Aditya Chadha

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!

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?

via: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625644

Stick it out, yes… that’s the most important part. That’s the hardest part. I think most people who have a startup want to quit at some point. It has to hurt. You have to move through the hurt, because everytime you keep going when you want to give up, someone else out there with the same idea who got to the same point where you want to give up… well, they actually gave up. They gave up which means more customers for you…
I was at a library once and this was a very popular library. There was a whole crowd of people waiting outside before the library opened all wanting to rush inside and find a desk where they could sit and read the books. The security guard had to yell at the people twice DON’T RUN! It was insane.
So what I found was, the people who went the farthest into the library were most likely to find a spot. Some people went in say, half way and instead of simply going farther in, they stopped and turned around and went back and hunted through the desks they’d already passed hoping to find a desk everyone else had passed up.
But on the next floor or closer to the corner, there were still open spots! Those readers simply didn’t go far enough. They gave up too soon and so someone who went farther got an open spot those who gave up could have gotten.
It was a metaphor for startups… “Keep walking!” that’s my motto. If a customer says no, keep walking, find another customer. If you find a bug, keep walking and fix it. Just keep walking. Don’t stop. Don’t turn around. You’ll stumble, but pick yourself up.
Damn, it’s hard sometimes… it’s really hard sometimes. You’ll want to cry (you’ll notice those go from tears of sadness to tears of joy as you walk), you’ll want to smash your computer. You’ll get depressed. You’ll get hungry and have no food. You’ll sleep on the floor. Everyone will think you are crazy. You are crazy. Crazy is good.
Just keep walking.

Maybe I should be using twitter for this, but these need some explanation and are things I don’t want to forget…

• Using the humans on twitter as a mechanism for large scale data computation – How would this work? Reminds me of the group mind of the Drummers from the Diamond Age. A knowledge engine seems closer to what twitter can do for you, but distributed computation?
• Writing a Facebook application that asks your friends questions about you and calculates a trust metric – How would this work? How do you convert raw data into a consistent metric that you can use across people?

That is all. Remind me to work on these, please.

So, the talk went OK. Here’s the slides in case you need them:

If you have questions or are interested in talking about this more, feel free to drop me a note

So, yesterday, a new social search engine called topsy launched. This is probably not a big deal to most people, even given the glowing TechCrunch review, what with all the search engine hype of late having being stolen by WolframAlpha.

However, topsy is going to be amazing. And here’s why. Topsy is the first real implementation of a large scale reputation network for the general public. When google invented pagerank, they used the inherent value of backlinks to assign authority to webpages. Topsy is taking this one step further, and assigning authority (or, in their words, influence) to people. There’s an abundance of social metrics (who is linking to you, who is friending you, who is following you, who is retweeting you, who is commenting on your blog post, etc.) out there which can be used to compute influence for a particular person and I believe when topsy is done, it will get very close to assigning reputation to people.

But, why is this important? Obviously, you can’t eat reputation (yet!). Nor can you use it as currency. No, of course not. We’re not living in some magical world where Whuffie has replaced money and can actually make things happen for you. But we’re getting close. In an attention economy, what reputation does get you is attention. And, attention is valuable because it is scarce.

You could theoretically use Topsy reputation to figure out who to pay attention to, and who to ignore, based on a single metric computed from a massively aggregated set of social interactions. You could use it to calculate trust in a particular reviewers rating for a particular object. You could take it with you to your next outing and use it to figure out if a restaurant is REALLY going to be as good as they say it is.

And, this, ladies and gentleman is why topsy is going to kick ass, not because it is computing your search queries, but because it is computing your reputation.

Full Disclosure: I’ve been friends with the topsy co-founders for a long time so I know where they are coming from, however I have no details about what they’re planning on doing so all of this could be hogwash

So, I’ve been quiet here for quite a while and that’s mostly been because of all the craziness going on with my life. I think I’m finally at a spot where things have slowed down enough that I can take a step back and coherently think and talk about them, and more importantly where I think they are going to be… This is going to be another long post, so sit back and enjoy

First up, I’m no longer with outside.in — that gig’s been over since February of this year, and has definitely helped put things in perspective for me. I don’t think my creative urges were really being satisfied and that was just leading to unhappiness and discontent, which consequently played out in the oddest of ways. Overall, I’m fairly happy with the way things have turned out and looking forward to where the rabbit hole will lead.

Since my departure from OI, I’ve helped co-found my dream company, subLucid Inc and I think from my perspective subLucid is really the culmination of a two-year long effort to see what lay beyond the big giant mess that is Corporate America and the Consulting industry in general. I’ve learned a lot, most importantly the fact that I’m not cut out to be an employee at this point in my life and probably need to do this on my own (and possibly fail) to figure out what the right answer is. If there is a right answer, that is?

We’re currently running subLucid as a Rails consulting company, so if you’ve got consulting work that you’re considering farming off, get in touch! The larger goal with subLucid is the same as my larger goal in life, which is to make beautiful and functional products. Very similar to what 37signals, balsamiq, CrowdVine and others are doing.

I’ve also moved out of Manhattan for the first time since graduating from graduate school, and seem to miss it quite a bit, but I’m living with some wonderful people and burning a lot less cash in rent so the jury on whether I’m moving back is still out. I do miss walking out and being in the center of it all, though, and taking the train just doens’t cut it so almost all signs point to a return to the island at some point.

That brings me to what I’m doing along with writing ruby code pretty much 24/7 at this point. My primary focus at this point is Groupped. I’ve talked about this on the subLucid blog and the groupped blog a bit so I’m not going to belabor the point other than to say that Groupped is going to kick all sorts of ass. Hopefully I’m going to be able to launch something (not too pretty) along the lines of “if you’re not embarassed by your first alpha, you’ve waited too long to launch.” — so stay tuned! Also, I’m working with Karen, who is an awesome designer, so if you’re every looking for one, hit her up.

Along with Groupped, I’ve also started working on an idea that I’ve been interested in for quite some time, connecting the dots between humor, memes and network virality. The goal is to throw a bunch of ideas against the wall and see if something sticks, and to have fun doing it. The project is tentatively titled QuitBlowingMyMind and will hopefully turn into something more interesting than a splash page soon. Once again, I’m working with some very awesome people, so I’m sure it’s going to turn out well.

The one other project, and perhaps the grandest of them all, that I’m involved with is John Geraci’s DIYCity, and its first spin-off, SickCity. DIYCity basically aims to harness technology and publicly available data (eg. Twitter in SickCity’s case)

to reinvent their cities as places that are more efficient, more cost-effective, more sustainable, and simply more livable places to be.

I’m super-excited about DIYCity since it brings together a number of things that I’m passionate about including extracting signal from large data sets, spreading automatic social and civic software, and building for the future. Very, very cool.

On the open source side of things, I did publish the Rails caching guide (and I think it’s going to become official Real Soon NowTM) and think I want to write more Rails documentation (especially since I _really_ miss the old wiki). Along with that I did start hacking on boomer, which is meant to be a rails plugin to enable usage of the Tokyo Cabinet key-value store, just like a regular CacheStore. That has languished for a while, and so should be updated soon!

And, that’s all the craziness that I’ve been upto in all the time that I haven’t written anything here, but the one thing I do want to add to all that craziness is a regular writing schedule, since I do enjoy it quite a bit (even though it is very stream of conciousness, I have all these posts that I just HAVE to get out!). Other than that it seems, that the larger picture is to help start or be involved with executing on as many creative ideas in parallel as possible. Remember, time is short!

The problem right now is that between my Rails blog, my two business blogs, and this blog, and my twitter feed, I’m not totally sure where everything goes. Ideas?