Tag: business

Short summary: the Libyan government, which owns the .ly TLD, doesn’t want foreign and/or objectionable companies owning prime short .ly domains anymore, and has already banned a couple prominent ones without warning.

I was wondering when this bomb was going to drop. We’re affected by it at Posterous too, with our post.ly short domain.

If you’re building a business, you need to choose your partners carefully, especially when you’re going to need to depend on that partner. Bit.ly chose to partner with the Libyan government. Fortunately, at Posteorus, it’s not the world’s biggest dependence, but it’s something we’ll probably need to handle at some point.

It’s nothing new, but definitely put in a current context. Hoy writes:

I’m not the first to write about this, and I won’t be the last. It’s 2010. I cannot for the life of me understand why so many smart restaurateurs (or the agents that work on their behalf) simply fall flat on their face when it comes to their online strategy. While I believe their intentions are genuine, many simply don’t understand the values of accessibility and usability. It frustrates the hell out of me - not so much as the president of a standards-based web design company, but as a human being.

+1

Why is Apple so controlling? Why do they have phones that are all nearly identical? Why do they have particular restrictions on background apps? It all comes down to battery life. Battery life is not just another feature on some specifications checklist. It is the driving philosophy behind every design decision made on the iPhone.

He suspects that Android will only develop more battery life issues, and things are already getting pretty bad.

Again, it’s all about balancing constraints. If you want to run seventeen apps at once, or play flash games, you have to expect you’ll get a couple hours out of your phone, max. Apple isn’t willing to create a device where consumers need to be charging their phones five times a day.

The venerable Scott Adams:

You’d be hard pressed to come up with an idea so bad that it couldn’t succeed with the right execution. And it would be even harder to imagine a great idea that couldn’t fail if the execution were left to morons.

As of next Friday, I’ll be steering the UX and design efforts over at Posterous. That said, I’ve made a posterous site:

As anyone who even slightly knows me could tell you, I’m interested in myriad random topics. At the same time, my main site, Jounce, is pretty strictly centered on web-related topics — design, development, business, etc. So welcome to jackson.jounce.net, where I’ll be making shorter, more frequent posts on pretty much anything I find interesting.

If you’re interested in other topics and my take on them, do check it out.

Eric’s article covers the basics of why people might like a curated/closed app store setup:

But inherent in the [store] experience is that what you find on the shelves has been selected and vetted by the person or people running the store. That doesn’t just mean favoring one brand of soap over another, but also deciding what to carry at all. Your hardware store doesn’t sell flat-panel HDTVs. Macy’s doesn’t stock six-inch PVC pipe. Target doesn’t offer porn.

And the opportunity that the web stack provides for alternatives:

For starters, imagine this: you have bought a number of apps at your favorite [web app] store and installed them on your iPhone… Then, two years later, you decide you’ve had enough of Apple and want to move to another smartphone. Once again, your apps and data go with you.

I love native apps, but I’m looking forward to this future.

Seth Godin, making sure you ask yourself the right questions when you’re going out on your own:

If you take someone else’s investment, are you prepared to sell out to pay it back?

How close to failure, wipe out and humiliation are you willing to fly? (And while we’re on the topic, how open to criticism are you willing to be?)

All sixteen are spot-on.

From Bob Sutton for the Haaaaahvard Business Review:

1. My success — and that of my people — depends largely on being the master of obvious and mundane things, not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods.

Lots of other good ones. I think Bob is missing two things: the balance of managing up to people above you with the people who work for you, and the importance of accessibility and follow-through.

The Wall Street Journal reports (subscription required) that as of June 1st, AT&T will nearly double the early termination fee for customers on smartphone contracts such as for the iPhone, going from $175 to $325. The change, which would apply only to new contracts, appears set to come just prior to the launch of a new iPhone.

I wonder if this means that Apple is getting a larger subsidy for the new phone than before. Maybe the costs of these gen-next devices are such that AT&T is taking a smaller share of the rev, but protecting themselves against cancellations, while keeping the subsidized price of phones relatively stable. Or, they could just be huge d-bags.

