November 2011
7 posts
Startups are hard so do what you love.
I recently read Michael Arrington’s post “Startups Are Hard. So Work More, Cry Less, And Quit All The Whining” and it struck me as extremely shortsighted and even propaganda-ish. It appears I was right. The article references Jamie Zawinski’s diary, written in 1994, in which Jamie details his experience being on the early engineering team at Netscape. The diary has...
Greg Joswiak on the Four Keys to Apple's Success
http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/11/18/four-keys-to-apples-success/
“Don’t hang on to ideas from the past even if they have been successful for you. You don’t build a product just because everyone else has one.”
Great insight into what makes Apple tick.
Zinio Raises $20 Million
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/23/zinio-raises-20-million-for-digital-newsstand/
Zinio provides global access to thousands of magazine titles from most major publishers in a variety of languages. The company’s website allows publications to be read online or offline on desktop computers (Windows, Mac OS X and Linux) and mobile devices such as the iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, WebOS and Android handsets...
Sketchbook of Susan Kare
The Sketchbook of Susan Kare, the Artist Who Gave Computing a Human Face
“Inspired by the collaborative intelligence of her fellow software designers, Kare stayed on at Apple to craft the navigational elements for Mac’s GUI. Because an application for designing icons on screen hadn’t been coded yet, she went to the University Art supply store in Palo Alto and picked up a $2.50 sketchbook so...
Software Complexity
Something fellow engineers and developers can relate to is the issue of the perception of complexity in software. Matt Gemmell wrote an interesting little piece on the subject a while back that I refer to ever so often when I find myself in the “Zone of Despair”.
”You have a task which starts off seeming simple, then upon further thought and exploration it becomes considerably...
Get your Androids! Only a Penny!
http://www.launch.is/blog/bezos-gone-wild-amazon-selling-every-non-iphone-smartphone-f.html
“Through next Monday, Amazon is selling all non-iPhones for one penny with a new two-year contract.”
Will amazon making a killing? You betcha.
Quantity over quality anyone?
Lean Startup
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6659.html
“Most startups fail not because they can’t build the product they set out to build, but because they build the wrong product, take too long to do that, waste a lot of money doing that, and waste a lot of money on sales and marketing trying to sell that wrong product”
Truth. Feedback early and often is the key these days.
