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12:38

Giant Robot Lasers: HR RPG

At my next company, I’m going to build a game mechanic into everything that doesn’t require creative thinking. You should be able to get points for going to the gym and eating well and those points should correspond to increased subsidies for your health insurance or gym.

Completing a W2 or a…

Double +1 (+2?)

The best management ideally rewards people based on the ever-shifting value of the tasks they perform; there’s huge efficiency opportunities for codifying & making explicit the values of those tasks. In games, HR, education, etc.

Currency (social & otherwise) for the win.

Wed March 3rd ∞

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17:44

The Barefoot Professor: by Nature Video (via NatureVideoChannel)

This is a great video on barefoot running (and why I’m running barefoot in the Boston Marathon this year!)

Mon March 1st ∞

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16:41

"It takes a loose grip on reality to create new ones"

— quoting myself on the topic of good artists

Thu February 25th ∞

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14:13

infoneer-pulse:slantback:

In Vast.com’s testing, Mad Libs style forms increased conversion across the board by 25-40%. (via LukeW | “Mad Libs” Style Form Increases Conversion 25-40%)

Now that’s kinda clever! :)

Thu February 25th ∞

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11:59

Boston Marathon, Barefoot - Donate for Prizes & Charity

I’ve teamed up with my friends at RunKeeper to run the Boston Marathon, wearing my Vibrams. This is my first marathon ever, and RunKeeper’s planning to boil this event into something really big!

Now is the time for charitable folks to help me kick off my fund raising… and potentially win some cool prizes.

For every $10 donated to Jason Jacobs (RunKeeper CEO, this will be his 3rd marathon) or to myself, you’ll be entered in the

RunKeeper Marathon Sweepstakes!

I’d be infinitely grateful if you’d donate to my most awesome cause (educating Dorcestor youth on health & welnesss issues)

PS: You could donate to Jason’s cause, but that’s not nearly as much fun. He’s wimping out and running in sneakers.

Fri February 19th ∞

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14:26

robgo.org: What Lean Startups are NOT

The Lean Startup movement isn’t terribly new, but the level of hype is reaching pretty significant levels. The contrarian in me is always a little wary when anything gets overly hyped. To be clear, I really really like the concepts of the lean startup and customer development. I’d recommend any…

My response to Rob’s thoughtful post:

Agreed on the lack of magic formula, and certainly official-looking charts are deceptive. On the other hand, the charts are a useful too to communicate differences against other startup / development approaches.

re: big opportunities vs lean; this a point a lot of smart, lean-wary startup friends bring up, and I think it’s a good one. My thoughts: in the spirit of “there is no one size fits all”, if we do away w/ all the CD/Lean ‘stuff’ except the core principle, learn fast, then I think that logic applies to any organization pursuing any particular vision, no matter the scope.

Make sure your team is learning fast & furious, and if you aren’t capable of articulating what you learned last week, recognize that it’s unclear if you’ve made forward progress. If it wasn’t possible to learn, fine, but if it was, you’re at risk of ‘straying’. If that persists week over week, where’s the forcing function to keep you in check? Months & months of ‘work’ without external validation is clearly a company killer.

Tue February 16th ∞

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22:27

Startups Have Too Many Engineers

jjacobs22:

I enjoyed this post by Tom Loverro, nice contrast to the ‘no place for an MBA in a startup’ rhetoric that I’ve heard so much about. No doubt engineers are the critical lifeblood of an early stage company, but as a non-technical founder (w/ an MBA), I like to think that our roles are important too.

I agree that non-technical founders are important, which is to say: all founders, no matter their type, are critically important. They craft vision, work hard to understand customers, and provide the right solution.

Tom’s real point appears earlier in his post: “the single greatest cause of startup failure is not understanding the customer’s needs, EVEN THOUGH THE FOUNDERS THINK THEY DO”. If you are thinking about hiring in a marketing person (non-founder) to help close that customer understanding gap… I worry it’s a little late for the startup.

Tue February 16th ∞

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14:00

markitecht:

Remove features, increase engagement! Hypothesis: feature set changes (removal of 50% of information presented and possible actions) will increase user engagement. This is one data point suggesting that this hypothesis may be true. Deeper analytics also running.

Love this stuff. Hurry through that loop again, Christopher! The more learning you can share the better.

Mon February 15th ∞

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14:06

What makes Apple’s App Store tick?

The App Store removes a ton of muck. Most importantly (from this survey at least), dealing with credit cards and payments is one of the biggest pains for developers, and the App Store completely shields developers from it.

The iPhone platform succeeds because the App Store “removes the muck.”

iseffcom (via caterpillarcowboy)

Handling payments is one of the gnarlier pieces website infrastructure from a technical perspective, but also from the perspective of conversion: it’s really, really hard to grease the wheels of payment online. How do you accept credit cards? What about gift certificates? What about building trust? What about re-using a customers billing data instead of losing some % of them by asking for it?

The App Store is the ultimate conduit to $$ across tons of interesting demographics. Amazon is right up there with it. Turns out there is another 800lb gorilla gearing to shake things up: Facebook; and Facebook is equipped to do it web-wide.

(PS: Where the f**k are the credit card companies during all this? Why aren’t they playing in this space? Why didn’t they invent PayPal for website payment processing?)

Wed February 10th ∞

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19:44

"Why does Buzz even exist? Is it because Google wants to make my life better in some way? No. Buzz exists because Google feels threatened by Twitter and Facebook and wants to kill them. Google has become what Microsoft used to be—the Borg, the company that gobbles up ideas from smaller rivals and cranks out lame imitations in an attempt to put the little guys out of business.  "

—

- Daniel Lyons from Newsweek

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/techtonicshifts/archive/2010/02/10/google-buzz-more-like-buzz-kill.aspx

(via dpstyles) (via tedr)