Category: TechBiz

Categories
How-To TechBiz

Working on the Road

Here’s how my Friday worked out.

5:30 am PDT Wake Up
5:45 am PDT Catch a Cab to SFO

6:25 am to 6:55 am PDT Work E-mails

7:25 am PDT Wheels up SFO
8:30 am Arrive LAX
8:30 am – 8:55 am Get Ticket for NYC & go through security again
9:00 am – 10:00 am Log into IM & plan out day

10:00 am – noon Make the database faster by sending search traffic to prod02, adding indexes where needed and optimizing table.

12:00 – 12:20 lunch at airport bk

12:40 – 14:00 Work on Android bug
14:00 – 14:55 compare SQL_CACHE vs. memcached. Use both? Where?

14:55 – 15:25 Board Flight; wheels up NYC.

15:25 – 15:45 Internet Blackout
15:45 – 18:00 Work on hosting issue for client & registration for business users

Hours worked: 8
internet outage: 20 minutes
miles Traveled: 3,124
Hours awake: 19.5

Categories
How-To Recruiting TechBiz

3 Creative Ways to Recruit Developers

Recruiting talented developers in this market is still extremely difficult. How should a recruiter find the talent (PHP, Ruby, MySQL, iPhone, .NET, Java) your clients need? I outline a few creative out of the box solutions below.

Disclosure: I work as the lead developer at AppDevAndMarketing.com . This article in no way suggests we’ve used any of these methods.

Update on 4/15/2011: Ya, I’ve had to resort to all these methods and they’ve worked for us. 😀

1. Turn your project managers, account executives and marketers into coders. This is a fairly cheap investment with a high ROI. It is cheaper than paying out a bounty, and you already trust these folks. Send them to iPhoneDev Bootcamp now! Just be sure to prepare their machines for the development they’ll need to do. I tried this at a previous place of employment with great results! If you were trained by me and are reading this, please ask for a raise.

2. Look for places not so obvious. Use dating sites to find talent. Ya, I know, you haven’t used that match.com account in awhile, or have sworn of okaycupid.com or JDate, but guess what. For you bleeding edge types, try the iPhone, dating app, Skout. Although s/he might not be the person of your dreams, s/he might have the talent you need. The key take away is to use unexpected social media spaces for recruiting. Don’t be sleazy or sly about it. A simple, “Hi, I read your profile. You seem very talented in X. I’d actually like to hire you. Coffee or drinks?”

3. Use IRC. If you’re smart enough to do this, you probably shouldn’t be recruiting, but IRC is this best place to find pure, raw talent. Details on how to get onto IRC can be found on Google, but the best guide for newbies can be found on this gaming site. Use reputation defender services to help improve your business reputation and attract reliable talents.

There’s one more special place that I haven’t revealed that will guarantee you top talent every time. Leave a comment and I’ll contact you with that exclusive place to find developers.

Categories
AdSense blogging Social Media TechBiz

How to Triple Your Site Traffic with the 3 Keys of an SEO Blog Post

My website traffic tripled yesterday!

Once again the 3 keys are:
1. Use adwords to tell you which words are expensive.
2. Use the expensive adwords in your post. In this case, “make money with adsense,” is worth $1.50 per click.
3. Blast your social network using something like ping.fm .

Categories
blogging Social Media TechBiz

The 3 Keys to a Blog Post with SEO

According to SEO companies like VICTORIOUS, page speed is an essential ranking factor for all websites. So, on how fast your web pages load, will determine how high your SERP rankings will be on Google. Again, here you need to make sure that your web hosting provider isn’t bottlenecking your website where it matters, negatively impacting your SEO efforts. If you need a good hosting service to increase your website speed, you might want to check these wordpress hosting company plans.

This is just an Seo packages for small businesses experiment on how to make money with adsense.

I created a google ad words campaign focusing on what one does to start a blog and make money:

You do not need to know how to create blog software. You should learn more about SEO and its importance before you create your blog as this will help you with customer traffic.

The three keys are:

  1. Sign up for AdWords and create an adwords campaign. Do not run the campaign unless you really want to drive traffic to your site and pay for that. You only want to know which adwords are expensive which means those adwords get searched lots.
  2. Use all the adwords in your blog post. If you look above you’ll see that I did as close to that as I could
  3. Use ping.fm to blast your entire social network with your blog post.

