At SV Angel, we have a chart of “mega-trends” that we follow closely. The first and most obvious is social. We see a new kind of entrepreneur emerging in social. We call them “Behavioral Entrepreneurs.” These behavioral entrepreneurs understand that hardcore algorithms are no longer essential for success. Great UI and UX are becoming the new IP. Thanks to the low cost of computing, these entrepreneurs find innovation in human behavior, not pure technology.
Another mega trend we see is the intersection of real-time data and collective wisdom, where audiences contribute value the bulk of the content, enabling other services to build value by mashing up the layers. Quora is the perfect example.
Social commerce is also huge, as are big data, online-to-offline and, of course, mobile.

Once you have built your product and it’s in the market, there are only three things that matter: distribution (getting the product into users’ hands), engagement (validating that you’ve built the right product and that users are using it), and monetization (making money from those engaged users). This is your strategy.

In traditional media models, content producers typically give people something they want in the form of entertainment or information. Then they sell access to those people to advertisers — who want to sell something to those people.

Smart online entrepreneurs understand that they play both roles with content marketing. They provide people something they want to consume and share (content) and sell something … but in this case, what they sell is something extremely relevant to the content, and therefore, to the audience.

Case #1: The Authority
70% On-page, 30% Link-building

The Authority is an established site with a solid, trusted link profile and usually a good base of content. In many cases, it’s a site that’s evolved “organically”, which is a fancy word for “without a plan”.

As Apple CEO Tim Cook reminds everyone as often as he can, we’re still in the infancy of this mobile computing revolution. There are billions of people around the world who have yet to fire up their first smartphone, and over the rest of this decade we can be sure that those people will have at least two choices: iOS and Android.

Too many entrepreneurs focus their time on building things they think are cool or could be the next startup homerun. Stop building to get covered by TechCrunch or get an investment by Fred Wilson.

What are your problems? That’s what you should be working on. Businesses are solutions to problems. Solutions come from ideas. Ideas are hypotheses. These hypotheses need to come from a defined problem. Humans have problems.

If people don’t know about your great product, then they can’t buy your great product. It’s that simple.

You could be the biggest and most well-paid social media consultant out there, but if you don’t know what the specific goals are for the client project, you should never sign an agreement with the prospective company.

In the hope of avoiding competition, very often entrepreneurs get stuck with ideas that are simply not viable businesses. Trying to be unique, they target so small, so obscure niches that are not a business opportunity at all. This is what Graham points out as a common problem among groups that apply to Y Combinator. He says:” If you watch little kids playing sports, you notice that below a certain age they’re afraid of the ball. When the ball comes near them their instinct is to avoid it. I didn’t make a lot of catches as an eight year old outfielder, because whenever a fly ball came my way, I used to close my eyes and hold my glove up more for protection than in the hope of catching it. Choosing a marginal project is the startup equivalent of my eight year old strategy for dealing with fly balls”. In other words he is saying that great things have competition. Thus you cannot avoid the battle unless you avoid great ideas and focus on something irrelevant.

Success is incremental; its small gains made through ongoing intelligence-gathering leading to informed decisions. It’s calculated risk and passion, a framework that supports smart failure, and a curious culture. Success looks different for every company. And it comes to no company that waits for a silver bullet.

So how can your company keep its stars engaged? It comes down to creating a culture of communication — one in which employees know where the organization is headed, how they fit into these plans, and what’s expected of them. Here are a few key strategies your agency can employ to make this happen.

Over the years, I’ve done some foolish things with my finances. I’ve squandered money on comic books. I’ve speculated on risky stocks, hoping to make a quick fortune. I’ve paid a gazillion dollars — or something close to it — in credit-card interest and bank fees. I spent large windfalls on the latest technological gadgets.

No, I’m by no means perfect with money.

One trap I’ve managed to avoid, though, is the lottery.

Microsoft is toast because we're moving to a post-PC era;
HTML5, the new web standard that allows to make interactive web pages, is going to revolutionize the media and advertising industries;
Social is "done", it's now a feature, don't go do a social startup.

If you’ve just given someone your business card then you failed. If you have a business card you might be about to fail. Nobody cares what’s on it. I throw out all business cards.

