Useful quick reference for a ‘lean startup’
Check this post How To Build a Web Startup – Lean LaunchPad Edition from Steve Blank. Of course you know that Steve Blank is one of the gurus of the Lean Startup. This blog post is meant I think for his students at Stanford but you too can benefit from it 🙂
"But for the rest of us mortals whose eyes glaze over at the buzzwords, the questions are, “How do I get my great idea on the web? What are the steps in building a web site?” And the most important question is, “How do I use the business model canvas and Customer Development to test whether this is a real business?” (from : How to Build a Web Startup)
Nice bibliography for game designers
I got some of this list from Lee Sheldon's course syllabus. I have not read all these books but I want to:
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Designing Virtual Worlds. Richard Bartle.
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Character Development and Storytelling for Games. Lee Sheldon.
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Developing Online Games. Mulligan and Petrovsky.
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Massively Multiplayer Game Development. Thor Alexander et al.
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Synthetic Worlds. Edward Castronova.
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Community Building on the Web. Amy Jo Kim
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My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World. Julian Dibbell
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A Theory of Fun. Raph Koster
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Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
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The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses. Jesse Schell
Instead of giving out grades in a class, give out experience points
If you watched (or didn't) the preceding video by Jesse Schell you might have caught one throw away idea mentioned that really intrigued me: Eliminate grades and instead adopt a system modeled more like experience points in a game. The idea he mentions I believe came from a Professor Lee Sheldon. Here's the link to his course, Gaming the Classroom.
In my teaching at Brandeis, deciding how to handle grading is one of thetrickier problems to solve. While my experience teaching so far is quite limited I have come to believe you need to be aware that your students' expectations about what 'counts' towards the grade will heavily influence their behavior.
Whether you like it our not that which they feel will help their gradethey will do more of and less of the latter. Yeah I would say that they are sincerely there to learn and do their best given all the circumstances. But it's human nature: when it's 2am and they need to decide whether to tackle the final homework, go to sleep or go to a party, you can bet that somewhere in the back of their mind is the impact they believe it will have on the grade.
So, what might this new scheme look like?
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All activities that occur during the term can potentially gain a student experience points. Start simple:
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Show up on time: 1 point
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Show up on time for a week stretch: 5 points
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Ask a question: 1 point
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Answer a question: 1 point
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Homeworks can give you points too:
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Hand in your homework on time: 3 points. down to 2, 1 and 0 if it's late by 1, 2 or 3 days
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Quality of the homework can gain you between 0 and 10 points
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Let's say that your course has an element of team work
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Every week, each member of a team gets 5 points that they can award to one or more teammates for contributing to the project
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For every team delivery that's on time, each member of the team gets 2 points
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Each student's total points is posted electronically every day on a leader board
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A student or a team can 'level up' by making a certain number of points
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Each level comes with certain privileges
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And at the end of the term, your 'grade' is a simple, predefined formula based on your points
How is this different from what I did before?
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It's more granular. Each small event becomes converted into a standardized fungible unit, a point
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It's granular chronologically too. You know day to day how you are scoring
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It's more fun and introduces an element of competition, prestige and pride into the experience
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It's public yet doesn't reveal too much.
It does have problems though:
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The student who is not doing well is publicly exposed. This is probably a bad idea, and, it might even be unethical or illegal.
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You need to be very careful about how you set up the points because, referring back to my original point, it will modify behavior and you will 'get exactly what you are paying for' which might not actually be what you want.
Anyway, it was an inspired idea. Not sure if it's practical but it does make me think…
Game Design talk by Jesse Schell
If you are interested in Game Design you have probably seen this video… I finally watched it and thought it was really worth sharing. I definitely recommend it. Jesse Schell is funny and engaging to listen to and has great insights to offer. The last 7 or so minutes is a fantastic riff on how gaming might / will invade our everyday life in the future. Very plausible.
Quirky for Mobile Products?
I read about Quirky.com in the paper the other day. From my perusal it's a site where people (you and me) can submit ideas for manufactured products.
