ideas
Managers, screw the Golden Rule
Claire Lew quoting David Heinemeier Hansson (@dhh), the guy who made Ruby on Rails and the CTO at Basecamp:
You shouldn’t treat other people the way you want to be treated because the other person isn’t you.
The other person has different preferences (beliefs, ideas, and experiences) and is going to react to a situation differently than you. You might think something is reasonable or fair, but that’s you thinking that, not the other person. You cannot assume that the way she would like to be treated is the same as the way you’d like to be treated.
The Case for Letting Fevers Run Their Course
On The Daily Beast, evidence for Nassim Taleb's antifragility ideas:
Fever isn’t an illness. It’s the body’s attempt to fight illness. So when we treat fever with antipyretics, like acetaminophen (Tylenol) or ibuprofen, we only handcuff an important part of our immune response. Although it might seem counterintuitive, several studies have now shown that antipyretics increase the severity of infections. The time has come to get over our fear of fever.
Mobile vs. desktop usage habits
How Meredith built Allrecipes into a multichannel success, courtesy of A Founder's Notebook:
When designing each experience, we look to the unique strength of each medium.
Web provides a high degree of interactivity and utility: A keyboard and mouse allow the consumer to actively share their experiences through text. The large screen allows them to engage and to interact with the content through drag and drop functionality, and allows many items to be present on the page at the same time.
Mobile is all about mobility and constant connectivity: We take advantage of the likelihood that the home cook is most likely on-the-go or in-store when using their phone, so we are very much focused on helping them quickly find and share dinner solutions. The phone’s geolocation technology pinpoints the cook’s location so we can deliver hyper-local grocery offers that match their location and preferred retail outlet. We also take advantage of touch, voice and motion to allow them to enhance the brand experience. Mobile devices are also more likely to be a personal vs. shared device, so we can pay attention to their past behaviours to deliver a more personalized experience uniquely tailored to their interests and needs.
Print is an experience where cooks are most likely interested in having us curate the experience for them: The team pays close attention to the trends and behaviours we are seeing play out on the web to inform the editorial framework and focus of each issue. They are able to create features that marry our most popular recipes alongside hidden gems that might easily be missed through common search or browse behaviours.
Two system for successful startups
There seems to be two product systems which are quite popular and successful at the moment, for mobile apps.
1. Simple, mono-action apps
Focus around a unique use case, craft a superb user experience, wait for the market.
Instagram: Take a picture, apply a filter, share it to all social networks.
Vine: Take a 6 second, non-continuous video, share it to all social networks.
2. Kill the middleman
This is Uber, Airbnb, iCracked and Exec.
Find some market which does not need a middleman, as we now have phones with constant Internet connections. Then make connections, and exchanges of goods/services between people super easy, peer-to-peer style.
Airbnb: peer-to-peer house/room rentals
Exec: peer-to-peer house cleaning
In the case of Uber and iCracked it’s business-to-peer via the app.
So you know what you have to do, if you want to build a startup now. (Or you could build a cheap, efficient solar panel (apparently, you can’t).)