Starglider Systems Blog

Recently I completed the course Pattern Discovery in Data Mining – by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in Coursera.

It was interesting but had a fair theoretical slant. Still, I learned about a lot of algorithms I was not aware about before in the area.

The course is free (you only pay US$50 if you want a certificate, but it doesn't likely to be useful to me), and part of a larger specialization sequence in Data Mining, which seems to have more practical courses.

Coursera was pretty good as usual. I particularly like their iPad app, which allows you to download, speed up videos (quite useful in this case) and has full closed caption support.

Recommended to people interested in the area.

 

I just finished The Essential Guide to Entrepreneurship – by Guy Kawasaki. Guy Kawasaki is fairly well known, specially as the Chief Evangelist of Apple (and now Canva, which you will hear about if you get the course). He is also the author of several books, including The Art of The Start (on the same topic as the course), The Art of Social Media, and several more.

It is a new, interesting course about Entrepreneurship divided in these segments:

Launching – Ideas on how to come up with a product, position it, and how to avoid common mistakes. It is the only pre-launch segment.

Pitching – how to pitch to investors, angels or venture capitalists. Clearly one of the big topics for the course.

Fundraising – types of funding, how to find investors, types of investors and rounds of financing.

Building a Team – advice on how to build your team – what to look for, how to get a good fit, checking for references and getting people to join.

Social Media – mostly generic (use pictures/videos, repeat tweets, etc), but does have some good advice on how to use specific platforms best.

Evangelizing – how to make people want to spread the “good news” about your company/product.

There is a bunch of supplementary files (PDF), some of which are quite useful. Check the image on the side for the list.

The course took me about 6 hours to complete, including taking quite a bit of notes.

My notes from the Course

I had a ton of notes, this is just what I felt is most interesting/useful. I'm adding my own comments in italics.

Launch

Getting your idea – use simple questions, such as “Is there a better way to do this?”, “How can I make it better”.

Look for the intersection of opportunity, your experience and passion.

Ideas are easy, implementation is hard.

Get a prototype ready – just asking people if you'd buy a concept is limited (a common theme on the topic – Nathan Barry and others suggest pre-selling to actually check for interest – that is when you really know if someone is interested and when they will ask the hard questions about your product)

Use a mantra (2-4 words) instead of a mission statement. Do with a co-founder, through trial and error, keep it logical and short. Think about why are you doing, and what you are trying to do.
On launch, tell a story using simple questions used before to stand out.

Worry about getting critical mass instead of scaling – it is much more likely to be a problem (can't help but be a little wary of this as a programmer – architectures tend to go very bad when you need to overhaul them after design because you ignore scaling. Obviously makes some sense on corporate infrastructure)

Watch out for the chasm between the early adopters and going mainstream – Early adopters will accept a lot that mainstream won't.

Ease of use can be more important on social media – old press reviewers tolerated a lot more complexity.

Common mistakes
– scale too much, too early
– hiring mirror images instead of having a diverse team with complementary strenghts.
– obsession with control

No one vests stock early – anyone can decide to leave at any time.

Doing a vc demo

•  only do it when ready
•  have backups for everything
•  use a local server instead of trusting the net
•  be ready – do the whole demo before and be sure of where everything you need are
•  fast start
•  do it alone, coordination is hard
•  no jokes or jargon
•  questions only at the end
•  start on a high,  show how it works, end on a high

Pitches

Think Tinder, not eHarmony – fast, not deep.

Preparation, 20-25 times before you go it, practice is key.
Start with a personal story on how/why you made the product/got the idea
10/20/30 rule, 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 size font
Small size fonts might make you add too much text and read from the slide. Don't.
Every time you state a fact, pretend someone said “so what”
Next level, after “so what” explanation, “give me an example”
Avoid adding answers to every question you are asked to the pitch, but keep the most important ones in mind and consider rewriting the whole thing periodically.

Dream pitch: explain what you do, talk about the magic, demo, show that you already
have users.

Bring backups for everything. Even printed slides just in case.

What to avoid

• talking about patents as a big deal, require cash and time to defend
• don't say you are the only one who can do something
• don't say you have no competition, either you are clueless or there is no market
• don't claim your projections are conservative
• don't try to invent scarcity,i.e. Say they have to decide soon because you have other offers.

The Pitch Checklist/Dream Pitch and Pitch makeover supplementary files are all quite useful.

Fundraising

• 3F, friends, fools and family – good for 25-100K
• Angels 5-500. More interested in giving back to society, faster decisions.
• Venture capitalists – look for bigger scores. 3-4 thou a year deals worldwide
• Crowdfunding. No equity share, proves there is a market for the product

Easier with proxies, such as corporate finance attorneys, professors, executives already in the VC portfolio.

Team Building

– shared qualities – vision, size, timeline, commitment
– different attributes – expertise, orientation (detail vs strategic), perspectives

What to look for:
– work experience, education, do they get it (shared vision)

Checking for fit
– interview by phone first, to remove variables
– should have a strong positive reaction when you see a candidate (uh, isn't that the inverse of the previous one?)

– use linkedin and find people that worked with them for references.

Do it so that they feel they can do the best work of their lives and make a difference

Recruting is never done, even after someone is hired
Map – mastery,autonomy, purpose

Supplementary:
Top 10 lies of job candidates
Big vs small company skills
Questions for reference checking

Social Media

Don't get an intern to do this – it is too important.

