I have recently finished the second book of the millenium series; The Girl who played with fire. Lisbeth Salendar character is amazing. Previously, I watched first one in the theaters. The swedish one. I’ve heard an american remake is coming. I liked it. Nonetheless I went out of the cinema a bit shocked about how explicit some scenes were. I decided that the story was so good that I should listen/read the books. So I listen The girl with the dragon tatoo and like it a lot in the audio format. Simon Vance  is a great reader. Last week I finished the second one.
I’m really looking forward for listening the last book. Unfortunately publishers stupid policies currently do not allow me to buy the last book in Europe. Why? I have no idea. I bought both books in audible from the same IP address I am currently writing and I had no problem before. A lot of times publishers deserve the piracy. I should be able to buy an audiobook wherever I am in the language I please.
I began into audibooks less than a year ago. They are great when you are in the car, gym, cleaning. Give them a try.

This post is a recap of TWIST #33 with Shawn Gold. This Week in Startups is a weekly podcast, hosted by Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis.

Insights form Jason Calacanis

When things are going poorly, cancel a board meeting! Find an excuse to postpone it.

Bing has the potential to be a great porn search engine. About the Bing video feature. On mouse hover a video, it begins to play automatically.

eHarmony should put their ads in porn sites.

Redtube and Pornotube are to the porn industry what Craigslist was to classifieds

Ask Jason with Travis Fischer

Travis Fischer has already founded two Startups Key Minor and ECStageArt. He has the next question:

Q: I am coming out of school. Should I go to work for a great entrepreneur and learn as much as I can or should I go and do it myself, make mistakes, get my ass kicked and learn?

A: Both ways are great. Important is to get your ass kicked and learn. It can be difficult to get hired by a great CEO. Jason advices to convince the CEO that:

• You bring something to the party. For example: HTML, Search Engine Optimization or Affiliate Marketing.
• You do not care about the income.
• You are willing to work as hard as needed, weekends etc.

Shawn Gold gives a common tip in TWIST. Get out of Wisconsin quickly!. Move to a place with more startup activity!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9oMpwqVFyI]

Ask Jason with Stephen Cross

Q: How to get a grasp of what the value of an online community is to advertisers?

A: Shawn Gold, the man responsible of bringing the money in the door of WeblogsInc, points that the liquid of the community is in what they are doing and what the community topic is. He recommends to use the currently available tools. Use search engines, Adsense and pay attention to keyword clusters around the community topic.

Stephen Cross idea spins around marketing to people who is going to have a baby. Business around a mayor life event such birth, wedding or similar are always a good place to be. However, competition is tough. Jason praises Baby Center email newsletter.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VenLjwGAw7g]

Shark Tank with Nicky Hajal

Insights from Taylor

Make your pitch dynamic and engaging. Force the other person to respond back but being sure what the answer is gonna be.

Taylor’s Porche story.

Pitch One year ago, Nicky Hajal and his partner founded NiceTranslator. A Real Time translator based in Google API. Because of machine translation lack of quality, there is a niche for a quality translation service. Transissimo is a new project which allows people to share high-quality human translations. It evolves around four parts: an interface, an API, a ranking based on performance and a distribution system. The revenue ideas are to charge for longer translations and split the money with the translator and a model focused around dynamic hosting and management of translation.

Feedback Shawn Gold recommends to avoid Jargon. Jason does not clearly gets the uniqueness about the service and the way to make money. Taylor tips Nicky to engage the person receiving the pitch.

It is important to explain a business specific value proposition. After talking further, Jason advices Nicky to give a real example of the service and comes with an understandable sentence. We are the Mechanical Turk of translation. The prescription is to upload screenshots of the service in Flickr and to create an explanatory video. Jason is concerned about Nicky’s background. As expressed in previous episodes, Jason doubts about entrepreneurs coming from a wealthy family.

Guest Interview with Shawn Gold

Insights from Shawn Gold

How to get advertising? You have to be extremely resilient, you must have a compelling and extremely short email because nobody has time, you call at 8:45 when they are in the office and the assistant isn’t.

Anyone giving a pitch should avoid jargon. A twelve year old should understand your pitch.

The secret to success is to find the right people and empower them to execute.

The secret of a sales person is empathy and ego drive.

JC: If you are not fired up with enthusiasms you will be fired with enthusiasms.