Derek Sivers:

…When we yell at a website or company, using our computer or phone appliance, we forget it’s not an appliance, but a person that’s affected. It’s dehumanizing to have thousands of people passing through our computer screens, so we do things we’d never do if they were sitting next to us.

I think it’s important that we actively work against this ever deepening trend that people think internet “anonymity” is a license to be a jerk. It’s not new, but I hope one day it’ll be old.

The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay has switched the default font on its e-mail system from Arial to Century Gothic. It says that while the change sounds minor, it will save money on ink when students print e-mails in the new font.

30% savings. Not so bad. Who knew your typeface selection could be a function of how environmentally conscious you are?

Laws and lawsuits only matter to companies that have something to lose, and most early-stage companies simply don’t. Huge advantage, and one of the reasons why it’s the early-stage companies that will always do the innovating, while the big companies will always tend to wait and see.

Press release:

Canon Inc. announced today that it will begin the acquisition process for the top-level domain name “.canon,” based on the new generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) registration system.

Ugh, here we go.

A bit off-topic, but this bit of sleuthing by Bunnie is both awesome and a great insight into a piece of the industry you probably don’t know much about:

Second, the small vendors are entirely brazen about selling you well-crafted fakes. Typically, the bare cards are just sitting loose in trays in the display case; once you agree on the price and commit to buying the card, the vendor will toss the loose card into a “real” Kingston retail package, and then miraculously pull out a certificate, complete with hologram, serial numbers, and a kingston.com URL you can visit to validate your purchase, and slap it on the back of the retail package right in front of your eyes. Hey, it’s just like new!

The moral of the story is not necessarily that Kingston is a lousy vendor, though they may well be, but just how cut-throat their side of the industry can be, with tiny margins and sketchy practices in an effort to save pennies.

Kontra, in a scathing review of Google’s strategy in Buzz:

Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice-president for search and user experience, says 60-80% of Google’s products may eventually fail. Unfortunately, the few that survive are neither all that inspiring nor market leaders. What Google lacks is not infrastructure, engineers, money, time or even great ideas. It’s the ability to delight users. What Google is missing, in other words, is strategic design.

I’ve been noticing similar things the last year or two, and seldom have I seen or heard much that would contradict it. Read the whole post. It’s spot-on.

Sage wisdom from The Emmerblue about how to address your next cover letter. Hint: the conventional wisdom is wrong.

The single most important skill a product manager/designer/guy/girl can have…

Worth it for the punch-line.

Jason Calacanis pretended to know iPad specs first-hand, and duped a lot of people. Why anyone would trust anything that man says is completely beyond me, but many bought it hook, line, and sinker.

Mike Davidson has some sage wisdom to share, and provides some perspective about people in our industry who are increasingly filled with hot air.

John Siracusa looks at his reviews of the OS X preview releases and the first 10.0 release.

What’s most amazing is how gracefully things seem to have improved in those ten years. The old screenshots now look dated and sometimes downright ridiculous, and Siracusa’s evaluations were nothing short of dire in the beginning, but it’s slowly and steadily become the clear market leader.

One of the best things about Apple is their willingness to put something out that might be a bit of a reach, and then to go back and iterate and fill in the gaps. They pay a boatload of attention to making it a great experience in the first place, but they are always willing to acknowledge that improvements can be both subtle and major.

Huge blow to the Gowalla and Foursquare camps.

Yelp has boatloads of venues already, they obviously have an even larger number of legit and useful reviews, and they most importantly have existing relationships with these businesses (at least on the order of Yelp window stickers). Soon to come, deals for having a Regular badge at a given bar, or special happy-hour specials if you check in with multiple friends.

I’m a huge Gowalla fan, but these updates leave only one feature necessary for the Yelp app to really put the future of both Gowalla and Foursquare in jeopardy: contact import from facebook/twitter/etc. At that point, Gowalla will look like a “not as powerful, more game-like” version of Yelp’s offering.

