Just Say No to Features
To hit the market early and within budget, your feature development strategy must focus on creating the bare essential functionality. So in this vein, you should make it prove itself to be a “worthy survivor”. Your features need to be tough, resilient, and lean. I have come to embrace the U.S Navy SEAL’s “hell week” screening approach before letting any one of them into my development cycle.
Scaling the Wall
It’s romantic to view the world as a wall, scaled heroically by pure self-esteem. But in complex endeavors you’re certain to fall, without the support of a team.
The Startup Leap to Success
In the words of Ecclesiastes, there is a time and purpose for everything under heaven. In the early stages of a startup’s life cycle, process is negotiable. Too much process may hinder the speed in which you can build a functional POC. In later stages, however, good process and procedures (e.g. requirements, QA, unit testing, documentation, build automation, etc., ) are critical. They are the very foundations of any commercial grade product.
The Anti-Virus Virus Part II
One of the hundreds of affiliates install 154,825 copies of the malware in ten days, 2,772 of those copies were eventually purchased by the victims… the affiliate was able to earn the $146,525.25. A projection of this earning rate would land him over 5.5 million dollars year.
Social Network Analytics – Myth v. Reality
Algorithms for determining text sentiment, theme, writer’s sex, age, and education are only effective on large and well formatted compositions. They were designed to work on structured essays that are around 1000 words long. The likelihood of accurately determining any of these characteristic from a 140 character tweet or a blog posting that is riddled with expressions like LOL or OMG is as good as a coin toss.
Descend, ye Cedars, Haste ye Pines
Bach and Handel share some interesting history. They were born only 4 weeks apart (Bach 31 March 1685 – Handel 23 February 1685), grew up 60 miles from each other, used the same snake oil salesman eye surgeon (John Taylor), and even passed on the opportunity to marry Buxtehude’s daughter Anna Margreta.