Understanding our most common trait: being wrong

Web Expo 2011 - Trends in Social Commerce

A nice talk by Paul Adams about interaction between social networks and commerce.

How Your Customers' Social Circles Influence What They Buy, What They Do and Where They Go

View more presentations from Paul Adams

Read more about Paul at his site .

Conversations ecosystem.

A great info-graphic about the social and conversations ecosystem.



Check out more at The Conversation Prism

Glass Ball Readings

While sifting through referrers of visits to the blog, I saw an increasing trend of people searching for "glass ball readings" and visiting the site. I guess psychic, palm and tarot card reading is an in demand product. From a lean startup perspective these would be great signs of "product market fit" for that business :)

Of course, how to run doctests is another important question that people wonder about.

Lived fast, died young, left a tired corpse - Code Rush

Code Rush site: Link.

Jeff Atwood's article: Link.

Project Code Rush Intro from Jake on Vimeo.

Running doctests in a django project.

Running doctests from a specific file (or files in a directory) could be painful in the django environment (specially with older versions of django).
Just uploaded a script as gist on github, which can help. This script lets you run all doctests from a given file or files in a directory. One would run this from the base directory of your site (i.e., the same directory with manage.py in it).
Note that

manage.py test xxx 

will let you run tests for your django application but will search for docstrings in

app/tests.py and models.py 

(at least of pre django 1.0). If you have a large project its unlikely that you would have such monolithic files.

Entrepreneurship: For Passion and Profit

Recently wrote an article for Next STEP Forward (Science, Technology and Education in Pakistan) and got a lot of great feedback. The article is about the adventure of creating and running startups illustrated by Umair Khan's experiences (who is a serial entrepreneur, now CEO of secretbuilders.com). Check it out and let me know your feedback: Entrepreneurship: For Passion and Profit

Guy Kawasaki on Art of Innovation.

For those who won't listen to the audio recording of the key note speech by Guy, here are some key highlights from the talk.

1. Motivation for innovation: desire to make meaning.
2. Create a mantra for your organization. Why do you exist?
3. Set the targets right -- jump to the next level, push the envelope
4. Build great products. Roll the dicee:
   
   • Deep
   • Intelligent
   • Complete
   • Elegant
   • Emotive
5. Build and ship soon. (Ship then test!)
6. Create something that polarizes people
7. Let a hundred flowers blossom
8. Create revolution. Ship. Move to evolution
9. Aim for unique products with great value
10. Don't let the bozos drag you down