You Learn Something New Every Day!

people don’t share facts, they share feelings.

2012-06-10T00:26:00.000-07:00

Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web (Voices That Matter)

(Page 19). Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman studied the most-emailed articles on the New York Times over more than a six-month period, totaling 7,500 items. They expected to find content that included factual information that might help others, such as diets or gadgets, but instead found that people shared the content that triggered the most arousing emotions. This included positive emotions such as awe, and negative emotions such as anger and anxiety. Emotions that were not arousing, for example sadness, did not trigger sharing of content. Content that is positive, informative, surprising, or interesting is shared more often than content that is not, and content that is prominently featured is shared more often than content that is not, but these factors are minor compared to how arousing the content is. These findings have important implications for advertising.
(Page 19). BMW ran a successful campaign called “The Hire,” which induced feelings of anxiety through elaborate car chases and generated millions of views. Content that is non-arousing, for example, content that makes people feel comfortable and relaxed, is unlikely to be shared. Public health information may spread more effectively if it induces feelings of anxiety rather than sadness.
(Page 25). People are very conscious of being seen to be communicating information others will find interesting, funny, or useful.

Will You Be E-Mailing This Column? It’s Awesome

If you read the article and feel the same emotion, it will bring us closer together.

When I saw that video wall in central, I did the same thing. I had to post it to facebook and I made it public when almost all my other posts are shared with no one else

Build associations with things that are in people's environment

2012-06-09T00:14:00.000-07:00

Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web (Voices That Matter)

Page 21). Products that are visible and accessible will be talked about more. Products that are not naturally in people’s environment need to build associations with things that are in people’s environments. Yet, samples are not a substitute for the actual thing. Coupons and samples do not drive more conversations, but giving people the full product to try, so that it is consistently in the person's environment, can lead to a 20 percent increase in conversations about that product.

Human psychology

2012-06-08T23:53:00.001-07:00

Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web (Voices That Matter)

(Page 16). if people laugh together with strangers, they are as generous to them as they are to their friends.
(Page 16). people often respond by liking or commenting on the content, not because they actually like the content but because they want to send out a social signal to build the relationship.
(Page 17). we are driven to preserve a positive reputation.
(Page 20). Offline, many of our conversations are driven by a need to avoid awkward silences.
(Page 23). we talk to the same, small group of people again and again. Research shows that people have consistent communication with between 7 and 15 people, but that most conversations are with our five strongest ties. We communicate with the same 5 to 10 people 80 percent of the time. Keller Fay found that 27 percent of our conversations are with our spouse/partner, 25 percent are with a family member, and 10 percent are with a best friend. That’s 62 percent of our conversations with the people closest to us. Only 5 percent of our conversations are with acquaintances, and only 2 percent are with strangers. The remaining 31 percent is with the rest of the people in our social network.

Sometimes the world actually works very differently than how we want the work to work

2012-06-08T23:42:00.000-07:00

Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web (Voices That Matter)

(Page 11). This focus on “influentials” is mostly based on a view of how we want the world to work versus how it actually works. Marketing would be easier if these influentials did exist.

The web is aligning itself more closely with how things work offline

2012-06-08T23:37:00.000-07:00

Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web (Voices That Matter)

(Page 9). Human behavior changes much more slowly than technology
(Page 9). Despite huge advances in communication technology over the past 200 years—for example, the invention of the telegraph, telephone, mobile phone, text messaging, instant messaging, and video calling—our social network structure has largely stayed the same.
(Page 10). We’re now seeing the things we have done socially for
thousands of years move online. The emergence of the social

web is simply our online world catching up with our offline

world.

Focus on the communication and interaction you enable between people who care about each other

2012-06-08T23:31:00.000-07:00

Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web (Voices That Matter)

(Page 9). Instead, those who are successful with the social web today focus less on the technology itself and more on the communication and interaction it enables with the people they care about.
(Page 17). More than the act of sharing content, marketing
campaigns need to support conversations.
(Page 18). Build marketing campaigns that grow social bonds. For example, for
Mother’s Day, the online florist 1-800-flowers.com used Facebook

to have mothers vote on the products that they would prefer to

receive as a gift. this generated stories in the News Feed, to be

seen by their children. the motivation to grow social bonds led to

four out of the five top-selling Mother’s Day products being the

ones voted for on Facebook.

