Faith

by on October 19, 2012 in Ideas

buddhist-monkWhy do some entrepreneurial ventures succeed where others fail?

Hard work, luck, talent – these are the usual tired tropes paraded by entrepreneurs to explain their success (even though Malcolm Gladwell would disagree). They’ll talk about the number of hours they worked, the people they networked with, and that lucky meeting with the future seven figure client. What they won’t often talk about is another quality that so much of success depends on: faith.

Faith is a rather anomalous idea in the meritocratic, ‘sweat-of-my-brow’ world of entrepreneurship. As a word, it reeks of an archaic theism, a value that is asynchronous with the valley’s liberal ideals. But Faith is a much broader word – and a much broader concept – than can be whittled down to its theistic origins. It is an inexplicable, resolute belief in the value of something, even when all evidence points to the contrary.

Read More

Comments { 0 }

Attack of the Pinterest Clones

by on October 13, 2012 in Ideas

star-wars-cloneseBay is only the latest in a long line of startups and incumbent players adopting Pinterest’s grid-based layout. While eBay’s new design has been met with some criticism (partly because of the poor quality of images on eBay, partly because it’s uninspiring and obviously copied), that doesn’t change the fact that Pinterest’s design is possibly the most influential design idea to have emerged in the past two years. There’s a whole ragtag bunch of startups trying to capitalize on our constant hunger for stimulating visuals by piggybacking on Pinterest’s grid-based layout.

The obvious question is: why?

I’m not a UI/UX expert, but from my lay perch:

Read More

Comments { 0 }

After Raising $1.1M, TripFab Seeks an Exit on Flippa for $50,000

by on October 12, 2012 in Deadpool

saleAfter making as much noise as could be made (including telling competitors that they will ‘shit their pants’), Costa Rican startup TripFab finds itself staring at a less than stellar exit after it put its assets up for sale on website marketplace Flippa at a starting bid of $50,000 earlier this week. It’s a humble exit for a startup that once promised to turn the travel industry on its head, as it invites bids for its IP, domains, traffic and users on Flippa.

Read More

Comments { 0 }

LinkThing is a Simple, Lightweight Bookmarking Tool

by on October 11, 2012 in Bootstrapped Launch

bookmarking Last week, I wrote a little rant on the bookmarking hell I currently find myself in. After struggling to find a solution that was light, nimble, and easy enough for my needs, I may have finally stumbled on a bookmarking tool that solves my problems: LinkThing.co

LinkThing takes a delightfully old-school approach to bookmarking. That is, there is no feature bloat, it isn’t trying to turn into a social discovery platform, and there is certainly none of the pretentious lofty talk that plagues services like Pocket. It’s simple, easy bookmarking, and it is exactly what I wanted.

Read More

Comments { 0 }

Why?

by on October 11, 2012 in Opinion

bicymple

Behold the Bicymple, a chainless, two wheel unicycle that unnecessarily ‘disrupts’ something that doesn’t need to be disrupted: the bicycle.

The humble bicycle has to count among the greatest of modern inventions, a marvel of industrial design that remains unchanged from the last century when the design was finally perfected to its 2-wheeled form. You know why the design hasn’t changed in a hundred years?

Read More

Comments { 1 }

Hacking for the Sake of Hacking

by on October 6, 2012 in Opinion

viceOf all the charges you can lay against VICE Magazine, being uninteresting can’t be one of them.

The commodity that VICE deals in is a brand of abstract cool and hipster irony. VICE’s greatest assets is its self-awareness; it knows its irreverence and amplifies that stance by embracing the furthest point of the cutting-edge.

What VICE does better than any startup, any entrepreneur, is combine the vicarious pleasures of the verboten with a self-reflected irony at the irreverent attitude with which it approaches it. There are few other publications in the world that do it as well as VICE, and certainly, none of them are quite as big or edging towards the mainstream.

Read More

Comments { 0 }

Art Sumo is a Daily Art Deals Website With a Social Mission

by on October 6, 2012 in Bootstrapped Launch

art-sumo-smallI have a confession to make: I’m horribly ignorant about art. I can’t spot the difference between a Dali and a Picasso, and I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why Jackson Pollock is so awesome (post-modern something something). Despite my educational background in literature, I know as much about art as I know about the mating habits of manatees. And I suspect I’m not in the minority here.

The art world is so distant from where I am. It is esoteric, elusive, and accessible to only a handful of people. And while I can still be expected to know a little bit about the trailblazing artists in the western world, I’m at a significant loss when it comes to understanding art from beyond the west.

Which is why this write-up is about ArtSumo, which is an incredibly awesome service that gives you access to one original art piece everyday. Think of it as AppSumo for art. The art is entirely original, and the service strives to showcase artists who would otherwise never get their voice heard.

Read More

Comments { 0 }

SEO = Suicide

by on October 4, 2012 in Ideas

seo-suicide

After an episode of nostalgia brought on by a marathon session of Seinfeld and Thundercats, last night, I found myself keying in a website I had long forgotten about: Mahalo.com. Mahalo, the demon child of Jason Calcanis’ SEO perversions, was one of my favorite startups for showing all the ills in the world that could be bought with link spam. So I typed in Mahalo.com expecting the familiar drivel that I’d happily tsk-tsked and shake my head about, but instead, I found a polished site that sells video tutorials on the app store.

What happened? What caused this transformation from black-hat poster child to shining beacon of respectable content?

Two words: Penguin, and Panda.

Read More

Comments { 0 }

Hands-On With Woisio, the Curated Video Discovery Platform

by on October 4, 2012 in Startup Profiles

tvI’ve been following Turkey based startup Woisio ever since I first heard about it a few months back. Part of the intrigue was due to the obscure-yet-approachable nature of the startup itself: Woisio curates video content, albeit by turning it into a TV guide-like platform with synchronous programming. Conceptually, it is somewhat difficult to grasp, as I found out after struggling to understand it for half an hour.

GigaOm did a write-up on the startup three days back that should be a good starting point for anyone interested in Woisio. But Woisio warranted a more detailed hands-on overview – the idea is groundbreaking enough to deserve as much.

Here are my impressions.

Read More

Comments { 0 }