Entries Tagged 'startup' ↓

Every once in a while I have wonderful conversations about life, technology and everything. Many times I end up talking about a myriad of topics. For example today I had lunch with Jonathan Greenwood (you should follow him on twitter here) and learned a great deal about many interesting things. I am always intrigued and delighted to rediscover that not everyone has my same brain, interests, browsing habits. Not everyone keeps track closely of the same spaces and same people I do.

So here is a random mesh of interesting links that I recurrently mention in my conversations, the common thread being – well it’s quite a broad one I’ll admit – entrepreneurship, social media, cool people and products, online videos, friends. You might have seen some of these already, but then again, maybe not.

Seedcamp

Seedcamp is a Micro seed fund that invests in start-up companies. I want to participate in the August selection round with my friend nocivus.

Vibram 5 fingers

The product site

Tim Ferris review

Gary Vaynerchuk inspiring videos

“The” online wine guy and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, pioneer of video blogging is quite a personality. Totally love him:

• His video blog on wine is here
• Personally I liked this of his keynotes. All his other keynotes here.

The story of Parrot Secrets

The story of Parrot Secrets, fascinating recount about a very simple (though controversial) e-book business.

Sorapot, a cool teapot

Sorapot, the teapot developed by a young designer and manufactured in China. Good video interview by Kevin Rose from digg.

Paul Graham essays

Really insightful essays about startups and innovation.

This is one of the first I read and it made a deep impression on me, years ago.

Tim Ferris on improving your blog

Video of Tim Ferris giving advice on improving your blog, very practical and analytical as always.

Diggnation

Kevin Rose’s video show about popular news stories on digg.

Two guys and a beer

Pedro picked up video blogging. Non politically correct, alcohol consumption, cursing. Promising!

Geeky and Entrepreneur news sources that I visit daily

http://news.ycombinator.com

http://programming.reddit.com

Equalway

Mirko Calvaresi’s site about grassroots italian buying groups – in Italian.

By the way

You should follow me on twitter here.

*lol*

Wow that’s a few links and videos. Enjoy and take your time.  I’ll be delighted if you want to chat about any of the above or if you found anything interesting.

And if you are any of the people mentioned above and are reading this, you rock and are an inspiration for me.

One of the first things I implemented for tuttivisti – to add just a hint of viral marketing to the project – was a widget that you can import on your own blog, maybe on the sidebar, to show the latest movies you either want to see or just watched. Let me test it here for you (and for me ):

How does it work? Just go to the goodies page (well login first) select how many columns and how many movies you want to show, click preview, copy the short Javascript snippet into your blog, website, myspace,etc. and you’re done.

I don’t think anybody is using this yet, but it’s understandable, tuttivisti has only a little above 100 users at the moment, most of whom never came back.

We’ll see if adding the next level of viral-ity will improve things: think posting your movies to twitter, pwnce, plurk, friendfeed, facebook, etc… . I’ll try. I think I’ll start from twitter this week. Pinax supports it out of the box (together with openmicroblogging which is way cool).

First things first.  My new webapp tuttivisti is live!

This post is about how it came to be. In just one week. One person team. Crazy working hours.

So I was there immediately after receiving the news that YC did not select my team for this round. I thought I would feel depressed. I thought that the put down would ruin my mood.

Well it didn’t! I actually felt a jolt of energy. For some reason I felt a bit as if I had been freed. Can’t really explain why but my motivation and excitement bounced back up.

So what did I do with all this creative energy? Well my partner for diffract.me (the other project I am preparing to launch) had to go for a few days back home and we hadn’t planned our next iteration yet. So I decided to dive into something new, short and sweet.

Yep, I started coding. Again. From scratch.

I sat on the shoulders of giants. For this 1 week challenge I picked some of the most productive tools I know (and these will be topic for a future post):

• Django
  
• Pinax
• Bluetrip
• jquery

I’d love to communicate properly the productivity boost that the set of frameworks above can give a developer.

No more spending endless hours trying to create a decent CSS/HTML layout. Bluetrip (and by saying Bluetrip I mean also the great Blueprint and Tripoli from which Bluetrip has been created) makes it trivial to put the stuff exactly where you want it on the screen. Cross-browser. No hassle.

Pinax. Ah, the joy. No more coding for the nth time a registration module. No messing with authentication emails. No rewriting another openid library. No more. It’s all there. Ready to use. Greatly structured. Amazing stuff. This is a game changer in my opinion.

Jquery. Well it needs no introduction. Jquery is a work of genius. For me it changed coding in Javascript from a painful experience into a pleasurable one. I love Javascript again.

Now will tuttivisti fly? I sure hope so, but the truth is that it does not matter. What I am saying to myself is: If I can build something like this in 1 week the question is not “will I ever manage to build a webapp that gains some traction?” but “How many attempts will it take? Is 5 going to be enough? 10?”. Maybe.

I have a lot more to say but will cut it short. I am at the end of a very very long and demanding coding spree.

Update: The past weekend a new version of tuttivisti has gone live, my 2nd week of work on the project, which incorporated much of the feedback I received, but a lot of work is still needed. So feedback is welcome, and – yes I know – I need a graphic designer.

It’s been a crazy ride these past few weeks.

My partner in crime – nocivus – and I have been working very hard on our submission for the 2009 Winter round of Y Combinator.

It has been a lot of fun.

Creative energy is like a drug. When you’re under its effect you can’t stop working and fleshing out ideas. We’ve been coding like crazy. We’ve been thinking and thinking about what we would really need first, to present a cool demo. We thought hard at the problem we wanted to solve, at our target, at the way we could make money.

So here it is, our creation, diffract.me. We can’t disclose too much about what we’re building but it’s real now. In front of our eyes.

We also picked a name for our company. A funny name. The origin of the name comes from an hilarious piece from Eddie Izzard. Here I present you evil giraffe.