Dave McClure:

If investors don’t have operational backgrounds in design, development, or marketing from proven consumer internet companies, you probably don’t want their money.

Agreed.

Fred Wilson:

I’ve long noticed that the most innovative, decisive, and risk taking companies are led by founders or at a minimum have their founders actively engaged in all key strategic decisions.

There are probably times when it makes sense for a founder to leave, but it seems like it’s usually after an exit. That driving vision is super-crucial, even if there’s a little craziness mixed in.

That’s the widget that social media expertards loved which showed the faces of other users who visited their blogs. It was yet another of the slow and annoying widgets in the sidebar. In that respect, I’m happy to see it go, though I frequent those kinds of blogs less and less these days.

As Marshall’s article details, though, there was potential for this kind of thing with respect to analytics. I’m sure a better implementation of the same kind of idea will win out someday.

While most entrepreneurs would like to have as much cash on hand as possible, it was a double-edged sword for the Duke Nukem Forever team:

Yet the truth is, Broussard’s financial freedom had cut him off from all discipline. He could delay making the tough calls, seemingly forever. “One day, Broussard came in and said, ‘We could go another five years without shipping a game’” because 3D Realms still had so much money in the bank, an employee told me. “He seemed really happy about that. The other people just groaned.”

The pursuit of perfection these guys displayed is certainly admirable, but in the end, it was completely foolish. Duke Nukem Forever became the poster child for vaporware, and it was all because they didn’t know when to call it a day and ship some software.

It’s a sad day at TechCrunch HQ. Hitting the publish button on this post, which makes all of this so…final…is a very hard thing to do. I’m enraged, embarrassed, and just…sad. The CrunchPad is now in the DeadPool.

Strange ending. You’d think that a lawyer like Arrington would have been a bit more careful when it came down to the contracts here.

I don’t believe for a second it was quite as close to launching as he claims, but I do wish it had seen the light of day, just to see if Arrington can actually produce something in line with the size of his mouth.

Aaron Swartz:

There are three questions you have when you’re hiring a programmer (or anyone, for that matter): Are they smart? Can they get stuff done? Can you work with them? Someone who’s smart but doesn’t get stuff done should be your friend, not your employee. You can talk your problems over with them while they procrastinate on their actual job. Someone who gets stuff done but isn’t smart is inefficient: non-smart people get stuff done by doing it the hard way and working with them is slow and frustrating. Someone you can’t work with, you can’t work with.

Good advice to start, and he’s got more where that came from. Some of it would be different for designers, but a lot of it holds for any position, at least in our industry.

David Thorne to his least-favorite client:

Disregarding the fact that you have still not paid me for work I completed earlier this year despite several assertions that you would do so, I would be delighted to spend my free time creating logos and pie charts for you based on further vague promises of future possible payment. Please find attached pie chart as requested and let me know of any changes required.

And that’s just the beginning. This is par for the course when you’re having designers do work for you on spec.

The case also highlights the distinction between understanding and listening to customers. “Adrià’s idea is that if you listen to customers, what they tell you they want will be based on something they already know,” Norton observes. “If I like a good steak, you can serve that to me, and I’ll enjoy it. But it will never be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. To create those experiences, you almost can’t listen to the customer.”

Don’t take this the wrong way — Adrià most certainly pays a lot of attention to his customers. It’s at the core of what he does. But what he doesn’t do is listen to their input, he instead works to understand their needs and desires, and creates his own experience to satiate them.

You can listen to customer feedback all you want, and it might give you an okay product. It’s when you understand your customers and forge your own pathway based on that understanding that can lead to something really special.

So they’re going the freemium route in 2010, it seems.

I think the described featureset makes sense — if you’re a large company that requires a lot of technical feedback and support like Comcast, Twitter as a support mechanism can become unwieldy quite quickly, so a UI that helps manage this inbound traffic would be of great value. Additionally, for these companies and a lot of smaller ones, having good statistics around your use of Twitter, your reach, etc. will probably be worth whatever fee is charged.

Who is this bad for? Social media monitoring tools.