Shawn Gold got in the Web in 1995. We began convincing big companies that they needed to build a Website. Later, in WeblogsInc, he convinced big companies that they needed to have a blog. Before landing in WeblogsInc, he launched his own publishing company. He defines himself as a consumer guy. Indeed he was responsible to bring the advertising money into WeblogsInc. After the AOL acquisition, he left WeblogsInc and went to MySpace. He left it and got recruited by his wife to be the CEO of her consumer start-up company Cocodot.com. Jason and Shawn discuss Cocodot business model, partnerships and the current state of the product. The service is in the early stages but its getting already positive reviews and usage. Shawn has already done some important performance deals which will be published soon.

The News with Lon Harris

Rackspace Goes Down. Again. Takes The Internet With It. Again.

Jason and Shawn agree that a down happens to everybody, important thing is how you respond to it. Jason thinks that Rackspace will respond properly. A public company, as once Microsoft was, is again in the hands of Robert Scoble.

Google In Discussions To Acquire Yelp For A Half Billion Dollars Or More

Jason considers it the biggest Deal of the year. It will suppose a mayor seat change for Google because it will mean to buy a content company. A large number of content companies will suddenly become target for Google Acquisitions. However, Taylor doubts about the deal while Jason gives credits to Mike Arrington and believes the deal could become true. The 20th of December TechCrunch published that Yelp Walked Away From Google Deal, And Half A Billion Dollars. It seems Taylor was right.

Insights form Jason Calacanis

If you go social media, when things go bad things count 10x.

Mark Zuckerberg could kill Facebook because of arrogance

This could be a PointCast level disaster

If you are a Facebook employee, sell your stock!

Facebook is greedy and thinks that users do not have rights!

If you build something on top of Twitter’s API, its not a business but a hobby!

Twitter Hacked, Defaced By “Iranian Cyber Army”

Jason does not believe that it was a terrorist attach. Who could be behind the attack? Iranian opposition, a fired System Admin or even Mark Zuckerberg. Nonetheless, Twitter being down is not a matter of national security.

Groupon Valued At $250 million

The crew do not understand why is the valuation so high. Shawn Gold points to added value of their popular Email Newsletter and their big percentage in each sale. The coupons categories is on fire but the number is impressive.

Facebook privacy controversy

In his newsletter Jason asked if Facebook was unethical, clueless or unlucky. Currently he believes facebook is none of them but delusional. Moreover, he believes this privacy blunder could be Facebook’s Achilles’ heel.

Netflix has been sued by a woman who claims that it ostensibly revealed her sexual orientation

This brought the controversial Eric Schmidt’s sentence into the table If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. The crew agrees that Netflix should be more careful about privacy or they are gonna be sued more often.

Google and Facebook launched their own URL Shortners

Link data stored by URL Shorteners is really valuable. Jason predicts that the biggest problem for Bit.ly, the current market leader, is not Facebook or Google but Twitter itself. He thinks Twitter will release its own version of the best third party applications as Microsoft did with Windows. Taking out Lotus with Office.

This Week in Startups is sponsored by UStream.tv, PowerVPS, DNAemail, Web Spy and Bing.

En la entrada No te asocies con otros startups ya exponía mi punto de vista el trabajo con otras empresas pequeñas. Matt Coffin habla sobre el tema con Jason Calacanis en el podcast TWIST de un modo muy similar.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YKJ4oAUfak]

Matt Coffin: Una de mis leciones más importantes y que ví una y otra vez cuando estabamos en el inicio de la evolución de Lower My Bills. Dos empresas jovenes trabajando juntas … Muy doloroso, Muy doloroso… ¿Quién esta al mando? ¿Mi Idea? ¿Tu idea? ¿Como funciona todo esto junto?. Dos empresas pequeñas no deberían trabajar nunca juntas. Es tan doloroso.

Jason Calacanis: Las asociaciones me parecen como una gran perdida de tiempo para las startups, a no ser que seas un negociador genial.

Nowadays our news are full with crisis headlines. They are sometimes difficult to understand if you are out of the economics context. Humor is probably the best teacher, i bet you in eight minutes you understand about our current situation.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFmYIFk5i1Q]

This is true for software too. Head first labs books are famous for making you learn while laughing. We, developers, should use more colloquial language in our application. Stop using submit in your application profile form’s button, use Change instead. Use more funny and clear feedback to users. Happy, engaged users and more efficient users

While IE 8 expectations continue to grow, IE 7 continues to eat IE 6 market share. I have created the next bar diagram (using TheCounter data) which reflects the last five quarters of IE6, IE7 and Firefox.

