Lessons Learned: A new way to recruit for (and find) startup jobs

• Lessons Learned: A new way to recruit for (and find) startup jobs

  tags: statups

• Online community best practices: Reward your top users / Brian Cray’s Blog

  tags: Community

  • 90% of your content is coming from that 1%, and there’s no better way to thank them than publicly. Public recognition also provides an example of good behavior for the other 90% or the new-comers who may one day be part of that elite 1%.

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My daily readings 07/31/2009

• What is a hard link? — definition by The Linux Information Project (LINFO)

  tags: Linux, ln

  • Hard links are created with the ln command. For example, the following would create a hard link named hlink1 to a file named file1, both in the current directory (i.e., the directory in which the user is currently working):

    ln file1 hlink1

    When a hard link is created, there is no obvious indication that it is any different from any other file. That is, hard links appear to be files of the same type as their target files (i.e., the files to which they are linked) when they are viewed with commands such as ls (i.e., list) and file (which is used to determine the type of any specified files). Likewise, when viewed in a GUI (graphical user interface), the icons for hard links are identical to those for their target files.

    That the initial name of a file and all hard links to that file all share the same inode can be clearly seen by using the ls command with its -i (i.e., inode) option. Thus, for example, the following would show that the inode numbers of file1 and hlink1 from the above example are identical:

    ls -i file1 hlink1

• iPhone Application Design Patterns — Flyosity: Mac & iPhone Interface Design

  tags: iPhone, App, Design

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My daily readings 07/30/2009

• “We are more possible than you can powerfully imagine” – Bad Science

  tags: no_tag

• Toyota Humanoid Robot Runs At 7 Km/hr | Singularity Hub

  tags: no_tag

  • The Asimo robot from Honda has been around for over a decade, so at first the humanoid robot from Toyota might not seem like much of an achievement.  Perhaps this is true…but after watching the video you will have to agree its still pretty darn cool.  Apparently the Toyota robot can only operate on conventional flat surfaces, whereas the Asimo robot is capable of walking up stairs and handling more diverse situations (except when it falls). 

• Cooper Journal: Dear Mr. Jobs, I have some ideas about how to improve your phone

  tags: iPhone, design, improvemnent

• Getting Good IO from Moody EBS

  tags: no_tag

  • Under perfect circumstances a totally untweaked EBS drive running an ext3 filesystem will get you about 80kb read or write throughput and 7000 seeks per second. Two disks in a RAID 0 cofiguration will get you about 140kb read or write and about 10,000 seeks per second, this represents the best numbers I’ve been able to get out of an EBS disk setup as it seems to be saturating the IO channel on the EC2 instance. (This makes sense as it would be about what you’d expect from gigabit ethernet). However, when the EBS drives are NOT running their best, which is often, you need a lot more tweaking to get good performance out of them.

• 40 Free and Useful GUI Icon Sets for Web Designers | Icons

  tags: icon, webdesign

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My daily readings 07/28/2009

• http://cr.yp.to/daemontools/multilog.html

  tags: log, rotate

  • The action

         ssize
    

    sets the maximum file size
    for subsequent dir actions.
    multilog will decide that current is big enough
    if current has size bytes.
    (multilog
    will also decide that current is big enough
    if it sees a newline within 2000 bytes of the maximum file size;
    it tries to finish log files at line boundaries.)
    size must be between 4096 and 16777215.
    The default maximum file size is 99999.

  • The action

         nnum
    

    sets the number of log files
    for subsequent dir actions.
    After renaming current,
    if multilog sees num or more old log files,
    it removes the old log file with the smallest timestamp.
    num must be at least 2.
    The default number of log files is 10.

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My daily readings 07/27/2009

• How We Learn

  tags: Education

  • When we talk about learning, we really mean two quite different things, the process of discovery and of mastering what one discovers. All children are naturally driven to create an accurate picture of the world and, with the help of adults to use that picture to make predictions, formulate explanations, imagine alternatives and design plans. Call it “guided discovery.”
  • As in the gear-and-switch experiments, children seem to learn best when they can explore the world and interact with expert adults.
  • In guided discovery – figuring out how the world works or unraveling the structure of making tortillas – children learn to solve new problems. But what is expected in school, at least in part, involves a very different process: call it “routinized learning.” Something already learned is made to be second nature, so as to perform a skill effortlessly and quickly.
  • Children would never tolerate baseball if all they did was practice. No coach would evaluate a child, and no society would evaluate a coach, based on performance in the batting cage. What makes for learning is the right balance of both learning processes, allowing children to retain their native brilliance as they grow up.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My daily readings 07/26/2009

• Foursquare: Why It May Be the Next Twitter

  tags: LBS, mobile

• Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise – ACM Queue

  tags: bookmark, enterprise

• Qitera: Social Bookmarking for the Deep Web – Annotated

  tags: Bookmark, enterprise

  • Among Qitera’s other interesting features are a Cover Flow-like view of your screenshots, the ability to rate other users’ shared items, and a news feed with updates from all your contacts.

