I will be giving a presentation at the Weekend Apps [http://blog.weekendapps.com/about/] event on February 22nd.  This event, which will take place over the course of 3 days, will bring together some very bright minds to build a number of [what I hope to be] excellent Facebook Applications.  Weekend Apps takes cues from the very successful […]

Today at the SNAP Summit, Lee Lorenzen said something that was both scary and encouraging, and it summed up the current social network platform craze very well. I can’t quote directly, but the gist of it was this: If this is a new era in what could potentially become a new bubble, we’re […]

…If apps need to try so hard to spread themselves based on the “Ideavirus” model, why take it so literally? It seems like the model here is the common cold, spread almost uncontrollably… and nobody really needs it. Whatever happened to confidence in product?

This is part II of a series.
What kinds of apps are working on Facebook, and what can we learn from them as developers and designers? How do we even define success on Facebook applications? Installs? Active users? Canvas page views? Churn rate? Let’s see.
Let’s begin by taking a look at the Appaholic Viral Dashboard. Over […]

Last thursday, LuckyOliver had its one year anniversary birthday party at Ace Auto, a junkyard in San Francisco.LuckyOliver is a website that allows you to purchase and sell stock images. Ace Auto was a pretty cool place to visit and was also surprisingly clean and organized for a junkyard. To purchase photos on the website, […]

So, as of my latest perusal of facebook’s usage statistics (as per Zuckerberg’s f8 speech), the number of daily returning users is “24 million and growing, 24 million and growing…” < If you read that last phrase out loud, it may have sounded like something Zuckerberg said in his f8 speech. Indeed, it may […]

Taking advantage of many web-startup events taking place around San
Francisco, a conversation that I’ve heard more than once a conversation that
goes something like
“So what’s your startup?”
“… I have an idea but I really do not talk about it, keeping it stealth.”
The first fear that that a founder of a startup has to get over is: […]

Part I: Housing and Transportation, aka “Should I bring my car?”
These days it seems rare when a week goes by in which I don’t meet a startup founder who has just moved to San Francisco. It’s no accident: the Bay Area is the preeminent locale for tech startups, and moving here is often a rite […]

The event of tonight was the Silicon Valley Newtech Meetup, organized by Vincent Lauria. The first hour or so was dedicated to presentations, as they always are. Nothing too new… I’m beginning to get tired of seeing Lucky Oliver everywhere I go. I’m yet to step foot on their website! But […]

Picture of our facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg’s Keynote Speech at the Facebook F8 Developer Conference was pretty bad, as all of my readers have agreed. He positioned Facebook as a world changing platform for entrepreneurship and developers. He clearly wants to see people build applications off Facebook as if it were an […]