Build marketing campaigns that enable people to help each other. S

ephora fans on Facebook organized to send each other unused

cosmetics samples. One person starts a box of 30 samples, sends

it to someone else who takes 15 samples out and adds 15 of their

samples back, before sending it on to a third person who does

the same, and so on.

(Page 23). Research shows that people use social networks primarily to
strengthen the bonds with their strong ties, and secondarily

to build relationships with weak ties. When we looked at how

many different people members communicated with directly

on Facebook every week, including private messages, chats,

wall posts, and likes and comments on status updates, we saw

that the average was just 4 people. When we looked at how

many different people they communicated with every month,

it was only 6 people. This is despite the fact that these people

are checking Facebook almost every day.

Other research has

shown that the more people see each other in person or talk on

the phone, the more they communicate online.

Bolting on social features will not work

2012-06-08T23:21:00.000-07:00

Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web (Voices That Matter)

(Page 8). Don’t think about the social web as a set of features to add on to your existing site. The social web is not about adding a “like” button or a “share” button to your web pages. bolting on social features will not work, because we don’t bolt on social behavior offline. we’ve seen how Zynga, Facebook Photos, and etsy reinvented businesses by designing around people. Think of the social web like you think of electricity. it’s always there, powering everything else. social behavior is the same: always there, motivating us to act. it should be placed in the center of the development process.

Sweep the Sleaze

The web is entering its third phase of development.

2012-06-08T23:07:00.001-07:00

Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web (Voices That Matter)

(Page 8). The web is entering its third phase of development. The first phase (left) was documents linked together. For businesses this often meant copying and pasting their print marketing materials online. when we interacted with websites, we couldn’t interact with other people. with the second phase (middle) we started seeing opportunities for interaction with others. some websites had reviews, and ways to leave comments. Many businesses simply added social network buttons to their existing site pages. This was social behavior being bolted on. we are now entering the third phase (right), where websites are being rebuilt around people. social behavior is the key feature. it is not bolted on.
(Page 7). There is overwhelming evidence that the web is being rebuilt around people. This is not a small change, it’s a fundamental re-architecture. We’re moving away from a web that connects documents together to a web that connects people together. A person’s profile, which tells us the things they care about, and their connections, which tells us who they trust, will move with them as they move from website to website. This fundamental re-architecture of the web is going to affect almost all businesses, because almost all businesses revolve around people. We watch movies and go to concerts with our friends. We ask travel advice and go traveling with our friends. We buy things when we’re with friends. We share news with our friends. Even with traditionally conservative business verticals such as finance, we turn to friends for advice—on the best bank to join, or what mortgage rate is reasonable. Businesses that place people, rather than content or technology, at the center of their business model are thriving and in some cases outperforming incumbents.

The web is being rebuilt around people

2012-06-08T21:55:00.000-07:00

Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web (Voices That Matter)

(Page vi). It’s moving away from being built around content, and is being rebuilt around people.
(Page 3). Facebook Photos was not built around the content, it was built around the people, and people cared much more about seeing their friends than seeing high-resolution photos, or beautiful landscapes.
(Page 5). Etsy has a version of its website that has been built around people. It connects with Facebook to allow you to choose a friend to buy for, and then reorganizes the content around the things that person has “liked” on Facebook. Suddenly, it’s much easier to buy a gift that you think you friend will like.
(Page 7). We’re moving away from a web that connects documents together to a web that connects people together. A person’s profile, which tells us the things they care about, and their connections, which tells us who they trust, will move with them as they move from website to website.

Geckboard

2012-01-13T22:15:00.001-08:00

Good

Bad

MixPanel widget failed to import funnels

So how about a … site that let’s you find who is the best at something

2009-08-26T13:01:00.001-07:00

Pitch

Who is the best person at doing something?

The site would let you ping your friends and also the general public with one question. For example, “Who is the best programmer you know? or What is the best burger joint in the SF? Answers have to be in the format of name, url and email. The website would automatically ping that person and ask the same question. The website would automatically tally the results and let you know who is the best.

