking criterion. I don’t have an exact ratio but from my experience in SEO I can tell PR algorithm counts more than 90% of the weight.

So what’s wrong with this.

Google’s PageRank algorithm is designed from ground up to filter great websites from not-so-great ones. It would know if a great site published a great article. But it’d fail on the most part if a great site published a crappy article. On the other hand if a not-so-great website published a crappy article, Google knows it’s crappy but if they write a great article, Google has no way finding that out unless that article gets thousands of backlinks from great sites. If that happens, Google will start taking the whole website as a credible source and all of their content would start ranking better.

It is odd, but it works.

Great websites usually publish great content and that’s what we see in our results. But there are blogs written by individuals, professionals and industry veterans containing awesome content. Search for ‘things to know about SF’ on Google and get contented with an about.com article without even knowing that Jason has a much better article on the topic.

Our contention with Google’s search results is because of the fact that there’s no better alternative yet. Coming to the Facebook Graph Search, it’s all about great content. Search for ‘Great parks around me’ or ‘Places to hang out that my family likes’ and you’d get the results that matter to you.

Facebook Graph Search – Restaurants my friends like

No crappy restaurants good at SEO and no review sites appearing. You are sent straight to the official page with legitimate content. Later on, when Graph Search grows up, you’d be finding web results similarly.

3. Google search has no life; Facebook Graph Search is all about life

Google wanted to induce a life into their search results with +1s and Google+. ‘Your friend has recommended this page’. ‘James, shared this page with you’ etc. But that didn’t work. We see no life in Google’s search results. It’s just like giving commands to a machine and getting results back.

On Facebook’s graph search all the search results are about life, your friends and your family, people in general and everybody in real life. And this thing belongs to Facebook, SERPs can’t get this taste. It had to go like ‘Facebook turned search engine’ rather than ‘Google turned social network’, there’s isn’t any other natural way round.

This is also where Facebook leaves Siri behind. Siri too has no life, she knows who your wife is but doesn’t know which hanging places aound you are popular among your friends. There’s a potential of Siri+Graph Search but that has to be seen yet. Also, Google’s results are not personalised as Google doesn’t know who you are, sure they say they do but Facebook knows you more and better.

4. Google is all about ‘structured data’; Facebook Graph Search is all about natural representation of data

Google provides you with structured data ‘News about your query’, ‘images that match your keyword’, ‘places on map having your keyword in their name’ etc. With every passing day, Google is getting more structured. Rich snippets are being encouraged more and more. In future, you’d see more results like this:

Google Rich Snippets

This is all good for university students, scientists, professors and coders but for the rest of the world comprising of moms, bimbos, artists and dads, it’s science. A science they have no interest in and they never bother understanding it. Facebook Graph Search is all about natural representation of data. ‘Here’s my friend Amy, she likes this coffee shop’; ‘here are great photos about fishing, wow! there are a lot friends I see’. Simple, natural and there’s no science.

Larry Page already got mind-fried, says ‘Facebook is doing a really bad job on their products’. He had to.

Back in 2008, he wrote a Menifesto for his Open Access Movement. It was this menifesto which lead him to steal millions of JSTOR documents from MIT to make them publicly available and got him 35 years in jail plus a $1m fine.

Aaron Swartz addressing to a gathering against SOPA/PIPA

Menifesto quoted from Earlham website:

…The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything

up until now will have been lost.

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.

“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed….

There is no justice in following unjust laws.  It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks….

Aaron Swartz

July 2008, Eremo, Italy

You have got a point Aaron. The point for which you sacrificed your life.

Later on, passionate him got him into the development of reddit; he had co-founded an internet prodigy who smacked right into the face of digg. It hit so hard that digg couldn’t get back up and Kevin Rose had to make an escape.

Money was just a little part of his ambitions. He was an internet activist and a politically active citizen. He founded DemandProgress, an online movement against internet censorship. It was majorly because of DemandProgress’s work that SOPA and PIPA got cancelled.

He also helped launch creative commons – probably the most used license on the internet.

Aaron Swartz (credit)

He was a genius. A never-compromising, reckless, hit-hard, keep-going genius. Nothing could satisfy him, he always had an urge to achieve more, better, and at times he got agressive too. So much that he started doing breathtaking stunts.

