Here’s a pretty insightful post-mortem from a failed startup. Key lessons learned (stated in the positive): start small and get feedback; have a good partner; pick a good market. To me, the most interesting thing about this story is how it highlights how failure isn’t the worst outcome. He concludes:
“It’s not really […]
Winner!
On weekends and evenings, I am helping to launch a start up social networking site called yasnap.com. It’s an interesting idea, I think, but a topic for another day. Today, I want to talk about our experience using 99Designs.com.
99Designs.com is a marketplace for web design. You post a proposal for the job […]
As an Obama supporter, I was disappointed that Barack did not seal the deal yesterday. I have been reflecting on the delegate stalemate and the PR loss, and I have a few thoughts.
1) Identity politics: Obama has made massive progress in demonstrating that equality for all is a powerful message for whites and blacks. […]
I was just thinking about this issue as I read this post about how to get hired by Google. Then, along comes this terrific list of criteria is about screening for good tech hires. Hint: what you want is not printed on the resume. I am sad that the cat is out of […]
Look ma! Someone decided to post a video of my presentation last night on a prominent facebook blog.
My Stanford class on facebook apps is wrapping up. As a class of 80 students, we created 40 or so applications that run within facebook’s social network. As of last night, more than 16 […]
I claim that iTunes could earn 40% more revenue than it currently does just by slashing its price from $1.00 to $.50 . Why? Let me explain.
Digital music is a virtual good. As v1.0 approximation, I assume:
Marginal costs are essentially zero (e.g., hosting, processsing and bandwidth)
Customers have limits on the quantities that […]
Scott Reents sent me an email with just a single link, and man did it bum me out.
Lawrence Lessig is a famous constitutional law scholar who teaches now at Stanford Law School. For the last ten years, he has led the charge to redefine copyright in the Internet age as the founder of Creative […]
Obama continues to think of innovative ways to fundraise on the Internet. Today, the campaign announced a program for matching donations. They will match me with another donor from across the country who agrees to donate the same amount. It sounds really cool. They are promoting it like NPR: donor matching […]
What is a mashup? Consider the trip to Greece that my wife Maria and I put together this past summer. We stayed in 4 different cities, took 5 flights on 4 different airlines, rented cars in multiple cities and took a ferry. We planned everything ourselves with web research, online booking and […]
I previously wrote about my initial experience with choosing a content management system. I’ve now had a day or more working with Joomla, Drupal.org, and RadiantCMS . My conclusion: none of them is appropriate for a hacker like me. The answer has been in front of me the entire time: wordpress.org. […]
I found this link of 40 sites to bookmark that you don’t know about on del.icio.us. (I was invited to see the preview site, so I had to go check it out.) But the theme I discovered was spy vs spy: sites designed to fix intentional flaws in other services.
Here are seven sites that […]
On a different project, I wanted to have a simple sales web site. My web host, BlueHost.com, seems to have a nice suite of available tools that you can install with a single click. The top three that I have been experimenting with are: Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. I also wanted some […]
Recently, I conducted a search to find a web designer to redesign our Voter Guide Toolkit web application. My ideal situation was to find a free-lance designer who had experience making sleek “web 2.o” apps, preferably civic-minded, possibly local. It was a frustration process, but I think it has a happy ending now. […]
About
I am a grad student at Stanford University in the Communication Department and a founder of e-thePeople.org, a digital townhall. A longer, more self-indulgent bio.
Einstein Eightball
"Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal."
Recent Archives
Contact
Please send me email at mike (at) weiksner (dot) com
Subscribe in a reader (or articles plus comments) or by email