Great little post about how pinball got a bit smarter in the mid-80s, accounting for different types and levels of players, and then how its new smarts ran up against a foe in video games:

Pinball developers struggled with this problem as pinball was slowly losing to video games. Video games competed by adding levels of play with increasing difficulty. Any new player could quickly get chops on a new game because the low levels were easy. This ensured that new players were drawn in easily, but still they were continually challenged because the higher levels got harder and harder. By contrast, the physical nature of pinball, its main attraction to hardcore players, meant that there was no way to have it both ways.

A little late to this, but the guys at Steepster, a tea review site, have a fantastic post about how they overhauled their ratings system:

It turns out that the average rating for products on sites with 5-star scales is around 4.3. To us, this says that we need to dive deeper — zoom in to a level where it’s clear what the difference is between a really great tea and the best tea you’ve ever had.

There’s a lot of great thinking here. Rating scales are like identity systems in apps — easy to overlook them, but it can have a huge impact on the final product.

When you give to someone via Kiva, you’re not actually giving directly to them. It’s more symbolic:

Thus, the direct person-to-person connection Kiva offered was in fact an illusion. Kiva’s lenders were actually backstopping microfinance institutions, and since Kiva and other online giving and lending models pride themselves on their transparency, Mr. Roodman and others suggested it might better explain what its lenders’ money — about $100 million over four years — was really doing.

Kiva does some really great work. This just goes to show that there’s a fine line between simplifying for marketing’s sake and misrepresenting a product. The former can be incredibly important, while the latter can lead to a major backlash, even if the end results are genuinely good, as they are with Kiva.

Dustin Curtis:

A FEW MONTHS AGO, I wrote an article expressing my displeasure with American Airlines‘ hideous online presence. I also spent some time mocking up a redesigned version of their website. To my surprise, the head of user experience at AA.com emailed me an amazing response describing some of the design problems faced in large corporations. You should read my original article here and the response from Mr. X here. An hour after I posted the response, American Airlines fired Mr. X.

One one hand, he violated his NDA, which is generally a bad thing and sometimes worth termination. On the other hand, the fact that what he said was even covered by an NDA is a bit absurd. The biggest secret he might have revealed was forthcoming transparency into fares and sales policies — and that’s only a shocking announcement if you often fly AA.

In any event, the firing of this guy is sure to hurt AA more than his post could have.

Not only are DVRs not killing TV advertising, but more folks are watching shows because of them, and many of those people are too lazy to skip commercials:

Almost across the board, the gains for playback are growing. The best preseason estimate for the current season, said David F. Poltrack, the chief research officer for CBS, was about a 1 percent increase from playback over the live program for the networks combined. Instead, many are in the range of 7 to 12 percent, with some shows having increases of more than 20 percent when DVR ratings are added. The four networks together are averaging a 10 percent increase.

Of course, as with almost all such things so far, digital media isn’t actually killing a business, just threatening one particular model, revealing another more profitable model.

A good look at the problems Google Wave really does solve — primarily centering around business email:

I believe this is partly Google’s fault: they released Wave to geeks and hackers and social media folks first. But Wave is not a geek/hacker tool, or a social media tool, it’s a corporate tool that solves work problems (more on that later). On the other hand, they never claimed it would be a Facebook replacement or a Twitter killer. Google calls wave an “online tool for real-time communication and collaboration”. The way Google should have advertised Wave is: “it solves the problems with email”.

The article also discusses a few key shortcomings with conventional email. Would you solve them the same way?

Marco Arment discusses the two sides of the iPhone app store — the popular side and the craftsman side — and how apps targeting the wrong one can find themselves on the wrong side of success. He takes, as an example, the Iconfactory skee-ball game Ramp Champ, which has been revealed to be a commercial failure thus far.

Derek Powazek:

It’s a game, and every link is a score for the SEO jerkwads and their disreputable clients. And every time they win, those of us trying to create quality work and good experiences on the web lose.

I’m looking forward to my first opportunity to use the word “jerkwad” in semi-formal conversation.

