HackFwd Blog

Tom Hulme - Design For Emergence

Mon, 06 May 2013 18:21:11 +0200

Tom outlines his four trends he sees in startups and how to design for emergence.

"Wired: Peter Thiel, expressing his dissatisfaction with technology’s progress, recently noted, ‘We..."

Mon, 06 May 2013 18:15:04 +0200

“

Wired:
Peter Thiel, expressing his dissatisfaction with technology’s progress, recently noted, ‘We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.’ Do you agree with him?

Bill Gates:
I feel sorry for Peter Thiel. Did he really want flying cars? Flying cars are not a very efficient way to move things from one point to another. On the other hand, 20 years ago we had the idea that information could become available at your fingertips. We got that done. Now everyone takes it for granted that you can look up movie reviews, track locations, and order stuff online. I wish there was a way we could take it away from people for a day so they could remember what it was like without it.

”

- Bill Gates in a recent Wired interview with Steven Levy

[via Gary Tan]

(via whitneymcn)

fantasyshopper: Whether she’s at a festival, the front row at...

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:35:15 +0200

fantasyshopper:

Whether she’s at a festival, the front row at Fashion Week or on the red carpet, style crush Jameela Jamil always looks effortlessly chic. Show us your Jameela inspired outfits in our latest style challenge > http://bit.ly/XYDA4c

Company with the "World's Least Powerful CEO" Makes $2.5 Million Every Day

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 20:24:04 +0200

idonethis:

The popular depiction of the CEO is the titan of industry who rules with an iron fist. The CEO’s will is the employees’ command.

Not so at Supercell, a remarkable Finnish company that’s making $2.5 million dollars every day and has been described as “the fastest growing company ever.” Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen, calls himself “the world’s least powerful CEO”, and that’s not the surprising part. What’s incredible is that Paananen made himself a weak CEO by design:

As its name implies, Supercell is organized as a collection of small, independent teams called cells tasked with developing new games or building new deep features for existing games. Cells are given complete autonomy in terms of how they organize themselves, prioritize ideas, distribute work and determine what they ultimately produce. Describing himself as the “world’s least powerful CEO”, Ilkka encourages cells to exercise extreme independence and prides himself on having no creative control over them once they are constituted. The company as a whole is merely an aggregation of these cells; a Supercell.

The only thing to say is that it’s working. Their organization and philosophy is letting this team of 100 take on the behemoths at Zynga, which has 30 employees to every 1 employee at Supercell.

The organizational and cultural design decision was purposeful: Supercell’s founders had witnessed first-hand “the downfall of too many companies that had turned into bloated, bureaucratic behemoths with many design studios in multiple time zones requiring massive management overhead and crushing hierarchies to coordinate.”

If it’s hard to fathom how an economic miracle could result under the leadership of a weak boss, consider another organization that designed its CEO to be powerless: the United States. The founders of America purposely set up the government to have a weak CEO, compared with Europe’s monarchs.

Having experienced misguided local tax policy decreed by a head of state thousands of miles away, the founders pushed decision-making authority out to a federated constellation of state governments, local governments, small groups of people, and individuals. That structure set the stage for the American economic miracle.

https://cobook.co/ is rocking our world. Do you have it...

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 18:56:24 +0200

https://cobook.co/ is rocking our world. Do you have it installed yet? Mac and iPhone now, there is a signup for Android.

Sean Ammirati: What I mean by "pattern" ...

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 03:01:31 +0200

Sean Ammirati: What I mean by "pattern" ... :

seanammirati:

Alex Payne wrote a post about a year ago where he critiqued VC’s use of the term pattern matching:

There is a term that venture capitalists use: pattern matching. My ears perked up the first time I heard this from a VC, because in the world of computer science, pattern matching is a …

Ville Miettinen - How To Run A Startup Company While Being On The Road

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 18:52:24 +0200

You will be hard pressed to find someone that loves startups as much as travel as the following speaker at our HackFwd Build event. Ville Miettinen runs Microtask and shares just how to travel and run a startup concurrently. You can follow him on Twitter here.

Ville Miettinen - How To Run A Startup Company While Being On The Road from HackFwd on Vimeo.

Update: Cobook Livecards, now on the web

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 18:43:51 +0200

cobook:

We are really excited to launch our first web version of Cobook Livecards, the digital business cards that automatically keeps your contacts complete and up-to-date. You can sign up today via cobook.co.

The web app is complementary to Cobook for iPhone and lets you update your contact info as well as view and download info of your connections.

Currently Livecards requires a Facebook account but alternative email sign up is coming soon.

Want to Learn to Code? Start Small & Have Fun.

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 11:42:17 +0200

fredkschott:

I liked a lot of things about Zack Shapiro’s post Want to learn to code? Start here. I actually remember reading his original post dedicated to Ruby on Rails last year, and thought it was a great starting point for the framework.

Zack’s obviously a smart dude, but there’s a certain hostility in his newest post and others like it towards those who “don’t want it enough” and I cringe every time I see it. Coding isn’t a secret club that requires a pledge of undying loyalty to join; it can be enjoyed on all parts of the spectrum. So advice like, “Nights, Weekends are bad” is incredibly damaging to the cause. If someone works days, then what? They just shouldn’t bother? Quit their job? Worst-case scenario they never try, and best-case they think they’re screwed from the get-go and have an easy excuse to quit. “Well, I could only code at night… so obviously it didn’t work out.” A more helpful way to phrase it would be, “The more you can give yourself to learning the better” which is both true and doesn’t alienate the rather large group of “people who do things during the day.”

