There have been numerous startups and trends that use crowdsourcing to generate their desired results. Most of them rely on people to publicly share the (public) information, whether they are tweets, status updates, checkins or shared links and then aggregate this information to generate interesting results. This model works great for public content, but completely breaks for anything that is …

General Software Chrome (Primary Browser), Firefox 4 (Looks quite good) Digsby IM Postbox Email Client OpenPandora Paint.NET Audacity TightVNC VLC Media Player Online Services LastPass password manager Pinboard.in paper.li Development Tools SecureCRT WinSCP Quick HTML Color Picker NoMachine Eclipse S3 Browser

Don't talk to me about investments. Do introductions if someone is doing something I might be excited about, not just about investing. My primary reason to invest is not to make money (though its a nice outcome), but to get involved in products that I get very excited about.

We were recently discussing a new feature for my new startup TheIceBreak that involves building functionality that has never been done before. In order to design it, we relied on a few assumptions that are difficult to validate without actually building the product. This reminded me of the fundamental differences between dogfood-style (bottom-up) vs vision driven (top-down) product development, …

Just finished reading the book ‘Presentation Zen’ by Garr Reynolds. Its a really good book if you want to do an actual presentation, when you are the speaker on a podium and everyone else is listening. The concepts in this book revolve strongly around keeping the ‘deck’ as simple as possible with heavy use of images, etc. The author also suggests that instead of adding more details on the …

While pitching my startup to investors, or listening pitches from founders for their startups, the topic of Exit Strategy often shows up. In general, there are 2 kinds of startups: Startups built to stay independent Startups built to be acquired I think both of them are valid exit strategies, but entrepreneurs who build them with the goal to get acquired are thinking very small. 

Pivot is one of the most overused terms in the startup world in 2010. The general thinking is that Pivoting is a good thing and founders are very proud to say that they have ‘pivoted’ X number of times for their current startup. I have seen funding pitches which even contain a slide on ‘possible pivots’, where the founders talk about how its easy for them to change their vision. Having ‘pivoted’ …

Having built YouTube Mobile, which is doing very strongly in both app and browser space, the question of browser vs apps on mobile frequently comes up. Below are my thoughts:Now: Apps are better than browser The only way you can get an 'awesome' looking mobile interface is via a native app. People have been trained to use the app store to find the services they want rather than just visiting the …

…but decided to stick with Blogger. Tumblr blogs are definitely better looking, and the interface is cleaner, but its an absolute pain to customize or add anything external. You can’t change the theme once you have added simple things like facebook buttons, and it has no comments!

If you are thinking of buying something, but are not in a hurry, and want to make sure that you get the best deal, check out camelcamelcamel.com. They have an awesome amazon and 3rd price history of different items. Happy shopping!Dwipal