sardonicbryan

Agreed. On my team at Kabam, we have meetings, but

1) They are as small as possible, typically including just 2 or 3 people.

2) Are always optional.

3) Typically last around 15 minutes.

It helps to have plenty of space/rooms where you can just pull someone aside to hash out a quick issue, and a mature, responsible team that doesn't need baby sitting to get stuff done.

I totally agree with the sentiment in the blog post. As someone who has built and now compulsively checks a real time dashboard however, I'll enumerate one case where I've found real time really valuable.

I'm the product owner of a social game, and we are blessed with:

1) high traffic

2) tools that make it easy to test sales, promotions, contests in real time

3) a team that is capable of doing multiple meaningful releases a week reliably

The result of this is that we end up making meaningful changes to our product on a daily basis. With our high traffic, I can reliably tell you within one hour (on the outside) whether a promotion, contest or feature is having its intended impact, especially once I:

1) Benchmark against recent averages (and take into account the volatility in the metric I'm measuring... everything is framed as how many standard deviations above or below recent averages)

2) Compare against recent trends.

3) Compare against my expectations/hypothesis. After a couple years of looking at realtime KPIs move in response to changes, I've gotten pretty good at forecasting results.

Obviously, I also look at metrics at a daily level and track weekly cohorted metrics out for months to make sure strategically we're maximizing for a global maxima and not a local one. But there are a lot of pretty realtime businesses where tactics are extremely important that could really benefit from realtime dashboards.

Yahoo Fantasy Sports still has a leadership position in its space, which is a $1-2 Billion market for football alone. Anecdotally, it's the default fantasy sports platform for not only my group of friends, but whenever we are running an office pool (NCAA brackets, fantasy football, NFL survivor pool, etc.) since it's by far the fantasy sports platform with the widest adoption (main competitors being ESPN and CBS).

I'm a little surprised that the top answers on Stack Exchange accept the premise that analysts and PMs get paid higher salaries. That is certainly not the case at my company (mid sized tech startup), nor I would imagine at most other tech companies.

Anecdotally, in Taiwan the quality of McDonald's is significantly higher than in the US. The quality of the meat and materials in particular.

One term my company uses (not sure if it's an industry standard) that captures what you're describing is "yield," which is basically revenue/cost per user. Ultimately, what "CPM" you are making your advertisers is hard to really evaluate without knowing how much they are paying per impression or click.

That said, sounds like you guys are on the right track, now just have to sustain this success and scale it!

You could Tivo or DVR, or watch content made for TV on DVD/Blu Ray.

Well, I'd imagine most people earning $400K or more in a year are millionaires. Income <> net worth.

Dashboards don't have to be expensive to build. My company uses Graphite now, but before we were at that level, I just had engineering give me credentials for our DBs, and used ODBC + Excel.

Next thing you know, you have a dashboard tracking: - Real time revenue/revenue projections - Real time payments funnel metrics (impressions on payments page, conversions, average transaction size) - Real time tutorial completion rate by hour (aka application health monitoring) - Other KPIs tracked by the day (revenue, install, etc.)

In fact, there was a period of time when my dashboard was the most effective health monitoring in the company, and detected an issue before engineering or ops.

Yea, it seems like this is a pretty market position if you ask me -- if you need DB like tools, why not just use a DB? This product would have to be an order of magnitude easier to set up and use to get people to use that instead, IMO.

Could be wrong though -- would be great if something like this could improve the data/analytical literacy of the general population.

So for "collaboration," I'd almost rather see something like Spotfire's publish/view model, where not everyone has edit permissions, but power users can publish their sheets for people to view.

This more closely mirrors the workflow in my office at least, where only a handful of people create reports, but maybe 10-20x the number of people just want to consume it.

Just some hopefully constructive feedback here: for Excel power users, you're not just competing with Excel, you're competing with Excel+ODBC+SQL+Workbench which is basically an Excel/DB hybrid, just not web based.

I read your "how this is different than a spreadsheet" blog, and none of the examples struck me as compelling, even though I use my Excel/SQL toolchain every day. Given how strong the ecosystems are around those tools, I think it would be very challenging to convert power users without some really obvious hook.

