This mention of a possible revival of Google’s MyStuff idea caught my eye. I’ve been interested in the idea of a persistent personal data archive for a while now, and Google’s a natural for it. I was initially optimistic about EMC’s plans for Decho (their combined acquisitions of Mozy + PI Corp), but if so continue…
I just finished Ian Ayres Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart. It’s very pop / light, along the lines of Freakonomics, but still worth a read for the reminder that (unlike pretty much everyone I interact with in the Web software world) surprisingly few folks are aware of the extent continue…
I first encountered the idea of intermittent reinforcement in my Organizational Behavior (OB) classes at business school, but it’s become a touchstone in my conversations about user experience design and application “stickiness” as well. Pioneered by renowned (and sometimes reviled) behaviorist B.F. Skinner, the core insight is that a behavior that is reinforced intermittently is continue…
I’ve written before about the need for visionary founders to break their idea down into achievable chunks, but I was missing a referencable framework for the idea. After serving as a judge in their business plan competition, last night I attended an awards dinner put on by the University of Washington Center for Innovation and continue…
I’m a firm believer that every good application designer is an amateur behavioral psychologist at heart, and this conviction was reinforced (again) by two different product strategy sessions I participated in recently. Because I tend to work with startups at the earliest phases of the customer adoption cycle, I spend a lot of time thinking continue…
I’m more than a little skeptical of the academic merits of MBA programs (mine included), but there are a handful of ideas I picked up in school that I still use almost daily. BATNA is one of them. It stands for “best alternative to a negotiated agreement”, and was coined by Harvard Law professor Roger continue…
This article in Wednesday’s New York Times caught my eye. The theme is ‘coworking’: “where someone sets up an office and rents out desks, creating a community of people who have different jobs but who want to share ideas.” We didn’t know we were in on a national trend, but this is what Andy and continue…
Q: Chris, as an entrepreneur, how do you balance the need for a general state of dissatisfaction and the need to celebrate victories as they come? Posted by rpathak A: Hi Rahul, thanks for the great question (and apologies for the delay in responding – just operator error, as far as I can tell). My continue…
A while back I promised to extract some nuggets from my recent holiday read of Poor Charlie’s Almanack; The Wit and Wisdom of Chares T. Munger. I started with the easy one, my favorite excerpts from Charlie’s Investment Principles Checklist, but my next project was to do the same with Talk Ten, “The Psychology of continue…
Since I began my professional “career” I’ve gravitated steadily from larger to smaller organizations. At first this was an intuitive rather than a considered objective (I’m an INTP, remember?), but over time it’s become an explicit requirement. At one point I tried to codify the “acceptable” size for an organization in terms of numbers of continue…