Especially early on, starting a company is about addressing one overarching concern that, if solved, will totally make everything so much easier.
When I first started thinking about SpotDJ, I had a job. Being a loyal employee not looking to get sued, I only worked on the project during nights and weekends. Which is to say, […]
I’m putting this first because I know you’re busy starting a company and I can save you a lot of time by telling you to skip all the other tips and listen to this one. Or don’t. That’s the whole point.
When I, and later we, were first starting out, we sought a lot of advice. […]
When I started a company a year and a half ago, I also started a list of things that would’ve been useful to have known ahead of time. My plan was to publish the list several years later in hindsight, but now that I’ve reached a nice round number (37) and half of my friends […]
Many of the prominent blog posts and press pieces about OpenSocial have touted its use of open standards a key benefit for developers. Focusing on HTML and JavaScript is not only inaccurate, but it actually makes the platform less attractive for developers.
We Like FBML
As a developer, I am far more interested in coding in FBML […]
When we wrote the User Profile feature for SpotDJ, we decided we wanted something a little more interesting than just filling in your username and password. We came up with the idea of presenting the user with three questions, randomly selected from a list that we could easily change. I think it was Grant who […]
Turns out that the method of integrating online chat and television that I co-invented as a Microsoft intern was approved late last year and nobody told me:
http://www.google.com/patents?id=F0R9AAAAEBAJ&dq=kleper&ie=ISO-8859-1
My favorite part of the patent application (which I didn’t write) was the sample chat between the WebTV co-founders, which includes this gem:
Bruce: This is the best movie of […]
Back in January, when I expressed my frustration over the lack of a Third Party API for the iPhone, everyone seemed certain that Apple had confirmed this as a fact. Now everyone seems certain that the iPhone runs a full version of OS X and will have a developer API.
Neither of these things make much […]
Okay, so maybe it’s only the second most “Newly Popular” pirated book, but still — we’ve got more seeds and leechers than the first episode of “The Tudors.” And we’re trouncing other books in our category — Suck it, Professional ASP NET 2 0 Server Control And Component Development!
Thanks anonymous sketchy friend who apparently uses […]
I was recently offered the opportunity (and a Starbucks gift card) to evaluate Palore, a service that’s apparently huge in Israel and is in the process of adding support for the US.
At a high level, Palore is a browser extension (currently supports IE and Firefox, but only on Windows) that provides contextual information about businesses. […]
In 1995, when I was a freshman at Stanford, a former co-worker of my mom’s invited me to brunch with some of his friends. I was eager to meet some people from the Silicon Valley tech world and happily biked over to Hobee’s for some overpriced smoothies. One of the people at brunch was Paul […]
