• How to choose a web hosting provider
• How to choose bandwidth and how much is enough
• Should you chose dedicated or shared servers
• Should you chose managed or unmanaged hosting plan
• Should you use Linux or Windows based servers
• etc.

The site also covers 3 top hosting providers and compares them extensively on all levels of features and services provided. They have also reviewed them in depth in the following criteria:

• Reliability
• Control Panel
• Customer Support
• Value for Money

All of the above criteria are very important when choosing a hosting service for your website. However, I would suggest that you pay extra attention to the customer service part

Summary
As a resource site, I think it’s a very straight forward and very informative website. My suggestions would be to expand the “Learning Center” to include even more questions and answers.

And also to add more hosting providers to the review list, instead of limiting it to only three. While in-depth reviews of the hosting providers are very useful, I think to make it more credible, they should also allow other users to review and comment under each hosting provider.

URL: www.webhostingbluebook.com

Below I will address two ways to backup your Instagram pictures; 1 – your existing Instagram pictures and
2 – a way to auto-backup all your future Instagram pictures as well.

Backing up all your existing Instagram photos

Instaport is a great way to backup all your existing Instagram photos. It’s very simple to use, all you need to do is to connect using your instagram login and all your Instagram pictures will be zipped and ready for you to download.

Website: http://web2.instaport.me

How to auto backup all your future Instagram Pictures

Using two great tools, IFTTT and Dropbox, you can auto backup all your future Instagram photos to your Dropbox as they are posted by you in your Instagram account. I have previously blogged about ifttt here.

For this to work, please make sure to signup for IFTTT and Dropbox first. After which, just activate this recipe in your IFTTT account and you are done.

Now, all your future Instagram pictures will be auto backed up to your Dropbox account. Safe and sound

Recipe URL: https://ifttt.com/recipes/43183

What’s the current problem?

You would ask “what’s the current problem that it requires this kind of solution?”. Well, the current problem is that there are many great blogs and websites on the web that are simply difficult to read. This could be due to many reasons. Here are some of them:

• using small font sizes for the content
• using dark backgrounds behind the content
• using difficult to read font-styles
• blog layout is not user-friendly
• too many ads on the blog
• etc etc.

The Solution

Solution is a product called Readability that works with your web browsers, smartphones and tablets. Here is how it works.

1. You sign up for an account with Readability and drag the browser bookmarklets to your browser’s toolbar. Bookmarklet works with all the major web browsers. (You can also install Google Chrome extensions)

2. And when you are browsing the web and come across a good blog post or an article that you would like to read..

3. You just press the bookmarklet and it will send that particular page to your Readability account. Google Chrome extension gives you few options when you press the button; Read Now, Read Later, and Send to Kindle.

4. Once you send the article to your Readability account, this is how the article will look like (see below) – nicely formatted – all the other design elements of the page, except for the blog post content are stripped out and displayed in a user-friendly and usable font style and font size.

Usually, if you want to read the article later, you can open it up in your iPad or iPhone app, again with a nicely formatted, user-friendly interface (see below).

If you liked the article, tweet it to your friends!

URL: http://www.readability.com

Often times I come across a great resource on the web and I want to bookmark it. I usually use Delicious.com to save and manage all my bookmarks. However, sometimes when I’m browsing the web via mobile, I can’t really save the links to my Delicious account, especially when I’m using a specific app, so normally I will do one of the following:

1. Send the link to myself via email, so that I can bookmark it later when I check my mail on my notebook.
2. Send to Readability app, if it’s something I want to read later.
3. Tweet the link (if it is something that will benefit my twitter followers) so that I can favorite it and it will be thus bookmarked on my Favorites list. Yes, I use Twitter’s Favorites list as my bookmark page That’s why I suggested to @twitter to do something about it.
   

The Solution

Luckily there is a solution from Delicious’ side that they have introduced few months back. Basically what it does is that, it connects to your Twitter account via oAuth, and pulls all the tweets with hashtags #d. You can also select few other options, such as pulling all favorited tweets etc.

To set this up, login to your Delicious account and go to Settings > Sources – Connect a Twitter Account.

After you have selected the preferences, press “Connect Twitter“.

Once you are shown the above page, press “Authorize App” and you are done. Now Delicious will diligently collect all your links from tweets that have a hashtag of #d and/or all your favorites tweets.

Below, you will find some of these websites:

Code Academy

Codecademy is an interactive and fun way to learn coding. By asking you to type set of words and answers to questions, it will involve you in a two-way communication. By the time you realize, you will be coding and understanding the concepts of object oriented programming. It also employs social elements to the site, so that you can learn together with your friends.

Website: http://www.codecademy.com

Khan Academy

Khan Academy has a huge collection of 2700+ free videos. And it’s a work of one man, Salman Khan. What started of as a casual online tutoring sessions for his relative’s kids, turned out to be one of the largest non-profit educational organizations in the world.

He has MBA from Harvard, he has three degrees from MIT: a BS in math and a BS and a master’s in electrical engineering and computer science. His website is mainly popular for his maths videos, which are easy to understand and appealing to school kids. You can read more on Khan’s story at the following sites; Money.CNN, Wired, and SiliconPrairieNews.

Website: http://www.khanacademy.org

TreeHouse

Treehouse is a fairly new website that concentrates on providing instructional videos on Web Design, Web Development and iOS Development. As a part of its teaching method, it uses ‘badges’ similar to what FourSquare does, you will get a badge for answering questions correctly. However, unlike CodeAcademy and KhanAcademy, Treehouse charges for its service, starting $25/month.

The project is backed by one of the well known investors, namely; Reid Hoffman, Kevin Rose, David Sze, Chamath Palihapitiya and Mark Suster.

Website: http://teamtreehouse.com

Veri

Veri is a veri good website It’s a community managed website that have a wide range of topics, from online marketing to understanding term sheets to parenthood. Yeah that’s how wide their array of topics are. Teaching method employed at Veri is multiple choice based questions, if you answer the question wrongly, you can learn the right answer.

You can also invite your twitter and FB friends and see their progress and classes that they are taking. You can also create your own lessons or contribute new modules to the existing topics.

Website: http://www.veri.com

Code School

Last but not least, Code School is a paid service ($25/month) that teaches variety of programming and web design subjects. Their teaching method combine video, coding in the browser, and gamification principles to make learning more fun and therefore more effective. There is a selection of free courses that you can take.

Website: http://www.codeschool.com

What you say?

I hope you liked the resources. Do you know of any other resources that are making a difference in online education/learning? If you do, please plug them in the comments section.

UPDATED: JAN 19, 2012

• Skillshare.com – marketplace for teaching and learning. Find people to teach or learn from. All classes happen in real life/offline.
• Udemy.com – create your own video lessons, take courses from others.

UPDATED: APR 10, 2012

• Programr.com – learn tons of programming languages.

UPDATED: APR 15, 2012

• CourseHero.com – website that collects education related videos from youtube and arranges/categorizes in different subjects, making them a course for you to take and follow thru.

UPDATED: MAY 16, 2013

• Coursera.org – Coursera is an education company that partners with the top universities and organizations in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free.

But you can also do a lot of custom recipes of your own. If you like Google Alerts you will love Ifttt, because it can do a lot more than Google Alerts.

Website: Ifttt.com

Failure is given, and it should be celebrated

Throughout the event, speakers and panellists have time and again reminded entrepreneurs that they have to take risks and prepared to fail, because they were told, for the first (few) startup(s) they were definitely going to fail.

As we know, failure is celebrated in Silicon Valley, but not so much in other parts of the world, especially in Asia. In most Asian countries failure is stigmatized, it’s especially true in Japan.

“From olden times, if you were defeated in battle you committed seppuku [ritual suicide by slicing the belly, also known as hara-kiri],” Mr Honda says. “That’s in our genes, so people don’t try if they think they might fail.”
Stigma of failure holds back Japan start-ups – FT.com

For this reason, it’s not an easy feat for us Asians to take risks and celebrate our failures…

Failures == (Hopefully) Learn How to Launch Successful Startup?

For me the whole message of failures and embracing failures sounded a bit like, to put it very bluntly – “i don’t care what you do, just go and try and learn it by yourself. I don’t have time for this. Surely after few startups you will know how to launch successful startup/product“.

Cartoon (C) CartoonStock.com

Because let’s face it, not everyone’s startup will be next Twitter or Facebook. And not everyone is in the position to take risks. So, I thought and had desired that these successful entrepreneurs show some sort of “guidance”, “methodology” for starting a successful business or at least minimizing failures and maximizing success rates of new startups. But alas, the message was, again to put it bluntly “i don’t want to hear anything, just go do it yourself“.

Which brings me to next point…

Success of Incubation Centers
Incubation centers like Y-Combinator, TechStars have been quite successful in the US. These centers provide extensive training, mentoring and funding for startups if it passes their selection criteria. This is a very good development, and it’s very beneficial for the first-time entrepreneurs.

In Malaysia, MDeC provides somewhat similar program for entrepreneurs. Also the newly launched AllStars incubation program is a good start for the local industry.

Success of these programs is, I believe mostly due to the vast experience of the mentors who run these places regarding startups. Also their gut feeling about the next big thing when it comes to selecting ideas. Basically they are very hands-on with the startups that they mentor. They share their domain knowledge and expertise in the product development, marketing, team building etc. It’s an end-to-end program, which is what first-time entrepreneurs want. And not “go and do yourself” kind of message.

There is a way to successful startups

Until now, entrepreneurs have believed that there is no recipe for successful startup. And I believe, SVC2M speakers did genuinely thought that they were giving the best advice when they said that there is no one way to launch a successful business. You just had to try it for yourself, and once you have enough experience, a keen eye for “the next big thing” ideas, then you would finally hit a bull’s eye, hopefully.

However, Steve Blank, thinks otherwise. After founding 8 successful startups, he says that he saw a pattern in making startups work. And he has come up with, what’s called “Customer Development Methodology” for Startups. Some info on Steve:

After 21 years in 8 high technology companies, I retired in 1999. I co-founded my last company, E.piphany, in my living room in 1996. My other startups include two semiconductor companies, Zilog and MIPS Computers, a workstation company Convergent Technologies, a consulting stint for a graphics hardware/software spinout Pixar, a supercomputer firm, Ardent, a computer peripheral supplier, SuperMac, a military intelligence systems supplier, ESL and a video game company, Rocket Science Games.

Total score: two large craters (Rocket Science and Ardent), one dot.com bubble home run (E.piphany) and several base hits.

In his book “Four Steps to Epiphany” Steve talks about Customer Development Methodology extensively. He argues that “Product Development Methodology” is not the right methodology for running startups and making plans, especially sales and marketing plans. Because it exclusively concentrates on the product and totally ignores the customer part. He argues that, startups who use “Product Development Methodology” for running startups have higher chance to fail.

One important thing to remember though, he doesn’t advocate replacing “Product Development Methodology” with “Customer Development Methodology”. He says that PDM, should be used for developing and managing a product, and CDM should be used to manage, plan and run Startups.

CDM is a big topic in itself, so if you are interested, I highly recommend that you get the book.

MVP or Minimum Viable Product

Coupled with Customer Development Methodology, getting your product as soon as possible to the market with the most basic version first, in order to get customer feedback is gaining popularity now. MVP has been popularized by Eric Ries for web startups with his book Lean Startup.

“The product is typically deployed to a subset of possible customers, such as early adopters that are thought to be more forgiving, more likely to give feedback, and able to grasp a product vision from an early prototype or marketing information. It is a strategy targeted at avoiding building products that customers do not want, that seeks to maximize the information learned about the customer per dollar spent.”

Summary

I think there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I strongly believe that Steve Blank is right, and coupled with concepts like Lean Startup, every startup can iterate successfully and if not become the next Twitter, at least they will be able to minimize the failure rate. Sometimes, entrepreneurs are just happy to see their idea to be alive and profitable, even though it doesn’t become the multi-million startup.

And I hope that successful entrepreneurs, will guide beginners to these concepts and methodologies, rather than just sending them to battlefield with no weapons. Your thoughts?

Related useful book: Business Model Generation

As the story goes.. In 1999, Jimmy Wales had an idea, he wanted to create a free encyclopedia to be written by experts and PhD holders, it was called Nupedia. He reasoned, only scholars, academics and experts in a particular field would be able to write such articles. It made sense, as scholarly articles needed a lot of referential data and research, not everyone would be able to write such articles. However, in its first year, his team of “experts” were able to write only a dozen articles. They were simply too slow. This was due to many reasons, most of the academics were too busy, it was difficult to convince them to write for Nupedia, research normally took few years..etc.

So, Jimmy Wales saw that it was not working, something had to be done. He came out with a new idea. He suggested to his team, why not make it in a way that anybody can create an article, others can edit it, etc… basically early years of crowdsourcing. But the editors of Nupedia and Advisory Board were not very supportive of the idea. For them it was the opposite of what they were doing at the moment. Non-academics, and uncontrolled editing and creation of articles, they thought, would jeopardize the credibility of the articles and company as a whole. They reasoned, there would be too much error in the articles, which would render the articles useless for any scholarly reference or research.

This new idea ended up separated into different project and was called “Wikipedia” (wiki – hawaiian for quick). Within a year, there were more than 20,000 articles in it. Clearly it was a success and it was working. As for the margin of error, it was 3.86% per article, compared to 2.92% for Encyclopedia Britannica according to 2005 research by journal Nature, which is acceptable. And usually these errors get corrected over time.

Eventually, Nupedia was shutdown in 2003, and it had only 23 articles at the time of closing. And as they say, the rest is a history…

Lesson to Startups and Entrepreneurs..

Sometimes the initial idea for your startup may not work out, and you might end up doing something totally different for your startup and its direction. And this phenomenon is actually very common in startups. As Jawed Karim of YouTube said in SVC2M event in Kuala Lumpur, their initial idea for youtube was “a dating site with videos“.

So, if your first version of your product (MVP) didn’t take off, don’t despair. Find out why it didn’t take off, get feedback from your potential customers/users on what they want, after that iterate and try again!

Note: If you want to read more about wikipedia story, check this Business Week article here

Please feel free to comment about your own experiences or of any companies that you know which changed their business model, direction, idea drastically from the original one.

Google is already into it as we all know it, they are trying to figure it out at the moment. But there are so many great products and services can be built for bringing internet to the TV. Just a food for thought!

Was it affective? In my case no, because I didn’t signup. However I did have a look at their page. So, it was effective in getting the traffic to the website, but ineffective in converting the leads.