2008 February | Mike Industries

Archive for February 2008

February 9th, 2008

Obama landslide in Precinct 1711. Not even close.

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I don’t recognize a single person at my caucus. My neighborhood sucks.

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Will it fly? How to Evaluate a New Product Idea

Good guide to evaluating startup ideas.

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How To Give a Presentation

Nice primer on presenting and speaking… two slightly different things.

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I often hear people say things like “if only I thought of YouTube a year before YouTube did, I’d be rich”, implying that given first-mover advantage, that person could create a company as great as YouTube. A statement like this completely disregards just how difficult YouTube was to build, from having the balls to allow brazen copyright violation, to building a great user experience, to scaling out the ability to serve millions of video streams a day. In other words, 99 out of 100 people who may have had the same idea at the same time would have failed to create anything remotely as successful as YouTube.

Other startups fall into the same class. Companies like Google and Amazon owe most of their success to great engineering, great execution, and great scaling.

But which are the startups of the last ten years which really do owe most of their success to someone simply having a smart idea first and acting on it quickly? Perhaps an easier way to ask this question is “if you could have one business idea from the last ten years as your own, which idea could you most assuredly turn into a success?”

In trying to think of good examples, the best one that came to mind for me was HotOrNot.com. Super simple idea. Developed by two people. Very low expenses. Millions of dollars in revenue per year.

Any better examples out there? What are the most slam dunk ideas of the last ten years?

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February 3rd, 2008

10 Good Stock Screeners

A good way to filter stocks and funds based on criteria.

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February 2nd, 2008

Funniest Clip in a Long Time - Chris Berman Goes Apeshit

My friends at ESPN tell me this stuff happens all the time… it's quite funny when it gets out though. I've already watched this clip about 20 times.

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Solitude and Leadership:

Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think.Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information…

Takes a little while to get going, but overall a great article about the virtues of seeking solitude from distractions in order to develop your own original thoughts.

“I think you’ve got a pretty good imagination, despicability-wise!”

“Look Around You - Computer Games”

Can’t believe I hadn’t heard of this BBC series before. Brilliant. Make sure to watch them all. (via daringfireball)

10 New Year’s resolutions for designers:

Do you think Chelsea Clinton asks herself if her mom would understand something complex? No. Because her mom is a badass.

How Doctors Die:

If there is a state of the art of end-of-life care, it is this: death with dignity.

This is the most concise, easily understood article on the perils of end-of-like care in the United States I’ve ever read. It is a must-read, and frankly, a must-heed, in my opinion. (via kottke)

Lost Type Co-op | Browse Fonts:

A nice collection of pay-what-you-will typefaces from Tyler Galpin and Riley Cran.

How to interview a designer with the perfect design exercise:

These sorts of tests are common for engineering hires, but it’s nice to see an example of a good design-oriented one.

Jessica Hische's Lovely Blog:

Embarrassed I had never seen this until today. Lovely work all around. (via drawar)

This recently unearthed video of Steve Jobs at work during the early days of NeXT is a remarkable look inside how he ran meetings, how he created culture at his startups, and how others — like Joanna Hoffman around the 11 minute mark — called B.S. on his reality distortion field. It’s also remarkable in that it reveals Jobs to be a man who picks carrots in pressed work shirts.

Paper Birds by Diana Beltran Herrera

View.js — A simple, lightweight, jQuery photo viewer for the web

The Republican Clown College by WMxdesign. These are so great. Make sure to check out the whole set.

BuiltWith: Web Technology Usage Statistics:

Sometimes when you are deciding on technologies to use on a new site (e.g. jQuery vs. YUI or MS SQL vs. MySQL) it’s instructive to examine what everyone else is doing. BuiltWith has an incredible amount of trending data to help you out in that regard. Very, very cool.

A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design:

Lots of good thinking here. No solutions, but a nice reminder that two-dimensional touch interfaces are transitional, not permanent.