Predictablly irrational... part II

Our maladies of predictable irrationality have roots deeper than we have acknowledged thus far...

Watch Laurie Santos' TED talk to learn more

Steve Jobs' answer to 'What is object-oriented software?'

Found this gem of an explanation via @rabois

Steve Jobs explaining what OO software is in a Rolling Stone interview given in 1994

Would you explain, in simple terms, exactly what object-oriented software is?

Objects are like people. They're living, breathing things that have knowledge inside them about how to do things and have memory inside them so they can remember things. And rather than interacting with them at a very low level, you interact with them at a very high level of abstraction, like we're doing right here.

Here's an example: If I'm your laundry object, you can give me your dirty clothes and send me a message that says, "Can you get my clothes laundered, please." I happen to know where the best laundry place in San Francisco is. And I speak English, and I have dollars in my pockets. So I go out and hail a taxicab and tell the driver to take me to this place in San Francisco. I go get your clothes laundered, I jump back in the cab, I get back here. I give you your clean clothes and say, "Here are your clean clothes."

You have no idea how I did that. You have no knowledge of the laundry place. Maybe you speak French, and you can't even hail a taxi. You can't pay for one, you don't have dollars in your pocket. Yet I knew how to do all of that. And you didn't have to know any of it. All that complexity was hidden inside of me, and we were able to interact at a very high level of abstraction. That's what objects are. They encapsulate complexity, and the interfaces to that complexity are high level.

Thus, Silicon Valley.

" Thus, Silicon Valley." Yes, that's a complete sentence and I find that fascinating.

For more context head over to Caterina's blog, the sentence is about half way into the post.

Build what you cannot afford to buy...

My previous company's product was a sync and backup consumer product SugarSync.

With SugarSync we wrangled constantly with our cost of storage as we launched the service, designed incentives for referrals, tried to figure out optimal duration for free trial and so on.

So I was delighted to see a post on how another start-up is dealing with this issue. It is fantastic that they are able and willing to share their solution in such detail on ther blog.

Short list of lessons from Jeff Bezos

Short list of 3 items (full video here):

• Obsess over customers - Pay attention to competition but remember customers first.
• Invent - Listen to customer, invent for them, innovation is panacea.
  
• Think long term - Critical. 5-7 years time frame perspective. Be willing to be misunderstood. Be willing to change on feedback.

Bonus item:

• It is always day 1. Always, opportunity exists to innovate/obsess over customers.
  

Seth's blog on dashboards

I found some gem's in Seth Godin's blog post on dashboards/metric and their relevance to marketing.

"Building good dashboards isn't difficult, but it's an excellent marketing strategy. A few brainstorms:

1. If you can add a digital dashboard to your service, do it.
2. If you can make the dashboard public, it gets more powerful.
3. Highlight data that changes behavior.
4. Allow the user to highlight the information that matters to them."

In my experience, the last two points are often not even articulated clearly much less thought through and implemented in products.

How are folks discovering apps for their iPhone?

We are trying to understand how are people discovering apps for their iPhone. If you have 2 min to take a short 6 question survey, that would help us out. Just follow the link below

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=nfKMk6P9qNg4VWmIcS7NzQ_3d_3d

The survey is anonymous but do remember to add your email address at the end - we will do a lucky draw on May 1st for $25 Amazon gift certificate and announce the winner on the company blog at http://appletics.blogspot.com

Thanks!

Scary stuff...

The amount of data about us out there is simply phenomenal!

I have barely used Twitter. I have less than a dozen tweets, have a few dozen friends who follow me and a few dozen who I follow and yet this is what TwitterSheep can tell about me:



I have been marginally more active on Facebook (again primarily accepting friend requests or sending out friend request, pretty lame - I know). And see how well TouchGraph can describe me and my network.



With so much information about each of us and how we are connected, what we like/dislike, our political views, our brand preference, institutions we are affiliated with, places we have worked, lived and travelled to and a long list of other things... it is only a matter of time before Facebook, Twitter and other figure out how to monetize it.

Don't you think?

Highly recommend: Predictably irrational

Highly recommend reading "Predictably irrational".

Some random notes I made while reading the book

• Influencing choice: A and B being arbitrary options, creating and providing an additional option A' which is closer but inferior to A, influences people to chose A more often.
  
• First impression: First impressions count, initial anchors are persistent.
• Endowment effect: People value what they have more while selling, they focus on loosing ownership rather than gaining cash.
• Power of free: Free has great power and appeal. Free falls in a different mental account and is an order of magnitude more powerful than giving away something for cents.