I’ve written before about self-publishing but more than the “why” and “how” (although I add more info about this below than I previously have) this post is why YOU NEED to self-publish if you are in business, a blogger, a writer, or in any profession (essentially all professions) where you want to stand out versus the competition. There is one window, right now, where you have the right combination of “easy to do”, “cheap”, and “nobody is doing it”. The key is the Era of Validation is over. Nobody needs to pick you. You pick yourself.

“What I’m about to show you,” Jeff Bezos says, “is the culmination of the many things we’ve been doing for 15 years.”

The CEO of Amazon.com, in regulation blue oxford shirt and jeans, is sitting in a conference room at his company’s spiffy new headquarters just north of downtown Seattle. It is mid-September, exactly one week before he will introduce a new line of Kindles to the world. He has already shown me two of them—one with a touchscreen, the other costing just $79—but that’s not what’s truly exciting him. It is a third gadget, the long-awaited Amazon tablet called the Kindle Fire, that represents his company’s most ambitious leap into the hearts, minds, and wallets of millions of consumers.

In this post I want to talk about a Twitter that I see beyond what is visible to most Twitter users today. Call it “Strategic Twitter.”

Most entrepreneurs in education build the wrong type of business, because entrepreneurs think of education as a quality problem. The average person thinks of it as a cost problem.

Stop Selling & Start Telling - How Clarity Trumps Persuasion For Getting Sales

This realization sort of snuck up on me. I’ve always been interested in Apple’s products because of their superior design; the business side of the company was never of as much interest. But at this point, it seems clear to me that however superior Apple’s design is, it’s their business and operations strength — the Cook side of the equation —that is furthest ahead of their competition, and the more sustainable advantage.

The list of successful founders-turned-CEOs is daunting. You have Bill Hewlett and David Packard (HP), Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore (Intel), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Steve Jobs (Apple). You could say I've hand-picked these names from among hundreds of founders who turned out to be lousy chief execs. You might be right. That's why we need data.

And the data shows that the first executives really do make better chief execs. That's because they have:

1) Better long-term focus

2) More value

3) The right incentives

While the tech world is buzzing about the launch and implications of Google’s new social network, Google+, it’s worth noting that Google isn’t just in a war with Facebook, it’s at war with multiple companies across multiple industries. In fact, Google is fighting a multi-front war with a host of tech giants for control over some of the most valuable pieces of real estate in technology. Whether it’s social, mobile, browsing, local, enterprise, or even search, Google is being attacked from all angles. And make no mistake about it, they are fighting back and fighting back, hard.

Attending conferences and going to local meet-ups is a great way to meet new people, but it isn’t a good way to get to know someone. If you really want to be successful at networking you have to follow these steps

After 10 years of being an entrepreneur, you probably think that I have everything figured out, right? Sadly I don’t! Don’t get me wrong, to a large extent I know what I am doing, but just like my first day as an entrepreneur I am still making mistakes.

The mistakes aren’t the same rookies ones I have made before, but instead they are usually bigger mistakes. Here are some of the mistakes I have made over the last few years that you should avoid:
Business mistake #1: Don’t get too personal with your employees

The Guardian in Britain has been a leader in taking advantage of the web for some time now, but the management of the paper — including the CEO of the charitable trust that owns the media outlet — made its clearest declaration yet that the future of the organization is online, with a statement on Thursday that it’s going “digital first.” This phrase has been used as a rallying cry by proponents of a new media approach, including Guardian Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger, to show that the web should take precedence over print. Now the challenge is for the newspaper to prove that this strategy can be a success financially as well as philosophically.

I ask with sincerity, is your business antisocial? Take a moment before you respond. I understand you may have Facebook and Twitter presences. Your business may broadcast on YouTube. Perhaps your executives are blogging. If you're among the more sophisticated organizations, the team is probably subscribing to elaborate monitoring services to listen more effectively. And, with all of the social objects produced inside the organization, it's come to the point where a content management system or social media management system is necessary to scale.

Social networks usher in a era of transparency and authenticity and these two elements represent the hallmark of your corporate social media program. You are walking the two-way street and you're already successfully building a community rich with the 3F's (friends, fans, and followers). How can your business possibly be antisocial?

Antisocial is defined as anything that goes against the laws and customs of society.

Whether it's last year's Android phone, a digital camera, or a robotic pet, getting the price you want for your used gadgets can be a challenge. Here's how to sell your old stuff and get the best return.

