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Hearst Fashion Hackers

I attended, sampled to be precise, TechCrunch Disrupt NY several weeks ago. More about the startups that we should pay notice to such as GLIDE, Enigma and iSpeech I'll write about later.

I was sitting in the closing session of the conference watching how Michael Arrington interviewing/trapping Ron Conway and then I noticed a familiar shirt :

Among the geeks, VCs, entrepreneurs and media, the first Fashion Hackathon alumnus are working their magic.

Gilad Shai

#tcdisrupt #hackers #Hearst #heasrtfashionhack

Complex Mobile Applications

UBER (Uber) is an amazing transportation solution. It is a simple solution to get from point A to point B.

UBER takes care to send the car to you and process the payment, just push the button.

Cut the rope, one of the mega successful games in the short history of iOS gaming.

The game is simple and as the player advances in the levels he encounters an incline in the difficulty to complete a level, while the interaction is still swipe and tap.

Vine app, Vine for iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPod touch (3rd generation), iPod touch (4th generation), iPod touch…, allows you to create and share a 6 seconds looping video.

The UI and the is simple.

The beauty of the mobile apps above is that they are simple to use and extremely complex in the background.

Apps can be complex just make sure you hide the complexity behind the simplicity.

Gilad Shai

#mobile #application #product

Why Startups Fail #3

Every New Year's Eve all the financial gurus try to predict the outcome of the next year. At the end of the year we discover that the majority of the predictions were far from hitting the target.

One of the things that I find interesting, in any new project, is the Hit and Miss ratio. How many misses can your project can suffer before you label it a dud?

Tip #3 on the way to failure - estimate the product almost right

Many people confuse between project planning and product planning. The later, holds the MVP, a list of features and user scenarios, while the frist one holds the prioritization of the features and the resources to get them done.

Let's focus on the product!

To do it by the book is to interview at least 20 potential customers with the same script and result with a meaningful feedback. A product owner that makes all the decisions in his mind and thinks that he knows better than his/her customers has a higher probability to miss the MVP. There are only a few Steve Jobs in the worlds and chances are - you are not one of them!

#whystartupsfail #MVP

When you come from no where you Dream. When you come from everywhere you Think

#random thought

Shvoong

Shvoong, originated from the German word 'schwung', means full of momentum.

Earlier this week I attended an alumnus event. I always find these events useful. Not just for catching up on the news, but for getting insights and for contributing a word of advise.

One of the thing that interested me was how people from outside think we should use the Shvoong we created with the Hearst hackathon and move with it forward.

I heard interesting ideas, several where close to ideas I communicated to Phil Wiser a week before and others where a little bit off.

The interesting thing that I would like to share with you today, is the unseen shvoong in project management. The base of generic project management is time-budget-quality, and the job of the project manager is to monitor the process and improve it as the project matures.

Around 75% of all software projects fail!

You can define the failure as a breach of deadlines, budget or quality. The question is why?!

Projects fails because of a lack of shvoong!

Momentum equals to mass * velocity (speed with direction). We know how to measure velocity. If we can measure something it means that it is quantifiable, and we like that.

Now, we ask what is the Mass? The mass, in my opinion, is the critical understanding of the project. Or in other words - the business requirements.

The Mass

The mass can break the momentum from the following pitfalls:

1. Bad planning. You forget 2 tasks, or miscalculated the critical path and the time/budget is off by weeks.

2. Not managing the holy triangle of time-quality-budget

3. Doing instead of leading

4. Confusing task to deliverable

5. Defining the trees without the forest

The Velocity

I find that more external forces affect the velocity than internal ones:

1. To many drivers, or none at all. Let's call it a lack of clear hierarchy and ownership.

2. Executives that saw more failures than successes and look at your project as another failure in progress

3. Low risk tolerance

4. Time to respond to external changes

Gilad Shai

#project manager #project management #shvoong #momentum

Hearst Fashion Hackathon Winter 2013

#hearstfashionhack www.hearstfashionhack.com

From an entrepreneur I became an intrapreneur.

When I joined Hearst Newspapers, I gradually stopped developing my own projects and shifted my after work time to assist friends and start ups around the city. To keep my entrepreneur spirit I continued to measure the pulse of the NYC startup community by attending meetups and different hackathons.

Hearst CTO, Phil Wiser, decided that he wants to boost the innovation of Hearst corporation and bring forward the technology forces of the 125 years old publishing company. A simple and very effective action was to introduce a collaboration platform. The Jive powered platform enabled me, now a humble developer, to learn about the assets, the processes and the needs within the company. The later, a need from a social media manager, led to Hearst Fashion Hackathon.

Today is a week before the event. Usually, I wait a week after the event to perform a post mortem analysis. I gather numbers, investigate where did we go wrong and what did we do right. I interview people for their opinion and compile a list of lessons for future events. This time I'm adding a midlife analysis (excuse me for not sharing everything).

The gain from organizing the hackathon:

1. Collaboration!

In the late 90's the buzz word was "synergy", today it is pure cross company collaboration.

