(Originally posted on theicebreak blog.) Theicebreak is all about understanding relationships. It makes sense then that we would want to ensure that we have a strong understanding of who we are in a relationship with - our user base. To do so, we really focus on tracking every feature and functionality through cohort analysis, as championed by Fred Wilson, Dave McClure, Eric Ries’s lean startup …

I now have at-least 6 different devices that are used to play music, so I think its high time to look seriously at streaming music services. I tried Spotify, Rdio, MOG and Rhapsody. All of them seem to have good audio quality, and a pretty solid music catalog for western music. My requirements are simple: Must have: Good Bollywood music catalog Share accounts, so that both me and my wife can …

We keep reading that the biggest asset Facebook has is their social graph, the network of friends and friends of friends that is close to impossible for other companies to replicate. Facebook initially grew their network not just because people wanted to be friends with others on an online service, but because it provided a real value that people wanted to capture (according to my friend who was …

Have been playing around with bitcoins lately. Even though I seriously doubt the long-term viability of such a currency, I think its pretty amazing to be able to use it right now. If you haven’t heard about it, Bitcoin is a P2P, completely decentralized currency. Its like a digital version of having cash, with all the benifits (and disadvantages) of cash. Its anonymous and can’t really be tracked …

So one day, I decided that I want to go wireless with my keyboard and mouse. The main reason was that I didn't want to plug in the USB cable every time I get into the office. After searching for good, full sized bluetooth keyboards, I soon realized that there is nothing good out there. So I decided to get the Logitech MK710

With the millions of new blog posts, news articles, tweets and updates posted daily, getting to the content we want in real time is easier than ever. The only caveat: we need to know what we want. Traditionally, we have relied on the major publishers and distributors to feed us the content in the form of newspapers, magazines, journals, books, etc. The publishers would decide what content would …

Last year, when my parents were visiting the US, I decided to get Indian TV programming so they can watch it here. As Dish Network bill can go above $100 per month with such programming, I decided to go the Internet route by signing up with a service called WatchIndia.tv. WatchIndia streams TV channels directly from India (including the ads, which is nice) over the internet. Its a subscription …

VIM 7.3 recently got released, and supports persistent undo! This post describes a simple way to configure it. You have to compile it / get it from unstable repo, but totally worth it :) Enjoy!

A few people asked me what we use at TheIceBreak, so here it goes: Linux / Apache / MySQL / Python Pylons Framework (SQLAlchemy ORM, Mako Templating Engine) Lucene for Search JQuery for website Appcelerator Titanium for mobile app. Redis for caching GIT for source control, hosted on github nginx as load balancer Linode VPS for hosting webservers / database Amazon S3 for images Besides this, it …

I recently watched an excellent episode of Fareed Zakaria GPS on the topic 'What makes a good leader' that was sitting on my DVR since months. He had some of the biggest leaders in business and politics (Lou Gerstner, Tony Blair, Admiral Mike Mullen and others) talk about their take on Leadership. I thought I would summarize what were the biggest tasks that a Leader should accomplish: Set up a …