• MarkItForLater.com :: Mark your pages. Read them later.

  tags: bookmark

• 6 reasons why my VC funded startup did fail | Code Monkeyism – Annotated

  tags: Startups

  • During the dot com boom I founded a software startup with some friends – with me as the CTO. We developed a software for knowledge management. It was a combination of blogs, wikis, a document management system, link managment, skill managment and more. We started in 1999 which was quite early for wikis and blogs (Moveable Type was announced 2001). The link management system was essentialy the same as Delicious later. Beside all those new ideas (for 1999 at least) there were three great features:

    • Everything could be tagged. Skills, people, links, documents, blog posts, wikis, something which is today called folksonomies. Tags could refer to other tags to form onthologies. Tags could link to other documents, blog posts, persons.
    • Everything could be rated from 1 to 5
    • We had a clever fuzzy search based on tags and ratings. Searching for “people with oracle knowledge” would also reveal experts for SQL Server – for example to stuff your project if an Oracle guru wasn’t available

  • So the most important thing is to sell – a fact lots of startups forget. And we did too. After much thought it comes down to these six reasons why we failed (beside the obvious one that the VC market imploded when we needed money and noone was able to get any funding):

    1. We didn’t sell anything
    2. We didn’t sell anything
    3. We didn’t sell anything
    4. The market window was not yet open
    5. We focused too much on technology
    6. We had the wrong business model
  • • You don’t need a product to start selling if it’s software. The first sales meetings with managment were perfectly possible with screenshots, mockups and slides. As the topic was new to our customers, we first needed to convince them on the concepts (wikis, blogs, tagging) and that could be done without a finished product.
    • Start selling before you found the company. Start selling now! You do not need to have a company to sell new ideas to customers. Start selling now! When people really want to buy your product, start the company.
  • So the topic of knowledge managment moved up the chain of command and we had no real decision maker. We talked to irrelevant people (because the topic became strategic fast for our customers) and lost lots of time. Ask people if they are allowed to buy your product. Get to the one who says “Yes” fast.
  • As others are practicing now we could have gotten our foot in the door with an open source project, then sell support and enterprise features on top. Companies later paid us money to put features into SnipSnap, make it scale better and for other enterprise thingies.

• Offline to Online Conversion Fail « TIME TO GET STARTED

  tags: no_tag

  • Two weeks later.  Have I downloaded or even listened to their music yet?  of course not.  Do I know where the card is?  No.  Even if i could find it, I would have to transcribe the information to the section of my notepad where I keep bands I want to research.   Even if my notepad were electronic (ie I own an iphone or blackberry), there is a serious loss of conversion from the content leads written down in the “to research” section of  my notepad to the content that I actually look up and consume.
  • Think about it.  What about cool stuff you see on TV that you want to research later?  Posters you see on the street?  Cool restaurants that you pass by?  Do you always remember to check that stuff out?  I don’t, but i wish i did.  It doesn’t matter what form the content is in- music, articles, videos- offline content capture is clumsy because the place where you keep your ideas is centralized but the places where you consume content are distributed.
  • Instead of displaying urls in movie theatres or handing out business cards on the streets, it would be better if advertisers could send text messages to all phones in a given location – everyone has their phone with them at all times, so that would solve the problem of decentralized content consumption.

• Archivd: Demos

  tags: research, tool, team, bookmark

• imgfave | share your visual inspiration

  tags: image, bookmark

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My daily readings 07/25/2009

• A Framework for Building Customer Experiences – Peter Merholz – HarvardBusiness.org

  tags: customer, service

• HOW TO: Use Twitter for Customer Service

  tags: twitter, CRM, customer, service

• How to Get Customer Service via Twitter

  tags: twitter, CRM, customer, service

• Real-Time Conversations Hasten Social CRM

  tags: twitter, CRM, customer, service

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My daily readings 07/24/2009

• DIARY OF A WEBSITE :: DESIGN BY CAFFEINE » Blog Archive » Wufoo and the art of customer service – Annotated

  tags: no_tag

  • Going beyond expectations

    My usual expectation of a service is that it works, plain and simply anything above that I usually don’t bother to wish would happen as often it’s just not worth it. We’d all like to feel we’re a valued customer but in this faceless day and age that doesn’t happen very much. Just like everyone else I usually settle for the service billing me correctly and not breaking down. It’s like we’ve all become desensitised to bad customer service. Even when things do break the margin we ‘grin and bear’ things about is just plain huge. The glee that I felt from this card from wufoo really only goes to show that in business if you do bother to go the extra mile you stand out a mile.

