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An open letter from a former Facebook and VMware engineering executive on how startups can best structure their release processes.

Great article that very clearly explains how business model and deployment model decide between having a predictable, quality-focused schedule versus “ship fast, break things” schedule. Also depends on the company culture.

Predictable, quality-focused (slow)

- Customers pay high $ for your product (they need it)

- Product is deployed to customer’s devices - slower iteration time to get it to the hands of customer due to outside forces like app store review

“Ship fast, break things”

- Customer gets product for free (they want it, keep them hooked with frequent updates)

- Cloud based deployment means quick iteration time to correct anything that goes wrong.

Key takeaway: Just because you are a start-up doesn’t mean you should ship quickly. You can do it when there are no paying customers and you have nothing to lose, after that you have to pick one of the two paths based on the above factors.

The Art Of Framing

The fundamental question when brainstorming ideas for your product is “What problem are we trying to solve with this feature?”. How you frame this question in the context of your product goes a long way in guiding the ideation phase. Let me show this with an example. Let’s use the popular Snapchat app.

If you ask those who use Snapchat why it’s so popular, the most likely answer would be that “messages disappear” after viewing so you can send whatever you want without being judged. Others would say it allows for enhancing pictures with cool filters and stickers.

However, is Snapchat popular for those reasons? If you observe the day-to-day interactions people have in the physical world, most are casual conversations with nothing being recorded unless done so intentionally. Most popular social apps like Facebook are quite the opposite - every conversation or post is recorded and etched in memory forever.

Let’s frame the problem question as “How can digital conversation be more natural so it closely mirrors those in the physical world?”. Asking this question makes us understand the intent of why Snapchat introduced the ephemeral messaging. It also makes perfect sense of why it has been so widely popular.

Framing a problem correctly also lends itself to exploring newer problems within the same space. When humans interact in the physical world, they use more than just words. The facial and hand expressions, the props, the environment, etc. make a bigger impact in communicating the message. So if we frame the question as “How can Snapchat conversations be enhanced to make them more expressive?”, we see a perfectly good reason for Snapchat to have introduced filters and why its such a big hit. It also explains the acquisition of Bitmoji.

As a final example, consider the day-to-day experiences that you want to share with everyone in general but no one in particular. Like the beautiful sunset on the Waikiki beach or the perfectly made seasonal pumpkin spiced chai latte at Starbucks. “How do you share your life as it happens with everyone, no one in particular?” Enter Snapchat stories that last for 24 hrs.

Asking yourself the right question goes a long way in ensuring you are solving the right problem for the users. And this relies heavily on how well you frame the question. It’s always worth spending sometime framing the right question.

First, we want to let members of the public experience driverless vehicles firsthand, so they can better understand the impact this new technology will have on their lives. Second, based on feedback from pilot participants, nuTonomy’s engineers will adapt and improve our system, so that we can deliver an autonomous transportation experience that is extremely safe, efficient, and comfortable.

I would love to ride in one of these once they launch in SF. The company has been testing these cars in Singapore for a while now. For the Boston pilot, the cars have a safety driver as well as an engineer to monitor the ride. While it would be exciting to ride such a car - the thrill of a machine self-navigating the streets - I am curious to see if there are any interior design changes that make the passenger experience more “comforting” so a human can "trust” the vehicle. A bare minimum would be to have an in-car display for riders to see “what the car sees” so they can be confident of the vehicle’s capabilities. Such an experience is already available in Waymo.

As a user, my #1 concern would be safety. No matter how many technical papers are published to show these self driving cars will have lower error rate than humans, new users will start off being skeptical. The design of the human-car interface will play a key role in alleviating this concern and would be key to mainstream adoption.

Many companies loudly proclaim their desire to innovate, but how many know what it actually takes? The most innovative companies don't tell their

No matter which way you slice it or dice it, it all comes down to having the right people in the right role.

Ford made headlines at CES this week when it announced a major partnership that will integrate Amazon's technology into its cars, also following rumors..

