October 02, 2012

How to build consumer internet companies

Excelent article of Sarah Lacy explaining how to build consumer internet companies, using Color as a counter example.  

WEB 1.0

  • Winning was seen as a race to get as many resources as possible, buy a pricey domain, do as splashy a launch as possible and do whatever marketing you needed to land-grab users.

 WEB 2.0

  • The entire economics of how you build a company have changed. The costs are far lower, so raising money for the sake of a gaudy press release has given way to the luxury of raising less and retaining control. The marketing game changed too. 
  • First mover advantage is no longer valued. 
  • Commercials only work once you have a successful product and a solid user base and are looking to grow well beyond it.
  • People no longer get told what products to use in a Web 2.0 era, they use them and spread them to their friends if they’re good (Color wasn’t– as was evidenced by its two star rating). Money and grand articulations of a vision can’t shortcut that. The Web has become too crowded and users are too smart
  • There is no trick the way there was in the late 1990s. “You just can’t force users to get up off their asses and use your product” 
  • Crowded space where the quality of the product and whether your friends are using it are the only two things that matter to users. 
The way you build a company is to raise a modest round, get a minimum viable product, push it out, and iterate like hell until people use it or pivot and try again.

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September 19, 2012

Singtel+Pixable

Singtel_pixable

Dearest Pixable users,

Over the last few years, we have seen an explosion of opportunities at the intersection of photos, mobile, social and big data. Pixable has been part of that revolution, building a successful mobile product thanks to a talented team of more than 20 people with a passion for product, design and engineering; and a large group of advisors, directors, investors, and collaborators.

Today, we have very exciting news to share. We have joined forces with SingTel -- one of the world's largest mobile operators with over 400 million customers in 26 countries including Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, Philippines or India.

SingTel's Digital Life and Pixable have a shared vision of engaging with mobile users using digital services beyond simple communications, and joining forces was an easy decision. Pixable will continue operating independently from New York, with the same team, but will be part of SingTel's Digital Life group. We will now be part of a bigger family, with access to more global and user knowledge, and with a shared -and ambitious- vision. Having SingTel with us is a big win to continue building the company, growing the user base, and enhancing the product -- and we will continue to welcome the best talent.

At this point, we want to thank all of our users. Because of your excitement about Pixable, your incredible support and honest feedback we have been able to make Pixable what it is today. From all of us here at Pixable—thank you so much, we can't wait to show you where we are going next.

We are psyched to be joining SingTel and are excited to build a better Pixable for everyone, continuing to contribute to this amazing revolution in how people engage with photos, social, mobile and big data.

Viva La Pixable!

Love
-Inaki

for press enquiries, please contact Melissa Favero mfavero@singtel.com

ps.- Beyond our amazing team, we want to thank the people that contributed to the success of Pixable taking a leap of faith on us:

Our investors:

Our directors

  • James Joaquin, a pioneer in online photography, founder of oFoto, former president of KodakGallery, and serial entrepreneur; A great director that knows how to bring common sense and see things in perspective to the chaotic and paranoid world of entrepreneurship
  • Bob Davis, founder & CEO of Lycos (#1 website in the world during Internet 1.0). He is a real mentor who gave me daily advice on how to build a company and pushed me hard to work to the limit and think bigger. 
Our advisors 

 

 

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May 22, 2012

People with high expectations always feel better

A lot of people think that the secret to happiness is low expectations "you don't get disappointed when things don't happen and pleasantly surprised when they happen". But watch this TED video that proves that when failing, people with high expectations always feel better

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April 29, 2012

Data Driven Decisions

Great article today in Techcrunch about "Data Driven Decisions in Startups". I really believe that in today's world, consumer internet companies with strong analytics teams and with product teams optimizing clear metrics, always win. Paul Grahams says "If you hire all the smartest people and put them to work on a problem where their success can be measured, you win." The important thing in Paul's quote is that the success has to be measurable. 