Caterina Fake:

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be. Being able to read what people want. Putting yourself in the right place where information is flowing freely and interesting new juxtapositions can be seen. But you can save yourself a lot of time by working on the right thing. Working hard, even, if that’s what you like to do.

This actually raises one of the issues I brought up in my post yesterday. Jason Fried:

So I guess what ultimately bothers me most about this New York Times piece, and many other pieces just like it (see TechCrunch daily), is the example that’s being set for the next generation of entrepreneurs. They’re seeing business success defined as “the projections say we’ll profitable later”. They’re constantly being exposed to excuses. They’re being taught that profits are these things that only happen one day far away. That’s just wrong.

Word. There are a few ideas that make sense to plan for profitability down the road a ways, but those are really few and far between.

MSNBC has made some good acquisitions and seems to be strategically and financially well-positioned. Congratulations to Adrian and the EveryBlock team.

Benjamin Franklin is one of my heroes in many ways, and is worth being studied by anyone interested in invention, entrepreneurship, time management, organizational management, writing, doing, thinking, or just about anything else.

His contributions to the origins of liberal intellectual property in America went on to form the basis of what makes America successful:

[Great things] must be invented by people. And that, of course, is a great thing. Don’t mope in your room. Go invent something. That is the American message. Electricity. Flight. The telephone. Television. Computers. Walking on the Moon. It never stops.

In tough economic times, it’s tempting to get conservative. However, if we make it harder for organizations — like banks, real estate investors, dot-coms, car manufacturers, small businesses, whomever — to try something insane, fail, and move on (bankruptcy protection), we’ll lose what has been driving America forward for 200-odd years.

John Gruber with some strong commentary on AT&T’s apparent inability to support the needs of iPhone users:

Apple slagged AT&T twice during the WWDC keynote, for their inability to offer iPhone users either MMS or tethering. These are not advanced cutting edge mobile phone features. That was seven weeks ago, and AT&T still hasn’t said a peep about making either feature available. Of course Apple is furious. They are dependent on an incompetent partner in their biggest market.

The AT&T relationship, now a curse, started as a blessing for Apple. At the beginning, Apple was able to negotiate pretty liberal terms with AT&T which allowed for features like the App Store and Visual Voicemail, which may never have happened with Verizon. It also provided a large-enough audience for the platform to be such a success, which may not have happened with a network like T-Mobile or Sprint.

A good reminder from Derek Sivers next time you hear about an idea locked behind an NDA:

To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.

Word.

The headline says most of it, but here are a few interesting things:

Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10 year license to Yahoo!’s core search technologies, and Microsoft will have the ability to integrate Yahoo! search technologies into its existing web search platforms;

Microsoft’s Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo! sites. Yahoo! will continue to use its technology and data in other areas of its business such as enhancing display advertising technology.

Yahoo! will innovate and “own” the user experience on Yahoo! properties, including the user experience for search, even though it will be powered by Microsoft technology.

Maybe this is genuinely a good thing for users, too.

John Gruber responds to the previously-linked David Simon plan to have newspapers charge for all their content:

The primary problem with newspaper companies isn’t their revenue. It’s the size and scope of their operations. Again I say: mammals and dinosaurs. Simon, along with everyone else who thinks online subscription fees can save the newspaper industry, is effectively arguing that the world will change to support newspapers. The truth is that newspapers must change to adapt to the world. Just because the extinction of newspapers would be a tragic loss doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

We’ve seen boatloads of layoffs at some major newspapers, and it’s not clear that those have saved them. Perhaps they were laying off the wrong people.

David Simon, now best known as creator of The Wire, and a former Baltimore Sun journalist, has a detailed essay about pay walls, including a plan to help newspapers effectively earn money:

[The New York Times and the Washington Post] must act. Together. On a specific date in the near future — let’s say September 1 for the sheer immediacy of it — both news organizations must inform readers that their Web sites will be free to subscribers only, and that while subscription fees can be a fraction of the price of having wood pulp flung on doorsteps, it is nonetheless a requirement for acquiring the contents of the news organizations that spend millions to properly acquire, edit, and present that work.

