Hypesurfer

We are living in Internet renaissance age and once need to learn how to ride the waves.

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Had amazing time in the City of Nis, Serbia. with @hongbui. In pursuit for talent for @groupon we stumbled upon hidden gem of Southern East Europe

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How accurate is Google Maps App on iPhone? (by Bojan Babic)

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First interview on Al Jazzera

Al Jazeera Business Specijal: Bankomat Evrope (by AJBalkans)

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Woohoo, I've stared blogging again! Reason for such move is @medium - new startup by Ev Williams. More posts are coming soon. 

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MYO - Wearable Gesture Control from Thalmic Labs (by ThalmicLabs)

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Improve Ease of Use Panel - Bitcoin 2013 Conference (by Lindsay Holland)

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one of most exciting ideas I've seen in a while

A new spreadsheet, called Grid, and the mind behind it (by Scobleizer)

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State of Social media usage in USA 2012

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Based on engagement Tumblr and Pinterest look like good investment. Twitter needs to get rid of ADD users ( or maybe contributing to ADD of its users ). Facebook is clear winner in space

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PingBox and Openshift

On start of new project one needs to take care about bits and pieces in order to have even slight chance to be successful.

Every piece is important, from finding proper partners, finding good domain name that is not being hostage by domain squatters, picking proper technology stack, finding proper design, having good marketing strategy, picking up proper hosting provider ... and lots more.All strategies need to be in place before launch.

Today I'll focus on choice I've made for hosting solution. I'm big supporter of PaaS. Compared to traditional hosting you can more easily scale up and out. For previous project project (Instaright), I've used Google App Engine and got burned when they changed their pricing and TOS. Instaright was wired up with Google App Engine APIs and switch to another solution required to stop innovating and focus on rebuilding project from ground up. To make things even worse, I've faced roadblocks created by main partners that led that instaright needed to be euthanised. Lead by painful past I've decided that I need more flexible solution.

So, for PaaS provider I needed flexible solution that will not lock me in, with great community and proven technology behind. I've considered several solutions like CloudControl (Berlin Startup), Heroku, Aws and Openshift. Most of startups start their projects with out validating market for idea, I needed solution that will enable me seamless shift from prototype phase (small amount of instances) and autoscale traffic spikes that can be caused by unexpected press in Venture Village. Even though, price point have not been set at moment of platform choice (there was possibility to get burned again) I've decided that Openshift was reasonable solution for my needs.  

With Openshift you can choose which technology stack you want to go with and gear size. For each gear you can either use predefined setup or create your your own ( aka do-it-yourself ). I've decided to go with DIY and start with small gear. On top of that I've created app with following stack: backbone.js, tornado, tornado and mongo. After of couple of weeks of extensive testing I've decided to move to medium gears. During that time, for all issues and question I had I asked product manager (thanks Nam) and developers on official IRC channel. Their response time is amazing and for each issue I had they took snapshot of existing gear state and carefully documented all issues. 

Still, Openshift has long way to go and could make a lots of improvement (ie. missing essential memcache cartridge). I'd suggest more developer tools that will help monitoring app.  But, what I feel missing the most is way to maintain multiple versions of same app and seamlessly switch between different version of same app. IMO, one of possible solutions would be to take automatic snapshots on each git push and deploy those in background. As result, user could easily switch between different versions of app from admin panel without downtime. 

As conclusion to this post, I'd like to make final remark that expertise of people that are behind Openshift assure me that they are on right path and would suggest Openshift to everyone who thinks turning their ideas into reality. 

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Starting new project - PingBox

It has been a while since I’ve wrote post, but I feel obligation to write about my latest project.

Most of us can’t keep track of what media we watched and where did we watch it. Do you remember what movie you watched with your girlfriend year and half ago on BlueRay and can you think of easy way to watch it again? Or, where to find that awesome viral video you watched on Youtube last week? Was it Youtube, Vimeo or maybe on DailyMotion? PingBox tend to be centralised place for your media.

PingBox solves even bigger problem. Most of hardcore movie lovers keep copies of media on hard drives that can get lost or it can get broken. With existing solutions, you can upload all your media onto DropBox, Google Drive, but that is too much of overhead. Why syncing terabytes of data onto cloud and paying hundreds of dolars in fees, when you need only semantic information about media like id from IMDb, Netflix or some other similar service? 

PingBox - cross platform iTunes and light Dropbox for your media, runs in background on your devices and you do not need to alter your behavior in order to maintain your movie library, PingBox is your seamless lifetime cloud media library.

PingBox is cross platform app that tracks media on your desktop, mobile, tablet and lets you connect all online services in ONE secure centralized app. You can access that information anywhere. On your mobile, via web or tablets.

What makes PingBox awesome is that is allows you to check which movies your friends watch and sends you cross-platform notifications. That way you can comment together with your friends on your favorite scenes from movies you watched.

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Euthanizing Instaright

 I want to start by thanking everyone for supporting Instaright over the 3 past year. I'm extremely proud with how the app turned out, but unfortunately reality has caught up with us. 

 Instaright was my first baby and it helped me a lot to understand product and customer development and how it feels like to bootstrap your company. 

 At first it looked like I've hit the sweet spot. Users loved Instaright! I've received a lots of praises. As soon as I introduced Donate button on Firefox addon, donations keep pouring in. Those where enough to keep app up and running for months. App was running purely on users donations, but as soon as Google Appengine changed pricing model price of hosting such product when sky high. I've considered various pricing models, but none turned out to be good enough to uniquely distinct Instaright from other services in market. On top of that, app was dying for redesign. Time was running out, but I had big plans for Instaright. 

 Grand vision for Instaright was to become implicit version IFTTT where links, based on user intentions, would be sent to various destinations with just one click and no predefined rules. Upcoming (never shipped) version of Instaright supported Evernote, Picplz, Twitter and Facebook (no Instapaper but Instaright). Ie, if user "Instarights" image - it will be send to PicPlz; if user "Instarights" selected text it will be sent to Evernote as note; or if user "Instarights" article, then based on trends and internal article-souce score, it will be shared on Twitter or Facebook (thus, leveling up your social present and social rating). I still believe that this kind of implicit sharing service is in need by wide range user cohorts, ranging from social media experts to busy office employees. 

 NOTE: Unpublished version of Instaright did not include support for Instapaper, since Marco Augment provided no feedback when asked for oAuth key despite dozen of request. 

In the meantime, while struggling to keep Instaright up and running, I've received great job opportunity and was offered to move to Berlin. Which I have accepted and now I'm fully focused on new endeavour.

 Still, I believe that idea behind Instaright can be monetized. If you have some thoughts on subject, I'd be more then happy to share more details with you - just PM me. 

 Thanks again for your support, and if you want to be notified when I announce my next app you can follow me on twitter. 

Bojan Babic 

Creator of Instaright

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Instaright ReLoading

It has been very exciting couple of months since last blog post (release of  Instaright Google Chrome extension ). A lot has been accomplished and still, many features need to be implemented. Ideas are just popping up and it is very hard to distinguish gems from sea of ideas. Basically, I try to stay lean, have clear mind and focus on most important issues and features.

Lets get onto lastest Instaright updates:

- First you'll notice that this blog is now sub domain of instaright.com instead of instaright.tumblr.com

- Twitter Instaright handle got almost 3K followers and has steady klout score round 50

- Front end got new sections: Categories and Domains

- Embedded information in stream( images, videos, pdfs, books etc) in order to provide more useful link snippet in steam 

- Ajax support for crawlers (notoriously know as hash-bang), which resulted in big increase in number of indexed pages.

And many more ... If you are interested in what else is cooking, check out user dashboard in order to get sense of what else is cooking.

PS: Also there are many issues that Instaright face. The biggest one is rebranding of instaright.com and getting rid of Instapaper legacy icons ( sorry, Marco still haven't done it ). If you have some idea for new icon or have some manga-type minimalistic monster graphic at your disposal, I'll glad to consider it.

Instaright Social Bookmariking and Recommendation App

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Sharks at HP

Usually large enterprises are not under my radar. Most of time I'm interested in early stage startups, programming ( or should I say brogramming ) and entrepreneurship. All the time the time I try to connect dots between M&A , investors and product, like in case of blog post on YouTube acquisition by Google or connection between Thumblr, Vimeo and Union Square Ventures. Gradually I leaned about capital/power flow in deals, but all this seems like child game compared to enterprise size game that is ongoing in HP.

