Inaki Berenguer, MBA '09

Photofeed Personalization

Pixable is changing the way people view billions of photos. We call it your photo inbox. Each of the photofeeds sent to the user are fully personalized, using photo aggregation from multiple social networks and machine learning to boost relevancy to each particular user.

Techcrunch published an interesting article about the elements of digital personalization, which applies very well to what we do at Pixable:

"Media’s great opportunity is to bring the right content to the right person at the right place and time. Most impressively, “what my friends like” is already proving to be a good starting point to predict “what I like,” and so much of the Web is beginning to get at least a clue of how to serve us. These are the 6 elements contributing to digital personalization:

• It’s social – What happens to people close to me is important, because these people are important to me.
• It’s curated – People aren’t just content sources themselves; they’re also curators. To know me is to know my tastemakers.
• It’s an experience, not just a stream –Newsfeeds and timelines are a meager start.  Twitter’s 140-character format is great for insiders, but it’s inscrutable for Grandpa. Personalized media should come in all formats – not just a feed.  And it will be more powerful (and more profitable) when it creates an immersive experience.
• It’s incredibly, incredibly smart about what it recommends, and what it doesn’t – But better than today’s Facebook and Twitter, it brings me the right content, not all content. I trust it to filter the world for me, and to highlight what’s important to me out of billions of pieces of information.
• It’s self-refining – Speaking for myself, it would know to bring me news about digital media; about my company; about my friends’ reviews of great restaurants in Seattle, LA, and New York; and, in the winter, a helpful article or two on snowboarding tips would be greatly appreciated. It would also turn down articles about Glenn Beck, and turn up the latest find from Brian Stelter. And, before you cry (or scream) “filter bubble,” let’s get it straight that this is what I do already.
• It’s not just the content that’s personalized – It’s the advertising, too. Today’s version is very primitive: I go to a Web site once and its ads follow me around for weeks. But, instead, my demographics, interests and intent should all combine to inform what ads to show – and not show – me.

Each of these demonstrates the central aspect of this new vision for media: bringing my world to me.

[...] To be successful, we all need to be data companies – as data is the clear way to know what our audience wants.  Data is the currency of personalization, and so it is our best path to delighting our audience"

Techcrunch, January 8th, 2012

Video of NetDay NY

Video summary of NetDay New York: Startups In the City that took place in Cervantes Institute the 19th of October 2011. Amazing event about entrepreneurship in which I was one of the keynote speakers.

NetDay NY from Net Day Changemakers on Vimeo.

Web vs. Mobile

"If you had to start a web company today, work on mobile first and then web. It forces you to focus on simplicity (bandwidth, features, ...). It forces you to focus on what matters to the user", David Sze

Getting ready for the Chicago Marathon

Just one week away. I have been injured for the last 10 days although I feel I am recovering. In the meantime, I have been reading articles about marathons for mental training. Two of the best articles:

1) Running outdoors can improve mental health (The Telegraph, Sep 28)

“Running helps me to deal with everyday stresses. It never fails to give me a buzz, and a sense of satisfaction when I’ve finished.”

FACT 1: While all types of exercise are thought to help reduce stress, it seems that running – for two miles or 26 – has a particularly beneficial effect on mental health. Research suggests it can boost mood, confidence and self-esteem and may even help in the long term with serious depression

FACT 2: Scientists have long theorised that these natural chemicals, called endorphins, may cause “runners’ high”. Running (and other exercise) may also increase the availability in the brain of other chemicals that affect mood such as serotonin, dopamine and adrenaline. “Running causes chemical reactions in the brain that lead to improvements in mood,” “It also results in a higher level of oxygen in the blood which makes you more mentally alert. But aside from the short-term physiological changes, it’s also thought that running provides a sense of achievement and self-confidence.

2) You are only as old as you run (NYTimes, Sep 23) 

FACT 1: A few years ago researchers at the German Sports University Cologne took a close look at the finishing times of 400,000 marathon and half-marathon runners between the ages of 20 and 79. They found no relevant differences in the finishing times of people between the ages of 20 and 50. The times for runners between 50 and 69 slowed only by 2.6 to 4.4 percent per decade.

FACT 2: The number of runners who finished marathons in the United States, where 7 of the world’s 15 largest races took place last year, increased to 507,000 in 2010 from 25,000 in 1976

FACT 3: In 1980, the median age for a marathon runner was 34 for men and 31 for women. By last year, the age had risen to 40 for men and 35 for women. People over 40 now comprise 46 percent of finishers, up from 26 percent in 1980.

Real world networks: every 7 years we replace 48% of our friends with new ones

"Over the course of 7 years, we replace 48% of our friends with new ones … The total never changes: there's only so much room for new people in your life", Gerald Mollenhorst, 2009

The survey contained questions such as: Who do you talk with, regarding personal issues? Who helps you with DIY in your home? Who do you pop by to see? Where did you get to know that person? And where do you meet that person now?

