Competition

When we look at technology we use everyday, the great success stories all have one thing in common: competition. They all achieved their success despite healthy competition, or perhaps because of it.

9 Ways to Know When to Jump Ship at a Startup

For the last couple of months I’ve been plagued with wondering if I should stay at my current startup. I’ve been approached with a few different job offers that I haven’t followed up on, and maybe it’s time I pursued greener pastures. In the words of the Clash: should I stay or should I go now?

Magazine Review: October 2007 Issue of Inc. Magazine

I came to a rather startling discovery in the past month: magazines are just blogs with the added luxury of being able to read them while on the toilet or in the bathtub (but hopefully not both).

I picked up the October issue of Inc. magazine because Joel Spolsky of Joel On Software has joined the magazine. I’m a Joel fan-boy. Internet Duct Tape was inspired by Joel on Software. Here are some random thoughts from spending a rainy Saturday flipping through the pages. Can this possibly be entertaining or of value to my readers? I have no idea.

9 Techniques to Promoting Your Social Web Application

How do you build a web app that has traction, gain users and hopefully explodes virally? I’ve been paying attention to this space for far too long and this is a round-up of the tricks and techniques successful and not-so-successful social web applications use to promote themselves.

The Problem With Social Web Applications

This is an exciting time because unlike traditional software that runs on your computer [1], web applications are created as social software where you have a friends list, collaborate on a document with multiple people and it is easily to share information and communicate. The downside is these networks consume a lot of attention and too much time is wasted building profiles and adding friends — for some of these sites building a profile and adding friends is the only utility they have.

Aaron Swartz on becoming a DotCom millionaire

Aaron Swartz of Reddit fame is blogging about the experience of becoming a DotCom millionaire this week after Reddit was bought by Cond�Nast/Wired magazine (Aaron’s collection of web clippings on the acquisition). It’s a very interesting read for those of us working at startups in high tech. The fact that he’s a good writer only [...]

Paul Graham on Why Startups Fail

Paul Graham has an essay on the 18 reasons why start-ups fail. I especially like how he sums it up to a single sentence: “In a sense there’s just one mistake that kills start-ups: not making something users want.“

How to be a successful Web2.0 company

In “Web Too.Many” I lambasted and flamed the Web 2.0 bubble of start-ups that are receiving far too much attention. One of the criticisms readers had was that it’s easy to flame, but harder to suggest improvements (very true). AU Interactive has a much better post on the subject than I could ever write where [...]

Startup Lessons - Viral and Scaling

The problem with viral and scaling is that you never know when it’s going to hit. I can’t predict my post will get dugg, and he can’t predict the spike in traffic. It’s an anomaly. Where things fall down is that the spike can happen at a bad time (code updates were happening to ScheduleWorld and my article was out-of-date), and the servers can degrade poorly. This gives a bad impression to first time visitors.

Startup Lessons - Distribution Channels

Guy Kawasaki covers one of the most basic premises that all engineers forget about: distribution channels. We get our heads down and so focused on getting these things out of the fab bug free (for hardware, software is more flexible), that we might forget things like “do we have an operations team?” and “why would [...]

Web Too.Many: The Internet has no clothes (Bubble 2.0, not porn)

…there’s barely room for a number one social bookmarking app, not to mention a number two.

Gwabs Desktop Battler

It looks like Cambrian House is doing pretty well with their concept of Crowded-source Software. They already have several products developed.
One of the products is an online computer to computer fighting game called Gwabs. I’m impressed with how rapidly they go from idea to development. I decided to spend the $9.95 and support them (hey, [...]

Developing 1.0 // Rands In Repose

One of my favorite comments is when he talks about having a great programmer on the team who is busy building infrastructure when they're trying to ship a 1.0 product. Whether or not the product exists will be the sole thing that defines if the company will still be around in the future, and you [...]