Great infographic from Mashable on the current state of tech & services that make up the average startup’s arsenal. Almost as cool as the spying features you get with http://builtwith.com/, it’s a good validation of the things most of us take for granted. Some surprises (Evernote? Omnigraffle?), but generally a good gauge of what’s out there, what’s hot, and what others are doing. If you’re stumped, just go with Google…
Nobody ever got fired for buying Google
Being born in Greece means having to explain a lot – how we could have mismanaged our economy for so long, why the Windex jokes in Big Fat Greek Wedding don’t really make sense and which of the famous Greek Isles to visit. The latter has been asked of me more than a hundred times. Rather than recycle the same email, here are my quick notes and thoughts. If you have additions or comments, please please add them in the comments. If you disagree, fuck off and go buy a guide book.
A work of art...
On April 1st, two friends and I launched a humorous art project called TweetForger. It lives at www.tweetforger.com. The idea came about when we were discussing the immense stock that people place in 140 characters. People use the medium to discuss their lunch, and yet the same platform starts revolutions and ends careers. There has been a proliferation of clients, platforms and ways to interact with Tweets, and we were very interested in how people consume that information.
Most important to me was the work behind the scenes. It has been a serious technical challenge to build something this quickly (~60 hours) that could scale well and retain its lightweight structure. It’s a validation of the technical skills I’ve been trying to develop but, even more, it’s the satisfaction of seeing a fun project come together in a few weeks and actually make people laugh.
I had a great professor in business school who used to quote that to us all the time. It was only later I found out there’s a second part. The whole quote goes like this:
Out of chaos, revenue; Out of discipline, profit.
That stuck with me, as it really does hold true across industries and time. Perhaps a look at the ad tech landscape (below) can highlight why there is such a tumultuous upheaval constantly taking place. It’s an ongoing arms race rife with the kind of nuance and industry jargon that ends up making people rich. I wish I understood more, but this is certainly an interesting view of the landscape. Here is the graphic, in all of its dizzying glory:
Chaos, for sure. But discipline?
Click on the photo for a full-size view, courtesy of http://www.adexchanger.com/.
There has been a noticeable lack of activity on this site for the past few months. And the activity that was on here seems pretty light on substance, in retrospect. The reasons are twofold – a new venture and a some fun side projects eating up my time.
Since January, I’ve been heading up product at a New York-based video startup. We plan to bring foreign-language video content to the world, and we are gaining awesome traction in the process. There is a great deal of niche demand in the US and abroad for high quality, in-language content from various regions. To date, this demand has either been served by illegal streaming sites and DVDs or simply gone unmet.
This is the kind of high quality TV and film content that routinely garners 30-40% ratings share in its own country, and could potentially have tremendous crossover appeal. So far, our demography has been about 30% from the region and 70% unaffiliated. That’s huge, and I’m reporting stats on nearly a million unique visitors per month. Needless to say, if we can string several of these niche audiences together, we could have something pretty big on our hands. I’ll post occasionally on this blog regarding the company, but would rather keep the two separate…
On another note, a fun side project I’ve been working on in a tech capacity is about to launch for April Fool’s day. It’s a bit of a gamble, in that it could piss off a lot of people, but it’s meant to be a lighthearted look at Twitter and social media, and we’ll see where it goes. More on that in another post.
To summarize: I’m back and eager to communicate…
Really simple white noise generator – allows me to tune out everything around me without having to listen to music (which I find equally distracting sometimes). Love the simple interface and easy-to-use options. Great example of what an ultra-simple, laser-focused value proposition looks like. This is the ultimate minimum viable product…
OMG. What an awesome tool. I just discovered Twilio and I am totally addicted… I mean, I had heard about how easy and powerful the tool is, but wow. The community is intensely helpful, and the documentation makes it easy to follow along and create powerful voice & sms interactivity for your applications.
Case in point: long distance for my parents. Continue reading
I always thought people who used this phrase were assholes. Now I’m one too…
I’ve got a meeting with Bartek Ringwelski, the founder of SkillSlate, this week. We chatted briefly at the Hunch Lunch, but I’m really curious to hear about how he and his team are attacking the problem of fragmentation and (un)sophistication in the urban labor market. My first startup, Fresh Maid Cleaning, attempted to fix this for one vertical, and we tried to do it by intermediating the channel. Continue reading
This is why I still love Google (via Geekosystem):
1.Go to Google maps.
2. Go to directions
3. Type Japan as the start location.
4. Type China as the end location.
5. Go to direction #43.
Schedule a time to buy me a beer.
