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Prevent Analysis Paralysis By Avoiding Pointless A/B Tests
Jan 13, 2:00AM
Editor's note: Robert J. Moore is the co-founder of RJMetrics, which develops software that helps online businesses make smarter decisions using their own data. At RJMetrics, we believe in data-driven decisions and that means we do a lot of testing. However, one of the most important lessons we've learned is this: not all tests are worth running.Hiring Great Engineers: Kleiner Perkins' Mike Abbott Explains How
Jan 12, 10:30PM
Editor's note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 35-city event series hosted in 15-countries that educates, inspires, and connects entrepreneurs. He also founded Commonred (acquired by Income.com) and is ex-Electronic Arts. I spoke with a robotics engineer and PHD from Stanford this week about looking for a job. He’s not the type of guy that easily joins your startup but he described two recent attempts. One was an email from a recruiter that as he described used “plenty of buzz words”, while another email came from an engineering team lead on the special projects group. Can you guess who he went to meet with and who he didn’t? When interviewing Kleiner Perkins Partner Mike Abbott at a recent Startup Grind event in Mountain View, this is one of the critical elements that Mike points out when it comes to hiring the best engineers. Engineers close engineers. Mike has plenty of experience, having taken Twitter’s engineering team from 80 to 350 in 18 months and building the team that engineered WebOS at Palm. Hard to find many people who have been directly responsible for hiring as many software engineers in the last five years. Here are a few of the top strategies and insights pulled from Mike on how to get great engineers to join your startup. Some insights are edited for length. Getting Coffee Is The First Win “For that first reach out, the goal, the win, is just getting that coffee. I think you should always pay, I mean they’re doing you a favor and if you give me your time I really appreciate that. The other recommendation is to not do that meeting at your office. There’s something about making it more informal that people are more willing to go with and this is particularly important for various senior hires. Now I say this but at the same time I’m saying it’s not that you don’t need recruiters. Recruiters are very helpful to fill the top part of that pipeline to help manage that process so it’s a good experience for the candidate and it gives the candidate another person for he or she to talk to. Especially when you’re negotiating or competing with other companies, which is often times the case.” Create Internal Competitions For Leads and Referrals “This is something that we really tried to focus on, how are you going to recruit? You make a competition. How many names can you get on a board from LinkedIn? How many names canThe Boy Who Cried Facebook Phone
Jan 12, 10:01PM
In The Lord of the Rings, when Sauron's forces capture Gollum, they torture him in Mordor but are only able to get two things out of him: "Shire" and "Baggins". Over the past few days, we've had similar frustrations in trying to track down the content of the Facebook event taking place this coming Tuesday. Despite hounding a number of people who might be in the know, the only discernible things we were able to come up with was: "big deal" and "mobile". Interesting, but way too vague. But we endured. And now we have a bit more information. And that information points to a Facebook Phone ...of some sort.What Games Are: The Fun Boson Does Not Exist
Jan 12, 10:00PM
Perhaps the biggest roadblock facing the development of generation-two social games is the addiction to metrics. Social game makers still believe that fun is about finding the right behaviours, the right metric to measure fun and the right way to maximise that. They are wrong. Fun is, and always has been, a dynamic quality. They need to learn that there is no "fun boson".One Million Raspberry Pi Boards Have Been Sold Since Launch
Jan 12, 9:22PM
With all the hoopla around CES, we sadly missed this amazing milestone for one of the greatest little projects I've seen in a long time, Raspberry Pi. An estimated one million of these tiny computers have been sold so far, an amazing feat for a tiny $35 circuit board that can boot directly into a streamlined version of Linux.In Defense Of The HAPIfork
Jan 12, 9:00PM
There's been no shortage of jokes lobbed at the HAPIfork, as you've seen from the Colbert video above. The overwhelming consensus seems to be that the technology in the fork is solving a first-world problem, and that, people who really want to lose weight by eating more slowly should just, uh, eat more slowly. So why do I love it?Defining The M&A "Nibble" And What To Do When You Get One
Jan 12, 8:00PM
