Wadiblog

The main speaker at Thursday’s NYC Ultra Light Startup meeting was John Carlino, the founder and president of GoNogging.com, a free platform to share digital content and demand the video you want. GoNogging.com is John’s second internet business and is developed purely through outsourcing. So it made sense that he was at Ultra Light Startups to tell us about his tricks for effective and efficient outsourcing.

I liked John. He’s a straight up New Yorker who tells you his tricks of business in a clear no-nonsense style. Here are some of John’s do’s and don’t:

• Don’t pay them

Lump sums or installments. Pay your outsourcers by the milestone. This way you are incentivizing them to provide exactly what you want at the price agreed. Anything else may mean you waiting around twiddling your fingers.

• Own your code

Your outsourced teams should not have the right to replicate. This is your baby. Protect it.

• Don’t mix it up

Don’t host and code through the same provider. A one-stop-shop is not a good idea. It means that the provider has more control over you. If things fail on one end you have a lot more to lose if you try and leave the shop.

• Make friends with everyone

Especially project managers. Even if the company treats your work shabbily, a project manager can be a very useful resource at a later date. He can give you honest feedback and teach you about the technologies out there.

• Break it up

Into modules and have different developers/development teams work on it. This way you can test several teams, if one person/team is unable to deliver the process still runs. Make sure the code is well commented for smooth transition between teams.

• Let them teach you

Tech changes fast. You can’t possibility know all you need to know, especially if you are not a techie yourself. Do enough research to figure out what you need to know and then based on that find teams with potential and have them compete. They will teach you what you need to know. You can use this knowledge with other lower priced teams. This doesn’t mean the team that originally taught you lost out. They formed a relationship. You might end up working with them in the future.

My stance is the stance of one who stands the test of fire.
My drum the raging force of burning, over-come desire.
I march to the beat of my own raging beating drum.
I dance my fire-dance like only few can but inspire.

People dance with fire, yet I dance to my own flame.
My fire is my turban, and my flame is my own name.
In this crazy world, I choose to play yet I refrain,
from playing any game but the one I find insane!

The game I choose to play is the game Allmighty One,
has made for us to learn with every daughter every son.
The game of learning more; of seeking out our truth galore.
The game of finding who we are, whatever makes us run.

This - , my crazy world is seeking not in sanity.
Living mass delusion, preaching MASS insanity.
Thus insane, the game, pulls my burning heart to play.
To seek out my own answers, to make out my own way.

Danced my heart out here - a gift to a friend - click here to see it.

I now think of me as I am..
a maturing thought - yet realizing itself.
I have always seen myself as I envision -
a reality coming about in its own time.
Altering destiny in its wake, more than the story of me.
It’s beyond what we see; the story of a past yet to be.
~
I remember, as a child, wanting the non-existant..
desiring toys uninvented, that were to become my tools.
Wanting to play with model airplanes, and the mind,
with flight simulators and grand opponents, strategizing.
I recall longing for that chess partner, no longer around.
And friends distant I wish I could chat with, and confound!
~
And I look back and realize that my dreams are ..
no longer dreams anymore. So many of them.
My dreams have the ability to alter reality, see?
So many toys I have today are the result of wishes.
So many joys of mine are outcomes of dreams -
and these dreams - children of desires screamed!
~
I remember grieving over the Commodore 64,
and now what do I play with? Mac OS X galore!
Windows 3.1 showed possibility, but left me wanting more,
So I asked for it to change, and it became Vista via M.E!
I desired the means to share thoughts across time,
and now we have the web & blogging, beyond MIME.
~
I remember missing my baby sister, beloved she.
And now I am blessed to be father to a her and a he!
So now that I know that my dreams create -
they create the future and the history of time..
Why don’t I then employ them to Liberate -
this future, so beloved, beyond the curtain blind?
~
Help the new age that arrives, as yours and mine,
straight from the Source, through intention divine!
Which we are! You can see: it is so! Here are we.
And my desire -my burning need- I say is One.
I wish to attain that single most worthy of goals..
I seek to KNOW -to remain in union with- ALL *.*
~
So that when I go, its not so much a departure..
as it is an arrival - to the place of my desires.
And what, do you ask, is the place of my desires?
It is the state of connectedness to the source of ALL *.*
And what, do you think I mean by these elusive words?
I mean exactly what Rumi meant, when he spoke of being more.
~~
*.* = All-Wisdom, All-Grace, All-Knowing, All-Love!