Features:

Facebook/ Open Social App so that you can easily send to your friends
Live update of questions on the site so that anyone can answer the question. Maybe weight the answers of your social network higher than those of your friends

So how about a … Birthday Store

2009-08-22T11:03:00.000-07:00

Pitch

BlueMountain.com for gifts

Sometimes, it’s quite hard to pick a gift for someone. The Birthday store would let you go on into the store or use the website and specify age, gender and some interests and it would automatically present some options for individual gifts or package for a person’s bday. So for example, you could get an adventure gift pack for a baby boy’s first bday and so on.

Future

Can be extended to other occasions: Anniversaries, Baptisms and so on.
Remind people about upcoming occasions and suggest gifts

Monetize:

Purchase price for gifts and gift packages

Competition:

ThingsRemembered
Hallmark
BlueMountain

So how about an … Automated compiler error fixer

2009-08-13T11:36:00.001-07:00

Update 20090905 : resharper does this: http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/documentation/presentation/overview/quick-fixes/qf_ca_demo.htm

Pitch:

When compilers encounter a syntax error, they usually just give you more information about the error. But the majority of my compiler errors are trivial to fix (bad case, wrong prefix etc). What I want is a compiler that abides by my principle of “If you tell me there’s a problem, I want you to offer at least two solutions”

Features:

Automatically lets user apply fix to common compiler errors.
Allows batch fixing of errors that are the same.

Monetize:

Trial-Buy
Freemium

Isn't social the opposite of secret?

2009-08-13T11:12:00.000-07:00

Apple Planning Some Super Secret Social App?: "

Again, this is nothing but a very vague rumor for the time being, but it’s also very interesting. Following up on its iTunes 9 rumors, Boy Genius Report claims to have new details from the same trusted source about what iTunes 9, and specifically the social aspects of it, will entail.

As expected, the tipster says you’ll be able to broadcast songs you’re listening to out to various social networks. But the really interesting thing is the reference to some new social application that Apple is supposedly getting ready to launch. It’s not clear at all if this would be a desktop app or an iPhone app, but it is said to be something that consolidates your various social networking activity from around the web into one place.

Is Apple planning a FriendFeed-killer after Facebook has already essentially killed FriendFeed? That would certainly give the team a good reason to sell, if they caught wind of that. But who knows, it could be anything, or it could very well be nothing. Hopefully we all know by now how rumors, especially Apple rumors, work.

Regardless of what Apple has in store, if there are social elements added to iTunes, it will be a big move for the company. Right now, they basically have absolutely no social strategy beyond a bit of Facebook and Flickr integration in iPhoto. And yes, there are plenty of apps that use Facebook Connect, but that has basically nothing to do with Apple itself.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

So how about a … Web Alarm Clock

2009-08-12T17:20:00.000-07:00

Pitch:
Dead simple way to set an alarm.

User Experience:

One web page. You go to the site, no login or anything. Enter your phone number and pick a time and hit Done.

Website calls you at that time.

Features:

Snooze (Press 1 for 10 minutes, 2 for 20 minutes and so on)
Voice recognition to snooze (Optional)

Monetize:

Ads on the page
Ads when the phone calls you

Company Culture

2009-08-05T20:44:00.000-07:00

Just read through all 128 (2^7, i like) slides on Netflix's culture.

Lot's to learn here, but here's what caught my eye:

s7: True company values are shown in hiring, promotions and firings
s26: "adequate performance gets a generous severance package"
s27: "Netfix is a pro sports team, not a family" (Auren Hoffman blogged about this Netflix mantra two weeks ago)
s33: Effectiveness is more directly relevant than hard work
s40: Increase employee freedom as company grows
s53: Grow talent density faster than inevitable business complexity
s54: Increase talent density by hiring less people than average, at top of talent and top of market compensation
s55: Decrease business complexity by having few large products vs many small one
s61: Focus on preventing unrecoverable mistakes instead of recoverable ones
s62: Get rid of rules when you can
s78: Favor context over control
s90: Groups should be highly aligned and loosely coupled
s123: Continuous Success (Continuous growth in rev, profit rep) requires rapid innovation & excellent execution

Culture

View more presentations from reed2001.