Editor's note: Jason M. Lemkin served as CEO and co-founder of EchoSign, the web's most popular e-signature service, from inception through its acquisition by Adobe Systems Inc. in 2011. If you are in a reasonably hot and/or interesting space, and you have a modicum of traction or even perceived traction after X months or X years (likely years in SaaS), you'll probably have a day when you get an M&A. And later, two or three or four.Forget Calories, New Gadgets Redefine How To Lose Weight And Be Athletic
Jan 12, 7:00PM
A treasure trove of new health devices unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show promise to make us healthier by more accurately measuring what makes people thin and athletic. Calorie counting, for instance, can be a terribly misleading way to lose weight, since research shows what and how we eat can affect our love handles more so than the total calories consumed. But such brute-force measures persist because, prior to the consumer health sensor industry, we had very few ways of monitoring our internal wellness. In other words, what we can measure will become the new means of self improvement. Below is a roundup of the new gadgets launched at CES and how they’ll redefine what we watch. Weight Loss Speed Eating – HAPIfork – Many of us meticulously avoid Snickers, yet slam down our salads during the busy workday. Unfortunately, rapidly eating healthy foods can have a similarly poor effect as can eating sugary foods. Speed eating also leads to overeating, since satiety doesn’t register till long after the body no longer thinks it needs to feed. The HAPIfork aims to end the cultural habit of shoveling food into our mouths with a fork that vibrates when users eat too quickly. Check out Stephen Colbert giving a “wag of my finger” to the HAPIfork below: The Colbert Report Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive Air Pollution – Withings Scale: polluted air might not only be killing you quickly, but sending you to an extra-wide coffin, as research has implicated air toxins in obesity. The new Withings scale, which measures weight and fat percentage, added a new feature to measure carbon dioxide, an important proxy for airborne poisons, and can affect sleep, breathing difficulty, and heart rate. Check out our own Darrell Etherington’s review below: It’s difficult to describe just how misleading calorie counting can be. Last year, I hacked my diet to transform an extra 1,500 calories a day of ice cream and cheesecake to lose fat and gain muscle. While it may not have been the healthiest way to disprove the calorie-fat link, it’s clear, at least for me, that the types of food I eat and how I measure my wellness are much more effective ways of controlling my body composition. Athleticism Blood Saturation – Masimo iSpO2 – Olympic athletes train in the mountains because high-altitude training transforms our bodies to more efficiently utilizeGillmor Gang: Hello Goodbye
Jan 12, 6:00PM
The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — go beyond the usual scenarios in examining the symbiotic relationships between Apple's more proprietary model and Android's open heritage. CES may have been presiding over the collapse of the PC, as the mobile device wave overwhelmed Wintel. But the speed with which the two silent partners have captured our attention and spawned a new generation of muscle memory continues to startle.Digital Activist Aaron Swartz Dead At 26
Jan 12, 5:15PM
Digital activist and early employee at Reddit, Aaron Swartz, committed suicide in New York on January 11. He was 26.10 Reasons Why 2013 Will Be The Year You Quit Your Job
Jan 12, 4:00PM
Editor's note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. You can't make money without selling something real. You can't make something real without first imagination manifesting itself in your head. You can't have imagination without surrendering yourself to an idea that you want to create something of value to other human beings. And now it's too late.Nadia Heninger Is Watching You
Jan 12, 2:00PM
It's been a bad week for online security. An "extremely critical" Ruby on Rails security hole; a Yahoo! Mail XSS exploit; and yet another Java 0-day vulnerability. I know, I know, security is hard: still, it's difficult not to be left with a frustrated throw-up-your-hands "can't anybody do anything right?" feeling.Carvoyant Is Ready To Put Your Car In The Cloud
Jan 12, 11:04AM
Carvoyant, a startup that's been busy developing a platform that will tell you exactly what's going on with your vehicle's general health (and what that blasted "check engine" light means), is today ready to start shipping its devices to early adopters and developer testers. It has also signed a couple of agreements with auto dealer partners, who will be the first to distribute the system more broadly to potential customers.Parku Looks To Make Parking Spot Rentals Mobile-Friendly In Europe
Jan 12, 7:50AM
