Over 100 variations of illustrations created from the logo of a fried chicken restaurant in Venezuela by artist Juan Salas. It’s been a while since the last time I saw something this interesting.
Link: Transmutation: Los Primeros 100
- via Drawn.caFrom Marty Zwilling, Startup Professionals:
“It is true that motion in any direction is often better than no motion at all. But motion without momentum is even less productive than no motion at all.”
Twitter cofounder and CEO Evan Williams was invited by the White House today to join a “young business leaders” summit to discuss the economic crises.
image from VentureBeat
Link: Searching for the wisdom of the twits (VentureBeat.com March 5th, 2009)
*Update from EV on Twitter: Lessons from today: Obama’s team: smart and committed. Learned a lot and was inspired. Also: people should take my tweets less seriously.
- via Silicon Alley InsiderSeth Godin says:
If you want to grow, you need new customers. And if you want new customers, you need three things:
1. A group of possible customers you can identify and reach.
2. A group with a problem they want to solve using your solution.
3. A group with the desire and ability to spend money to solve that problem.
Posting here to remind myself for future projects.
Link: Three things you need if you want more customers
-via Seth’s blogA few days ago I came across a great conversation between two well-known bloggers Fred Wilson and Jason Calacanis on the topic of life in public and the costs associated with it. Thought it’s a nice topic to share.
With a tragic story told about his friend Josh Harris and the Sundance-winning film We Live in Public, Jason wrote on his newsletter:
We’re all canaries in the coal mines now … We’re harvesting our lives and putting them online. We’re addicted to gaining followers and friends (or email subscribers, as the case may be), and reading comments we get in return. As we look for validation and our daily 15 minutes of fame, we do so at the cost of our humanity.
Fred, in response, points out that our social behavior evolves with changes in technologies and communication methods, and we as a society will be able to build real accountability while adapting this process. He then concludes with a following set of rules based on his own experience:
1. Keep your family out of it until they want to be in it
2. Be nice
3. Demand that others are nice back
4. Encourage the community to police the comments. Early on Jackson was my “bouncer” and now Kid Mercury has assumed that role
5. Take the nasty comments lightly and use humor to defuse them
6. Do not delete comments unless they are hateful to others, porn, or spam
7. Ignore the trolls even though it kills you
8. Be careful with photos. They greatest lesson I got was when I posted a photo of me on vacation looking smug. Bad move that I learned a lot from
9. Give more than you take
10. Enjoy yourself. Talking, discussing, and debating is fun. Keep it that way
The two articles can be found here. Great reads:
We Live in Public (and the end of empathy) - by Jason Calacanis
Living In Public Doesn’t Have To Be Destructive - by Fred Wilson
Via Susan Mernit’s blog:
“Part of being a successful artist is to make amazing art– seemingly effortlessly. But this is the rub– to make amazing work you have to make a lot of stuff that kinda sucks. That may seem obvious, but when you reach a place where you’re work is selling at a consistent pace and supporting yourself and your, ahem, habits, it’s very easy to feel like you’ve got it all dialed out. Making work that sucks suddenly doesn’t seem like an option, it feels like a waste of time. It’s very easy to convince yourself that everything that comes off your fingertips should be good and reflect your masterful craftmanship. When it’s not, failure is something to be disposed of quickly.”
Leave politics aside, the Obama campaign logo was a popular topic among design blogs during the election time. The interview with the design lead Sol Sender was just out on YouTube a few days ago (from the design agency VSA Partners). It’s great to hear the creative process and see the various design options being laid out in one page.
I really like the one in the final list (at 6:15). It is surprisingly inspiring.
Video Part 2: Sol Sender - Obama Logo Design Part 2 of 2
Related Article on NYT: The ‘O’ in Obama
Related Article on LogoDesignLove: Obama logo ideas that weren’t chosen
This week’s Sunday Business section on New York Times has an interesting article about Yahoo!’s approach revamping their homepage: one bit at a time.
Comparing to having a beta page that migrates users gradually, changing things bit by bit is not the practice that I am very familiar with. But the idea itself - to let users to adopt new usage patterns in a step by step fashion - does seem very practical and convincing to me. For websites that have millions of customers (including my company), any change, whether it’s good or bad, runs a huge risk of alienating existing users, and the impact is sometimes unpredictable.
Well, think Facebook’s recent profile / app platform changes.
“If you go from light to dark by flipping a switch, your eyes may hurt for a minute or two, you may end up being able to see faster if you use the dimmer.” - Tapan Bhat, Yahoo!
Link: Changing That Home Page? Take Baby Steps (NYT Oct. 17, 2008)
Today’s buzz word is Google Chrome. After trying it out for a few hours, I can say my experience was mostly good. Love the clever UI (finally, combination of the Address and the Search bar), speedy as advertised.