Not completely sure that this would have the desired effect, but I do think that bold and far-reaching action is required of the newspapers if they hope to survive another five years.

Paul Graham has an insightful essay on the difference between the schedule of the manager, which is chunked into hours, and that of the maker, which is chunked into half-days or longer:

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in… That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what.

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning.

I try to do maker things at home, and “manager” things in the office, but as Paul observes, it’s tough to straddle both schedules.

Apparently Apple and RIM are doing something right:

The two accounted for only 3% of all cellphones sold in the world last year but 35% of operating profits, according to Deutsche Bank analyst Brian Modoff. The disparity will become even starker this year when, he estimates, the two will take 5% of the market in unit terms but 58% of total operating profits.

You don’t always need enormous market share to have a very healthy business.

Questions about the GPL seem to come and go in waves, and lately there’s been a lot of chatter about the usefulness (or the harm) of GPLd code.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss has twenty good and hard questions about the GPL, some of which may have no answer without a courtroom decision:

foo.js is a JavaScript library released under the GPLv3. bar.js is a library with all rights reserved. For performance reasons, I would like to minimize all my site’s JavaScript into a single compressed file called foobar.js. If I distribute this file, must I also distribute bar.js under the GPL?

From Mind Hacks:

Not Exactly Rocket Science covers an intriguing study on how people try less hard in a competition as the number of competitors increases.

The researchers started off with a simple observation that US students tended to get better marks when they took their exams in smaller exam rooms.

This brings up one of the reasons why you might not want to grow your team or business too much. When you have 50 designers, will they all work as hard and be as creative as when you had five? Will you still be the team you used to be?

TechCrunch sucks, but Auren Hoffman is a pretty smart guy, from the times I’ve met him:

We’re all familiar with Moore’s Law – that the power of computers doubles every 18 months. In my 15 years of software development, I’ve seen 5x-10x productivity gains in engineers. Which could mean that the productivity of a well-trained engineer doubles every five years. (note that this Law is much harder to prove than Moore’s Law – but potentially just as profound). That would mean that the productivity of an engineer is growing at roughly 14.9% per year! That’s fast … really fast … much faster than the 2.6% yearly gains than the population as a whole is making.

It’s true in my experiences working with new companies. Make sure there’s a developer or two on the team first, then worry about the other roles as you grow. Developers without designers may make something ugly, but designers without developers may make nothing but art.

Microsoft and Google presented the results of their user performance tests, and Brady Forrest at O’Reilly has a nice synopsis:

Here are Brutlag’s and Schurman’s final points:

• “Speed matters” is not just lip service
• Delays under half a second impact business metrics
• The cost of delay increases over time and persists
• Use progressive rendering
• Number of bytes in response is less important than what they are and when they are sent

These are pretty consistent with the conclusions we’ve already had, and corresponds pretty closely with the talk I gave up in Halifax last month, but it’s great to have some metrics attached.

A quick post on the Viget UX blog about a discussion Barn and I were having at the office today. It spawned from a nugget in Jeremy Keith’s notes from Jared Spool’s AEA talk today:

You can buy an iPod nano on Apple, Best Buy, etc. for about $149. Amazon sells it for $134. That’s probably cost price. It turns out that Amazon can sell almost everything at cost price and still make a product because of volume. It’s all down to the Negative Operating Cycle. Amazon turns over its inventory every 20 days whereas Best Buy takes 74 days. Standard retail term payments take 45 days. So Best Buy is in debt between day 45 and day 74. Amazon, on the other hand, are sitting on cash between day 20 and day 45. In that time, they can invest that money. That’s where their profit comes from.

Right now there’s still a need for storefronts like Best Buy, but the rest of the post gets into speculating about how Amazon could make a play. Not that they would…

One of my favorite essays from Rands so far. He’s talking about people who not just don’t click with other personalities on the team, but in fact have very different goals and philosophies which make them the square peg in your organizational culture’s round hole.