You may have more Facebook friends as the years go by, but when it comes to your close friends, you lose about half and replace them with new ones after 7 years. Managing relations on a large scale is impossible. Mollenhorst also established that networks were not formed based on personal choices alone. Our friend choices are limited by the opportunities to meet. 

"Facebook now host 4% of all the photographs ever taken. EVER"

The exact numbers of this analysis might not be correct but the conclusions are directionally right and impressive!

Facebook now host 4% of all the photographs ever taken. EVER. That equates to an estimated 140 billion photos of the 3.5 trillion thought to have been taken since Joseph Nicéphore Niépce first introduced the image capturing device in 1826. Incredibly, 70 billion of those photos were uploaded this year alone, showing just how quickly the rise of smartphones and ever-more-affordable digital cameras are increasing our photo-sharing habits.  In fact, 10% of all the photos we have, were taken in the past 12 months.

With 750 million+ active Facebook users, many of those uploading hundreds of photos on a regular basis, the collection is set to grow exponentially in the coming years.

1000Memories

"The power of small batches", Eric Ries

In the book Lean Thinking, James Womack and Daniel Jones recount a story of stuffing newsletters into envelopes with the assistance of one of the author’s two young children. Every envelope had to be addressed, stamped, filled with a letter, and sealed. The daughters, age six and nine, knew how they should go about completing the project: “Daddy, first you should fold all of the newsletters. Then you should attach the seal. Then you should put on the stamps.” Their father wanted to do it the counterintuitive way: complete each envelope one at a time. They told him “that wouldn’t be efficient!” So he and his daughters each took half the envelopes and competed to see who would finish first.

The father won the race, and not just because he is an adult. The one envelope at a time approach is a faster way of getting the job done even though it seems inefficient (Because our intuition doesn’t take into account the extra time required to sort, stack, and move around the large piles of half- complete envelopes when it’s done the other way.)

But even if the amount of time that each process took was exactly the same, the small batch production approach still would be superior, and for even more counterintuitive reasons. For example, imagine that the letters didn’t fit in the envelopes. With the large- batch approach, we wouldn’t find that out until nearly the end. With small batches, we’d know almost immediately.

All these issues are visible in a process as simple as stuffing envelopes, but they are of real and much greater consequence in the work of every company, large or small. What if it turns out that the customers have decided they don’t want the product? Which process would allow a company to find this out sooner?

What if it turns out that the customer doesn’t want the product we’re building? Although this is never good news for an entrepreneur, finding out sooner is much better than finding out later. Working in small batches ensures that a startup can minimize the expenditure of time, money, and effort that ultimately turns out to have been wasted.

Eric Ries, The Power of Small Batches

Discover and Enjoy Your Friends’ Twitter Photos & Videos on Pixable

Yesterday we announced the integration of Twitter with Pixable. This is an additional step to become the destination to discover and enjoy your friends' photos and videos.

Now you are able to connect your Twitter account to Pixable and enjoy all the photos and videos that your friends are sharing. So, we are pulling in all the photos and videos shared to Twitter from places like TwitPic, yFrog, Instagram, Picplz, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, etc. Note that by integrating Twitter, we integrate many repositories as Twitter already does the job of aggregating links to photos and videos shared from multiple repositories.

This comes around at an interesting time - photo sharing is only getting more popular (e.g. Instagram, Foodspotting, Google's Photovine or Google+) and, specifically in regards to Twitter, Apple's iOS5 will include native Twitter integration.

Some interesting links covering this new announcement:

• Techcrunch: Pixable Adds Twitter To Intelligent Social Photo And Video Aggregator
• Gigaom: At Pixable, no filters, just pure photo magic
• Fast Company: Pixable Turns Texty Twitter Into A Stream Of Your Friend's Photos, Videos
• Digital Trends: Pixable adds Twitter to its photo curation application

Principles of UX Design

"UX design is about helping users accomplish their goals as efficiently as possible (good user experiences are discoverable, efficient, economical, and recoverable)"  Tyler Tate

"North star" principles of UX

• simple
• fast loading
• elegant
• efficient
• minimal design unless for a purpose
• try to let content speak for itself
• interactive
• keep the users attention
• clear direction and calls to action (including how to get back)
• ability to navigate forward or back
• people should feel safe about taking any action

Thanks to Gin Lane Media

"Building a company or a product is just about determination and believing that you can", Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg's speech today at Belle Haven Community School in Menlo Park, today in Techcrunch:

• There are no shortcuts to success– ”A lot of building a company or a product like Facebook is just about determination and believing that you can,” Zuckerberg said. “Everything that’s worth doing is actually pretty hard.” 

• Great relationships are the most important thing —  Focus on building great things with people that you love, “No one ever does anything alone.” “Great friendships make life fun and meaningful.”

• Do what you love – If you love what you do you’ll power through adversity, “It’s a lot easier to focus on challenges that you actually really enjoy doing.”

“It’s not about a single moment of inspiration or brilliance, it’s years and years of practice and hard work … Anything that’s really awesome takes a lot of work.”