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Principles part 2

Think and participate in a debate without retiring by saying " i dont know". At the same timedont get emotionally attached to either side. Play a devil's advocate for most oh the time. But also pick a side which your system 1 endorses, making system 2 work hard to approve it EXERCISE

Living by principles

Enjoy whatever you are doing without guilt. e.g. Watching sitcoms entire day is fine Implement your ideas quickly Be confident: you frankly are as smart as most of your friends and colleagues, if not smarter. Dont be insecure. Express your ideas freely, they are not going to make fun of you. They are here to learn too. If they are making fun of you/your ideas. Well fuck them Talk more and express your ideas or thoughts with others. Thats the most effective way to get feedback and refine your ideas. You have enough time to think within yourself when you are alone Start doing things that are not on your comfort zone everday. Follow and master atleast one of the above principles everyday. Dont worry about what others are going to think about you. THEY DONT CARE ZEN IT

Unique features of crowdfunding education loans

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Crowdfunding education loans is slightly different from existing crowdsourcing(funding) platforms which focus mainly on ideas and not individuals. Ideas are more permanent than individual's educational needs.

Supporters of a project check often for the progress of the idea, whereas individual's education takes more time than the idea

What are we funding : ideas vs individuals educational needs

Status of the subject who got funded: ideas completion time is smaller than education which typically takes 4 ~ 8 yrs. So this is more long term

Difficulty in bootstrapping: ideas to implementation time is smaller, bootstrapping them is easier.

Difficulty in establishing credibility: On crowdfunding sites which fund ideas, ideas themselves establish credibility, whereas when a site which supports funding individuals there must be a "fool-proof" of verifying identity of users on the site. This can be overcome in the bootstrapping by launching it only in few popular schools (but this doesn't cover the original use case of poor, but smart, students who couldn't afford to go to popular schools)

Existing education loan system: Existing loan system is broken because it doesn't support poor people who have potential to succeed in their lives. Loan system in India requires collateral to approve a loan. Poor person obviously can't afford collateral so can't afford loan. And the interest rate in developing nations like India is very high. If the investors/backers of a person are in a developed nation they can lend at a lower interest rate than the interest rate charged by the banks in developing nations.

What is the incentive for a foreign investor to invest in a poor student's education at a lower interest rate?

Though the interest rate is lower than borrowing rate from the bank, it is still a good rate for the investor because since he is a foreigner he can't invest directly in developing nations anyways. This allows him to invest in developing nations in a easier way

Better sorting on hackernews

Why do articles like “Nexus 7 released” or “iOS 6 has xxxxx feature” come to top of the hackernews site. I use hackernews site to read news/articles which is difficult to find on internet, unless I do lot of work myself. But finding articles like above, which are covered by almost every tech blog out there still become top ranking posts on hackernews.

Hackernews shouldn’t allow press release of a feature of a multi-billion dollar company to become top post on its site. It should instead remove such mainstream articles, (articles covered by all other tech blogs), from its top results and encourage articles which are informative and relatively hard to find on the internet.

#thoughts

Buzzers in airports

I was travelling to New York from San Francisco this weekend. It was an early morning flight and I was too sleepy. To get out of my sleepy mood, I went to a cafe near my Gate to get some coffee. Cafe had a television set which was airing Olympic Finals tennis match between Roger Federer and Andy Murray. I am a huge Federer fan, and the match got me out of my sleep even before my coffee kicked in.

But I almost forgot boarding my flight, because of the match. But I heard the announcement with my name, and ran back to my Gate to board the flight.

Why can't airports give Buzzers, similar to restaurant pagers/beepers which notify you when your order is ready. Airlines have all the information they need to know when I should start boarding. If they give buzzers to their travelers, that would be very helpful to the travelers and less annoying at the same time. Announcement with my name in it is helpful to me, but not too much to others' who were watching the finals with me

Crowd-sourcing education loans

I was born in India and I spent most of my childhood there. I was lucky enough to be born in a upper-middle class family where I didn't have to struggle for basic necessities of life. But majority of people in India struggle for basic necessities everyday, and they lose the struggle most of the days.

For those people who struggle for basic necessities everyday, getting education is a pipe dream. But education is the strongest force which will help you in your daily struggle for basic necessites, yet majority of people in developing nations can't afford it. Though few parents save up for their kids' education, their savings is only sufficient for primary schools. When it comes to high school/college, the tuition is too expensive for parents. But these kids are just as smart, determined, hard-working as me (who was lucky enough to get high school/college education), and I think given proper education they will definitely be successful in the future. It is a shame that they are not able to achieve that success in the future because they can't afford high school/college education now. Existing solutions by Government are clearly not sufficient.

Imagine a crowd-sourcing platform (kickstarter for education loans) for funding education loans. Anyone who cannot afford high school/college education can use the crowd-sourcing platform and try to raise the money for their high school education. It is a platform where people (who were lucky enough to get a headstart and are successful in their lives) invest in people (who are determined, hard-working, smart but just can't afford the college tuition). I am very optimistic that this system will benefit the society as a whole. Investors reap benefits because they are investing in smart and determined people, and it is beneficial to borrowers as well because it provides them an opportunity to get high school education

Marketplace for exchange - Part 2

I wrote a previous on a marketplace which is mostly focused on renting/leasing articles from neighbors.

This article is mostly about a marketplace which allows users to swap articles (main reason being swap is permanent and rent/lease was temporary)

Swap is permanent and overcomes a very big obstacle that is involved with rent/lease(ing) articles. Swapping involves a use case which goes like this:

1. User A searches for a something (say Article X) that he wants and he finds that User B is ready to swap Article X.

2. User A finds that User B's list of "Wanted Stuff".

3. User A decides that User B wants Article Y which has approximately same value as Article X that User A wants.

4. User A makes an offer to User B for Article X in exchange of Article Y.

5. User B seals the deal.

Couple of interesting things here are:

a. System should allow users to determine articles of "approximately same value". Most of the times users have an understanding

b. Facilitating exchange of goods. Developing a mobile app for this marketplace solves this problem, because mobile knows users' location and makes it easier showing user only articles within a radius of ~R miles.

#startup ideas

Dangerous addictions

I have heard many people say smoking cigarettes and alcohol are addictive and they are harmful to your health. I agree that they are harmful to health. But amount of harm done by alcohol and cigarettes cannot be quantified. We find reports which correlate smoking and drinking with lower life expectancy rate, but none of them are definite.

I think most dangerous addiction is watching TV. It is easily quantifiable, you can say I spent 3hrs watching TV today, and you lost 3hrs of your life. Smoking and drinking will affect you when you are old, when your productivity is not at its highest. But watching TV affects you instantaneously. If you think of watching TV as losing time in your life, I think nothing can come even close to harm done by watching TV.

#random

Marketplace for rentals/exchange

I always wanted a marketplace where I can rent stuff either for free or for discount price (when compared to selling price of the actual article). I am sure many people encounter use cases on a daily/weekly basis where they want to rent stuff.

Having a marketplace where people list what they can lease out would obviously be beneficial. But, when it comes to renting stuff, I would like to rent/lease stuff from/to someone in my neighborhood (or someone who stays around where I stay). The use cases people frequently encounter involve house hold things like waffle iron, or vacation stuff like ski equipment, and I don't know to show listings in California to someone in New York.

A marketplace for rentals/exchange should have atleast the following features:

1. Show users what's available around you.

2. Allow users to create triggers "e.g. notify me when someone is leasing out ski rentals"

3. System should protect users from getting their things stolen.

4. Some kind of reputation building which helps the system in doing [3].

5. Basic auctioning, that helps when someone is leasing out something that is needed by many(e.g. ski rentals during winter). Auction/bidding is the best way to decide who the buyer/leaser should be.

#startup ideas

Marketplace for exchange of stuff

I was thinking of marketplace only for free stuff or stuff which is priced for very low prices(this can be two categories: a. things which are inherently cheap b. things people are trying to get rid off because they dont want it anymore )

What is the product-market fit for this marketplace. Do people really need access to such a marketplace from their mobile phones.

Below are some of the assumptions which leads me to believe that marketplace for free stuff is not needed

1. People with smart phones are usually well off, and they don't really need free stuff

Some assumptions which support the need for such a marketplace:

1. College students or other people who value money more than others. (Though college students spend more on their phones)

People would like to get notified if something is being given away for free or at a high discounted price around them. Mobile platform is the best one to notify people about free stuff given away around users.

People would like to set "triggers" for something that they need. e.g 'mountain bike', 'camping tent'

One use case I think people would be very interested in is using stuff temporarily and returning it back. It happens very frequently, and we don't want to buy something for a one-off situation. And best way to get these one-off articles (waffle iron, lawn mower, ski rentals) is from neighbors or people who stay around you. Marketplace which allows users to search, rent and return stuff would be very useful and I don't think there is one for mobile platform. Neighbors and friends (friends data can be obtained from facebook) who are around users are the best ones to ask for these one-off stuff. People could post such requests on facebook and twitter, but it will be lost in so much noise generated on those social networks. It is more valuable when you have a dedicated marketplace for this.

#startups #startup ideas

Decline of "Dream job"

I remember when I was studying in college, I always thought of securing a job at Microsoft is my dream job. And I realized it wasn't just me but most of my developer friends in college agreed with me. And that has been the case for years till Google came.

And Google held the "Dream job" title for quite some time, though not as long as Microsoft did. And then came facebook which took over the "Dream job" title from Google.

The trend I have been noticing was, time for which a company holds "Dream job" has been declining. Especially in Silicon Valley, home to so many startups, time span a company holds "Dream job" title has been declining rapidly. You see people jumping between companies frequently with the hopes of being present for the "next Google" or "next microsoft". You hardly see a company being called "Dream job" by developers for more than a year now.

Lifeblogging

I am always very interested in recording events in my life, and to observe the correlations and improve parts of my life.

I am very interested in starting with a very minimal setup, using my iphone and integrating with some existing services to start lifelogging

Using iphone:

Physical movements:

Create a very simple iphone app which tracks your movements, think it is possible by allowing it to use GPS and accelerometer on your phone. This should allow you to log your physical movements everyday.

User data:

Take input, start with simple input, like (2 cups of coffee, 2 candy bars, 1 pizza slice, 1 cigarette)

Integrate with existing services

Integrate with Zeo:

We spend 1/3 of our life sleeping, and I think logging that will log 1/3 of your life. Zeo has been doing reall great job of recording accurately (almost) the sleep phases a person is in by using their Zeo bands. Zeo also has a public api for developers, and I think this will give some important data to look at.

Plot the data you get from above steps. This is a hard and tricky step because it is important to chose which what to plot and then observe patterns/correlations if any, and then tweak your life and see if you see any changes

#startup ideas

Bring source before sink

It is a well known fact that when you are building an application which relies heavily on UGC, it is very important that your first users should be sources of highest quality information which feeds your app.

1. If you are building an app which provides reviews for hotels, it is very important that your first users are foodies who can give/rate the content on your site. Your initial users shouldn't be casual users who are just sinks (or consumers of the information of the site). This seems very obvious but the important point here is your initial users should be *HIGH QUALITY* sources and not *NORMAL* sources

User involvement

There is a popular book titled "Dont make me think" (or don't make users think) when using your application. It is true that users get frustrated (and will never return to your site) when you make them think a lot.

However, if you tweak user's brain by involving him in some activity (e.g. clicking on space on a site built using impress.js revolves content on the site), which requires user to think (involve in your app/site) a little bit in a good way, I think it increases user's engagement when he is on the site.

Why do all the important sites have broken UI/UX

Most of the important sites (like booking ticket, making a reservation with a doctor... ), sites which actually/literally improve our lives are broken.

Best option would be to build a good UX/UI team as consultants and get some good projects and show off to the world how it should be done.

However, not all sites are broken.

Vanguard is one of good UX sites that I use everyday

NOT A FINISHED BLOG ENTRY

#startup ideas

What I learnt from draw something

Draw something is a game developed by omgpop company. It is a pictionary kind of game where app gives me a word ("pig") and I should draw it on the canvas provided by the app and submit the drawing to my opponent. My opponent then guesses the drawing and *my opponent* wins if he guesses correctly.

One thing that came to my mind, very quickly I must add, was players can cheat each other by drawing unrelated drawings and submit it to the opponent. So I thought the app should have "Report unrelated drawer" button in the app. But.... the app was doing really well without this feature and users were having a lot of fun.

Most important lesson I learnt was get your product done as soon as possible assuming that users will behave properly. Having anti-spam (or related feature) features will just slow down your development and will unnecessarily consume your time and other important resources on petty things which are not needed

News feed as landing pages

So, what kind of apps (both web and mobile) should have news feed as the landing page.

Other types of landing pages include pages which take input from the user before displaying any content.

News feed landing pages are automatically "tailored towards" the user.

Tailoring can be done in multiple ways:

1. Social graph(facebook)

2. Location based (foursquare)

So, when should news feed be the landing page?

Most of the apps which have news feed as the landing page are when user visits the website(or app) with nothing specific in his mind. User is on the site to gather information. He might perform some action after he gathers the information, but thats not why he is on the site.

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