That one hook COULD be a good mobile client. For example, I have a dashboard built in Excel with an ODBC connection to a few of my company's DBs. However, I obviously can't see this on my phone, since no mobile Excel client supports ODBC (not to mention the macros I have built in).

I could maybe see a "disruption" angle, where you provide 75% of the functionality of Excel+ODBC+SQL+Workbench in one easier to use package, but I wonder how large the market is for people who want to work with that level of data but don't want power tools. I guess that's one area where you'd have to trust your market research/gut.

Sometime shortly before 8pm Pacific time to around 9:30pm Pacific Time.

For what it's worth, FB has indicated to my company in the past that in situations like this one can refer to http://connect.beta.facebook.net/en_US/all.js

Anecdotally, I absolutely believe their stat about cab show rates. I went out in the city a lot when I lived there, and on Friday/Saturday nights around dinner time, your odds of getting a cab felt much worse than 50% -- it was always a surprise when you did get one. Late at night, after the clubs close at around 2am? Forget about it, I don't think I've ever gotten a cab at that time without waiting like an hour.

In that context, I've found Uber pretty useful. One thing to recognize is that I hardly ever rode Uber alone -- defraying the cost over 3-4 people makes it significantly more economical.

I agree that this is a sad state of affairs for SF cabs -- having grown up in Taipei, I'm used to being able to get a cab pretty much any time, any place.

I think in the cases cited in the OP, investing in more employees is probably strongly correlated with knowing how to deploy additional employees at high ROI.

A smartly run business is probably better equipped to get incremental revenue out of more people/investment.

Actually, Google Talk on Android already has a video chat feature that's great because: 1) It works over 3G 2) It works with anyone else on Google Talk who's online, regardless of what device they're on

All you have to do is open Google Talk (I have it running all the time anyway) and tap the camera button next to someone's contact.

I frequently use it to chat with my girlfriend or to show her something on the go, and it doesn't matter if she's on her Galaxy Nexus or her MBP at home.

I've never heard of Kenyon College, but the quality of their commencement speakers is staggering.

From a very macro level, buying a house is like making a highly illiquid, incredibly non-diversified investment. The returns can be strong, but it's definitely a higher risk play than other investment vehicles.

Personally, I'd only do it for a place I really wanted to live in, and a place I could afford without worrying about rental income or appreciation. Then, you have a longer time horizon to recoup your investment, and at minimum you are buying cost certainty, which is something that you won't get in most rent situations.

All this is is the author reaffirming his normative value judgments. I could just as easily compare iPad2 unfavorable with my Toshiba netbook...

Price: $230 (with RAM upgrade) vs. $500 Apps: The entire internet and every piece of Windows software vs. 500K apps Features: A keyboard that lets me type emails and chat with people and type posts on Hacker News vs. a virtual keyboard that's good... relative to other virtual keyboards Accessories: Doesn't require accessories to protect it vs. Often used with an expensive case Apps part 2: Excel and Exchange vs. no Excel/Exchange, so that I need another device to respond to work

etc. etc.

I don't think it's an insurmountable challenge. It seems like over the past decade, a number of cable channels have started producing more HBO-like content with decent success. FX with Nip/Tuck, Justified, etc., AMC with Mad Men, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead, and even Starz with Boss.

I save 30-40% of every paycheck (not including 401K), but I live at home and don't pay any rent (also no loans), have no wife/kids, no mortgage and my work offers free lunch and dinner.

One thing that helped me save more though, was creating a spreadsheet that I update every weekday with all of my account balances (through Mint). I have some formulas built in that basically then calculate when I will be able to afford a down payment on a home. http://twitpic.com/7i78rb

I put both Mint and this spreadsheet on the list of default tabs that get opened when I open Chrome, and the minute every morning I spend updating it and seeing the date it spits out really keeps me on top of my spending and finances.

Translating my current financial picture into a concrete date for a goal also helps make things more real, and motivates me a lot to save more.

Sounds like there might be an inefficiency in the resume filler market that an enterprising future IBanker/Lawyer/Consultant could exploit.

What I did was basically ask a professor who I knew had a research lab, and ask if there was anything I could help him with. In my experience, most professors have too much stuff to do, and are very open to free labor.

I think if you know early on that grad school is something you might want to do, it's not too hard. I started working as an undergrad RA my sophomore year by approaching one of my professors in the spring quarter of my freshman year and asking if there was anything I could do to help out. I basically helped a more senior undergrad with his honors thesis -- I helped run subjects, review papers, collect data in the field, etc. The next year I became co-Lab Manager (I graduated after that year). Many other undergrads did similar work in that lab, and in fact, most of us went on to good grad programs, probably partially on the strength of strong recommendations.

During my second year, I also approached another professor in the dept who was a MacArthur Fellow and asked the same thing, and ended up helping him transcribe and code a bunch of interviews he had done. Wasn't the sexiest work I've ever done, but voila, at the end of three years, I had one very strong letter of rec from one professor (well published), who also reached out through his network to put in a good word for me at CMU, and another rec from a professor who was a MacArthur Fellow.

Granted, I think something that's really cool about my undergrad (UCSD) and department (Cognitive Science) is that they are very open to undergrads helping out in research capacities, but it doesn't seem like something that is out of the reach of most self starting undergrads.

This post seems geared toward applying to grad schools, many of which receive hundreds of applications. Having to contact hundreds to thousands of references would probably overwhelm most admissions committees. Remember, for grad school, admissions are typically handled by the department, which has fewer people to deal with this stuff.

I know this likely doesn't apply to the average Joe, but I'm sure that I will have ICS running on my Galaxy S2 within a month or so, once the custom ROMs start getting stable.

In Android you could use the universal search widget and start typing, but it's just not the same. I don't regret giving up my Blackberry, but having the physical keyboard there definitely made a lot of interaction flows better (RIP Blackberry Bold 9000).

1) Swype - It's just much less awkward to type with Swype because you don't have to shift the phone from its natural position -- holding it with one hand and interacting with it with the index finger of your other hand. Also, much easier to type one handed by Swyping with your right thumb, which is useful when you're, say, carrying something in your other hand. Plus, even over a year later, it's still fun to wave your finger around the screen and make words. YMMV.

2) In my opinion, the home screen shortcuts to individual contacts is way better than Siri. Tapping is faster than talking. Plus, I can see if they're online and IM them if they are. I even have one click video chat with Google Talk Video Chat natively supported. Here's a screenshot of what I mean http://twitpic.com/73xo6d

3) My Galaxy S2 can run for almost 40 hours on a charge with light usage, and probably around 24 hours of heavy usage, so battery life is not an issue as it was on the original Galaxy. I like being able to see my calendar at a glance or the weather forecast without talking to my phone, or toggle on a wifi hotspot in one tap. YMMV.

4) It seems minor, but makes using the browser a much better experience. Don't knock it till you've tried it.

5) Has nothing to do with Siri. It's a Chrome extension that works with your phone. I just click a button in my browser, and it sends a notification to my phone with a link to whatever page I have open. Really nifty for grabbing an address before heading out the door, and sending stuff to read later on the train.

I don't see why this is surprising -- after all, the Nexus S is a previous generation phone released 9 months ago. A more fair comparison would be with a Galaxy S2 or Galaxy Nexus.

Personally, I love my S2, as it's remarkably faster than my first gen Galaxy S in pretty much everything.

And since I hardly ever see anyone extolling the actual feature benefits of Android, here are 5 Android only features I could not live without:

1) Swype - Delightful, much faster one handed, much much better in portrait mode, don't have to change the way I hold my phone to start typing

2) Shortcuts to Contacts on Home Screen (two tap calling, texting, IM or email! Best flow for actual communicating after Blackberry's "Just start typing their name")

3) Widgets (Calendar, Time + Weather, Evernote, Live Weather background, Wifi Hotspot)

4) Dolphin HD Browser - I can use my volume buttons to change tabs!

5) Chrome to Phone - Really easy to clip notes to myself for later