Forget the positive/negative comments on your favorite tech blogs, here is a really nice article from GigaOm on why a Google browser matters:
On GigaOm: Google Browser Puts the Cloud To Work
Related Article on Wired: Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web
Muxtape.com - Screen capture
Muxtape.com (an online service that allows users to upload mp3s and create digital mix tapes) was shut down yesterday citing problems with the RIAA, and I just found out why Pandora.com (a popular personalized internet radio service) has also decided to pull the plug:
Last year, an obscure federal panel ordered a doubling of the per-song performance royalty that Web radio stations pay to performers and record companies.
Traditional radio, by contrast, pays no such fee. Satellite radio pays a fee but at a less onerous rate, at least by some measures.
As for Pandora, its royalty fees this year will amount to 70 percent of its projected revenue of $25 million, Westergren said, a level that could doom it and other Web radio outfits.
Having listened to the lecture podcast Music Artists Go Entrepreneurial (mentioned in my earlier post) , I got a picture of what’s happening between the music industry and the online content distributors, and how the artists (the real content owners) try to bypass them both using social media tools. It seems ironic to me that the fight is more about the ownership of the Internet, rather than the content itself.
Link: Giant of Internet Radio Nears Its ‘Last Stand’
Update 07/07/2009: Pandora: “Royalty Crisis Is Over” for Internet Radio Companies
A series of weekly lecture podcast provided by Stanford Technology Ventures Program. Speakers include Larry Page (Google), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Sue Decker (Yahoo) and leaders from various industries such as web2.0, biotech, venture capital, academic and entertainment.
I especially enjoyed the latest episode on Music Business Entrepreneurship with Quincy Jones III, Chamillionaire, MC Hammer, and Mistah FAB. The content is very informative and honest.
The technology blog TechCrunch has a recent post on Startup Presentation Tips quoting the email from Jason Calacani’s mailing list (the founder of Silicon Alley Reporter, Weblogs and Mahalo). It caught my attention as the topic is relevant to my work and it’s also very useful in many real-life situations.
Other than tips such as “Show your product within the first 60 seconds”, or “Talk about what you’ve done, not what you’re going to do”, I find this particular one amusing:
9. How to handle questions you don’t know the answer to
a) take a moment to think about the question. You can even say “Hmmm… that’s a good question. Let me think about that for a second.” Folks appreciate a little consideration when someone takes a question.
b) if you don’t have an answer be honest and say you don’t. There are many ways to say this including: “I’m not really sure, I’m going to have to think about that for a bit and get back to you,” or “I’m not sure to be honest. What do you think?”
c) feel free to think out loud and brainstorm with the person. You can do this by saying “I’ve never really considered that. Perhaps you can expand the question a little and we can explore it right now.”
d) if you’re not sure of the answer you can always say you’ll cross that bridge when you come to it. “I’m not sure how we would deal with a sudden spike in the cost of bandwidth, we would have to collect more information and answer that question down the road. It is a manageable risk factor I suppose. ”
The worst thing to do when you don’t have an answer is b.s. the person. No one has an answer for everything, except a b.s. artists. So, feel free to say you don’t know–folks find it refreshingly humbleand honest.
Link: How To Demo Your Startup
I read an interesting article on Read Write Web yesterday about the gradual transformation of the blogging landscape through concepts such as micro-blogging, lifestreaming or widgetization.
I don’t think what’s been described in the article necessarily represents the “future” per se (well, at least not yet), but this one-small-piece-at-a-time, or the bite-sized approach for content generation seems to be a common character and a trend that is hard to ignore.
Yongfook.com (above), one of the websites mentioned, is an new type of blogging format that combines custom widgets and the Twitter-ish, chronologically-ordered content structure. I find this communication style has scary similarities to the Facebook Walls.
Link: The Future of Blogging Revealed
-via Read Write WebGreat statistics for those who are interested in the usage trends of Social Networking websites.
The only social networks studied that didn’t have more women than men in the 18-24 year old group were venerable old LinkedIn (where incidentally the 25-34 age group was tops) and a site called Perfspot.
Other highlights:
- Women ages 14-24 dominate activity on social networks and have more friends than men of the same ages.
- Men ages 35+ are more active and have more friends than women of the same ages.
- The average social network user has 2-25 friends.
- There are a disproportionately high number of 69 year olds across various social networks. (my guess is that it’s the most popular ‘fake age’)
Link: Study: Women Outnumber Men on Most Social Networks
-via Susan Mernit’s BlogCuil.com was a hot topic yesterday.
Follow up to my earlier post on search engines, I am not sure if I can describe this as “diversity of the Web” … well, it is surely entertaining.
Eric Schmidt
Larry Page
Ghandi
Paul Graham
Link: The World According to Cuil
Related Article: Try Yuil
This post has made my day … with a bit of bitterness.
At its charming new stock price of $12, the New York Times Company (NYT) has an enterprise value of about $2.85 billion. As BusinessWeek’s Jay Yarow notes, after you back out all the non-core stuff, that means that the New York Times itself–the paper and the digital assets–are valued at about $750 million. That’s less than half of what CBS just paid for CNET…
Link: Announcing Our Offer For The New York Times Company
- Via Silicon Alley Insider