He released millions of US court records online, got investigated by FBI and almost ended up rest of his life in jail but managed to escape triumphant. But this was just the begining.

Things kept on getting harsh. With his urge to help others, achieve more, make a free & open internet happen, he crossed the limits – as we see them. But for him, sneaking into MIT and stealing millions of JSTOR publications, was no limit. (He was actually stealing or not is still a topic of hot debate.)

His stunts started to screw up his life.

He built a habit of publicly denunciating his friends and mentors, got fired from reddit, developed depression and aggression issues and started to think of death.

The world outside his head, was not ready to accept the reckless Aaron. The feds and advocates of SOPA & PIPA couldn’t see the founder of DemandProgress chilling around in Silicon Alley. He never sold, published or probably not even make use of the stolen documents. But the law works its own way. He got a 35 year sentence and a $1m fine.

He had friends, mentors and caring family members. But his standards were too high. They were there but nobody could touch Aaron’s height, passion and agressiveness.

He decided to give-up. He decided to escape.

The 26 year old genius, Aaron Swartz is no more. He committed suicide in NYC today, as his uncle confirms.

The world has lost a legend. A legend whose legacy will keep the internet from censorship, keep providing the base for millions of internet connected applications and keep inspiring youth.

But before he went away, he told us how to live a life like him.

Not much of a surprise but if you type the old name of the app in spotlight, you’d get the right app appeared in results. Start typing “add…” and Contacts just pop up as the top hit – just as Address Book have. Same goes for others.

Here’s how it looks:

Spotlight in Mountain Lion

Have you upgraded to Mountain Lion yet? It doesn’t have all the issues Lion had.

A common problem with iframes is that you cannot embed a specific part of a page, you rather have to show the whole page inside an iframe or only the upper left portion; you can’t choose the portion. There are some workarounds available on the web to deal with this problem but they use jQuery and require a lot of programming knowledge. Here’s rather a very simple method which uses nothing else but CSS.

How to code it

Let’s do it with a live example. Say, we have a t-shirt site and we want to embed details of a shirt from spreadshirt but don’t want to show their header and footer stuff.

Let’s do it with the following page:

Source page: http://gidmid.spreadshirt.com/deadly-bull-t-shirt-A8794607/customize/color/196

Dimensions of the portion we want to embed: 950×750 pixels

Showing a specific portion of source page in iframe

The idea here is to enclose the iframe into a div and then hide as many contents as we want.

Step #1

Create a div with the dimensions of the portion and set its overflow property to hidden.

<div style="
height: 750px;
width: 950px;
overflow: hidden;
">
</div>

Step #2

Create the iframe inside the above div

<div style="
height: 750px;
width: 950px;
overflow: hidden;
">
<iframe src="http://gidmid.spreadshirt.com/deadly-bull-t-shirt-A8794607/customize/color/196" scrolling="no" style="">
</iframe>
</div>

Step #3

Set the margins of the iframe to move it to the desired location. Don’t hesitate in using negative values as margins.

<div style="
overflow: hidden;
height: 750px;
width: 950px;
">
<iframe src="http://gidmid.spreadshirt.com/deadly-bull-t-shirt-A8794607/customize/color/196" style="
margin-top: -180px;" scrolling="no"></iframe>
</div>

Notice margin-top: -180px; It will move the iframe up by 180 pixels which is the height of the header of the source page. As the enclosing div has the overflow property set to hidden, the header won’t show up.

The height of the div is already set to 750px so the rest of the iframe is also hidden.

You can play around with margin property of the iframe to show any other portion of the page as well.

To make your iframe more cool, use seamless=”seamless” HTML5 property and it’d look like a genuine portion of your webpage. Here’s the final code:

<div style="
overflow: hidden;
height: 750px;
width: 950px;
">
<iframe src="http://gidmid.spreadshirt.com/deadly-bull-t-shirt-A8794607/customize/color/196" style="
margin-top: -180px;" scrolling="no" seamless="seamless"></iframe>
</div>

This is a live example from our own t-shirt shop.

View demo