Steve Blank wrote an interesting post today on the Startup Genome Project. The report is based on a survey of 663 startups. All of them are web-based businesses, and they are all early in their lifecycle. The objective of the study is to determine what factors drive startup success, and the report draws some interesting […]
Here is a must-watch video from Eli Pariser discussing some of the themes from his new book The Filter Bubble (reviewed well here by Cory Doctorow). It’s only 9 minutes, and it is well worth your time: Pariser’s main point is that the primary filters on the internet these days are algorithmic, and that these […]
To succeed at innovation, you need to be making a lot of little bets. What are little bets? According to Peter Sims in his excellent book called Little Bets, they are: A small, affordable action that anyone can take to discover and develop ideas. Here is a more complete explanation in an interview with Andrew […]
One of the weird trends in spam comments now is that through services like mechanical turk people are getting paid to make marginally relevant comments that link back to some spammy site. This makes getting rid of spam a lot harder. However, while I was running through a recent batch, I ran across a comment […]
Innovation is a complex process and I’m always sceptical about simple solutions to encourage companies to be more innovative. Recently I have written about some evidence against the widely-held assumption that creating industry clusters will make firms in these clusters more innovative. It turns out the the relationship between industry clusters and innovation depends a […]
Malcolm Gladwell retells the story of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the latest issue of the New Yorker (it’s readable behind a paywall here). The story of PARC is fascinating, and Gladwell provides a nice twist to it. One of the main threads in the story concerns their invention of the laser printer. […]