Earlier this week, we detailed how to get a free iPhone upgrade by selling smart. Today, let's take a look at getting the most out of the sale of all your other, less over-hyped gadgets. Overall, it's really about keeping your stuff in good shape, finding a buyer you like, and selling at the optimal time to get the best return on your purchase. Doing this requires a little work and a bit of patience, but putting in the extra effort from the start will pay off in the end.

One skill that every designer must learn — and quickly — is how to be creative on-demand. While there will always be specifications that guide a project as well as tried and true methods of solving common visual problems, one must still be able to get focused, get creative and produce work that doesn’t end up looking formulaic or forced.

Unfortunately, though, not every project will be tantalizing and fun, and there will be days when you simply don’t want to go to work, no matter how much you love your job. How do you keep the creative spark going when you’re not feeling particularly inspired? We have 12 simple tips you can use to foster a more creative mindset.

While most of these tips are for the freelance designer who works independently, anyone in a creative industry should be able to relate and gain insight from them.

1. Set a Schedule

For more than a decade I've studied history's most creative strategists--from Napoleon Bonaparte to John Boyd--and compared their thinking habits with those of their modern peers--Grameen Bank founder Mohammad Yunus or Tesla CEO Elon Musk. I have found five thinking habits that stand out:

Mental time travel
Seeing the interconnected system
Frame-shifting
Disruptive mindset
Influence

Your Mix Is Unbalanced: Twitter’s Limited Features are Overloaded. I’m seeing an unbalance in how individuals are trying to get the word out, and an excess focus on micro tools, resulting in some bad behaviors.

Mindset Change: Rebalance Your Social Media Mix.

The word disruption is thrown around way too much. It's often used to describe ideas that are not disruptive. Recently though, I've noticed a trend of YCombinator backed startups that follow a similar theme: Go after an industry or process that is excruciatingly painful and make it better.

One of the questions I hear frequently from frustrated business owners who are trying to break into search marketing is "Where do I find keywords for my website?" Now, there are many methods and resources you can use to find traffic-driving and profitable keywords to target

This past year, the Mac business went down percentage-wise, from 28.4% of Apple’s total to 20.3% this past quarter, and operating margins are certain to be smaller than the almost obscene 60%+ Apple gets for its iPhone ($620 ASP against an estimated $180 BOM).

With these numbers, why bother with the Mac? Last October, Apple held a Back to the Mac event whose purpose was to answer that one question: Why bother?

Google announced a new update last week to its search engine that addressed the growing complaint that low-quality content sites (derisively referred to as content farms) were ranked higher than higher-quality sites that seemed to be more important to users. This major change affects almost 12 percent of all search results, and the web is still buzzing about its implications...

Organizations don't need "social media" strategies. They need social strategies: strategies that turn antisocial behavior on its head to maximize meaning. The right end of social tools is to help organizations stop being antisocial. In fact, it's the key to advantage in the 2010s and beyond.

Here are seven social strategies that are turning yesterday's zombieconomy upside down. They're what I look for when evaluating investments, innovations, and ideas across the social mediascape.

Just as Dan Pink has suggested that there are two kinds of people in the world, so I believe that there are two kinds of organizations.

Those organizations that are trying to delight you – and those that are trying to make money off you.

We Wrote The Book on
Social Media Marketing
By: Ryan Quintal & Brian Donnelly
Download the Free Book Now

So, in the spirit of One Web and Ambient Findability, I’m asking Facebook on behalf of all Web citizens to give us the benefits of being able to just look at things online without being tracked by you. Give us the option to treat Facebook like every other part of the Web, whenever we want, and I assure you it will benefit us all.

Give us an easy one-click way to truly and totally disconnect from Facebook Connect whenever we want. I’ll still spend just as much time on Facebook, I promise! But now I won’t have to see my friends’ faces every time I look up a restaurant review on Yelp, read the news on the New York Times, or wait for external modules to load on TechCrunch. It’s just an option, and an option confers value… I’m sure the vast majority of users love Facebook Connect and will continue to use it. But having the option to return the rest of One Web to its pre-Facebook status—useful but not fundamentally social—would be the best gift that Zuck could give back to the Web.

Don’t Let Search Dominate Your Traffic Sources. If Google sends 90% of your traffic, your business has real danger associated with it. Why aren’t people coming directly to your site, being passed links in email, getting Tweets and Facebook mentions that send traffic? Why is no one blogging about you, writing about you in the press, commenting in forums with links to your content? These “natural” signs tell a story of a real business providing real value. The 90-95% Google trafficked site says something strange is going on, and Google themselves are likely to figure that out sooner or later.