Some great sites were featured at this week’s Web2NewYork, a more casual and smaller NY Tech.

• Tabbery
• Sosauce
• Zubka
• Drawn by pain

Tabbery

Tabbery is web app that allows you to upload different tabs of your desktop onto the Tabbery website to share it with friends. This made me wonder how does this really help me. I already have basic collaborative tools via google docs. During the presentation I changed my mind. This thing is fantastic!

I can have different themes for different tabs. So if I want my BF to look at the websites I have for travel plans I can have him look at one tab. If I want my partners to see other websites whose design I like I can share a different tab with them. This small app also remembers the size, location, and order of windows. Amazing, I no longer have to do an incorrect mozilla exit to have it remember what web windows I want opened when I begin work again tomorrow. And goodness me the app also caches thumbnails so I can easily remember which is which. The only draw back to the tabbery is that currently all tabs are saved on public domain so if you have some highly sensitive business plans and designs in the works, don’t share those with tabbery just yet. In the near future though, they will be allowing greater control.

Sosauce

Remember the days pre-FaceBook open API? remember how darn excited us techies used to be at each new feature? Even post open API we still got excited about cool apps. Although some apps are still exciting, they lack integration of features across the site plus the apps like much of FB don’t represent data that is portable.

I like that travel app but I can’t add it on my blog page about my travels. Now this is where sosauce comes in. I can show a map of where I’ve been and integrate it with journal text and photos. These photos don’t need to be hosted elsewhere and manually embedded with code for your journal. Instead they are a click drop away.* Also, sosauce lets you send syndicated content back to your existing social graph on FB. At the moment the syndicated content is just a thumbnail and to see your content your FB friend will have to become a sosauce member.

I gave founder the idea to allow a small photo or other load to facebook with a sosauce URL which will allow FB users to get a glimpse at how powerful sosauce is. He’s going to look into it. Whatever gateway they are using to get their minifeeds to FB, my guess is an app should make this possible also.

Zubka

In the last 2 months I’ve had two head hunters and 1 corporate recruiter find me on linkedin and contact me so that I would forward a job description to my peers. In most cases I didn’t forward, I mean none of my friends are unemployed or looking for anything. My thinking about who in my network might be interested in something just doesn’t seem worth the effort. Especially since these head hunters who are strangers aren’t giving me anything.

Zubka is changing this. It helps people like you and I get paid to help our friends find jobs. It fulfills obvious needs in its market–hirer finds the right person fast and at a low cost (only 6-10% cut), helps your friends get jobs, and helps you make money in the process. Oh and if you are holier than moi (which isn’t that hard) you can give your money to a charity.

In future they will include a hirer and referrer rating so both parties can make smarter decisions about their time. Plus with their RSS feed/widget you can even advertise open jobs on your blog space. Sounds amazonish/ebayish doesn’t it? Well that’s cause it is. Red Herring called it the ebay for jobs last year.

A very different presentation than what I am used to seeing at tech meetups was from the director of “Drawn by Pain,” a Web TV series. It was different because when I walk into these things I usually don’t watch clips of metaphysical, anime/film combos. I also rarely meet directors like Jesse Cowell talk about passion, good content, and humbling experiences.

In the words of the website: “Drawn By Pain engages its audience by leading them through an episodic spiral into one woman’s search for salvation as her animated madness fights for her sanity in the real world.” The animation with film combo makes the film surreal and metaphysical while still capturing the protagonists’ inner demons with startling clarity. Its become my regular dinner TV, why don’t you give it a try.

Great presentations and even more interesting people.

Until next time,
Spunky

*Travel isn’t the only sosauce feature though there are others.

Crosslinked at spunkystartupper

1. Trendr
2. Kluster
3. Twiddla
4. Muxtape
5. Bricabox

Trendr

A snazzy trend tracking website. You can track # of blog posts from googleblogs or technorati, stock tickers, particular job queries in specific cities on craigslist and monster, google news items, amazon sales ranks, number of Ebay auctions, flickr photos for specified query, stats for a particular video and the list goes on. You can also track custom data sets by uploading by hand or using their API.

Most interesting to me is the ability to collects stats from a given profile in myspace such as –Number of Friends, Number of Comments, and Profile Views Per Day. Now granted this does not have facebook yet but it is the beginning of tools that are slowly getting us closer to being able to measure influence on social networks, and perhaps new business models around social rank (see Sanford Dickert’s notes from NYC Bar Camp 3).

But do have fun with this tool too. For example check out the number of times the youtube song called I have a crush on Obama got favorited.

