Sidney Crosby has some insightful words after Pittsburgh’s 8-4 loss to the Ottawa Senators last night:

We made some big mistakes… you never want to lose, but you also don’t want to get away with [mistakes] like that… sometimes that gives you a false sense of security when you get away with [mistakes] like that. *

What he’s saying here is that being lucky will hold you back. Lots of tech people - entrepreneurs, hold that there is a huge element of luck to their success. But the fact is, if you get very lucky a few times and you survive big mistakes, you’ll make these mistakes again when you’re bigger, and they’ll hurt a lot more.

Get unlucky, learn from your mistakes, keep going, be successful. 

fred-wilson:

trading one addiction for another

adamkatz:

Interesting.

understatementblog:

Tesla Motors’ lineup of all-electric vehicles — its existing Roadster, almost certainly its impending Model S, and possibly its future Model X — apparently suffer from a severe limitation that can largely destroy the value of the vehicle. If the battery is ever totally discharged, the…

yongfook:

In direct response to: http://designerfund.com/infographic

I’ve created products / services in the past that have garnered praise for their design. I love good design in all forms - copywriting in particular fascinates me. I’ve never called myself a designer.

Here’s my pitch. This…

Every once in a while I play some NHL with my brother on a PS3. We’ve been playing the 2010 version for a while. 2012 came out not long ago, and I noticed a change in the 2010 version. EA allows companies to buy in-game advertising. The ads are in the same places you would see the ads on TV - along the boards of the hockey rink.

As of a few weeks ago, all of a sudden, the only things plastered all over the boards are $1.39 Sausage McMuffins! This is quite genius, for the following reasons:

• Buying ads in a 2 year old game is way cheaper than buying ads in a new game, for the simple reason many fewer people are playing it.
• The ads being cheap as they are, you can buy all the ad real-estate in the game. While I never noticed any ads before since they blended in so well, I can’t help but notice the Sausage McMuffins. They’re everywhere!
• And the best bit - McDonald’s demographic is, well, working class folks. The same people who buy their kids a 2-year old used EA game for $9.99 instead of the new version for $69.99 are the same people who are more likely to frequent McDonalds. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I personally love an occasional Double Cheese after a good night out.

I just finished reading Eric Ries’ much-lauded book, Lean Startup. One thing that really clicked with me from the book is the application of the scientific method to startup business development. The scientific method is is the normal method that scientists use in their everyday work:

• Define a question
• Form a hypothesis based on observation, intuition.
• Test the hypothesis experimentally.
• Analyze the data gathered from the experiment.
• Accept of refute the hypothesis.

While I don’t think Ries every makes the connection between his Lean Startup method and the Scientific method, it is fairly exactly what he advocates as the central tenet of the book:

• Define a question - this is our problem, for which our startup is looking for a solution.
• Form hypothesis - we have an idea how to solve the problem we’re having, be it customer acquisition, our value proposition, or revenue model.
• Test hypothesis - build a MVP (minimum viable product) that will solve the problem we’re having, and let us test our hypothesis.
• Analyze data - we gather meaningful analytics (user metrics)
• Based on the data we accept of refute our hypothesis.

The most important bit to understand about the scientific method is that the process is not considered a failure if the hypothesis is false. It merely eliminates one option, and guides science ever closer to it’s goal. The big problem with startups right now is that too many people have but one hypothesis, which when proven false completely derails them and demoralizes them, often ending the startup effort too soon. Others stick with a false hypothesis for too long in blind faith, wasting much manpower and resources.

This is of course the wrong way to do it. Some people do strike gold on their first attempt, but if you don’t you can keep applying this process over and over again rigorously, and you will fairly soon be successful (given that you have enough grit and runway to iterate over the process a few times).

At an event last week, Microsoft gave everyone in attendance an unlocked Windows Phone. I’m an Android guy myself, sporting a Galaxy S. Tablet wise I use an iPad, and I also own an often used iTouch. However, for whatever reason, before putting my free Windows Phone up on eBay, I decided to give it a run.

I was pleasantly surprised. I’ve been using it - an HTC Surround (average phone spec-wise) for 3 days now and I don’t feel constrained compared to how I use my Android. The only things missing that I really need is a good Google Reader app, and new shinny toys like Path.