Does it work?

Stay tuned for tomorrow when I publish the results here.

Update on August 20, 2010: I tripled my site traffic just by doing those 3 things above yesterday!

Categories
TechBiz

Internet Speeds in Santa Monica and Westwood Suck

Internet speeds in Santa Monica and Westwood suck when you compare them to Kyrgyztan (14 mbp/s) or Latvia (24 mbp/s). Never mind that these areas in LA have economies that dwarf these two places.

The average speed in these areas seems to be at about 1.5 mbp/s in Westwood and 10 mbp/s in Santa Monica.

1.5 mbp/s is simply not acceptable in Westwood. 10 mbp/s is simply too slow in a town that prides itself on being the movie capitol of the world, especially for someone like James Cameron who has his offices there. Using a messenger to ship a DVD is still faster than using the bandwidth available there.

If West LA is to have a world class tech scene, we must have more bandwidth. More bandwidth is what allows a place like Silicon Valley to develop technologies first. A good example is AJAX, which sucks when most folks are on a modem. However, leveraging faster than average bandwidth allowed folks in Silicon Valley to learn this crucial technology / technique first.

Categories
TechBiz

How To Pitch At Capitalize

Last night I got to check out an event in Cambridge called Capitalize hosted at the SCVNGR offices. The audience gets to see a company pitch to VCs. Last night’s company, Peekaboo Mobile, pitched to two investors from Dart. They were asking for $550,000 to $770,000.

Basically, the investors wanted to see 3 things:

  1. a great solution to a small problem involving a very specific customer, e.g. an app focused on moms that tells moms where stroller friendly businesses are,
  2. a message that shows how all parties involved are going to make lots of money, e.g. tossing the phrase, “We are going to make you lots of money and this is how,” works wonders, and
  3. a solid set of numbers showing cost to acquire customer and ROI.

Peekaboo didn’t have these 3 things so they weren’t written a check outright, but they’re still making money. Also it takes a lot of courage to stand in front of a crowd and get scrutinized by VC.

Categories
How-To Social Media TechBiz

How to Get a Good Tech Job

I love this quote from Mark Suster:

“Finding the best jobs takes a lot of commitment to taking many different networking meetings with executives, recruiters, entrepreneurs, VC’s, investment bankers, etc. The best jobs (as you know) are found through personal connections. The best jobs are the ones that have not already been put on a job board. The best jobs are the ones that certainly haven’t gone out to an executive recruiter. The reason these are the “best” jobs for you is that once it goes to an executive recruiter there will be a stack of 100 prospective recruits, 20 amazingly qualified resumes that will have phone or in-person interviews with the recruiter of which the company will meet 5-6. So unless your last job is a mirror image of your next then good luck with those odds.”

Okay, that’s pretty general. What’s a specific example of getting the best job?

A good example is starting out small. Get a reputation for doing quick tech jobs on weekends. This can be anywhere from:

  • writing a basic facebook app, or wordpress plug-in
  • fixing bugs that you are sure you can fix
  • addressing server issues that you are sure you can fix

After a string a little successes like these, you can start taking on bigger jobs.

Recruiters at this point will start knocking at your door. It is not worth it. In my experience, they will fill a position that hasn’t been filled in a long time and with good reason. Also, the fact that your prospective place of work is going through a recruiting agency means 3 things: they are ramping up with hiring and are being quick to hire and slow to fire. There are good reasons not to do this. Another reason is that, they simply cannot recognize talent. If they cannot recognize talent, then they cannot understand you. Misunderstanding is the source of a lot of work grief.

The 3rd thing that it means is that you are walking into a den of Vampires that will take all your soul and talent and feed off of it. You can find the worst Vampires in large corporations and they are usually project managers, or middle management. It is one thing to let a contractor just get the job done, and another thing to take what they do and keep the glory for yourself. These glory hounds, these vampires should be avoided at all costs. They will burn you out.

At this point, be sure to be paying your taxes. You should have a nice little consultancy going. Be disciplined. Don’t be afraid to say, “No.” If something doesn’t feel right, e.g. you sign a contract for PHP work but are doing .NET, then drop them. Yes, drop them. Any person with business sense will understand bait and switch is not the way to think long term.

