Monthly Archives: January 2012

Megaupload – Burning the Library of Alexandria

Yes it hosted a ton of content considered copyright infringing.

It also stored our collective culture of the last 2 DECADES.

Books, music, movies, games, art.  Petabytes of knowledge and data available to all, without restriction, bias or condition, available for rich and poor alike, the very vision of what a library should be.

The creative work of hundreds of thousands of individuals and groups, large and small…backed up and available for all to view and admire.

And now it’s gone.

Forever.

Whether you agree with the actions taken against Megaupload that day or not, they’ve affected us all.  We lost something that day guys and we didn’t even realise it…

We lost our collective digital record.

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1-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria

Startup founders equity split

Someone asked on HN how we go about allocating equity with our “auction” system.  So here it is again:

We total up the cash available and our runway, say $60k for 2 founders and 12 months. Total equity is of course 100%.

So at one extreme, one founder gets $60K over the year in wages and 0% equity while the other gets 100% equity and no wage packet. At the other end, its $30K each for 50% equity each. Somewhere inbetween is a sweet spot.

The core concept is get the cash now, or potentially more later.

Start with the equal split, then begin negotiating for the value per equity point. Eventually you’ll reach a point where you both agree on equity/wage split.

The added bonus is you’ve also technically valued your startup in the process (value per equity point*100) and have an indication of how much your relative belief in the success of the startup.

Since I tend to keep my expenses down and as an example of the last one I took 55% equity for a $7k drop in monthly cash. Cofounder gets a 7K bonus over the year (he was starting a family at the time) and was happy with his 45%.

Voting rights are equal. Always. Do not mess with these in the startup phase as they give a sense of ownership and control that founders need to commit.

Quora Needs To Die

Quora Experts Exchange Fail

Please let Quora die.

“Sign up for free to read the full text. Login if you already have an account.” – Quora.com

Quora needs to be removed from search results like Expertsexchange for this silly bait and switch.  Having a web 2.0 styling (as Quora does) is not an acceptable excuse.

I might not be Joels biggest fan, but at least he has his head on straight when dealing with visitors to Stack.  Here’s his finest work (Google tech talk regarding Stackoverflow how and why – long, but good):

Joel Spolsky Stackoverflow talk

Search engines need a system of collectively flagging sites like Quora, so I, and everybody else, would never see it in their results ever again.  This is the only way they’ll learn.

And the real kicker is it only turns up when I have an urgent tech problem.

Fuck Quora.

Which Android Devices Get Updated Most – Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0

In case I lose the link and that other spammy google+ link keeps appearing and I never find it again, here is the link to the google android updates image.

This shows which cell phones get the latest Android updates, including ice cream sandwich 4.0. It is a graph, also known as a chart or a horizontal bar graph.

May I never lose this again. The chart shows data for Android devices manufactured by Samsung, Motorola and HTC among others. Colors used are yellow, orange, green and red and the detailed Android updates chart is compiled by a Michael DeGusta from theunderstatement.com.  The site uses a favicon of what appears to be his face.

Android Updates chart

Why Funny Image Websites Are Popular

It’s all about brain input constraints and the maximum information absorbtion rate.

Let’s take a look at the main media types:

  • Audio – You can listen to a maximum of one at a time, maybe two.
  • Video – Since its a combination of image and audio, the minimums traverse.  Meaning, one at a time, maybe two.
  • Image – Many at a time.  This is the key.  Plus it’s fast.  Just look and you’re done.  No need to listen to a 30 minute podcast for information here.  One glance, and you’re done.  Get back to work.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why images rule the web.  They are the current evolutionary maximum. They lead to maximum brain input, in minimum time.  So be sure to have images on your website, followed by beautiful video tutorials explaining what you do on the front page.

Combining images and video then, you will create the best possible front page for your website.  But I hear you say, “it’s hard work to add those!”.  True…

Consider outsourcing it the video creation.  You can do that on the main freelance websites.