The 10 Stupidest Things an Entrepreneur Could Do

1. License away the crown jewels.
2. Fail to protect intellectual property.
3. Lose key employees.
4. Sell too much equity to investors.
5. Create inequities among founders.
6. Over-optimize deal terms.
7. Let advisers freeload.
8. Lack preparation for negotiation.
9. Hide weak points.
10. Lose focus on what’s important.

The process of launching a new website is, for many entrepreneurs, bloggers and business owners, an uncertain and scary prospect. This is often due to both unanswered questions and incomplete knowledge of which questions to ask. In this post, I'll give my best recommendations for launching a new site from a marketing and metrics setup perspective. This won't just help with SEO, but on traffic generation, accessibility, and your ability to measure and improve everything about your site.

Umair Haque @ Daytona Sessions vol. 2 - Constructive Capitalism

Forget business models. Focus on ideals. Reconceiving value creation depends on new ideals. Ideals shape what we wish to achieve in the first place: freedom, peace, fairness, justice — all are ideals vastly more powerful than mere business models. That's because they are what ensure the value we are creating is authentic, deep, meaningful value — not just the shabby, threadbare illusion of value.

Tomorrow's prosperity was stolen by yesterday's so-called leaders. In a world where people are becoming rapidly worse and worse off, there is nothing more revolutionary than an ideal.

The real crisis is in the DNA of the industrial economy — and it's just as lethal as ever. Most businesses are socially useless. They're about as useful to society (to paraphrase Gloria Steinem) as bicycles are to fish.

Sound controversial? If it does, it only underscores just how out totally of touch with real value we've gotten. (Here, for example, are Paul Krugman, Simon Johnson, and Lord Turner all discussing social uselessness.)

What has socially useless business cost just over the last five years? $12 trillion at a minimum. Those are the costs of the various bailout packages for socially useless banks.

Socially useless business is what has created a global economy on life support.

You've decided to start a business but believe that you'd be (much) better off with co-founders. Not a bad idea, of course. How do you pick the right person? This decision may be the most important of the your company's entire history. Most early-stage startups fail due to founder disputes, not the substance of the business. And founders spend so much time together that the business relationship is the closest some of them will ever get to marriage. This is a high-octane, high-consequence, long-term date.

New research has found that, of all the factors that influence the success of an entrepreneurial company, there is one that dominates: the creativity of the entrepreneur driving the company. Why? Because many times along its journey, an entrepreneurial company finds itself stuck between a rock and hard place, and it takes a lot of creativity to figure its way out. Entrepreneurial creativity has several dimensions that we touch on briefly. Surprisingly, there is currently no conclusive evidence that business education, best practices and business plans are significant determinants in entrepreneurial success.

In my opinion, RIM is indeed in danger, probably a lot more danger than its executives realize. But I don't agree on the reasons most people are giving for why RIM is in trouble, and I think most of the solutions that are being proposed would make the situation worse, not better.

It would be incorrect to say that there is a new type of customer out there. In reality, they are the same customers, they’re just consuming their data and information in a different manner. They’ve gone social.

This shift has forced businesses to approach their customers in different ways. The message has been replaced by the conversation. The methods of communication have morphed from a simple line to a convoluted mess of back and forth interactions. The way that businesses perform customer relationship management has spun on its head.

Dear Yahoo:
Many of us have relied on Delicious for years and have thousands of bookmarks organized on it. Please consider opening Delicious up to the open source community to keep it going.

A lot has changed since I got into link building a few years ago - link exchange is dead, ad banners are no longer all about gaining referral traffic, and buying links is more dangerous than ever before. Because of the changes mentioned and a whole load of others the majority of link builders don’t like to give away their secrets to sourcing links, even though it’s all pretty much the same at most agencies.

We regularly receive variations of this question, which is somewhat surprising since the F-22 and F-35 are two of the most well known of current acquisition programs in the United States military. Perhaps the best way to understand the purpose of these two planes and their differences is to look at the bigger picture of how the American fighter fleet is composed.
During the 1970s, the US Air Force adopted a strategy referred to as the "Hi-Lo" mix. Whereas the service had previously purchased a number of different types of fighter aircraft tailored to specific missions, the Hi-Lo mix called for simplifying down to two fighters, a more capable "high" quality fighter and a less capable "low" quality fighter.