Read More

Cobook Blog: Launch: Cobook Livecards, the easiest way to keep your contacts up-to-date

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 19:58:49 +0100

Cobook Blog: Launch: Cobook Livecards, the easiest way to keep your contacts up-to-date:

cobook:

Today we are proud to announce Cobook 2.0 with Livecards, the simplest way to keep your iPhone address book complete and up-to-date.

Livecards allows you to share your contact info with friends and colleagues and get their info in exchange.

How it works

Tell us who you are. Currently…

dropify: Case Study: How Darryl Reeves Doubled His Facebook Fan Base in Less Than a Week

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 21:42:32 +0100

dropify: Case Study: How Darryl Reeves Doubled His Facebook Fan Base in Less Than a Week:

dropifyapp:

If you’re into Jazz music you’ve maybe come across the wicked tunes of Atlanta-based saxophonist Darryl Reeves by now. Not only did he release his brilliant album “Mercury” last summer, but he also just recently followed up with a free mixtape titled “The Dillaquarium Mixtape” – a tribute to…

Download this now.

Cristina Cordova: Transparency in Startups

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 16:31:44 +0100

Cristina Cordova: Transparency in Startups:

cristinacordova:

In startups, employees expect a level of transparency that doesn’t exist at large companies. At Apple, only the people who need to know are in the know about new products and sensitive internal company information. Contrasting this with a startup, team members are taking both a financial and…

buzz: xkcd: App

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 17:30:51 +0100

buzz:

xkcd: App

amalucky: Analyzing share of time spent on social networking...

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 17:27:16 +0100

amalucky:

Analyzing share of time spent on social networking sites in December 2012, comScore reveals that while Facebook dominated at 83% share, Tumblr occupied the second spot (5.7%), more than Pinterest (1.9%), Twitter (1.7%), and LinkedIn (1.4%) combined, and almost as much as the aggregate of all other social networks (6.1%).

18-29-year-olds more than twice as likely as the average internet user to use Tumblr (13% vs. 6%).

(via Chart/table from: Tumblr Beat Pinterest, Twitter, and LinkedIn for SocNet Time Spent in December)

Tumblr is #2, thoughts?

dropify: Combine SoundCloud with Dropify to Easily Get More Fans on Facebook

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 16:37:37 +0100

dropify: Combine SoundCloud with Dropify to Easily Get More Fans on Facebook:

dropifyapp:

As an artist, band, DJ or producer using SoundCloud, people can listen to your music or sounds by playing your streams. This is what makes SoundCloud great; right now it may be considered the premier service for STREAMING music.

Why we are emphasizing streaming here? Because that’s what…

smart move Dropify.

taylordavidson: kbspvc: Fred Wilson + Creative...

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 17:04:26 +0100

taylordavidson:

kbspvc:

Fred Wilson

+ Creative Entrepreneurship

Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) of Union Square Ventures recently sat down with us to talk about his contribution to “Creative Entrepreneurship” and his MBA Mondays series. Fred shared his thoughts about why he started writing MBA Mondays and the topic of education around entrepreneurship and venture capital.

+

Watch the video above, and download “Creative Entrepreneurship” for free to read his contribution and the contribution of 24 other venture capitalists and entrepreneurs.

I sat down with Fred Wilson recently to talk about his contribution to “Creative Entrepreneurship”, and we talked a lot about MBA Mondays, teaching through blogging, and NY tech.

Come to Europe Fred! Would love to see you around!

Cobook Blog: Update: Cobook for iPhone, now with multiple account support

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 13:00:25 +0100

Cobook Blog: Update: Cobook for iPhone, now with multiple account support:

cobook:

Today Cobook for iPhone gets several great improvements including the much requested support for multiple address book accounts, quick contact actions and phone number formatting.

Multiple Address Book Accounts

You can now use Cobook to manage all your iPhone contacts from iCloud, Exchange,…

infogram: Meet Jifo, the infogr.am animal - it has travelled...

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 15:51:22 +0100

infogram:

Meet Jifo, the infogr.am animal - it has travelled from a distant planet to us. It’s aim is to detect and eliminate ugly data, in fact, it eats old, rusted charts for lunch.

“it eats old, rusted charts for lunch.”

Great interview with Dave Morin.

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 12:53:04 +0100

Great interview with Dave Morin.

dropify: Case Study: How a Recipe PDF Reached 50,000 People on Facebook in just a Week

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 13:58:39 +0100

dropify: Case Study: How a Recipe PDF Reached 50,000 People on Facebook in just a Week:

dropifyapp:

Let’s share the numbers upfront: 1,300 downloads of the Drop resulted in 450 new fans. That’s a great feat considering people were able to skip the Like button to directly receive the download.

Quick Facts

Drop Type: PDF (recipe)

Fan Base: 25k Facebook, 8k Twitter

Time Frame: 1 week

Total Downloads: 1,300

Viral Reach: 45,000

New Fans: 450