E.g. iPhone Application store: Releasing lite/paid app pair results in higher revenue via paid app download and conversion from free to paid over revenue generated from releasing only paid application.

• Market vs. Social norms: Social norms and market norms often collide, market norm wins.

• Social norms: Social norms are very powerful and can be used instead of market norms in many situations to much better effect in less costly way.

E.g. Motivating employees bonus versus promoting culture of hard work by giving plaques to most hardworking employee.

A name for the venture...

I have harassed many friends about a suitable name for the new venture and they have obliged. After discussing many candidate names, some thinking, a little philosophizing (along the lines of what is in a name...) we decided to go with 'Appletics'.

We have something to do with mobile applications... hopefully that draws some connection.

We have the company website at www.appletics.com and the company blog to go along with it at - so head over there and add it to your feed reader if you are interested in my exploits. I plan to mix my my personal observations and commentary with the typical company announcements there.

A new venture...

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

-- Confucius

And that step is leaving the sheltered existence of a well defined job and plunging into the unknown... (in spite of warnings).

The journey begins from the ominously named conference room called "Swinging Doors" at Sharpcast which now is a sparsely furnished office of 'yet to be named' mobile venture.

I am working on some exciting ideas in the much hyped mobile application space. I am looking for a co-founder with following attributes/skills:

- never-say-die attitude, bias towards action, hands on
- passionate and exuberant about evolving mobile landscape.
- smarts and deep technical chops
- experience with iphone sdk/android sdk, objective c, c++, java, python, linux, mysql.
- bonus traits: sense of humor, humility

If this piques your interest and you fit the profile or know someone who does, drop me a note at ashishchordia AT gmail.com

Ominous...

Sequoia presentation to the portfolio company CEO's.

Must read for every start-up CEO. Very ominous...


Sequoia Venture Capital Warning to CEOs - Get more Business Plans

The threat of a TB pandemic

It should be a shock to most in the Western world that TB (short for tuberculosis) an ancient disease can raise its ugly head again.

I learned about XDRTB while reading Mountains Beyond Mountains, the bibliographical sketch of Paul Farmer (a must read by the way).

The fact that the disease is taking its toll with over 1.5 million people dying every year is shocking, specially considering that most people die within weeks of being diagnosed.

Doing my bit here by linking to a short slide show put together as a TED prize.

Apple drops iPhone NDA

Apple's NDA has been causing iPhone developers some headache, today apple dropped the NDA, IMHO this is another small step that helps foster innovation.

From the apple iPhone Dev Center

We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software.

We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.

However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software. Developers will receive a new agreement without an NDA covering released software within a week or so. Please note that unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released.

Thanks to everyone who provided us constructive feedback on this matter."

I will buy it if it is free

I wonder what do people mean when they say they will 'buy' something?

Quoting a review from iPhone AppStore...

A reminder to self:

Failure and fallure. The difference is subtle, but it is all the difference in the world. In fallure, you still do not get up the route, but you never let go. In fallure you fall; in failure you let go. Going to fallure means full commitment to go up--even if the odds of success are less than 20%, 10%, or even 5%. You leave nothing in reserve, no mental or physical resource untapped. In fallure, you never give yourself a psychological out: "Well, I didn't really give it everything. . . . I might have made it with my best effort." In fallure, you always give your full best--despite the fear, pain, lactic acid, and uncertainty. To the outside observer, failure and fallure look similar (you fly through the air in both cases), but the inner experience of fallure is totally different from that of failure.

Leadership Lessons of a Rock Climber by Jim Collins

We are on CNBC!

We are on CNBC!

Check out New York Times technology columnist David Pogue raving about SugarSync!

Long time no post...

Over the past few months this blog has fallen to the way side... and that's bad, but a few good things have happened since.

I have joined Sharpcast in the product management group. We have a fantastic team and have been working on the 'future of sync' which we are very close to launching at SugarSync.

If you are curious about what SugarSync can do take a look at this. And if you still need more convincing this should do it. (-:

I will keep posting on this blog for sharing interesting tid-bits and things outside of work, to follow the progress of SugarSync head over to the official product blog where you will find me chiming in from time to time.

A talk that tingles the brain...

From Ted website:

In a wide-ranging talk, Vilayanur Ramachandran explores how brain damage can reveal the connection between the internal structures of the brain and the corresponding functions of the mind. He talks about phantom limb pain, synesthesia (when people hear color or smell sounds), and the Capgras delusion, when brain-damaged people believe their closest friends and family have been replaced with imposters.

Randy Pausch's speech

Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University computer-science professor. He has pancreatic cancer and expects to live for just a few months. He gave one last speech, 'the last lecture' which is on Google video.

A must watch.