Two choices will present themselves:

  1. Continue freelancing, or
  2. Focus on one company, e.g. being a co-founder or lead

The first choice makes sense if you are shooting for the 4 hour work week. The second choice makes sense if you are hoping to turn a company in a few years.

If you are going for the 2nd choice, then a few things are key:

  • You need to court this company if they’re a hot commodity. This means hanging out with the devs, the marketers, top-level folks. If you’re really good, they’ll just ask you to go for the interview process. But the best jobs are never listed…. therefore…
  • Use the process to understand the company’s true business needs. From those needs list the ways that you can contribute to the company.
  • From that list, you’ve created your position.

The best job ever is something you create. It is not some laundry list of things someone you don’t know has given you. Your best job ever is your destiny, your meaning of life. Do not settle for less.

Categories
Erlang Social Media software TechBiz WebApps

Twitter: Thoughts That Are Hard to Fit Into 140 Characters

What are the limits of expressing thoughts in Twitter?

Here’s a powerful but inefficient (when run) thought that can be expressed on Twitter, a quick sort in Erlang in 126 characters.

qsort([]) -> [];
qsort([Pivot|T]) ->
qsort([X || X <- T, X < Pivot]) ++ [Pivot] ++ qsort([X || X <- T, X >= Pivot]).

A lot of Perl one-liners can fit into a tweet – powerful and useful ones.

Haikus can be expressed in a tweet.

The answer to the question, “What form of body language do most FBI interrogators consider to be the most telling?” can be answered in a tweet.

A marriage proposal can be answered in a tweet.

You can propose the concept of a hash tag in a tweet:

hashtag proposal

However, there are many thoughts that seem to be difficult to fit into a tweet:

  • The Pythagorean Theorem and one of its many proofs
  • Anselm’s Ontological Proof for God’s Existence
  • Merge Sort in Ruby
  • Merge Sort in PHP
  • Why you should or shouldn’t outsource
  • What qualities make a great tech hire
  • Well-thought out political proofs
  • How to subtly tell someone something in an indirect way with the only others knowing being those in the know
  • A legally-binding, work contract – It would be amazing if you could!
  • The mechanism for how DNA works

Twitter encourages the laconic expression of thought which means plenty of affirmations, aphorisms, insults, congratulations, and reminders that can display any combination of sharp wit, pointed humor, and succinctness of expression. The mot juste becomes very important with the constraint of 140 characters.

Categories
php TechBiz Webalytics WebApps

URL Shorteners: tinyurl.com bit.ly and seductive.me

There’s a pretty useful spreadsheet comparing different URL shorteners here:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pApF4slh39ZkqUOoZQSo8bg .

Tinyurl just really shortens your URL and doesn’t provide any other data. A great feature is the preview option that allows you to preview a link so you don’t get Rick-rolled.

Bit.ly is my favorite service. The features I like are

  • its API,
  • its analytics, and
  • its Pro feature which allows you to make a branded URL shortener

I wanted to figure out just how much effort it was to code a URL so I coded up my own MVC based on Rasmus’ article on making one in PHP, and added URL shortening code to it. You can get the URL shortener I wrote on Github.

Here are a few things that I noticed once I put this code on Seductive.me:

  1. Somebody found a bad, infinite loop that I accidentally put into the code
  2. URL Shortener services that offer analytics have to sort out “bots” from real user clicks, and I’m not sure they are correct 100% of the time
  3. Using CRC32 as my hashing mechanism for shortening URLs will cause a link collision after 65,536 URLs shortened.
  4. Seductive.me is a lame url for a URL shortener which is why I got 3vi.be the next day.
Categories
TechBiz

Streamys Tech Fail

Last night’s streamys from a tech perspective had 2 big pieces of fail which some might’ve overlooked because of the creativity of the presenters and comic skills of Paul Scheer.

1. The free, event based iPhone app never updated with the latest winners.

2. The video player that showed the nominees broke down half-way through. The work around was to tell jokes and then eventually bring up the nominees on stage.

I really wish – and I’m not alone in this -that they kept the bar open for the whole show.

These fails show where corners are cut which is understandable in a fledgling industry where creators of content are often the monied producers, too.