“It’s one thing for a car company to react to a more reliable or more affordable car marker, as US automakers dealt with in the 1970’s. It’s another to respond to the very threat of car ownership going away forever, or the challenge that making self-driving cars requires a fundamentally different skill-set from what you’ve invested in over a century.”

Adapt or Perish

IBM's two strategic moves

On May 8 2015, Ionic which provides HTML5 hybrid app development framework, announced that it is partnering with IBM to bring Ionic Creator to IBM's MobileFirst Platform.

Recently on Sept 10 2015, IBM announced the acquisition of StrongLoop which is one of the key contributors to Node.js. StrongLoop provides a platform to visually develop REST APIs in Node and gets them connected to new and legacy data.

What this means for enterprise software: (1) Hybrid mobile applications using open source technologies like Ionic is the inevitable future. (2) Node.js, is gaining popularity (and acceptance) in enterprise.

#ibm #nodejs #ionic

"Success or Failure is Mutually Assured"

Although the statement is obvious, you can feel the impact it makes as you read the article.

Ev's writing has reiterated my belief that a great startup has to have a thoughtful leader. No matter what the product, the idea, the location or culture - the person leading the charge pretty much shapes everything else.

#startup

The Invisible Girlfriend

The lines between real and virtual have blurred a lot in the past few years but this startup takes that one notch higher. One of the "hunts" via Product Hunt that landed on my inbox was the startup "Invisible Girlfriend". It provides "A girlfriend your family can believe in". You can "create a girlfriend", baptise her, choose her age, a photo and "create her personality".

Image from TurboSquid

At first this sounds funny and appears to aim primarily for those who may not be able to acquire one in real life, but if you read this article on guardian filed in 2012, you will see that their market is beyond such folks. Due to China's single child policy, there appears to be a lot of societal pressure on children to "settle" down and there were already services that had cropped up that provided "fake" girlfriends/boyfriends. Now with this virtual one available on demand, that you can tailor to your taste, it's even easier.

With huge strides in processing power, complex AI algorithms for NLP (Natural Language Processing) can be run to cater to mainstream computing consumption. Mashable put together a list that provides several NLP APIs in market available for commercial use. A similar service is probably being used to provide automated text message responses to text messages - a feature advertised by the startup.

Technology definitely has it's benefits but can have downsides as well. Most people are going to setup a "perfect" girlfriend for themselves, one that gives always gives the right answers to all their text messages. Using this service over time will possibly play on the psych of the individual. If they do choose a real girlfriend later, the responses will definitely not be this "perfect" so there is a good chance they will probably be permanently in love with their invisible girlfriend as no real one would match up to their virtual creation! :)

"An algorithm can perhaps surface guaranteed content, but it cannot surface unexpected, diverse and sometimes weird content exactly because of how algorithms work: they know what they already know. "

Very cool concept

"When you sleep, your brain literally recharges, shuffling through the day’s memories and storing or discarding them (which causes dreams), so that you wake up alert and clear-headed. Stressful projects often make you feel as if you have no time to sleep, but taking the time to get a decent night’s sleep is often the one thing keeping you from getting things under control." "Taking time to contemplate what you’re grateful for isn’t merely the “right” thing to do. It also improves your mood, because it reduces the stress hormone cortisol by 23%. " "You can’t control your circumstances, but you can control how you respond to them. So before you spend too much time dwelling on something, take a minute to put the situation in perspective."

"Media constructs Reality" - this is so true. (On social network sites) "The more we engage with certain type of content, the more similar content is made visible in our feeds." This appears to be very obvious but is a very powerful statement. When we continue to 'like' things, more of those similar things are fed to us - under the garb of "personalization". The other opinions or perspectives never reach us, consequently building a world around us that completely skewed.

Fireworks filmed with a drone!

bigzaphod

Each one of these things is great by itself, but I believe that there’s an even bigger plan hidden in plain sight - and it’ll all land this fall.

Apple now has everything they need to disrupt the game console industry in a way that none of them see coming.

A company can decide to shoehorn remote employees into a system designed for in-house employees, or they can take a Remote First approach: Figure out how every aspect of their organization can thrive with remote employees, and then progressively enhance them for in-house employees.

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