IE6 versus IE7

IE 6 have lost about 17% of its market share in the past 5 quarters. If we just considered the past two quarters, where the boost provided by enthusiastic early adopters can be dismissed, IE6 has been losing around a 4% of market share per quarter. If this continues during 2008 IE 6 will have around 30% of market share by the fall of the year. 30% is a big market not to be considered by designers or web developers. A percentage such as 3% could be the point where we can finally forget about IE 6. Such a percentage, considering a 4% fall step, will not be achieved until the fall of 2009. However, i expect IE 6 to be almost gone by the arrival of summer 2009. I expect the fall step to speed dramatically in 2009. The reasons:

• New computers are mostly being shipped with IE 7 – even if Opera does not agree. One year and a half is a huge amount of time in computer era. We have to expect people to replace their old machines with new machines (specially laptops) which will be shipped with IE7.
• Vista will keep eating XP market share which means more IE7 adopters.
• The release of IE 8 will push people to update. We, consumers, do not like to be old fashioned. One thing is to be one model behind but being two models. When IE8 hits the news on TV, a lot of people will upgrade their browsers.

There is one thing Microsoft could do to speed the upgrade process up. Leave IE 7 upgrade out of Windows Genuine check. I have seen a lot of people with pirate copies of XP not upgrading their machines because of Windows Genuine does not allow them. If you want an improved product, buy a license of my operating systemcomes to say. If you are an illegal XP user, are you gonna buy a license of XP with Vista out there?. No way! However, if all illegal XP users could upgrade their browsers to IE7 or even better will be upgraded automatically, we could get rid off IE6 much quicker. While IE 6 is in the game, the image of Microsoft is damaged. Everyone involved in web design or development hates IE6 and Microsoft for not giving a replacement for such a long time. No, it is time to remove IE6 and Microsoft image will be grateful for.

Today i configured a list of 50 persona names using the 25 most common surnames and names of both male and female in the US in the 1990. Almost every software has some-kind of user module. The projects i am working on nowadays are not out of this thumb rule. Soon or later you have to populate your database with a meaningful dataset. I will be using this for mine, maybe you may use it.

Male names:

1. James Smith
2. John Johnson
3. Robert Williams
4. Michael Jones
5. William Brown
6. David Davis
7. Richard Miller
8. Charles Wilson
9. Joseph Moore
10. Thomas Taylor
11. Christopher Anderson
12. Daniel Thomas
13. Paul Jackson
14. Mark White
15. Donald Harris
16. George Martin
17. Kenneth Thompson
18. Steven Garcia
19. Edward Martinez
20. Brian Robinson
21. Ronald Clark
22. Anthony Rodriguez
23. Kevin Lewis
24. Jason Lee
25. Jeff Walker

Female names:

1. Mary Hall
2. Patricia Allen
3. Linda Young
4. Barbara Hernandez
5. Elizabeth King
6. Jennifer Wright
7. Maria Lopez
8. Susan Hill
9. Margaret Scott
10. Lisa Green
11. Nancy Adams
12. Karen Baker
13. Betty Gonzalez
14. Helen Nelson
15. Sandra Carter
16. Donna Mitchell
17. Carol Perez
18. Ruth Roberts
19. Michelle Turner
20. Laura Phillips
21. Sarah Campbell
22. Kimberly Parker
23. Deborah Evans

During the last months i have been really busy writing and debugging the last details of my master’s thesis. I have been occupied reading and sniffing around the most important online bookmark/tagging sites. This post describes the bookmark organization approach that i use nowadays.

In spite of the fact thatdel.icio.us and other bookmark online sites have been around for a long time, i did not use any of them until now. I use different browsers, in different platforms and different computers on a daily basis. As you can imagine it has been quite a nightmare to keep all my bookmarks synchronized. I pushed my self to bookmark from the same browser and then migrate my bookmarks to the rest. It was clear to anyone that i needed a more centralized approach. I guess laziness delayed the change such a long time. In the last year i have began to subscribe increasingly to more blogs and more blogs. As anyone who reads a lot of feeds, you are forwarded constantly to some interesting resources which are worth to be bookmarked for later retrieval. Hmm, maybe i could use this in a later project. Ok, i will bookmark it. Moreover, sometimes also the post you read in the first time is worth to be bookmarked . That is to say, i suddenly had a huge amount of sources which i would like to bookmark. Blog post are mainly opinions or tutorials which overlap several themes and jump between each other without a clear structure. Thus, they are difficult to classify with the typical categories hierarchy we are used to. The typical shelf model we used to order our books is not valid anymore. At least it does not scale well to internet’ bookmarking.

