AngelList: HotOrNot For Startups

After seeing about 20 tweets talking about 'angellist', I couldn't help but look. For a moment I thought it was yet another fallout from angelgate that I wrote about last year. It sounded like a leaked document outlining shady angel investment practices...

Got Killer Idea But No Seed Money?
AngelList Might Get You The Other Wing You Need...

In reality it was not. AngelList is a craigslist-like service for startups, but with a touch of crowd sourcing. In Hollywood executive pitch, I would call it HotOrNot for startups; connecting entrepreneurs with angel investors.

That seemed straight forward, but there have been lots of tweets about what we might be losing and what we might be gaining because of AngelList. Some praised it as break-through in venture funding (as Dave McClure wrote on his 500 Startup blog) while others cautioned the indiscriminate use of it citing increasing signs of overblown hightech startup bubble (as Mark Suster wrote on TechCrunch).

Which is it? Is AngelList a boon to angel investment and startup community or a failed experiment because of decreasing signal-to-noise ratio?

Twitter: Celebrity Gossip Network or Democratic Activist Network? Neither, It's Your Network

Back in 2007 when I first saw Twitter, I saw a dumb-down Facebook. It lets you send short text-only status update only. No photo attachment, no user-friendly UI, and even the status update was limited to 140 characters. I didn't think much of Twitter. It seemed to me that it was yet another social media that are competing for internet user's fragmented attention span.

Who Would Have Thought Twitter
Would Become A Symbol Of Egypt Revolution?

Forward the clock all the way to January of 2011. You cannot escape mention of Twitter from main stream media. From Grammy Awards to Tahrir Square Twitter has forever changed how people interact with crowd. Twitter has equalized the playing fields for all so that any one could influence in shaping collective consciousness.

LinkedIn's Challenge During Rapid Growth: Balancing Good, Bad, and Ignorant

Reid Hoffman Has Been Working Behind The Scene
To Make LinkedIn IPO a Success

As you might have heard, LinkedIn is moving in full speed ahead to go public. With added PR surrounding first social network site to file for IPO, the professional social networking site has been steadily picking up new users along the way. Last time I wrote about LinkedIn back in early October 2010, user base was around 80 million. Now there are reports suggesting that user base has climbed to 90 million as of early January 2011.

All these growth means good thing for both LinkedIn users and those who earn paycheck thinking about how to harness the power of social networking sites. But I am a little circumspect in accepting the rapid growth as all good news.

Here's why:

Best UI Is One That Attracts User Then Gets Out Of User's Way

These days one design trend that I hear often is minimalism. In my book, this translates to putting the absolute minimum design elements while providing functional software. Minimalism is a good guideline for designer to force themselves to think carefully about each design element. If something is not absolutely needed, then chances are it will do more harm than good to overall product usability.

That's because great product UI/UX should do following:


1. It should make target users want to use the product
2. Once the users get their hands on, it should disappear in the background

It's Not About Content; It's All About Communication

Google is all about content; Facebook is all about communication.

- Kailash Ambwani CEO of FaceTime Communications

Today I want to share a few articles that I found over last month or so. All these articles talk about non-intuitive observation. They all point to importance of communication, and how enabling communication is really the key to harness the explosive network effect of social network. Contrary to popular belief, they all talk about content, as we know them, is not the king.

Tips From Three CEOs: Obsess Over Customers To Make Fans Out Of Them

While I was taking a deeper dive from tweets that landed on my Flipboard, I came to discover three separate interviews with CEOs who recently have made headlines. To my surprise -- maybe it's not too surprising if you think about the final message -- I found a clear theme across these interviews: Obsess over customers to make fans out of them.

This lesson has been repeated so many times that it has almost become a cliche. But I think it's a lesson that we should hold close to our heart when we are building a company or service. We have to constantly think about how to improve the customer satisfaction, and turn the customers into advocates so that they can be viral marketing agents working for you.

For anyone who's aspiring to launch a service or create a company, these interviews are must watch.

What Would 2011 Have For Us?

After 3 week long hiatus I'm about to restart my blogging. During the break I visited India and South Korea for about ten days each, and was reminded that how much I grew addicted to constant Twitter feeds and Facebook status updates. The moment I regained my free wifi connection at Seoul International Airport, I was back at catching up all the news bits from my social media curators.

One theme that I noticed from all tweets and articles was the year 2011 prediction. Whether Facebook will go IPO or not, whether Google will successfully launch its social network site or not, what the next Groupon or Zynga will be in year 2011, and such. After reading a few of them, I realized I had a few overarching trends that I saw from my perspective. I wanted to outline a few notable trends that I anticipate in year 2011.