So how about a … Dynamic weather site

2009-08-04T11:52:00.001-07:00

Pitch:

The UI of the site matches the current weather. So bright UI for sunny, dark for cloudy, moon for night time. Basically a site that changes based on the weather and time of day.
Provide API so that other non weather sites can take advantage of this functionality

Monetize:

Ads on the main site
Charge API users based on usage and new features.

So how about a … Reporting and Analytics App for startups

2009-02-11T18:36:00.000-08:00

Pitch

Pixel and API based analytics and reporting. Not just traffic, but everything about a website. Easy to add new items to measure. Easy to configure new items

Features / Use Cases

Reporting System - click on any date and see a time line of everything that happened on that date similar to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_14 & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1028. This may lead to the ability to graph events on any graph and also find correlations that are now apparent.
- For example, clicking on the date for when a coupon code was activated would show all the events for that day and you may find that registrations increased and so on.
breakdown of what sites people visit by hour .
path users take through the site .
analyze Google trends or some other service to detect what changes/events cause the most amount of press. So as you do a change, record the Google trend number before and after .
For a specific user ability to know how they were acquired them .
When recording data ability to set markers of events to see impact of external and internal events.

References

2009

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2006/05/the-10-90-rule-for-magnificient-web-analytics-success.html

Competition

Overture

Context is important ...

2008-09-18T14:07:00.000-07:00

Q: What's the first thing you think of when you see this image?

Scroll down for the answer...

...

...

...

A: Did you think "Door". Here's what I thought :)

Why? Because I saw the picture in the context of an article about real world emoticons.

Would I have recognized the "smiley" pattern if I saw this door without being in context of "smileys"?

Similarly, the quest to get computers to think like human's will require same way to computers to acquire the same context humans have based on their daily experiences.

As an aside, if we want computers to think like humans, we better be prepared for them to make mistakes like humans do. Computers today do exactly what they are programmed to do. Are we ready for a world where computers possess other human traits such as "intuition"? Intuition can be wrong.

Startups, founders and ownership

2008-08-31T16:07:00.000-07:00

There are a number of cases where initial ownership percentages in a startup end up being unfair to one or more of the cofounders. For example:

The third missing cofounder at govWorks.com: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup.com
The facebook cofounders: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

There are a number reasons for this. Maybe it's because one founder ends up working harder/longer/more passionately than the other founders even though they all have the same equity stake. Or maybe its because one founder is working fulltime on the startup and taking all the risk while the other founders with the same equity have jobs and aren't as motivated or bearing all the risk. In any case, the result is the same: resentment, infighting, loss of focus, legal battles and so on.

I’ve been thinking about this problem and here’s my solution:

First let’s split the life of a startup into two parts:

Bootstrap Stage: In the beginning, the startup is just an idea/project along with some people (lets call them contributors) who believe in the vision and are willing to contribute their time to work on it. Assumptions:

The contributors may or may not be working fulltime on the project. They may have a day job and may be moonlighting on the startup.
They contributors aren’t drawing a salary either. It’s just sweat equity. They are basically contributing their time for a share of the company.
The startup have not incorporated.

Post Bootstrap Stage:
- The startup has incorporated and is a real company now with shareholders, board of directors, officers and employees.
- The founders are officers and employees who work fulltime for the startup and are being paid a salary.

Based on these assumptions, here is how to allocate ownership

Bootstrap stage:

There are no founders in the bootstrap stage, only a project with contributors who are working unpaid, fulltime or part time.
Each contributor is treated as an per hour contractor. As a result they have to fill out daily timesheets and log the hours they spend directly working on the project.
Contributors can leave the project at any time. Contributors who leave will be compensated at incorporation for their contribution as long as they do not leave to work on a competing project or use the assets to create a competing project
Contributors can go fulltime/ part time on the project at any time. Nothing changes except that they now log more hours working on the projects
The following events require active contributors to vote:
- Adding new contributors
- Taking in external investment
- Expenses
- Incorporation
Each contributors vote is weighted by the percentage of hours they have worked on project to date.

