Cue launched two days earlier than planned this week, in a move that’s chronicled below. There’s a new accelerator just for startups based on open source technologies. Startups are leading us to connect with strangers in entirely new ways. These links and more are below.
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- Thursday
Cue: The 10 hour scramble to launch two days early
Greplin relaunched as Cue this week — two hours before they had initially intended to. Someone broke their embargo and the team scrambled to build something so that visitors to the site wouldn’t be lost. Here’s a run-down on how they managed to squeeze two days of work into a few hours.
7 do’s and don’ts for founders
Ryan Carson, the founder of Treehouse, got a request on Twitter to lay out a bullet list of advice for startup founders. He did exactly that, coming up with seven short suggestions, several of which may very well surprise you.
The anatomy of a pass, a quantitative analysis on why a VC passes
Statistically speaking, investors pass more often than they agree to write a check. While you can’t let it stress you out, having some insight into why an investor typically chooses to pass can help you reduce the number of rejections you’ll face.
Trusting in strangers: Rachel Botsman at TEDGlobal2012
The full talks from TEDGlobal2012 aren’t up yet, but Rachel Botsman’s talk on trusting in strangers is already making a splash. Her examples are straight out of startup culture (Airbnb and TaskRabbit), and make a case for how we need to think about strangers — especially in a world where we’re interacting with more of them than ever before.
Form-field validation: The errors-only approach
Online forms make me crazy, particularly when I try to submit a form and it keeps spitting back errors at me. Christian Holst’s article shows some easy wins in how to make your forms a little easier for your users to deal with.
What was it like to work at the old Napster?
When a Quora user asked what it was like to work at Napster in its original iteration, Ali Aydar jumped in with an in-depth answer, taking us through three distinct eras at the company. Aydar was the first non-founding employee at Napster.
Mozilla partners with MuckerLab for new open source accelerator
Just because a piece of software is open source you shouldn’t assume that there’s no money to be made. Mozilla and MuckerLab have announced plans to drive that point home with a new accelerator focused just on startups working with open source technologies.
Retro link of the week:
The world’s most dangerous geek
This look back at Justin Frankel’s career, starting with his creation of Winamp, is something of a cautionary tale with what happened after he sold Nullsoft to AOL. But it also sets the stage for the work Frankel has done since leaving AOL.