For example, let's say I have an idea for a dog leash with a built in flashlight. Clever eh? Well, you can describe it to the best of your ability and submit it to the Quirky.com site.
Ideas are socially curated (translation: visitors to the site can vote on how much they like the product.) Once they reach a certain threshold then the Quirky staff analyzes the idea from a design, marketing, manufacturing perspective, and decides whether it's worth pursuing. If it is, they actually design or mock it up and put it up for "pre-sale" in their catalog. If enough people buy it then the product is actually created and you (the inventor) gets a small cut of the profits. Here's their diagram of the process.
What if we created a similar service, but focused exclusively on products for app phones (e.g. iPhone and Android.) What do you think?
One More Thing…
Check this post One More Thing… from TechCrunch:
"So instead I read what everyone else had to say. Some articles were excellent, many were very good, others read far too much like obituaries. More came today. I kept reading. Slowly, two things struck me. First, I’ve never seen anything quite like the outpouring of emotion that people are showing in response to this news. Second, what we’re witnessing right now is Jobs’ final masterstroke." (from: TechCrunch)
A really good article about the topic that everyone is writing about. There are dozens of such articles that I've read in the last day or two which I will not be linking to. But this one strikes me as one of the better ones.
Steve Jobs steps down as CEO of Apple
This news saddens me:
"Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs resigned today as chief executive officer from Apple. His place at the top of the company will be taken by Tim Cook, previously Apple's chief operating officer." (from CNET)
I hope he's doing alright and is with us for many many years to come.
Is Software Eating the World
Marc Andreeson has a really good, optimistic article in the Wall Street Journal about the future foundational role of Software in all industries of the world's economy:
"[…snip]Finally, the new companies need to prove their worth. They need to build strong cultures, delight their customers, establish their own competitive advantages and, yes, justify their rising valuations. No one should expect building a new high-growth, software-powered company in an established industry to be easy. It's brutally difficult.
I'm privileged to work with some of the best of the new breed of software companies, and I can tell you they're really good at what they do. If they perform to my and others' expectations, they are going to be highly valuable cornerstone companies in the global economy, eating markets far larger than the technology industry has historically been able to pursue.
Instead of constantly questioning their valuations, let's seek to understand how the new generation of technology companies are doing what they do, what the broader consequences are for businesses and the economy and what we can collectively do to expand the number of innovative new software companies created in the U.S. and around the world.
That's the big opportunity. I know where I'm putting my money. […end snip]" (from Wall Street Journal)
A fine article. One thing that does go through my mind is that even though he cites opportunity after opportunity in the full article, my observation is that it is quite hard nowadays to get people to pay for software in any form. We've gotten used to free, even in the enterprise. Yes some do succeed, big, but many many do not make it.
You must have a deep, illogical, passionate belief in your company and then you have to actually be really really good at execution.
Cool idea: Skillshare
Check this post With Skillshare, everyone can be a teacher
"The New York City-based startup launched its service in April, offering a platform for users to offer real-world classes of any kind to interested students. The service, which rolled out in New York first, is now poised to branch out to San Francisco and Philadelphia starting Aug. 15 and is looking to expand to Boston and Los Angeles later this year. It’s already built a strong community of users, who are leveraging Skillshare in much the same way Airbnb has transformed short term room rentals, Kickstarter has evolved project fundraising and Getaround is changing car sharing." (from GigaOM — Tech News, Analysis and Trends)
I can't wait to see this in Boston!
[GEEKY] Connecting Web Apps with Web Intents
Check this post Connecting Web Apps with Web Intents
"Android OS addresses this problem with Intents, a facility for late run- time binding between components in the same or different applications. In the Intents system, the client application requests a generic action, e.g. share, and specifies the data to pass to the selected service application. The user is given a list of applications which have registered that they can handle the requested intent. The user-selected application is created in a new context and passed the data sent from the client, the format of which is predefined for each specific intent type." (from Chromium Blog)
This is a really cool idea! If you are familiar with Android Intents it will make sense to you. Read the article if not. I wonder whether W3C will embrace this as a 'good idea'. I think they should!