Post bootstrap stage

The bootstrap stage ends when the company incorporates. Here is how the outstanding shares are assigned at incorporation:

Assume the founders have full control of 100% of the outstanding shares at incorporation (If there are investors or an employee pool, dilute accordingly. Working with a 100% number makes the math easier to understand)
Only 20% of the outstanding shares are reserved for work contributions prior to incorporation.

The 20% is split based on the hours put in by each contributor up to that point. This includes contributors who may no longer be working on the project. The 20% is assigned as stock and not options.

The rest 80% of outstanding shares is split equally amongst all the founders with a 4 year vesting period with no cliff

Any active contributor at incorporation time can decide to become a founder if they are willing to work fulltime for the company as soon as the company incorporates

These rules may appear to be complex, but they are actually simpler in practice. Also, as you can see, they are designed to reward people fairly for their actual contributions.

Are you an “idea guy” or an “implementer guy”?

2008-08-08T20:28:00.000-07:00

Just came back from a great dinner with a bunch of engineering folk including Jeff Atwood of coding horror and stack overflow fame.

At dinner, Jeff mentioned that he was more of an “implementer guy” as opposed to an “idea guy”.

That got me thinking about which one I am.

At EA, I was an “implementer guy”. We had producers who were paid to come up with ideas and us engineers who were paid to implement them. Of course, we engineers often came up with interesting ideas on how to implement these features, but for the most part, we were basically implementing someone else's ideas.

At TrueMoney, my current startup, I’d say that I am “idea guy” and “implementer guy”, since TrueMoney was born out of my vision for the next generation of personal finance software. However since I was the only engineer, I was also “implementer guy” and I developed from scratch both the vision prototype in the video and also the tech prototype to showcase the algorithms I created.

However, if I survey the sum total of my ideas and implementations, I’d have to say that I am more of an “idea guy” because the rate at which I come up with ideas is greater than the rate at which I implement them. I get new ideas for features, products and companies all the time. I’d say on average I get an idea for a new feature every week, a new product every two weeks and a new company every month. I’ve written down all of them and I’m using this blog to share them with the world since I don’t have time to implement all of them. Btw, one of my ideas was a Youtube for ideas focused on letting people with ideas find other people who are interested in working on the same idea.

Is it better to be the “idea guy” rather than the implementer guy”?

To me, ideas by themselves aren’t worth much, it’s all in the implementation. I value ideas less than implementation because I know how easy it is for anyone to come up with ideas, but extremely hard to execute and deliver on those ideas. Maybe it’s also because I have so many ideas that I’ve written down over the years that haven’t seen the light of day because of a number of reasons. In any case, in my book I’d pick one “implementer guy” over two “idea guys” any day.

So how about a … Youtube for ideas

2006-12-09T17:00:00.000-08:00

Pitch

Youtube for ideas (startup, product, book, game, software)

Allow people to share ideas for startups, products, product enhancements, books, games, software and so on. Other people can rate and vote on ideas.

Features

Phase 1
- CRUD for ideas and ability to make them private or public
- Embed your ideas on other sites
- Extremely easy. Require as few steps as possible easy to create new idea
Future
- keep track of suggestions to generate app ideas. Maybe automatically generate ideas based on the suggestions
- Partner with godaddy to provide realtime domain names that are available
- Always default to the last idea the user was working on
- Put in ideas that other people have created to encourage viral growth. So for example, any user can “upload” ideas on behalf of another user and let the original person who came up with the idea claim it
- Make versions and phases and explicitly callout them out, so that people are aware that they need to be thinking in terms of that
- When an improvement turns into a product or a product is based on another product, track the forks and branches and also if the improvements come back to the original product
- Ideas can start out as improvement to a product and then can be upgraded into a new product
- New products can be downgraded to improvement to existing product
- Users can vote up ideas and individual features of the ideas.
- Idea creators can rank ideas in order of execution or some other order
- Each feature or atomic concept should have it's own section and you can move atoms over and under each other to built a hierarchy. People can comment on individual atoms to give feedback, indicate competitors and so on
- Users can find people to start the startup

References

Competition