Only bookmark sites came to rescue. There are a lot of them. Del.icio.us is probably the most famous one. It has as well the least appealing design i ever saw for such a successful site. They could take a look to Magnolia, which shows how a great color palette pleases user experience. However, del.icio.us integrates well in almost every browser. It is easy to include add-ons to facilitate the creation of bookmarks. Moreover it integrates with my OSX spotlight search feature. I can search my online bookmarks directly from my desktop. This was probably the feature which put me in the side of del.icio.us in the bookmark online war. However, do not underestimate other bookmark online sites integration. Magnolia offers dashboard widget and bookmarklets. Similar features are shared by the others.

Bookmark online sites are suitable for multi platform/os/browser users like myself and tagging is a better approach to bookmark classification in comparison to hierarchy trees offered by browsers. I see a lot of potential (serendipity, community) in shared bookmarking specially in corporate environment however tagging as a bookmark classification technique for just personal use is worth in its own. I have four kind of sites in my bookmarks:

• Private bookmarks. They are sites which i do not want to share with anyone. For example, administration login panels.
• Frequently visited sites They are sites which i visit regularly but which i am not subscribed to. Sites for documentation (e.g. java doc), reference (e.g. htmldog) or e-commerce (e.g. amazon). I normally remember their urls but i am to lazy to type them and i prefer to visit them through my browser bookmarks.
• RSS feeds These are sites which offer their content through feeds such as Blogs or news portals. I am normally subscribed to them through an external feed reader. I just keep them in the feed reader or backup them with a bookmark in my browser.
• Knowledge spots These are blog posts, online tutorial, inspirational sites which i bookmark because i may visit them someday in the future. This is the long tail of my bookmarks. It is composed by a lot of sites which i hardly visit but nonetheless i like to keep and be able to retrieve. I store them in my del.icio.us feed

I would like to know how do you manage your bookmarks. If you share a similar approach to mine or if you use a total different one. Please leave me a comment or send me an email.

Maybe i am doing the first error of Web design assuming how the user mental model works based on my perception. Nonetheless, i think RSS seek follows this pattern

• User finds an interesting blog entry. The blog topic seems to be interested and the user decides to subscribe
• The seek for the RSS link begins
• Search for an RSS Icon (Standard web feed icon is broadly accepted) in the header or in the top positions of the navigation bar. Orange is usually the color
• Quick scroll in the navigation bar continuing the seek
• Search in the web site footer. RSS link is often there
• Click CTRL-F and search for rss
• If not found, I normally scroll carefully the navigation bar searching for things such as Syndicate or XML

I tend to use the CTRL-F search right after the icon seek. This is surely caused by my overdose of internet and bad information architecture experiences. I actually think that CTRL-F is the best browser feature.
To sum up, use an RSS icon and place it where it is really visible. Use text as well. RSS is often enough. Community Hacker Blog offers a good (a bit exaggerated) example:

The motivation to write this post comes from my today’s hard experience searching for an RSS button which by the way finished to be broken.

I am the youngest brother of a family of two. My sister is almost five years older than me. Life has taught me that being second is sometimes a big advantage. While i grew up, i met several situations where my sister had already faced trade offs. Her decisions and their consequences where the best mentor to take my own path. I took advantage from her school annotated old books, from her advice toward learning english outside the poor spanish educational system, from her experience doing the university in another city, from her work ethic. Moreover, my sister was the person that forced me to push myself through challenges. I am really different from my sister in several aspects but i am truly sure that the best sides of my character come from her experiences, which made my life lighter

In the world of software senior developers are like older brothers who coach us with their approach to problems and their design patterns. Great artists are for sure older brothers for designers. People to copy from. Americans are the european older brothers. We watched them in the last weeks buying iPhones. Their reactions and comments helped us to build our opinion. Being second sometimes means being ready to take the right decision.