Aditya Chadha

Yeah, that’s the other place I love: http://www.neighburrito.com/

On the other hand, is delicious: http://tinysgiantnyc.blogspot.com/

Everyone seems to love baohaus, but I’m not into it at all. Just sayin’.

You did:
wget http://opendna.org/dna/mycoides.txt
then emailed it as an attachment from your hotmail account to DNASyth LLC and they sent you back a vial, you pulled up a bacteria, put a needle in it, squirted your lols into it, and then wrote a paper.
What parts are inaccurate? Was it a yahoo email address?

LOL, via: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/c6kd6/i_am_one_of_the_creators_of_the_first_synthetic/c0qgerq

So, I now follow 200+ people and my twitter timeline is a bit too much to enable sending all tweets as txts to my phone. I do, however, want to know ASAP whenever someone @replies to me and so, replies2phone.com was born.

All you need to do is, sign up and it’ll make you follow the @rep2p bot, once you do that, the bot will scan the Twitter Streaming API for @mentions and DM them to you as they occur.

I’ll write a more detailed architecture post soon, but just wanted to put it out there for your enjoyment! Feedback appreciated.

Interesting:

To make step-function changes, revolutionary changes, it takes that combination of technical acumen and business and marketing — and a culture that can somehow match up the reason you developed your product and the reason people will want to buy it.

Full text here: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/31896381/from_the_archives_a_revealing_interview_with_steve_jobs/print

Cross-posted from the tumblog

A lot has been written recently about why NYC is the best or the worst place (depending on who you read) to start a startup.

I think there are pros and cons to starting up in each city and as a startup founder here in New York, I’ve got my own take on the situation.

Yes, NYC is expensive. Yes, it is hard to compete against the high salaries that an engineer can make working in Finance. But you know what? If you’re determined to build a great startup, neither of those things will stop you from building it here in New York.

There are three things that a traditional technology startup needs: Employees, Users, And Capital.

NYC has all three, and in abundance. There’s a huge pool of design talent, and an ever increasing pool of passionate engineering talent that does not want to get sucked into the Finance cesspool. Along with that NYC is a real city, with real paying customers, not some echo chamber where everyone speaks the same language and no one cares about reality (yeah, sorry SF!). And then there’s the capital, which has traditionally been New York’s forte and now we’re seeing a lot of early stage capital expanding in the city as well.

What NYC doesn’t have is a dense startup culture. In my opinion, the Valley works because a pool of really smart, really well-connected people make it work, and this attracts even more people to move to the Valley. The NYC startup culture is a little less in your face. There’s a ton of networking events but there’s a big lack of serial entrepreneurs offering mentoring to first timers. Fred talked about it recently on his blog, and I think this is beginning to change and will continue to change as NYC sees more activity and more exits.

And that brings me to the reason for this post.

Starting a startup is a lonely path, filled with self-doubt and all kinds of seemingly insurmountable hurdles. The hardest thing to do is also the only thing to do for a startup, which is, to not die.

In order to make it easier for my fellow founders, I’d like to propose a new support group.

There are a ton of great events including, NYTM, Hackers and Founders (can’t believe it has become huge, over 400 members now and some excellent events, great job guys!), UltraLight Startups, Open Coffee, Entrepreneur’s Roundtable. The more the merrier, I say! The focus here is to provide an opportunity to learn, more than anything else.

Let’s call it Founder’s Anonymous. The goal is to get together people who’ve already taken atleast one step towards founding a company (could be as simple as having an idea and a domain) and bring them together for a small monthly event, where you get to meet people who are in a very similar situation to yours. Then we add in a guest speaker or panel each month, someone who has been in this spot before, an experienced founder, an angel or VC, someone from M&A at one of the web majors, someone who leads product or engineering at a successful start, etc. to come share their experiences on the various things that go into building a startup. How do you get started? Where do you get early users and traction from? How and when do you incorporate? Should you hire a profession PR firm? What’s the best lawyer/accountant to use? Do you know any good designers/developers? Questions like this and a lot more that comes up every day.

Now what does this group need to get started? Founders, Mentors and Sponsors. The event itself needs space, and needs to be free somehow.

What’s next? If you’re a founder, a speaker or a mentor, a sponsor get in touch. If you’ve got ideas or run a similar event, please drop me a note. If you just want to root for us, follow the blog and the twitter account for updates!

The app store is broken, and we all know it.

The mobile/smartphone space today is where personal computers were back in the 80′s. Multiple platforms (Amiga, Tandy, IBM PC, Apple Macintosh, TRS 80, Commodore 64) and little standardization. The market is ripe with innovation and people have a lot of choice, which is great for the consumer. But it makes it hard for app developers.

How do you decide what platform to build for and what application to build? Once you build an application, how do you spread the word so that you can get it in the hands of as many people as possible? How much do you charge for it? Most of just scratch our own itch, pick a number and leave the rest to Cthulhu.

Right now, it is hard for an app to stand out amongst the hundreds of thousands out there, and this has led to the crazy pricing that dominates the top 50 lists in search of a hit.

Earlier this summer we realized that what was needed was a cross-platform out-of-band solution to allow users to not only discover and promote the best apps for their platform, but also to bring apps from other platforms and from other cities to their city and their platform.
Effectively, a central meeting ground for developers and their users, that lives on the open web and outside the proprietary platform stores.

So, today we launched the Appify Developer Preview. Danny puts it very well when he calls appify a marketplace, discovery platform and innovation engine.

Appify will allow app developers to set up their own app pages on the open web and get them in front of a much bigger audience, even those that aren’t on their platform of choice. It will allow users to look at and get the apps offered not just for their device or city but around the world and on every device. It will also allow users to help promote the apps they think are worthy and to participate better in the app development process.

As a developer, you could still set up a webpage for your app, and you should, but then you have to promote your app, build an audience and spend time doing everything other than writing code. Why not let appify do all of that for you so that you can focus on what you do best, build awesome products? Do you want beta testers? We’ll find them for you! Do you want early-adopts who will find and spread your app? We’ll find them for you! Feature requests? Feedback? Exposure? We’re going to do all of that, and a whole lot more.

Currently, appify focuses on just local apps, although we’d like to encourage every app developer to create their app page. We’re building a community and since we’ve done local before, we decided that was the best place to start. Also, there’s been an explosion of mobile apps that help make cities work better and we’d like to give these apps as much exposure as possible.

So if you’re an app developer, go create your app page right now! If you have questions, concerns, suggestions, or flames, direct them to developers@appify.com

Yes, there are a bunch of easter eggs in Mozilla; so? By and large they’re pretty small, but that doesn’t really matter, because they serve a very important purpose: first, they’re entertaining to find (I love it when I stumble across them in other programs, and judging by the amount of mail I get about these things, so do a lot of other people.) Programs should be fun to use. But by far their most important reason for existing is that they are fun to write. Hackers get a kick out of puzzles, and you know what? If dropping in an easter egg allows a hacker to blow off some steam and consequently stick around the office for a few hours longer, and put in a 20 hour day instead of merely a 16 hour day, then those are resources well spent. The hacker’s happy at having been creative; somewhere down the road, some users will be amused by it; and the program ships faster, and is a better program because the people who wrote it cared about it. Everybody wins.

Yes, such toys are “unprofessional.” I wear my unprofessionalism as a badge of honor. Professionalism has no place in art, and hacking is art. Software Engineering might be science; but that’s not what I do. I’m a hacker, not an engineer.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/easter-eggs.html

How is this even possible?