We need these folks, but it can’t be at the cost of the existing culture. Yes, this toxic person might have a core cultural contradictory belief that is key to the future of the business, but assess the risk. What if the cost of integrating that idea is half the team quitting because they can’t work with the idea’s toxic architect? Is that a viable solution?

This is a really, really tough topic, and Michael’s nailed it here. Sometimes, an individual can be incredibly talented in various ways, but still be toxic to the rest of the team, which makes it even harder.

Paul Graham, the noted essayist and founder of Y Combinator:

Twenty-seven more companies will join Y Combinator in June, the program’s biggest class yet. Earlier this year, Sequoia Capital, the venture capital firm that backed Google, agreed to give Graham $2 million to put to work. Graham hopes to use the money to expand Y Combinator, to fund 60 companies or more every year. I ask Graham why he is so intent on growing. Why does the world need so many little software companies? He looks at me as if I’m insane. “Imagine that instead of starting Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin had taken jobs in some research lab,” he says. “They would have written a little piece of an operating system that might not even get used and maybe some boring academic papers. Think of how much more they did for the world as start-up founders.”

I’d love to work with this guy.

Exciting concept: the United Nations is funding and sponsoring the newly-launched University of the People, an online university that is nearly free. Students from over fifty countries have already enrolled into programs in business administration and computer science.

The only charge to students is a $15 to $50 admission fee, depending on their country of origin, and a processing fee for every test ranging from $10 to $100. For the University to sustain its operation, it needs 15,000 students and $6 million, of which Mr. Reshef [the university’s founder] has donated $1 million of his own money.

There are good and bad things about this concept in my opinion — the second-class status of the liberal arts falling on the bad side — but I’m eager to see a program like this succeed.

Good thoughts for clients and creatives from Seth:

The third scenario is the one in which all sides want the best possible project and the team believes that you have valuable insight on how to make that happen. This only works if there’s mutual respect around the table. They have to hold you in esteem and trust your judgment (not organizational judgment, but judgment about what makes the project great). That means that, “because I said so,” is not effective feedback.

A great read by Michael in this week’s ALA:

In reality, most meetings aren’t high-pressure, survival-of-the-fittest lynchfests. Many meetings are well structured affairs with hardly a drop of blood spilled. But each time you speak in a meeting, you get a moment in the spotlight to demonstrate that yes, you understand what’s going on, you are clear about the rules of this particular game, and you’re in it to win.

Sage advice, and a great analogy.

I posted this just about a year ago, when people were upset about the 3G upgrade policy, and it still holds true for the 3GS:

AT&T subsidizes the price of every phone it carries, by about $200. So that RAZR phone you got a few months ago for free was actually about $200. You’ve probably seen these un-subsidized prices if you’ve ever damaged a phone and had to purchase a new one at full price.

The new iPhone 3GS coming out has a similar policy, except that there is no grace for 3G owners since the 3G, unlike the original iPhone, is subsidized.

If you’re not near the point where you’ve paid off your subsidy — and usually that means being more than 18 months into your plan — you’re not eligible for an upgrade at the subsidized price. You can purchase an early upgrade for $200, which is essentially paying for a significant part or all of that subsidy, or you can purchase a plan- and subsidy-free phone for a $400 premium.

A beautiful article from Rands/Michael about getting it together in a crisis, and then making progress based on that experience. A little bit about communicating with employees, a little bit about running meetings, a little bit about staying same, and a lot about being a great manager.

The always-smart Seth Godin writes about the two ways to work with talent: giving the blank slate mission, where you have folks do their thing and hope for the best; or the well-baked and defined mission, which is more predictable in its output. On the results:

The strategic mission takes more preparation, more discipline and more difficult meetings internally. It involves thinking hard without knowing it when you see it.

The clean sheet of paper is amazing when it works, but involves so much waste, anxiety and pain that I have a hard time recommending it to most people. If you’re going to do this, you have an obligation to use what you get, because your choice was hiring this person, not in judging the work you got when you didn’t have the insight to give them clear direction in the first place.

Perfect. The client who wants the designer to just do their thing but doesn’t have time for frequent input is an impending disaster.