Now that Airbnb and Uber have dramatically changed the markets for providing rides and temporary space, it’s natural that we’re seeing variants of their models being applied in other spaces. Parking seems like a natural place, since there is plenty of unused inventory in urban cities. There have been a few attempts at the space in the U.S. through companies like Parking Panda. A Swiss startup called Parku is also attacking the concept. Because their local market is so expensive and supply-constrained, they believe they have a good chance at making this idea work. Co-founder Christian Oldendorff says there are as many as 250,000 privately registered cars that roll around Zurich every day. Even though there are 220,000 private parking spaces available, only 50,000 or so are freely available. On-street parking is almost fully occupied while the cost of renting a parking space per month can range from 250 to 1,000 Swiss francs every month ($273 to 1095). It’s a lot more than what you would find in a city like San Francisco, where parking spots in coveted neighborhoods range from $200 to $300 a month. Like with U.S.-based rivals, you can book spaces on the website or through a mobile app for certain days and hours. They’re hoping to scale up to 400-800 parking spaces soon within Zurich, and then expand more broadly within Europe. Because parking is so expensive locally in Switzerland, even as few as 350 parking spaces could produce a revenue run-rate of more than 1.3 million Swiss francs ($1.4 million) a year, the company says. In the U.S., Parking Panda has worked with garages in 73 U.S. cities to offer up to 10,000 parking spaces. Another earlier company, Hello Parking, shut down in 2011 after running into issues with scaling up inventory. That company ran into issues signing up huge garages, which had owners that were reluctant to dramatically increase local supply and drive down prices. Oldendorff says it’s too early to see if his company will run into the same dynamic in Europe.Open Government Initiatives Helped New Yorkers Stay Connected During Hurricane Sandy
Jan 12, 5:00AM
Editor's note: Rachel Haot is the first Chief Digital Officer for the City of New York, where she leads NYC Digital and is focused on the city's digital media strategy. >From hackathons to social media, open government is transforming the way that Mayor Bloomberg's administration and New York City government serve the public. And there has been no greater testament to open government's potential than the strategy and innovation in action during Hurricane Sandy.Pairasight Is An Embeddable, Open Source 3D Camera
Jan 12, 4:47AM
This morning we sat down with the creators of Pairasight, a unique system for adding stereo vision to almost anything including glasses. While the company is still nascent, they do have a very compelling technology that could help EMTs, police, and military record their world wirelessly when on duty.
iRig HD Surfaces At CES
Jan 12, 3:52AM
I spent a lot of time at CES 2013 searching for new audio goodness and one of the cool things I found was IK Multimedia's latest product called the iRig HD. Not "officially" announced yet and missing a release date, there were still a few demo units at their booth in the South Hall.PayPal Apologizes For Freezing Science Fiction Writer Jay Lake's Cancer Fundraiser, Promises Greater Transparency
Jan 12, 3:16AM
Earlier this afternoon, I started seeing a bunch of tweets from science fiction writers and fans about what looked a big screw up at PayPal. Author Jay Lake has been fighting cancer since 2008, and to raise money for a new treatment (whole genome sequencing), he pulled together a number of big-name writers to perform "acts of whimsy" when different funding levels are reached. (For example, fantasy author Neil Gaiman offered to cover a Magnetic Fields song on the ukulele if fans donated $20,000.) Within 24 hours, the campaign seemed like a big success, shooting way past the $20,000 goal. And then PayPal froze the account associated with the campaign, blocking Lake's access to the funds.The Weekly Good: Groupon Isn't Just About Selling, It's About Doing
Jan 12, 2:56AM
When you think of Groupon, you immediately think of instant deals for restaurants and nail salons. That's not all the company is about though, it's about connecting people to businesses and helping you find interesting things to do in your area. Sure, it's a business like any other company, but as we've come to learn, a lot of companies these days do non-profit work, mostly in the background. You know, when they're not acquiring companies.White House Responds To Death Star Petition: Obama "Does Not Support Blowing Up Planets"
Jan 12, 2:42AM
I love the Internet so much. America's netizens have demanded that President Obama consider building the legendary Star Wars Death Star and the White House has responded. Not surprising, they have thoughtfully rejected the request, claiming it would cost an estimated $850,000,000,000,000,000 and that "the Administration does not support blowing up planets." The White House was forced to offer an official response to arguably the silliest question in American history since the petition garnered the requisite 25K signatures on the WeThePeople petitioning system.If at any time you'd like to stop receiving these messages, just send an email to feeds_feedburner_com_techcrunch+unsubscribe-hmdtechnology=gmail.com@mail.feed2email.net.
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