Why I’ve Shifted More Attention to Facebook
I’ve been spending a lot more time on Facebook as a blogger than I ever did. So I thought it was worth explaining why. And I’m going to cross post this entire post on Facebook as an experiment rather than just posting a link on FB and trying to drive people to my blog. If […]
DevOps decoded: Guru explains what it is and why you should care
Anyone working in IT has heard of DevOps. It’s a phrase associated with giant cloud companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Salesforce. But DevOps also seems obscure, like a secret handshake that’s hiding in plain sight. To demystify DevOps, I invited one of the world’s most prominent DevOps figures to join me on CXOTalk. Gene Kim […]
The Silent Killer – The Company Your Community Never Created
I was at a dinner recently in Chicago and the table discussion was about building great companies outside of Silicon Valley. Of course this can be done and of course I am a big proponent of the rise of startup centers across the country as the Internet has moved from the “infrastructure phase” to the “application […]
Privacy is Dead and We Killed it
Privacy…everyone keeps talking about it and apparently everyone is concerned with it, but does it matter? I recently watched the documentary, “Terms and Conditions may Apply,” which provides a fascinating look at how organizations such as Facebook, Google, Apple, and others have changed the way they look at and approach privacy. After watching the movie […]
Should Facebook Get Into the Employee Collaboration Space?
An article in Techcrunch yesterday says that Facebook may be working on using their platform for internal collaboration. The article isn’t conclusive in any way and doesn’t speculate as to whether any type of new product is being worked on or if the chatter is about simply using Facebook for collaboration purposes. I remember hearing […]
APIs Are Bridging the Mobile App Gap
Almost overnight, it seems, our lives came to revolve around social networks: We scan our Facebook feeds for updates from our families and relevant news, use Twitter to follow friends and celebrities, and pin the latest fashions or home-improvement ideas via Pinterest. Behind it all is the desire to drive engagement, to stay connected with […]
What Entrepreneurs Should Learn From WhatsApp
Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp for $19 billion has dominated all news in Silicon Valley for the past 48 hours. Yesterday, I was at a urinal, and a group of people asked me what I thought. Most of the discussion seems to be around whether Mark Zuckerberg was crazy to pay so much for a relatively […]
10 examples of fabulously flawed product-first thinking
In talking about jobs-to-be-done here, I sometimes think that all I’m doing is stating the obvious. I mean, isn’t it obvious that you’d create something that helped fulfill a need or desire? What else would you do? But I’ve seen in my own work experience, and across a multitude of initiatives in other industries, cases […]
The Dark Side Of Big Data
Latanya Sweeney, a Harvard professor Googled her own name to find out an ad next to her name for a background check hinting that she was arrested. She dug deeper and concluded that so-called black-identifying names were significantly more likely to be the targets for such ads. She documented this in her paper, Discrimination in […]
The Internet is a Rage Virus
James Hong penned a thoughtful essay on an important topic: “Why there are so many assholes on the Internet.” “There are hard ways to get attention, and there are easy ways. The hard ways are more meaningful, but almost by definition they are more scarce and harder to generate. The easy stuff on the other […]
Influence tools: the devil is in the details
For those of you who haven’t heard of Klout, let me give you a brief history: they started back in 2009 with a lot of marketing, a so-so product and non-existent service. They had two ways of handling criticism: either shower the critic in increased Klout score, or ignore him (or her). With criticism multiplying […]
It’s Crunch Time for the Future of Work
Within the next 2 years millennials (ages 18-35) will make up the majority of the workforce. As I mentioned on Facebook page, these (myself included) are people who don’t know what it’s like to not have social and collaborative tools to get work done. We search on Google, share comments on Twitter, post pictures on […]
We really all thought it was Google, only to find out it was the person’s employer
We really all thought it was Google, only to find out it was the person’s employer Yesterday the web site Medium posted that they got a surprise visit from the Joint Terrorism Task Force to talk about some Google searches they were doing about pressure cookers, back packs, and other interesting things to search for. […]
The Right and Wrong Ways To Use Scarcity in Marketing
Nir Eyal is one of the top minds in applying psychology to the startup world. His posts are a must-read, and he’s also a nice guy. My only complaint is that I foolishly went barefoot running with him and developed a foot problem that kept me on a cane for months (I had a problem […]
Social Media is Really Tough in China. At Least There is Quora.
SaaStr is in Shanghai for the month of July. While I have internet access and an iPad … it’s tough to stay connected with the domestic SaaStr audience. Why? Well, first almost everything is blocked: Facebook, Twitter, WordPress (as an app and URL — individual sites with custom URLs sometimes barely work, sometimes not at […]
