I just came back from a very interesting meeting with 2 of the founders of @minshdotnet. Minsh is a game like virtual fish world formed by your tweets. A fantastic concept that has the potential of significantly reducing the text based burn out that happens for many tweeters by making your twitter life visual, fun, [...]

I have had a few strange experiences recently that made me reflect about how companies often abuse social media marketing. Here are two:

The organizer of an event I believe in and have been promoting on Twitter called me and asked me to tweet about hotel rooms available at a discounted price, [...]

Sometime ago Iwrote on the importance of listening to your social media strategy. But everyone and their grandmother (literally) is trying to get on the social media band wagon. How do you stand out from the social media clutter?

For starters, here are some tips.

Be a geniuinely honest and nice person

Social networks, like real life social [...]

So we’ve all seen Facebook copy millions of times. They simply grab features that work for others. They’ve copied Friendfeed and Twitter. And more recently even LinkedIn. Take a look the newest imitation a copy of LinkedIn’s completeness profile bar. You can see this on a new Facebook user’s page:

Some people, such as a new [...]

Orange Labs hosted a fantastic women in tech event last week featuring speakers like:

Rashmi Sinha – Co-founder and CEO of SlideShare

Heather Harde – CEO of Techcrunch

Silvia Console Battiana – Co-Founder and Member of Board of Directors of Auctionomics

Beatrice Tarka – Co-founder and CEO of Mobissimo

Sandy Jen – Co-founder and Engineering Chief of Meebo

Here are the [...]

I’ve been meeting a lot of amazing pre-launch entrepreneurs at various Silicon Valley tech parties. Some of the  apps they describe are truly fantastic technology applications solving major customer pain points.

Many times however its only after several questions that a key value proposition for their app becomes obvious. Unfortunately for them, customers probably won’t spend [...]

I’ve long been a fan of Siqi Chen. He is brilliant both for his razor sharp analytical focus as well as his bravery and commitment to sharing his company’s proprietary data in order to lift all boats in the social gaming space. He gave a wonderful presentation with David King at last week’s social gaming [...]

I sometimes make hand made prototypes of ideas and explore them with my roommates. When I make a prototype I do so to test assumptions about designing for maximum emotions and social interaction. I then use this learning on tech apps I work on, which may not be the same as the concept of the [...]

I generally work on utility apps and websites and this is reflected by the blogs you read here. However utility apps can learn a lot from social gaming because social games are some of the few spaces on social networks that have actually managed to effectively acquire, engage, retain, and monetize users. Because of this [...]

Startups often forget that for a user a good product is not one that gives all the features in the world. Instead, it is one that makes it clear to the user:

what they can do with it how they can do it how that fits [...]