• 30 Examples of Extreme Minimalism in Web Design | SingleFunction – Annotated

  tags: design, minimalism

  • As a follow up on last week’s roundup of 105 Examples of Clean and Minimal Twitter Apps, I thought this week would be the time to share with everyone examples of extreme minimalism in web design, and how with minimal elements, when properly used, so much can be achieved.

• Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule

  tags: meeting, productivity

• Victor Keegan: Barcodes will be the next net revolution but only with smartphone support | Technology | The Guardian

  tags: no_tag

  • Barcodes are something of a marketer’s dream. This is not only because mobile phones, unlike the web, are a mecca for micropayments but, as Michael Bhaskar, co-founder of Quik Communications, has pointed out, this is “pull” marketing, getting people to come to you directly, rather than “push” – using a scattergun and hoping something will stick.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My daily readings 07/23/2009

• The Bump app for iPhone makes swapping contact information as simple as bumping two phones together | Bump Technologies, Inc.

  tags: contact, business, card

• CEO Letter | Zappos.com

  tags: zappos

• Google Docs, Slowly Morphing into Google Drive

  tags: Google, docs

  • 
  • At some point in the near future, Google Docs will allow you to upload any type of files. Some of the files can be edited, other files can be previewed online, while the rest of them are only stored online. For example, PDF files can’t be edited online, but you can view them and share them.

• 10 Ways to Use Social Media to Pick a College

  tags: social, media

  • It wasn’t until I visited the schools I was interested in and actually talked to students that I started to get a real picture of what university life was like at those schools. Thankfully, students of today don’t have quite the same problems, and that’s all because of social media. Here are 10 social media resources for high school students (and their parents) to use in order to find out more about what college life is really like at the school they plan to attend.
  • It was with that in mind that Luke Skurman founded College Prowler in 2002. The problem, Skurman thought, was that the people writing traditional college guidebooks were so far removed from the colleges that they couldn’t possibly know what life was really like for students. So Skurman decided to do the most logical thing: he hired students to write the guidebooks.
    • test – post by joel
  • Unigo offers a way for current students to rate and review the colleges they attend so that prospective students get a clearer idea of what life is actually like at the school. In addition to providing the basic information about each school — enrollment, tuition, how selective the school is, and notable alumni — Unigo also offers unique ratings on topics most guidebooks don’t cover, like drug and alcohol culture, political activity, and the accessibility of professors.

• Django in the Real World

  tags: no_tag

  • There’s plenty of material (documentation, blogs, books) out there that’ll
    help you write a site using Django… but then what? You’ve still got to
    test, deploy, monitor, and tune the site; failure at deployment time means
    all your beautiful code is for naught.
  • Along the way, I’ll discuss what’s behind some of sites I’ve got in
    production right now, especially the problems I ran into and how we
    solved them. I’ll also critique any production environments tutorial
    attendees would like to share with us.
    • test – post by joel

• File:Geometric series 14 square2.svg – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  tags: no_tag

  • Click on a date/time to view the file as it appeared at that time.
    • test 2 – post by joel
  • The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file (pages on other projects are not listed):

• Why we say yes to drugs | Salon Books

  tags: no_tag

  • Ryan Grim would understand this disconnect perfectly. One of the theses of his new book, “This is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America” — a cornucopia of unconventional wisdom about our relationship to mind-altering substances — is that the popularity of drugs waxes and wanes according to a complex sum of factors. One of those factors is the “perceived risk” of using a particular chemical, which also fluctuates. There’s a tendency to idealize new drugs, as the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal did with a recently isolated narcotic in 1900. “There’s no danger of acquiring a habit,” it assured its readers about the drug that had just emerged from the labs of the aspirin manufacturer, Bayer. They named it heroin.
    • test – post by joel

• Facebook Video: Now Serving 1 Billion Views A Month, Including This Amazing Zuck Impression

  tags: facebook

  • Of course, the best part of the video comes from a Facebook engineer named Putnam as he describes Mark Zuckerberg’s initial reaction to the Video idea. Just watch the clip below.
  • Also be sure to check out the full video, though beware of the ridiculously sappy piano music playing throughout.

• Xoopit

  tags: gmail, extension

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My daily readings 07/22/2009

• My Thoughts on NoSQL – Die in a Fire – Eric Florenzano’s Blog

  tags: nosql

  • In the late nineties and early thousands, websites were mostly read-only–a
    publisher would create some content and users would consume that content.
    The data access patterns for these types of applications became very
    well-understood, and as a result many tools were created and much research and
    development was done to further develop these technologies.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.