Wired is in tough shape these days, with ad sales down 50%. Joel Johnson was brought in a few years ago to revamp the online side of the publication, with decent success. He’s writing for BoingBoing now, but decided to weigh in:

Wired makes a fantastic magazine. The “puzzle” edition last month was just brilliant, and I skimmed it from cover to cover. But for technology and pop science reporting, the market has moved on. Tech magazines, now matter how well executed, are nothing more than a cute anachronism, with the same sort of boutique market as hand-made stationery.

I fear that may be impossible, not just for Wired but for all these old brands, because they can’t accept that the work at which they have excelled for years will be just as important when it’s online—and online only. Don’t skip the comments, as there are lots of Wired folks, present and former, who weigh in. Chris Anderson himself chimes in to blame Conde Nast’s decisions for the downfall and policies.

City University, London researched the outcome of the decision to drop the print edition of the Finnish financial daily Taloussanomat:

Indeed six and a half months after going online-only Unique Users were 22 percent lower and Page Impressions 11 percent down. Overall Thurman and Myllylahti estimate that readers now spend about 75 percent less time reading the title than they did when it was available both in print and on the web.

Although Taloussanomat costs fell 52 percent when its presses were silenced, revenue also dropped—by at least 75 percent—due to the loss of print advertising and subscription income…

Based on their case-study the City University London researchers conclude that a newspaper would have to have an operating loss of 31 percent or greater to make ditching its print edition worthwhile.

Other impacts included decreased brand recognition, a decrease in original reporting, and more sensational/celebrity stories. Dangerous move, it seems.

A thoughtful and detailed analysis of the numbers behind Y Combinator’s seed funding program, as compared with a typical seed-stage angel investment:

YC argues their advice and connections are worth this premium. I respectfully disagree. Advice and connections for even idea-stage entrepreneurs are easy to find with a little initiative, and if you don’t have that, you’ll fail as an entrepreneur. YC’s connections, Demo Day, and brand are indeed value-added, but it’s hard to argue they’re worth ten times an angel and free advice and connections.

YC supporters say their teams are little more than first-time entrepreneurs with ideas. That’s generally true, but YC’s hackers are able to build most prototypes in 3 months anyway. Is it worth 3 months working by yourself to get 10x a better deal? I think so.

I can only assume that similar arguments exist with respect to our friends at LaunchBox Digital and TechStars.

In line with my recent post of the same nature about Twitter: A quick little list of instances of Google implementing “competitors’” product features shortly before or after the competitor’s announcement.

So what’s going on here? Greg’s reaction to this was that it was atypical of a market leader to be so reactive to “the competition” (if that’s what you call companies that have a minuscule share of the market). He’s right. Can you imagine Walmart making wholesale changes to its stores because mom and pop’s store on the corner implemented some neat features for its customers?

Compete on features with Google, Facebook, Twitter and other market leaders at your own peril. If it’s just features, your risks grow exponentially.

Clay Shirky in a thoughtful post on last week’s #amazonfail circus, in which thousands accused Amazon of bigotry for delisting LGBT works, before finding out that it was a system error:

Stupid stupid stupid stupid, yes, all true. If it had been a critique of those stupidities that circulated over the weekend, without the intentional mass de-listing, it would have kicked off a long, thoughtful conversation about metadata, system design, and public relations. Those are good conversations to have, we need to have them, but they are not conversations that would enrage thousands of people in the space of a few hours and kick off calls for boycotts and worse.

Another example of Harris’ Law and an example of the extreme and insatiable need for immediacy present among many internet users.

Matt Haughey doesn’t buy into the whole notion of “social media marketing”, and illustrates his skepticism in the context of buying a Rainbow swingset:

So maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need “social media marketing” after all.

Many of the companies I most respect seem to consider social media secondary at best, while some of my least favorite companies (think Comcast) are all about Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the fads. Would your favorite company use MagPie or PayPerPost, or reach out to bloggers?

This Boston.com photoessay shows there’s often a lot of hard (and often boring) work that goes into making such a useful process seem so simple.