But maybe the most crucial difference was simply quality. Oezil, Schweinsteiger and Khedira are talented players on the up, but were up against Iniesta, Alonso and Xavi, three of the best midfielders of their generation. It would be unfair to say Germany’s trio were outclassed, but they were certainly second best on the day.

Twitter is a great listening post for companies to monitor conversations related to their brand and engage with customers; and there are a variety of tools available to help groups and corporations tweet, collaborate, and generally manage their Twitter workflows. From tweeting and responding to customers to tracking the conversation and measuring the effectiveness of Twitter campaigns, there is a bevy of great tools out there for corporate tweeters. Finding the right Twitter applications is a challenge for social media managers, though, because new apps seem to spring up each day and they often have overlapping feature sets.

The use of the Notes feature is undoubtedly the single most under-rated feature on any of the football manager series of game. At the start of any game I play the very first thing I do before I even read my news is to set up my Notes so that I have a constant reminder of things I need to do/check throughout the season. I set up several notes to reoccur at Weekly,Monthly, 3 Monthly, 6 Monthly and Yearly points with another note set up to reoccur a month before each transfer window so that I can start to think about getting deals done ready for the 1st day of the window. In this short guide I hope to enlighten you on this very useful tool within your very game.

This post will describe ways to improve Google Adsense revenue from your existing websites or blogs.

One of my favorite professors in college was a self-confessed liar.

I guess that statement requires a bit of explanation.

The topic of Corporate Finance/Capital Markets is, even within the world of the Dismal Science, (Economics) an exceptionally dry and boring subject matter, encumbered by complex mathematic models and obscure economic theory.

What made Dr. K memorable was a gimmick he employed that began with his introduction at the beginning of his first class:

“Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day.”

We’ve got quite some money as a seed investment from a VC and were quite happy and successfully developing our application. We did show it to many users and received very favorable feedback from big companies. Why did the startup fail and I’m no millionaire? There are a myriad of reasons, but as I wrote in “Rules for a successful business”, the rules for a sucessful business are easy:

* The customer is the most important thing in your business
* The best business plan is to sell people the things they want
* Your business is successful if your earnings are higher than your spendings

So the most important thing is to sell

My tips may sound obvious, but I was always astonished why some people came to me for more money. They wanted more money for showing up and getting older. There are some general rules when asking for a pay raise, like companies giving out raises only once a year.

In reality, a review should be more than just a rant about how good or bad something is. Like any argument, a review needs a clear thesis and evidence to support your opinions.

We had a killer advisory board. We tested our site with user after user. We listened to feedback and iterated quickly. We launched our public beta in less than three months. We built relationships with investors, and applied to YCombinator, getting as far as a final-round interview.

Six months later, we walked away $50,000 poorer, and no closer to success than when we started. What went wrong?

For the first time, I’m sharing my startup lessons — and my story — with the public.

Apple ads really came into their heyday during the 1990s, with the “Think Different” campaign, which became very popular as they featured a number of famous people.
Here’s a stunning compilation of some of Apple’s most notable advertisements from the 70s until the present day, including a few videos ads.

The pundits have pronounced that Oracle acquisition of SUN is an industry changing event. I have no doubt that it is. However, for the world of databases this is not a change for the better. MySQL has always been an important player in this world applying significant pressure on commercial DBMS vendors like Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. I think this era is over. I don’t believe that MySQL will ever play the same role it once did. Maybe PostgreSQL will step in and fill the void. I am just sad to see that MySQL will not be joining the fight as its future is getting more and more uncertain.

Based on nearly eighty hours of interviews with fifteen all-time great programmers and computer scientists, Coders at Work provides a multifaceted view into how great programmers learn to program, how they practice their craft, and what they think about the future of programming.

A long time ago I discovered this fundamental rule of the net -- People come back to places that send them away. Places like Google, Yahoo, Craigslist, Youtube, even Twitter. These are the mainstays. You go there to get somewhere else. Sites that try to suck you in and hold you there, no matter how cleverly, go away. While it may seem like a good approach at first, long-term it's a losing strategy.

Steve’s a great guy, and the love affair has been wonderful, but I’m starting to look past him and back to Microsoft for a more healthy relationship that is less–wait for it–anti-competitive in nature.

