Can’t recommend this book enough. Besides being written by a Portuguese and a co-worker/friend/entrepreneur I helped choosing a few of the startups interviewed and with Balsamiq, TweetDeck, Shazam etc this is an invaluable resource. With so many great european startups featured you can’t help asking yourself the question: couldn’t it be me?
Category: Start-ups
Finishing The Year Strong
I’m determined to finish 2011 strong.
The year is closing on us pretty fast but there is still plenty of time to get things done!
“Ramping Up” Instead Of “Winding Down”
Even though we’re hitting close to the holidays when most people think things are slow, we are ramping up our efforts to finish in big style.
Essential Time Management For Startups
When it’s comes to time management there are two very important things to be said:
1. Important Due Soon -> Important Not Due Soon
We tend to work on ‘important due soon’ tasks first. Once we get those done there is a tendency to start working on the ‘not important due soon’ issues where in fact we should work on the ‘important not due soon’ ones. That’s the only way to get ahead on your timeline.
2. Schedule Time for Quadrant II activities
What we consider important is normally tasks where there is an action to be performed somehow (crises, pressing problems, deadlines, etc.). These are called the Quadrant I activities and what happens is that you end up never doing any strategic, planning (Quadrant II) activities. The strategic/planning stuff is the things that will “oil your windmill” or “sharpen the saw”. That’s why it’s a good idea to schedule some time every week to review your previous week, plan the week after and see how you are performing in accordance to your business plan or goals.
On User Experience..
“But it wasn’t until we’d invested an additional 400 hours improving the user interface — fully two thirds of the overall development cost — that we felt we had a minimum viable product — i.e. a product that delivered the core functionality, and within an experience so delightful that the users would want to tell others about it.”
http://makaluinc.com/blog/2011/07/minimum-viable-product.html
Service Design, The Lizard Brain and Arduino
- I was introduced to the concept of Service Design by Nuno Rod, an interesting and needed discipline. Watch this video for a visual introduction to the concept.
- My friends at Artica showed me the video “Seth Godin: Quieting the Lizard Brain“, a must watch.
- Found out about the portal “Falar Global“, seems interesting enough, pity it doesn’t contain a feed in the main page.
- Watched the Arduino documentary, well not all of it, but it doesn’t mean you have to do the same.
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