Why colors matter!
September 1, 2010
Colors may affect your purchasing decision. KISSmetrics has an excellent blog post about the topic.
Image Source: KISSmetrics
Why Apple is Evil.
July 21, 2010
Apple is “evil”. Why? They believe they know what is best for you and me. And I think that is evil.
Fred Wilson on gigaom.com
Well said. Apple’s growing image problem does not have its root in Antennagate but their tendency to limit the way people can interact with their products. Recent example of this behavior include exclusion of would-be-popular iPhone apps such as Flash and Google Voice.
Entrepreneurship Summit
May 20, 2010
Today’s Entrepreneurship Summit at Northwestern University organized by the Farley Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation featured several outstanding business plan/model presentation and panel discussions. Dry Goods won first place with a professional and well performed pitch and appears well positioned for its planned August launch. The runners-up did not fall short of insightful business models and thoughtful product concepts.
Looking back the last decade, Northwestern has come a long way in developing its entrepreneurial activities across campus under guidance of Prof. Mike Marasco. The Farley Center did an excellent job instilling an entrepreneurial mindset at Northwestern and developing a core framework of entrepreneurial classes for students. Together with the Technology Innovation Center incubator in downtown Evanston, there is a solid support layer for entrepreneurs in and around campus.
Lean Startup Conference
April 20, 2010
Make sure to check out the Lean Startup Conference this Friday. The lineup features the Who’s Who of the lean startup movement.
The Lean Architecture
January 21, 2010
This is the second in a series of articles on building elastic cloud applications. Read the first article here.
Adapting the Lean Startup principles to application architecture produces a few significant requirements. A Lean Architecture has the following properties:
- requires next to none upfront cash investment
- is flexible to changing application requirements
- requires little time investment to scale
- incurs moderate scaling costs
Taking these principles into account, it becomes obvious why some early design decisions may affect your business’ ability to cope with the challenges during the early stage and later growth. Cash is king and any required upfront investment directly affects the risk versus reward perspective. In Lean Startups where the product concept changes to reach a product/market fit, an upfront infrastructure investment may become obsolete quickly.
Nexus One Unboxing Ninja Style
January 19, 2010
The Elastic Cloud
January 18, 2010
This is the first in a series of articles on building elastic cloud applications.
This might be the year where enterprises finally adopt cloud computing. Despite all the hype about software as a service (SaaS), few resources focus on how infrastructure as a service (IaaS) helps Lean Startups avoid significant investments.
While IaaS saves monetary investments in hardware and long-term hosting contracts, it also frees up valuable human resources used to set up and manage data center infrastructure. And when your user base finally grows, the elastic cloud absorbs the extra load without creating sleepless nights and requiring urgent visits to the data center.
The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs
January 5, 2010
Steve Jobs and Apple are known for astonishing product launches. Pictures and an emotionally charged experience effectively communicate the message to the audience.
Behind the scenes, significant efforts and a drive for excellence produce these impressive presentations. The slides below shed some light on how Steve Jobs creates these presentations with the help of his team.
Lessons Learned
- brainstorm, plan and practice over and over again
- create an experience for the audience
- a picture speaks a thousand words
- keep it short and simple
- bullet points are bad, hah
The Lean Startup
December 19, 2009
The Lean Startup vision introduces a methodology for building a technology product. In short, a Lean Startup is a low-burn technology venture which combines the Customer Development methodology and an Agile Software Development methodology.
Startups don’t fail because the technology doesn’t work. They fail because nobody wants what they are trying to build.
Eric Ries
Eric Ries and his blog ‘Lessons Learned’ offer insights on how to build a Lean Startup. A recent presentation from Eric Ries’ on Lean Startups in the Stanford University’s Entrepreneurship Corner explains his approach to building a technology product. In his pragmatic view on how to integrate Customer Development with Agile Software Development, he advocates an approach with two teams. The cross-functional problem team continuously validates the problem hypothesis and updates the product concept, while the solution team uses an Agile Software Development methodology to build the product from the product concept.
A New Day, A New Blog on Entrepreneurship and Software Technology
December 18, 2009
Being an entrepreneur for several years and building software technology for even longer, I take an interest in what makes teams successful in these fields. In this blog, I’ll share insights into being an entrepreneur and building software products both from my experience and from resources on the web and other channels.
My hope is that while my research helps me become a better entrepreneur and build successful software products, this blog assists others doing the same.
