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Just finished re-reading this article by Jason Fried of 37signals.com, which included this 30 min. talk by David Heinemeier Hansson (cofounder of 37signals and creator of Rails) at Startup School 2008. Great common sense advice about starting a business. Despite the popularity of the freemium model among internet startups (grow a user base fast, charge nothing, get VC funding, think about monetizing later, better if we get bought for a huge sum of money on the way), David argues that one of the most basic way to have your company turn a profit is charging upfront for the service your company provides. Read more...

Susan Cain writes in the New York Times about the contemporary view which holds that creativity and achievement come from teamwork. As Cain explains, research strongly suggests the contrary: people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. Susan Cain, The Rise of the New Groupthink Read more...

Jack Cheng is a Shangai-born, Michigan-bred, Brooklyn-based writer, as he describes himself. His recently published novel, These Days, sells on Amazon, the iBook Store, Barnes and Noble and Kobo. The problem is that if you live outside the US, you can’t buy the digital edition (be it Kindle, ePub or whatever) from those sellers. I live in Perú, so now and then I run into this problem1 when trying to buy an electronic book. Read more...

It is not enough to identify an unsatisfied need to build a successful business model. Any business model whose viability depends on only one critical resource is in danger of failure. For reasons unknown, now and then appears a company in the software marketplace whose only product depends critically on a service provided by an external source, with almost no possibility of being replaced if that other company turns against you. Read more...

Donald Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things, explains how to approach problem solving: Designers (…) take the original problem as a suggestion, not as a final statement, then think broadly about what the real issues underlying this problem statement might really be (for example by using the “Five Whys” approach to get at root causes). (…) Most important of all, is that the process is iterative and expansive. Designers resist the temptation to jump immediately to a solution to the stated problem. Read more...