Years and years after Microsoft’s antitrust headlines, Apple is now the anti-competitive monster that Jobs rallied us against in the infamous 1984 commercial. Steve Jobs is the oppressive man on the jumbotron and the Olympian carrying the hammer is the open-source movement

For folks in the tech industry, this is not a new discussion. Another radical visionary, Steve Gillmor, has been hosting this discussion since Apple’s draconian iTunes updates led smart people to *downgrade* their software. Think about that mind bomb for a second: people downgrading their software to maintain their freedoms–is this a William Gibson novel?

Steve Jobs is on the cusp of devolving from the visionary radical we all love to a sad, old hypocrite and control freak–a sellout of epic proportions.

Open source software only comes in one edition: awesome.

The money is irrelevant; the expensive resource here is my brain. If I choose open source, I don't have to think about licensing, feature matrices, or recurring billing. I know, I know, we don't use software that costs money here, but I'd almost be willing to pay for the privilege of not having to think about that stuff ever again

I’m certainly no economist, but perhaps I’ll label myself a “rationalist” for the sake of my little rant here. As this “rationalist”, I’d like to propose that the problem-of-the-day has less to do with numbers, indexes and the sub-prime fiasco. Although these are clearly huge issues, I believe that our true adversaries are fear, panic and our own knee-jerk reactions. I propose that for the sake of your company, you stop for a moment, clearly assess your situation, and coldly ask what needs to be done to get past it.

I can easily imagine Oracle using hardware technology from Sun and Solaris to provide utility computing services (Sun already has a grid.) And, of course, I can easily imagine Oracle deploying its business suites (eBusiness Suite / Peoplesoft / Siebel / J.D. Edwards) and a lot of other applications on that infrastructure.

Exciting times ahead. Let’s hope that everything which is open source remains truly open source.

SimVenture is the award-winning business simulation game allowing people to set up and run a company and learn about business and entrepreneurship at no risk!

Used in hundreds of educational institutions and commercial organisations, the software’s authenticity, richness and depth means the subject of business is really brought to life.

I start with keyword lists from adsenseheaven dot com which guesstimates the most expensive keywords to bid on in the PPC AdWords side of the Google ad world. I generally ignore the top 1000, as they are very competitive and saturated.

iTunes offers a new option to users: iTunes Pass. It’s basically the iTunes equivalent of fan club; you buy the pass for a particular band (currently, only Depeche Mode is in stock) for a fixed fee, and you receive all their stuff - singles, remixes, exclusives, videos - as it appears on iTunes.

In a knowledge economy, companies with the best talent win. And finding, nurturing, and developing that talent should be one of the most important tasks in a corporation. So why does human resources do such a bad job -- and how can we fix it?

Juillet 2008: Après la fusion en France de TPS et CanalSat, l’union des deux géants de la télévision câblée dans l’océan Indien devient évidente.

A Synthesist is a person who takes disparate bits of information and weaves them to create something new. His role is to streamline and to simplify; to remove the cruft and clutter so that the end product is easily absorbable by the target human group.

Three years ago Sony handed one of the business world's biggest fix-it jobs to Howard Stringer. He had been running Sony's U.S. operation for six years, but the choice was still unorthodox: Stringer was born in Wales, not Japan, and he wouldn't be moving to Tokyo when he took over one of Japan's most revered companies.

In the latest in our series of in-depth chats with members of Rafael Benitez's Melwood staff we spoke to chief scout Eduardo Macia about life at Liverpool.

Turning Failure into Learning

Writing a post mortem is hard, particularly when the result is failure: a failed deal; a failed investment; a failed concept. That said, without a post mortem, without deep reflection, honesty and introspection, how can we

Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

ast winter, I detailed why Microsoft’s iPod Killer would fail miserably. This year, Microsoft will fail again, but for a new set of reasons. It is not obvious that the company has figured this out itself. Here’s why the Zune will fail in 2007, and how

Even it the 8-queens puzzle is often used to illustrate the recursion principle, I never tried to solve it myself. I only wrote my N-queens solution recently (using Erlang), and was pretty happy to see that list-comprehension is quite good for the princip

EMBO reports asked representatives of organizations that hold high stakes in the academic system—from universities and funding agencies to businesses and political establishments—for their views on what might be the future of the classic research univ