Startup Mistakes: Building Everything Yourself | StartupMuse One of the biggest challenges startups face is deciding what is core to their business. For example, at ShopSavvy we spent a LOT of time developing technology around barcode scanning. We assumed that developing and owning our own intellectual property would make our company more attractive to potential acquirers or investors. Turns out this assumption was a huge mistake that cost us time – one of the most valuable assets that startups and entrepreneurs seem to lack. In the case of our barcode scanning technology we used a combination of open source software and proprietary code for the Android version of ShopSavvy. Around that same time, I was in Europe helping with the launch of the G1 and stumbled across a PhD engineer by the name of Benoit Maison who lived in Belgium. Thirty days came and went and we were on the fence about using licensed technology in our app. Six months later, version one of our scanner was available. The real mistake was not understanding our business.
Music, Mind, and Meaning This is a revised version of AI Memo No. 616, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. An earlier published version appeared in Music, Mind, and Brain: The Neuropsychology of Music (Manfred Clynes, ed.) Plenum, New York, 1981 Why Do We Like Music? Why do we like music? Our culture immerses us in it for hours each day, and everyone knows how it touches our emotions, but few think of how music touches other kinds of thought. Have we the tools for such work? Certainly we know a bit about the obvious processes of reason–the ways we organize and represent ideas we get. The old distinctions among emotion, reason, and aesthetics are like the earth, air, and fire of an ancient alchemy. Much of what we now know of the mind emerged in this century from other subjects once considered just as personal and inaccessible but which were explored, for example, by Freud in his work on adults' dreams and jokes, and by Piaget in his work on children's thought and play. Why do we like music? Cadence.
My Next Big Thing. . . | StartupMuse Lots of you are asking about what I am up to these days so I thought I would give you a little update. Since January I have been working on a new startup called HAUL. Initially, spending all of my free time learning all I could about the market and attempting to formulate a plan to best address the opportunity. Most recently we’ve been recruiting the team and raising capital. For the past few months we have been in ‘relative’ stealth mode. meeting with lawyersshopping for office spaceworking with software developershiring employeesdoing video shootsraising capitalselected by Google for their Glass Explorer Programtelling friends what are you doing when they ask We aren’t quite ready to come ‘out’ as it were, but I can tell you that HAUL addresses a market segment an order of magnitude larger than any of my prior startups combined.
Raw vegetable crackers - YES there is a use for juice pulp! If you've ever juiced, you've asked but what about the pulp? I've put some in soup but never the whole quantity leftover from juicing. I can't live with the guilt of throwing it out, even when it is to become compost, anymore. I needed to try something and my experiment turned out to be a tasty one. We all crave crunch other than celery when on a mostly raw diet so here it is, my very own raw cracker recipe: Super adaptable, ingredients for this recipe can vary greatly, I've done this twice so far with similar results so now feel ready to post the recipe. As a sidenote, you can follow a similar process to make cookies with carrot and pineapple pulp, blend with raisins or dates, coconut, walnuts, flax, hemp, agave or honey and use a bite size cookie cutter (try a spice jar lid!). My crackers have such an intriguing colour cuz they're made with beets! I would consider the pictures here to represent a double batch of crackers. Here's how: Most of the flattening was done with the spatula.
Stop listening to what they are saying. . . | StartupMuse Recently I had an epiphany that has changed the way I deal with almost every person in my life and I wanted to share it with you. My question for you? The next time you are involved in some sort of interpersonal conflict – with a spouse, friend, client or employee – what would happen if you quit listening to the words they are writing or speaking and start thinking about where they are coming from. Think about the why more than the what. In high school and college I competed in cross examination debate, traveling nationally to argue any side of any argument (in rapid fire fashion like this young lad). By college I was really good at listening to the first 30 seconds of an argument and preparing my rebuttal as my opponent completed their reasoning and support. The other day I was involved in a tense conversation with someone and for some reason I stopped listening to their attacks and starting thinking about where they were in their life. Give it a try.
Mountain UltraLight: Make Your Own Backpacking Meals! My 14 day John Muir Trail thru-hike with my son is just a few weeks away, so I've been busy preparing 28 days worth of backpacking food for us. Making your own is not that difficult, less expensive, and much lighter than buying those individually packaged meals. Are you up for the task? A healthy hot breakfast is pretty easy. Now for some dinners. I may have gone a little crazy with this stuff, but did I mention that I absolutely love it? ...4 huge cans of crushed tomatoes... ...8 white onions, finely chopped... ...all in two giant pots with lots of garlic, basil, black pepper, and whatever else you love! Then into the dehydrator on parchment paper. I found the sauce finishes drying better if you remove it from the parchment paper and place it directly onto the drying rack. You want it to be dry so it will break apart, not like fruit leather. And what you're left with is 5 1/2 pounds and 13,500 calories of goodness. That's it for the hard stuff, the rest I will buy and repackage.
How to Memorize - Learn to memorize and increase memory If you are visiting from StumbleUpon and like this article and tool, please consider giving it a thumbs up. Thanks! Memorizing does not have to be as hard as most people make it. The problem is that most people only know how to memorize by reading the same thing over and over again. You have to learn to memorize. In this post we are going to look at how the brain remembers and then show how to use that knowledge to come up with a method for memorizing verbatim text. In this article we are going to focus on a technique that will let you easily: Memorize a speechMemorize the BibleMemorize linesMemorize Scripture At the end of this article is a Javascript tool that makes it easy to implement this method. Synapses and Neurons and How to Memorize In the simplified model of the brain in this discussion, we’ll be looking at neurons and synapses. When you remember something neurons fire signals down particular synapse pathways to other neurons which in turn fire signals to other neurons.
10 Best Science Fiction Stories Where Humans Are The Monsters Videogame suggestions: The Killzone series.. It's never actually been decided either way, but fans have been debating who the real bad guys are in the series since Killzone 1. A lot of stuff happens before the first game to support the Helghast being the good guys theory. They were pretty much wiped off their planet by the ISA, when the come to take it back Killzone 1 begins and you are of course playing as ISA soldiers defending Vekta from the Helghast threat. The Killzone 2 and 3 happens and once again the ISA is invading an alien planet hell-bent on revenge. Oh and in the upcoming game Killzone: Shadowfall the ISA allow some Helghast survivors return to Vekta some 20 or 30 years later, but in their own little colonies.
Why It’s So Disconcerting That SnapChat Is Now Worth Half a Billion Dollars These are strange times we live in, when a sanctum for selfies and sexting is valued at a half a billion dollars. Yet here we are. GigaOm reported Friday that an "untraditional" backer (Om guesses a hedge fund) will infuse the beloved photo-messaging app SnapChat with an additional $100 million in funding, and has valued the startup at a whopping $500 million. That's pretty whack. Sure, SnapChat has seen extraordinary growth in the last several months, and a whole lot of buzz. It's certainly a helluva lot of users, but users aren't dollars. In reality, SnapChat’s business plan probably looks something like this: "Maybe someone will buy us!" Prior to this latest reported influx of cash, SnapChat was prime for an acquisition. Then again, fellow photo-sharing app Instagram was scooped up by Facebook for $1 billion, with no revenue and less daily photos than SnapChat claims today (40 million vs. 60 million). It's a sort of economy of cool, not value.