2. Build infrastructure for future growth!

Magazines exposed the Magnus API (developer.hearst.com). The API is already in use for the Google Glass pilot.

3. Internal vibe (or seed of innovation)!

Employees are talking about the fresh breeze of innovation. It is a great opportunity to break the routine and be creative. In my opinion, one of the greatest challenges to big corporations is to be agile and response quickly to the market. The reason is that the development teams are immures in a long term roadmaps.

4. Good PR!

5. A precedent!

We can get things done and fast (the good - TBD). One month to plan, one month to execute.

Can't wait for next week.

Gilad Shai

#Hearst #Hackathon #fashion #heasrtfashionhack

Google Glass

Google Glass is the new kool-aid.

Glass introduces a new user experience. It is a new hands free experience that we first experienced with the BT earpiece, and now reinvented with the BT smart eyepiece.

Glass changes the way user consumes content, controls (or doesn't control) it and share it with others.

Having said that, Glass challenges the content providers to adapt to the new content consumption and create the right content strategy for it. The biggest challenge will be for the big publishers that need to add a new device with a new content concept to their digital media. So far we saw the evolution from paper Magazines to paper+websites, to paper+website+mobile, to paper+website+mobile+tablet with Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

The publisher will adapt and add a support to the new device. There is no doubt about it. The question is how fast they will do it and will it be smart enough to affect their mobile strategy. We need to keep in mind that today most of the hits origin from smart phones. You have three minutes free, you pull out your phone and consume content. With the Glass, you don't need to pull out your phone. The new content is being fed to you.

**no word regarding the Mirror API

Gilad Shai

#Google Glass

Own the channel

Recently I met with a friend who was looking to establish a founding team to his new startup. My take from our conversation was "own the channel".

The idea is to create the connecting infrastructure between groups, or entities, and monetize on future development on the infrastructure.

The simplest example would be building a road and charging a toll, the same as in Warren Buffet's biography, The Snowball, where he talks about a toll bridge in Fremont Nebraska. The road connects two locations and monetize on the "save time" service.

Gilad Shai

#startup

Why Startups Fail #2

Fail fast, succeed faster.

Tip #2 on the way to failure - don't give up

I can't recall where I learned about this phrase for the first time, whether it was at Forbes or from Lean Startups, the important part is that it struck a chord with me. It is a powerful phrase which makes a lot of sense at the agile development world.

Over time I realized that it is a perfect excuse for giving up. People attempt to create a new product, or develop a new feature. The problem is that when they encounter the first difficulty they give up. To be accurate, after all we refer to an intelligent crowed, they will calculate the ROI and the risk for investing more effort in over coming the obstacle. At the end they will justify it and move on to fail again.

#startup #lean startup #fail fast #whystartupsfail

Dance close to the revenue line

by Julie Morgenstern

“Everything you spend your time on should be assessed in terms of its proximity to the revenue line. What’s the revenue line? It’s the point at which your company is actually making or saving money.

“Which of the tasks on your to-do list are closest to your company’s revenue line? In most cases, it’s the activity that will immediately do the following:

Generate revenue Create the product or deliver the service Save the company money

Why Startups Fail #1

There are many reasons why startups fail. There is no checklist that will pave the ground for great success. If you meet a businessman who promisses wonders and a list of does and don't does to be successful, nod, smile politely and walk back slowly. There is a checklist that will provide you what you must do inorder not to fail, but it doesn't promise a success. Success is a total different ball game.

Tip #1 on the way to failure

Don't SHOUT at your development team!

Developers' main tool is their brain. Part of their job is to research, learn, plan, create, innovate, fix and maintain. Their efficiency is correlated to each one of these steps.

I was unfortunate to witness how a biz guy bullied a team of overseas developers in the attempt to make them work faster. In my opinion part of his act was to cover his dumbness. The result was a low quality product, a delay in deliveries and a breach of budget.

when the guns roar the muses are silent

Gilad Shai

#whystartupsfail #motivation

What Schrödinger's cat has to do with products?

Schrödinger described Heisenberg uncertainty principle by putting a Geiger counter, a cat, and a radioactive material in a sealed box. The cat represents a tangible explanation to Heisenberg's principle. Even more, the cat facilitates an object with emotional connection.

Schrödinger transformed a quantum mechanics uncertainty principle to an emotional dilemma of "is the cat alive or dead? And can it be in both states at the same time?"

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle means that one can't determine simultaneously the location and the momentum of a particle.

Schrödinger's experiment presented a situation in which the cat was in an uncertain state and could be simultaneously dead or alive, based on the uncertain emission of the radioactive particle. Only when we look into the box we can tell that the cat has one state of existence and it is either dead or alive.

New products hold great risk for a company. On the one hand, a new product canGo Live and increase the value of the company, on the other hand, it can "burn a hole in the company's pocket" and Go Dead. During the development phase (including the planing phase as well) the uncertainty is high, the product is dead and alive at the same time. Only when we test the product then we know what is its state.

Gilad Shai

Spotted Rhino

Why "Spotted Rhino" ? Even a 1,200kg gray mammal needs a splash of color...

Gilad Shai

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