For people that don’t want to be clueless “business” leaders of tech companies (good article about that on Yishan Wong’s site) or the “Whartonite seeks code monkey” type.
http://innonate.com/hope/
http://viniciusvacanti.com/2010/09/13/cant-find-a-technical-co-founder-do-it-yourself/
Before upgrading one of my old computers from Win XP to Win 7, I looked through my programs and saw Lala Music Mover. It was really good to me while it lasted 
Here are some screenshots.
Yesterday I began the task of changing my Gmail username to something a little bit more professional (gordonmzhu). The problem is that I have tons of services connected to my old handle (adsense, feedburner, analytics, etc.). I thought about this quite a bit in the past few weeks and it was enough to give me paralysis, but I think I’ve found an almost painless way to go about this. I’ll update again when I finish the process.
This is true. I spent a few hours with the game over a period of several days. I spent real money on the game to see if doing so would make me care more about it. Nothing worked. I just couldn’t get into it. I looked into the ROI of growing one crop vs. another to maximize my time spent playing but realized that it didn’t mean anything to me. It wasn’t fun. It was like pulling teeth. It was boring and a huge waste of time.
I was inspired to get addicted because I saw that a lot of my friends were. From my very unscientific observations, I noticed two main things.
POINT1:
I grew up on console games and played a lot of them. My expectation of what is fun and what a game should be is pretty high. Farmville is not fun. It’s like pushing a button (see point 2). People that didn’t play a lot of games while they were growing up seem to like Farmville a lot more. This is because they have little or no expectations of what a game is or should be. They can’t be disappointed because they have no reference points.
POINT2 (thanks to Jim Young of Hot or Not and i/o ventures for this idea):
Farmville is a fancy way of setting up a button with a timer attached to it. I’m sure researchers have played this game with monkeys. Monkeys probably push the button over and over again. I’m not sure why but it is tempting for my human friends too. I believe there was also a popular iPhone app that was just a button that you had to push over and over at random intervals.
I kind of wish that I had majored in engineering in college. It’s too late now though (I majored in business). Instead, I’m teaching myself programming. I’m starting with Python at this web tutorial. From there I’m going to go into PHP/CSS/HTML and will attempt to build some websites that I’ve been thinking about for a while now.
The hardest part was starting. Having looked at the material for a few days now, it seems very manageable and is more fun than I thought it would be. If you come from a non-technical background and are trying to raise your tech-IQ it definitely can be done. Thinking that you need classes and the comforts of an instructor isn’t true if you’re motivated and have some hacker friends around. Having this mindset is very empowering, you feel like you can do anything.
If you’ve gone through this process before or have any tips, please let me know. Thanks.
WARNING: This is a long rambling post with no clear structure. Read only if extremely bored.
After visiting GoodCrush at Dogpatch Labs in NYC yesterday, I thought I would finally take the time to write down some of my thoughts on online dating.
When I was interviewing with venture capital firms in September last year, I started investigating online dating as a way to generate investment pitches that I could give in my interviews. It seemed like an area that was profitable and quickly growing. Also, it was something that embarassingly, I could relate to. Though I have never used online dating platforms beyond experimentation and research (of course), I was confident that I could take on the mindset of a real user that was thinking about spending money on these services. I could completely understand that for the right situation and person, jumping a virtual paywall could be irresistible. If people are willingly shelling out money for fake cows, there would surely be people willing to buy a dollar-date.
In thinking about services, I always approach things from a user perspective, I don’t think that you can even begin to understand the subtleties of what it means to use virtual currency in Facebook for example, without trying it yourself. I don’t think you can compare lala and iTunes without trying them side-by-side. I’ve tried all of these services and will even admit that I’ve spent money on Farmville just to see how it would feel (it really wasn’t not as bad as I thought, it was almost enjoyable).
There are few things that I think would drastically improve the online dating experience and they all have to deal with increasing the success rates of the matching mechanisms in each platform. Success rates aggregate a combination of many important factors:
I’ll focus on only one factor here that I think is the most important and feeds into everything else, Match Quality. This factor is so important that it can cloud the other factors. If you get really great matches, you’re more willing to deal with other problems.
Many people don’t use online dating because they think there are already a lot of high potential prospects in their immediate social network; namely friends, acquaintances, and friends of friends. The problem is, there is no good way to get to these people beyond Facebook. This is where Zoosk and Goodcrush come in. They tap into your existing networks to generate high-quality leads; this increases the match quality.
This is a big step for online dating and is a digression from the older players like eHarmony and Match.com. Still I think there is tons of room to improve. The most obvious thing to improve this is to combine these existing networks with better personality matching. Pictures and videos are good enough to judge physical attractiveness, but there hasn’t yet been a good way to control for personality risk. Sites like eHarmony have questionnaires, but I think the level of detail can be so much higher. An obvious solution would be to combine Hunch with all these dating services. Hunch could charge a fee to the dating sites to allow them to access Hunch data. To protect Hunch users from unwanted advances, there could simply be an opt-in at sign-up: “Are you interested in getting matches from Zoosk, Woome, etc?”
The value proposition for this new generation of dating sites could be very powerful. Exhaust your existing networks first with extremely detailed personality/behavioral matching and only then go after complete strangers. This not only improves matching quality, but also does something else that is extremely important; it removes a lot of the creepiness factor that exists in online dating. Now online dating isn’t about trawling the web hoping to find a lucky break, it’s simply a friend that sets you up with their friends. Maybe it shouldn’t even be called online dating; it’s more of a facilitator and tool vs. singles marketplace.
This is one of my favorite spoofs already. I think the best part is the very first word, “yeauuuuh.” These guys have talent! Check out their startup at www.grasshopper.com. Remember chocolate covered grasshoppers?
A year ago, I bought a new Lenovo tablet. I also bought a docking station to go along with the computer, because I planned to make this my sole machine. I would usually lug around my laptop during the day and then plug in a bunch of devices (printer, speakers, mouse, external monitor, etc) after getting home. This is always a huge pain. The docking station was a way to get around this problem. Instead of having to plug in all these peripherals, I would just drop my laptop into its dock.
Recently, I found a much better solution. At this stage, a lot of people have multiple computers. In my case, I have two laptops, the tablet and a full-sized 17 inch Asus laptop. To avoid the need to plug in accessories and constantly move around my single machine, I wanted a scenario where I would have a dedicated laptop that would never leave my backpack in addition to a more complete desktop system that would never leave my desk. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but believe me, it makes life so much easier.
That’s easy enough right? The problem is in syncing files. With Dropbox and Chrome bookmark sync though, everything is a breeze. I never use my dock now. Moral of the story… docks are useless. Just salvage your old notebook or desktop. Another solution is to use your most powerful system on your desk and get a cheap netbook to tote around.
After reading the previous post (One-Minute Pitch: “Course Aggregator”), a few friends asked me what such a site would actually look like. After thinking about it for a few seconds, I thought of Boxee. Boxee brings together disparate media sources such as photos, music from your computer/online, shows from NBC/ABC/Hulu/Youtube, and paid sources like Netflix. It allows you to consume all this content using a beautiful interface via computer or TV. That’s what I’d imagine CA to look like, a Boxee for education.