It all started by HP acquisition of Palm for $1.2b in April of 2010. All of online news ranted that WebOS is future of HP and that Apple finally got competitor. Behind the scene, whole acquisition was actually bailout for Elevation Partners on their $460m investment in Palm. Initially, Elevation Partners initially invested $325m including preferred stocks and liquidation preference. Afterwards, same VC firm, in successive investing rounds, Elevation Partners invested even more. Whole deal structure you can find here. Overall, Elevation Partners got $485m on $460m investment and earning $25m.

Couple of months later in August of 2010, Mark Hurd, HP CEO, steps down after to sex affair with ex softcore porn actress that has been working as his assistant. How in the world she got access to such high position at HP?  Well ... on second thought this scenario can be seen very often, just take a look affair behind main man behind WikiLeaks - Julian Assange .

Successor of Mark Hurd, Leo Apotheker indulged himself into HP adventure on September 2010. Having in mind that Leo's previous position was CEO of SAP, company focused on consulting and support, and fact that Palm acquisition was not Leo's deal - Leo spins off HP's WebOS business. And this is how $1.2b just disappeared from HP.

What happened here? Obviously Mark Hurd has been closely monitored and there has been whole network of associates that have been reporting to board directly. My take on this is that Mark has been mislead into Palm deal and as soon as it has been closed, his services at HP where no longer needed. After advent of Leo Apotheker and one shot chance for WebOS, this division on HP business went into hibernation. 

Maybe, I've made some wrong assumptions here because  do not have enough insights on HP situation. Events that happen in last year and half round HP deserve deeper analysis. Sharks are hungry.

Bojan Babic

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This Is Why I L.O.V.E Intrawebs

  PS: Thank you Reddit

Bojan Babic

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Instaright extension for Google Chrome - Out Now

I'm very excited to announce that Instaright now has Google Chrome Extension.

Instaright extension for Google Chrome can be downloaded from Instaright tools section  or get Instaright for Google Chrome directly from Chrome Web Store .

  Essentially, if you are Instaright user for Firefox transition to Google Chrome extension would be painless. Instaright Google Chrome extension has been developed to resemble Instaright for Firefox as much as possible. Chrome extension contextual menu contains additional component that will save current page or link user hovers. Snapshot from below represents contextual menu for Google Chrome extension: 

  Additionally, Instaright for Google Chrome has new feature. Adjacent to the address bar there is button that will save current url.

  With this feature Instaright Chrome Extension is ahead of its Firefox clone. This option will be featured on new version of Instaright addon for Firefox, which will be hopefully confirmed in upcoming week. Additional feature is another reason to dig into Instaright for Google Chrome. 

  Beside Google Chrome extension, there have been many changes on front-end side. One of most crucial improvements was purchasing www.instaright.com . If you head to  instaright.appspot.com you would be redirected (301ed) to www.instaright.com

  Thats it for now  new goodies coming soon!

  Happy Instarighting 

Instaright Firefox addon for Instapaper

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Android activations mapped geographicaly (VIDEO )

This breathtaking video of android activation around the globe is showcase how to successfully execute marketing campaign. Just watch spikes on launch of Droid and especially Galaxy. Perfect timing and execution around the globe.

Bojan Babic

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AOL Content Business - will we see merger?

AOL hired Tim Armstrong in 2009 as prominent Google Executive, who became famous for his effort on Google advertising platform, that will point aging company in right direction. IMHO. By now he has been doing amazing job. He took company public ( NYSE:AOL ) , focused on most valuable assert of company in order to make up declining revenue of its dial-up assets. Based on past AOL acquisitions ( Weblogs Inc, GDGT , AutoBlog, Engadget ), AOL content business has been the most vivid part on AOL ecosystem, which was enough for AOL's CEO to set longterm strategy. AOL recently bought Techcrunch, as result of this strategy. And now, AOL bought Huffingtont Post for $300m and 5x of gross annual income, which is considered good buy. Content creation is blooming and also very competitive, AOL has been facing fierce competition among other content creation farms, like Demand Media ( filed for IPO ). It would be had to maintain good profit margin unless we see huge merger. For, instance Yahoo has its core business based on content creation, but they have management that has non-web background ( referring to Carol Bartz ). On the other hand, we have AOL that has to distance itself from dial-up business and focus on strong parts of his business. They still have couple of years of pain until they establish sustainable content business. Way to speed up this process would be AOL - YAHOO merger and Tim Armstrong replacing Carol Barz as CEO of merged company. It could be win-win solution for both companies. Yahoo will get firm executive and visionary, and AOL would establish its presence on Interwebs.

Bojan Babic