Kluster

Introduced by founder Ben Kaufman as an online decision making and collaboration platform that can be used to facilitate large group decision-making during product development, marketing/advertising initiatives, and event planning. Any kluster member can login as a user and then start or participate in a project which meets their skills. A spark is an idea on how to proceed further. While an amp is a suggestion or a refinement.

A highly interesting biz idea and even greater potential for the many startups out their who can use it. I’m going to start one of my app ideas out there as a project to see if user contribution is valuable. Since I am good at ideas but not a designer, I’d love some design feedback. Lucky for me since Ben told me that most of the 10k members of the site they got in the 3 weeks since launch are designers.

Twiddla

A few weeks ago when my partners and I were trying to mindmap our site flow ideas needed to be thought out by one person and emailed for comments or if done on spot we had to wait until 1 person finished his changes before another could make some. If we tried making changes simultaneously google doc and mindomo discarded someone’s changes.

Online meetings just weren’t as fast as each of our thinking. Too much waiting around, which as most of you know means a loss of great ideas since the rest of the team couldn’t see and build on all the individual ideas. I prayed for some way more efficient then this.

Twiddla is the answer to many my prayers. A whiteboarding service at it core, but one with the ability to co-browse. No more telling partners to go to the link, do x to see what I mean. With cobrowsing we can all be on the same page or mind map or photo or site template and simply mark it up. To check it out you don’t even have to sign in, you can work as a guest.

Muxtape

I wanna share my music tastes with this new guy I am dating, but I don’t necessarily want him to hear some of the trance I listen to every day. Passing on my pandora or lastfm login names will mean doing exactly that. But now with muxtape I can easily create and share mixtapes online of songs I know might work for him (without damaging his impressions of me). Once created he can click on any particular song or listen to all 12 tracks in each playlist in the order I place them.

Heck once Muxtape offers a link to itunes and a commission for my forwarding ppl to itunes I might even be able to make some money. A great way for me to make money of my recommendations and a great way to see if this guy I’m dating is worth it.

Brickabox

Is a platform where one can easily create one’s own social content site in mins. There are some premade templates for web review sites, mashup sites, video review sites etc. You can also create your own layout from scratch. Great tool for new organizations. The only other thing I could wish for would be an interface that connects with facebook.

Until next time. Love, Spunky

Also posted on Spunky Start Upper

Hi Wadiwallahs,

It’s been a long time since I last posted. Mainly because of the many conferences that I’ve been attending (NYC BarCamp, Snap Summit), wrapping up the day job prior to vacation and a fabulous vacation in Yosemite (will post pics soon).

Over the next few days I plan to update you on all the neat ideas I and news I gathered at my conferences.

But before I do that a little followup note, as you know I covered ShowBeyond a few weeks ago. In SF I came across Slide which allows you to personalize, touchup, and add videos, slideshows, and photos on your social network profiles.

I sent Steven a quick email asking him how ShowBeyond’s focus varies and he replied saying:

“Slide focuses on self-expression, good deco for social network. However,Showbeyond focuses on storytelling, good for content presentation. Showbeyond is a tool and media for blog and social network when users want to show and tell a story. It is a mini, portable, vertical 3D (image, audio, and text) blog.”

Wow, a new way of looking at the possibilities of expression on a blog.

Take care,
Spunky

1. State your name and title:
Steven Li, CEO, Engineer, CPA, Amateur Photographer

John Yan, CTO

2. What are you currently up to? If entrepreneurship tell me about your startup.
We are currently developing ShowBeyond—an online show and tell tool that provides users with a real time easy and flexible way to combine video, pictures, music, store, and link so tell others a story or simply share ideas.

3. Why are you doing this? You could be doing so many other things in the world, what about this particular idea strikes you?
Steven: being an amateur photographer I was always interested in ways of expression. It occurred to me that there is no tool out there that allows you to incorporate various mediums to tell stories in an easy, real time manner. For instance, many people develop slide shows, but adding music, text, and embedding the final product to a blog to share it online is not as easy.

Continue Reading »

Hi everyone,

This is spunkymasala, your NYC correspondent.

I had the pleasure of talking to 8coupons recently. 8coupons is a startup providing consumers with coupons for restaurants, entertainment, shopping and the like in Lower Manhattan. A great business concept and even greater people behind it. Check out an interview of the co-founders below and learn about the startup, where its going, and key tips for aspiring entrepreneurs for you. Enjoy!

Part 1:

Part 2: