It’s all about the “pivots” when it comes to startups

If you are an entrepreneur who wants to hit big in Silicon Valley, this is the video you must watch. Lots of great advices by Mike Maples.

Update: Watch it on youtube here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H69IK0B2ods

Jack Ma’s Philosophy on Shareholders

MBA books teaches you that – shareholders are the most important stakeholders of the company and that company’s main objective is to increase shareholder value.

However the founder of Alibaba.com, biggest online company in China, says that for him “the most important groups are customers and then employees. He says that customers are the ones who pay him and employees are the ones who stick with him but shareholders come and go. And for this reason, shareholders come last for him.”

That’s a very interesting point that he makes. Read his other two company philosophies on TechCrunch here. Watch the full interview here.

Seth Godin on How to Successfully Finish Projects

Good advice by Seth Godin, author of many successful books. As he rightly points out, many people launch projects but few succeed in following through and making the project successful.

URL: http://the99percent.com/videos/5822/seth-godin-quieting-the-lizard-brain

How to have an ecommerce shop on your Facebook

fb_commerce.jpgPayvment’s E-Commerce Storefront enables you to launch a professional storefront on Facebook. This app gives you everything you need including a full-featured admin area to manage your storefront and products directly from Facebook.

The Payvment tab couples PayPal’s API with Payvment’s shopping cart, allowing you to sell products directly on your Facebook Page… for free! This is a comprehensive app which allows you to add products and assign those products to a category. Payvment’s tab allows you to upload photos, list terms of service, provides shipping options, offer coupons and much much more. Your customers can shop for products like they would from any other e-commerce site, right on Facebook.

One of the coolest features of the Payvment tab is that it is integrated with all other Payvment stores, both on and off Facebook. If a user adds a product to their cart from your store, and later goes to check-out after shopping at another Payvment store, your item will still be in that user’s cart.

URL: http://www.facebook.com/payvment

Facebook launches “Places”

places.pngFacebook launched Places, an extension to its iPhone application where people can post their location via Places to their Wall on FB. You can also tag your friends who are with you in the same place. Another feature of Places is, you can find friends who are nearby you. Seems like going to be interesting. Unfortunately it’s only available in US at the moment, in Malaysia you only see this blank screen to the right.

Places will directly compete with foursquare, another most popular location tagging application at the moment. Foursquare is not easy to beat though, since it has a competitive advantage; people can use foursqare to get discounts in restaurants, boutiques, shops etc, users also receive funny badges and become a mayor of the places…

It’s going to be interesting in the next few months, how these two apps will be competing with each other.

App – iPhone 4 Retina View Simulator

getreviewapp.pngIf you are an iPhone developer that has yet to get your iPhone 4, you should check out this application. It allows you to view your mockups in iPhone 4 retina display.

App costs just $2.99, much cheaper than the iPhone 4 investment :)

URL: http://www.getreviewapp.com/

LogoDesignTeam has a new look

Friends and long time sponsors of my blog, LogoDesignTeam.com has a new look. Celebrating their new website design, they are giving away 10% discount to all AdesBlog readers, just mention “adesblog” when ordering a new logo, or repairing your logo and you will get your 10% discount. This offer is valid until 31 August 2010, so hurry!

There is no charges for unlimited revisions of your logo samples, so you can be sure that you will get your logo in exactly the way you want.

logodesignteam new look

Also check out their portfolio and string of testimonials from satisfied customers.

Website: http://www.logodesignteam.com

Get Twitter’s Official “Tweet” button

Twitter finally launched it’s official “tweet” button. As you can see below, it comes in 3 different sizes.

twitter_offical_button.png

URL: http://twitter.com/goodies/tweetbutton

It’s the “retweets” that count

Latest study by HP Labs suggests that “The correlation between popularity and influence is weaker than it might be expected. This is a reflection of the fact that for information to propagate in a network, individuals need to forward it to the other members, thus having to actively engage rather than passively read it and cease to act on it.”

That means it’s the retweets that really matter, and if you are a social networking advertiser you might want to find out the retweet rates of your twitter users that you are advertising on. Otherwise, if no one retweets their tweets, you might be wasting your money.

Because the research suggests that there are users with: 1) many followers and low relative infuence, and 2) users with fewer followers but high relative infuence. If you were to choose one of two, you should go for the second type of users. Because that way your message will be heard by a lot more people.

As we know twitter is like a river, at any given time you can only see the latest tweets and everything else is a history… So unless your “message” is retweeted, it’s as good as it’s dead.

I am just rumbling here, but I hope you know what I am getting at. Here is the research:

Influence and Passivity in Social Media – HP Labs Research

Google Font Directory – Embed Nice Fonts to Your Blog

Google Font Directory is a great place to integrate different fonts other than the usual Verdana and Arial to your blog. With the launch of Google Font Viewer, it got a lot easier to change the fonts of your blog to nicer looking fonts. With just a few selections and copy-pasting a CSS code, your blog’s fonts can be different.

google_font.png

I hope font designers will support this project and contribute more free fonts to the directory.

URL: http://code.google.com/webfonts/preview

Felipe Melo’s anger costs Brazil a semi-final

Following up on my last post on World Cup, today’s match was an interesting one, Brazil Vs Netherlands.

This image is probably one of the most memorable images of WC 2010 – Brazilian football player Felipe Melo stamping Dutch player Ruben, and subsequently getting a “red card” and leaving the field, leaving Brazil with 10 players, which was a huge blow and ultimately cost them a semi-final?

angry_melo.jpg

Ok, now let’s read your opinions :) I am sure many people are angry, and equally many people must be happy.

Watch WorldCup Online

livetvru.jpgNow that the World Cup fever is on, what is your favorite website that streams World Cup matches live? Just now I watched Serbia VS Ghana at http://livetv.ru/en/worldcup/ and it’s not bad at all.

Also, if you are Malaysian and Maxis 3G subscriber, you can try this iPhone app b.player from Astro. The bad thing is it detects your connection and if you are on wi-fi or if you are on different carrier line than Maxis the app won’t work.

Which other websites do you recommend for watching WC matches online? Please share.