Some quotes of the article:

  • Improper, simple, “stupid” models are better than intuition.
  • Turns out that you can build a simple model based on what you think are the important parameters of a decision and then evaluate the options based on that model. More importantly, it will force you to think analytically about what are the important parameters to consider for that specific decision. This by itself will lead to a better decision and will remove subjective biases. This is why data driven decisions are so powerful.
  • A decision made using a good professional objective decision-making model will always trump expert intuition.
  • Almost everything that you do can be boiled down into a formula. Doing that will force you and your team to think about what are the critical parameters for success in any given project or initiative and then better optimize for that success.
  • In the case of the data driven startup, one of the most interesting cases is the case of Jack Dorsey who has seen the power of data driven decisions and made it his job to put together an “inference team” at Square. This team focuses on collecting and analyzing data to make better decisions. In his words: “For the first two years of Twitter’s life, we were flying blind… we’re basing everything on intuition instead of having a good balance between intuition and data… so the first thing I wrote for Square is an admin dashboard. We have a very strong discipline to log everything and measure everything.”
  • it is more important to understand why data driven decisions work and to instill such a culture in your company.

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April 27, 2012

Slideshows with the best photos of any topic (realtime)

At Pixable we are creating a widget that shows the best photos of any topic or event. We do this by collecting photos from Instagram and Twitter combined with geotagging, hashtags, and ranking algorithms based on user relevancy, retweets and favorites. Several brands have already shown interests in using the widget. Have a look at this example with the best photos of the Space Shuttle flying over NYC today:

 

And if you want to see it full screen, check it out here.

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April 03, 2012

About Scaling Software and Businesses (Paul Graham)

About scaling software and scaling businesses:

There are a couple rules:

  1. You can’t predict in advance where the bottlenecks will be so you just keep going until you hit the next one
  2. You can always scale a lot more than you originally predicted. ”When you scale things, they often turn into other stuff that you would have never imagined,”

 

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March 19, 2012

"B2B vs B2C", Aaron Levie

Interesting interview with Aaron Levie (founder of Box) on why most startups are focused on consumers and why it's more exciting selling to businesses:

"When you're 22 years old or 25 years old—the Y Combinator demographic—you have no context for the enterprise. If you're in your early 20s and you're hanging out with a bunch of other people in their early 20s, nobody has a sense of the kinds of problems that 'real workers' run into every day. They're running into a completely different set of problems like 'what's the party going on right now that I should be going to? What are my friends looking at on the Internet that I want to read? How do I share photos and videos?' That's their frame of reference for life.

"Selling to businesses is much more exciting—and a better business. "In the consumer market, we were making it easier to get to a file from a device, or another computer, or to be able to look up your photos. That was very interesting, but it wasn't 10x innovation. Within the enterprise, if you compare Box to something like IBM Filenet, or Microsoft SharePoint, you get almost a 10x improvement on productivity, speed, time to market for new products. So we saw an opportunity to create real innovation in that space and that's what got us excited....We think the market for enterprise collaboration will be much larger than the market for checking into locations on your phone."

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February 21, 2012

On Excellence (Drew Houston)

Great interview of Drew Houston in the April 2012 Edition of Technology Review. And great definition of excellence and why excellence matters in consumer products:

"Excellence is the sum of 100 or 1,000 of these little details. We care deeply about making something that's excellent from an engineering standpoint"
[…]
"It's easy to make a solution that works 80 or 90 percent of the time, or even 99 percent of the time. But sooner or later, if the day comes where you're about to present before an audience and the ­PowerPoint is not there, you'll stop using the service—and you'll tell all your friends what a terrible experience you've had"

Posted at 08:50 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

How to Build a Scalable Infrastructure on Amazon Web Services - Tools and Architecture

Pixable is your mobile photo inbox, where the relevant photos from your friends on Facebook, Twitter and more, come to you. In the same way that Google and Yahoo crawl and index web pages --to add organization and boost relevancy--, Pixable crawls and indexes social photos. But in the case of Pixable, the ranking of photos is fully personalized. As you can imagine, the crawling and indexing requires a scalable backend infrastructure. 

In this blog post, Pixable's CTO and VP of Engineering describe how they support a scalable infrastructure with 80+ servers on Amazon Web Services to continuously crawl, process, rank and index new photos from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more. The main ingredients are:

  • Backend: AWS (with more than 80 EC2 instances), LAMP stack (with a little bit of MongoDB), Memcache layer and Beanstalkd for the job queue.
  • Web frontends: CSS5, HTML 5, jQuery with heavy use of ajax calls.
  • iPhone/iPad: Objective-C

As there isn't many documented best practices, I hope this post is useful to many tech entrepreneurs that need to build scalable backend infrastructures using today cloud tools and services.

Posted at 02:45 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

February 10, 2012

Best articles and videos on Pixable in 2011

Collection of some of the best articles and videos on Pixable in 2011

ARTICLES:

VIDEOS

 

Posted at 08:24 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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