A quick productivity boost for any aspiring startup: watch a video from Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Corner over breakfast. Short and yet jam-packed with information, there are over a thousand videos to choose from featuring luminaries such as Guy Kawasaki. There are even podcasts for the journey to work. Not sure why I didn’t run across this sooner.
[Credit to Alex for the suggestion]
While the concept of teaching entrepreneurship may seem contradictory, School for Startups has at its core an admirable goal: effectively, to help fledgling businesses learn the stuff that they’ll wish they had known if they hadn’t learnt it beforehand. Don’t worry, that makes perfect sense.
The one-day workshop managed to efficiently condense a lot of the principles around starting a new business into six clear questions, focusing on the large and small aspects of three broader dimensions:
Some of the things picked up from the workshop include, on the market side, a focus on customer benefits not product features. You don’t really know what your customers care about until you have a customer, and you might find that their definition of your products’ benefits might vary wildly from what’s on your business plan. (Interesting to see that Doug Richard seems to subcribe to Yossi Vardi’s “business plans are science fiction” view!)
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In the red corner today, a startup that caused a bit of buzz at the Web 2.0 Expo.
Plista’s presentations grabbed my interest from the start, since Dominik (speaking, above) outlined the information overload problem in stylish detail. Of course, it’s a pretty big problem and there are plenty of ways to solve it — Plista focuses on the recommendations approach.
The key components seem to be collaborative filtering and use of social graphs to build up a recommendations system that works across different sites; this allows for some interesting user tracking and the creation of central information profiles that can then be tailored to different output. A really interesting idea was the preference Doppelganger, someone who likes the same stuff you like — this is something I’ve vaguely touched on in the past.
While someone might like the same things as me, so I can use their behaviour to predict my own, I’m actually quite interested in the social graphs around that person and how they resemble mine; how the influence web bends around them compared to mine; and how that person’s key information sources differ from mine (are they reading a blog I’m not?). I guess this is more meta-informational than based in product recommendations, but there’s such a huge potential for discovery here. On the other hand, we once again run into privacy issues. My preference profile is going to be very diverse, do I really want people interested in the same technologies as me told which bands I like? To what extent are we really similar? And how do the different preference dimensions interact with each other? (Maybe people who use Open Source software prefer organic, eco-friendly products. Maybe they don’t.)
But back to Plista. An engaging presentation and a product that looks interesting, especially due to its cross-domain, supra-web type nature. An information overload company worth watching, even if it isn’t solving the problem in the same way I am.
(A bit more about Plista at CNet and Crunchbase.)
Okay. It isn’t Friday. Let’s not let that spoil the spirit of the thing…
The Expo’s over, leaving behind an Internet littered with #w2eb, #web20expoEU and variations thereof. To future attendees looking back, or even present ones still trying to stop their heads from spinning so fast, it can be quite hard to figure out exactly what happened. So without further ado, some aggregated links to help serve as a reminder:
This Linkfest will likely be updated as I travel around the web, but feel free to let me know about anything really obvious I’ve missed, while I mutter to myself about the information-filtering problem this event itself encompasses.
Sometimes the behaviour of the masses is all you need to get some fairly solid recommendations. The example I’ll use is World of Warcraft addons, but it really holds true for any sort of platform where there are a vast number of third-party modifications — you could use the Xbox Live Arcade, even, or web widgets. However, addons are an interesting case for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, the addon space is pretty crowded. An addon is a Lua-scripted modification that’s written by a third-party and enhances one or more aspects of the game. Thus plenty of enterprising hackers have put together things they specifically wanted to code, with the upshot that there are several options to choose from in pretty much every category. “What’s the best addon for…” is a common question, and in certain categories there isn’t a clear winner.
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