So, what are some of the things I like about it? Tho things mainly. First of all, where Android feels in many ways quite similar to iOS, Windows Phone takes on a much different and refreshing take on the UI. The best way I can explain it is that it feels like a Command Line Interface, brought into the 21st century to work well with a touch screen. The interface is minimalist (in a good way) and consists mostly of white text, on a black background, with an occasional icon to make things pretty. This thing feels like Linux should feel if you put it on a phone (sorry Android).

The other thing I like is the services integration out of the box. As soon as I booted it up, I got a list of accounts I could log in with, including Windows Live, facebook, Twitter, Google, Linkedin, and a regular email account. Having logged into all of them, I get seamless integration to all.

The best part is the People app, which lets me see all the updates from all my social accounts (twitter, facebook, linkedin…) in one app, and if I wish, in one all-encompassing stream. I can post, reply, see conversations, all from within this one interface, which is completely agnostic to which of the services I’m posting to. The notifications too, are rolled into one, showing me what new updates I have and from which service they come from. For me, this is a huge time saver. At the same time, for those of you who wouldn’t like this, there are separate apps for all of these services in the App Store… erm, Marketplace.

In the built-in calendar app, I have my Google calendars, facebook calendar (which I didn’t know even existed, but is really cool, showing me my events), and a Windows live calendar. The calendar app feels like Google Calendar, in that I can show/hide the different calendars, and that they’re all color coded for easier viewing.

Some of the bad things? It runs IE mobile, which is based on IE9, but it’s still IE. Also, the search button on the phone launches Bing.

Along with ‘synergy’, the words ‘paradigm shift’ have a very negative, roll-my-eyes reaction, especially when uttered by business dev folks, or worse, by ‘idea guys’. But paradigm shift is actually a very useful concept that needs to be reclaimed from it’s current buzzword status, and start being used in a proper concept again. It comes from a book called ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ by Thomas Kuhn, and it refers to important foundations on which research in a particular scientific field is based on.

So for example, Copernicus’ work is a paradigm of Astronomy. Before him, many competing schools of thought fought it out as to how planets and stars behave. After him, these competing theories mostly faded away. Because his theories were solid and easily confirmed, they were taken as a foundation for future work from then on. This is the important bit. Every astronomer since Copernicus has not had to re-invent the wheel, but merely takes for granted that the earth revolves around the sun, and takes it from there. This foundation and freedom from doubt makes the rapid advancement of science possible. If a field does not have a paradigm, competing schools of thought can fight it out for centuries before a breakthrough is reached and a paradigm established. After that point, the field advances rapidly! Think Netwon’s Laws, Maxwell’s Equations, Theory of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, etc…

But I want to talk about Software and the Internet. I doubt that any of the business guys who throw this phrase around have actual read Thomas Kuhn. A paradigm shift is merely the shift from an old paradigm to a new one. There are real paradigms in our field. Let’s see how they came to be and what they shifted:

• x86 instruction set - Many other competing ones, but for a long time now it’s been the dominant instruction set for general purpose computing.
• Unix. Many other competing OSs, but it seems after a long time that Unix has finally prevailed above all.
• The Internet. There is no other network in wide use. 
• The Web - there was Gopher and others, but with the Web they all faded away. The Web is a paradigm we all build on, not having to re-invent HTML and CSS and HTTP every time we want to build something that resides on the internet.
• REST - Roy Fielding’s work offered a clear foundation for our web architecture that was demonstrably better than others, such as SOAP
• SQL, for thirty years until now.

All of these help us by not having to re-invent the wheel, and providing a good foundation for future work. Let’s think about what some of the paradigms getting formed or shifted are:

• Facebook - the one social network?? Clearly destroyed other ‘schools of thought’, such as Friendster, MySpace, etc… It’s definitely a platform an increasing number of people build on, and it’s increasingly hard to ignore. I think this one really needs shifting.
• Asynchronous programming. We’re no longer doing just HTTP request/response apps. Blocking and threads have failed us for highly scalable, concurrent programming. Will async programming be fully adopted?
• NoSQL - jury is out on this in a big way. Good for starting flame wars.

What else can you think of? How do you take advantage of a new paradigm once you recognize a shift is taking place?

Adobe is slowly winding down Flash, with their announcements of stopping mobile flash as well as the development of Flex, the application framework for Flash. This is great news for the future of the open web.