• Pinterest , for photo worthy stuff, such as fashion, restaurants,etc. Posts have a longer shell life
• Instagram – good topics are the same as Pinterest
• Linkedin – more for the serious bizdev, b2b, contacts stuff
• Buffer, Hootsuite, Sproutsocial – don't focus on twitter, Google plus and FB, just blast at them using an app

Pay attention to the cover photo, it is an important marketing image
Tagline, should be your mantra or near it
Repost tweets and posts several times.

Every post should have a graphic or video
Recommends letting FB grab the image from the link, not add it manually. Several times more engagement this way.
Twitter, can add up to 4 images and tell a little story. Can also tag people in the images and these do not count as chars on the tweet
Get more engagement/view by posting video directly to FB.

Best practices for sharing:

• be brief – 2 or 3 sentences for G+ and FB, 100 chars on Twitter. 500 to 1000 words on blog posts.
• have pictures, graphic or video on everything.
• post early in the morning (test!)
• link to the source
• use bullets for posts longer than 4 paragraphs
• use popular title schemes. (there is a list with a few)

Try promoting posts where available. or pin to the top of the page on fb and twitter for free.
Automate your posts  – Buffer, DoShare , Friends+me, Hootsuite, Post Planner, Sprout Social, Tailwind, TweetDeck (article actually has descriptions of each)

Conclusion

I feel that the course was not a great fit for me, because pitching, fundraising and evangelism are the biggest topics and don't really apply to most of my ideas. If these are of interest for you, it is bound to be much more useful. A little too expensive (US$200, I got it at US$40 otherwise I'd be getting a refund) for the amount of content in the other areas.

Just finished XAML Jumpstart: Getting Started With XAML, by Kevin Dockx.

As someone coming from Delphi and with no XAML experience, XAML looks very, very powerful compared to Delphi forms (of course some might say it is unfair to compare a tech that is essentially from 94 to one from 2006, and that the proper comparison is with Firemonkey now).

I love how easy it is to do complex composed elements with DataTemplate (which would require very annoying custom drawing in Delphi), and the data binding system to classes seems great. Clearly auto-resizing/adaptive design was a big deal from the start. And the animation support looks pretty cool, too.

I'd love to see the full WPF stack get implemented on Mac and Linux, too, like the CLR. But I haven't heard about any efforts in this area and from what I understand it would be far from trivial. (I know about Xamarin.Forms, but it is not exactly the same).

I also found this blog post by the teacher about the future of XAML to be interesting.

The course and examples were quite clear and informative. The only thing I'd mention is that sometimes I'd have trouble understanding the teacher's accent, but while on the PC closed captions solved this.

Official duration is 3h 14 min. I spent almost 5 hours, due to taking notes and trying out the examples (and watching the videos at 1.1x speed).

Pluralsight – short review

This is the first course I completed in Pluralsight. I really like it, they have a huge selection of courses for .Net (and many in other areas, too), fast loading videos, closed captions (on most courses I've seen, but unavailable on the iPad unfortunately) and video speed controls. Their Recently Added course list is quite large, too.

Not very cheap, though – US$29 or US$49 a month. Given that the exercise files are very useful for most courses – and can easily make you spend extra hours re-typing things to try them out – or worse, just end up watching and not trying – only the most expensive option (which includes them) makes sense. For most people, the certificates and offline viewing are useful, too.

Thankfully, I got a 30% discount and got the yearly option for US$349, which is much better.

I also had some problems with getting my account to work with the 30% discount, and support was very fast and quite effective.

UX Design for Mobile Developers: Learn to Design a 5-Star Android App is an Udacity course about how to design your user experience for Android apps.

The course page suggest 6 weeks with about 6 hours per week.

Personally, I took the course in about 3 hours, but I mostly avoided using Prezi for the assignments. Prezi is used on the course to design cute boxes with the persona, their attributes, use cases and flows (how a user would perform a use case in the app). It looks like it would be lovely to wireframe the whole app and share with your team or clients, but for the flows it is actually used in the course, I think it is a whole lot simpler and faster to just use text.

I also had a rather simple app in mind for some of the assignments – a STG FolderPrint Plus extension for Android (yes, I realize for most people this doesn't make sense, I'd love to have a decent file catalog of my phone I can easily view and some people actually asked for it in the last survey). For anyone interested, I plan on making it for FPP 5.0, eventually.

There were some useful stuff in the course. They cover personas, use cases, several concrete ways to improve user flow (such as dropping forms entirely when possible) and the important constraints for mobile design.

The thing is, last year I saw another course that covered most of this elements and much more – App Making: Designing & Marketing Successful Apps (not an affiliate link).

So effectively, what I learned in this course was  fairly minimal. I was really hoping for more of best practices UI coverage of examples.

Overall, not bad for a free course, but if you'd like more on how to design and market your apps, App Making: Designing & Marketing Successful Apps (not an affiliate link)  is a much better resource – but you will pay for the difference.

PS: The course videos supported speeding up (1.25x feels great) and the closed captions are near perfect. Udacity also has an iOS/Android app, but it lacks those features on iOS so I didn't use it.

Become a SuperLearner is a course on speed-reading and memory skills.

I finished it several months ago, so I'm going to keep my review shorter than usual.

The memory and reading skills that are thaught here seem all very useful, but you do have to spend time practicing them. When I read an article using these techniques, that definitely improved my retention, but I didn't do all the practice recommended so far.

I didn't improve my reading speed with this course (around 600WPM). If you just want to improve your reading speed, get Ace Reader for PC, or even better, for the iPad (which is much cheaper and has all the same content).

Overall, recommended, but make sure to take the time to do the exercises.