Abstract Living

The Changing Social Fabric

Vinay Patankar
18 Aug, 2013
People

This is a really interesting video on how social networks have changed the social fabric. Social networks are a great way to stay connected and manage multiple relationships, but they are no substitute to talking to people face to face. That is where the real magic happens and why things like conferences are so important. If you're digging into social, you'll probably also enjoy The Currency of Social Value.

Vinay Patankar
09 May, 2013
Technology

**UI/UX Co-Founder** We are looking for a team member to join as a co-founder for a new startup called Process Street - www.process.st. Process Street is building a collaborative process management system targeted at the SME market. We are a brand new startup, working to build our MVP. We currently have 2 of our desired 3 "Dream Team". We have our Hustler (business/marketing) and our Hacker (coding/sys-admin) we just need our Hipster (UI/UX) co-founder to help make our dream a reality. We are Australian and Canadian and the company is based in Delaware, USA, but we're living and working in Buenos Aires, where we plan to build out the initial product and work on doing market testing and gaining traction. If everything goes well, we plan to move to San Francisco (Silicon Valley) to scale out the business. **The Role:** You will be part of a 3 man team, working to build a highly needed, super useful product that helps businesses make more money. Easy sell. Because you are coming in at the ground level, you will be entitled to founders equity - which we all know is going to be worth BILLION$ in just a few short months :) **Responsibilities:** \- User EXPERIENCE. Yes, that's experience, not design, or interface, or graphics, or logos... EXPERIENCE We are building a B2B product, and our first and foremost focus is to make sure our product is and simple, quick and painless to use. Because time is money for businesses, we must make our product as easy to use as possible or it will fail. \- User Interface. Yes, you will still be doing design work and will be responsible for the look and feel of all of the areas of the startup. This includes product interface design, marketing site design, logos, color schemes etc... BUT WAIT. If you are a kick ass user experience person who hates thinking about colors, we still want to talk to you :) \- Front End HTML/CSS. Putting your UI/UX designs into action. You know the deal. \- Countless other startup hats including - Content, Customer Support, Testing, Marketing etc... **Requirements:** \- UX Freak We are looking for someone who lives and breathes UX. UX is your shit, you know what I mean. Websites, web apps, mobile, tv, you are interested in all interfaces. You are on a mission to optimize design and streamline the way humans interact with technology. You have a focus on functionality, simplicity, customer conversion and retention as your key experience design principals. Not pretty colors (not that we don't like pretty colors). \- Outstanding Over Communicator (English). You gotsa know how to read, write, talk, yell, sing, shout etc... - A flexible life situation \- An understanding of how startups operate (understanding this job description is a good start) \- A burning desire to do something BIG If this sounds like you, lets talk! Cheers To go deeper on startup, check out Ingredients of a Successful Bootstrapped Startup?.

Vinay Patankar
17 Apr, 2013
Travel

I've been travelling for over 3 years and while I love it, I have found myself in dire need of sleep in many strange places. Couches in random peoples houses, rooms in raging college parties, bustling 18 bed dorms in hostels and of course planes, airports, bus stops, trains etc... With so many changing sleep environments it is essential to create a fool proof system to be able to sleep anywhere anytime, below is my system. The system might change a little depending the environment but this post will cover the essentials: ## Light blocking 1\. Eye Mask The eye mask is really the best tool for blocking light. Your face structure will depend on which mask works best for you. I have gone through a few. If you fly business they usually give you a pretty decent one, or you can pick them up at most airports. 2\. Hoodie Hoodies are an essential tool for traveling on planes, ideally zip up. Not only do they keep you warm and can be used to block light by putting the hood over your eyes (make sure hood is big enough to do this) but they are also great because **you can hide your headphones without the flight attendants seeing that you are still listening to an electronic device** (you will see why this is important below). P.S. I have not turned my electronic devices off on the last 40 flights I have taken... Don't worry, you won't bring down the plane. ## Noise Cancellation White Noise App This is a super hack. The White Noise App is available for both iOS and Android costs around $2 (there is a free lite version too) but is totally worth it. Even for 1 nights good sleep, $2 is a small price to pay, but for countless nights sleep, the value is infinite. Possibly the highest ROI app I have ever purchased. Get some quality noise cancellation headphones (sport headphones work well to if your roll around in your sleep a lot), close your eyes and listen to the world fade away. Use this in conjunction with a hoodie on flights, and sleep right through the safety announcements, takeoff and landing to get a sold extra 30-45 min sleep on a flight. ## Alarm Gentle Alarm I currently use this on my Nexus 7 tablet and really like it. It allows you to wake using any music on your device, I have it just play randomly from my playlist, it fades in music so you are not woken suddenly, it tracks your sleep patterns if you keep your tablet on your bed while you are sleeping and only wakes you when you are in a light sleep pattern within your given window and it makes you do math problems to turn it off! There you have it. With this combo you will be able to sleep through the next world war and wake up fresh for work on Monday. You can thank me later ;) If travel is relevant to what you're working on, this is worth reading next: The Luggage Conundrum (or How I Chose a Travel Bag).

Startup Idea: Work and Workout Space

I learned so much from my recent journey to San Francisco and Silicon Valley. I've traveled all around the world and I have to say, the Bay Area is easily one of my favorite places. Nowhere else do you get that magical blend of cutting edge technology, brilliant ambitious people, amazing food and a truly international culture. While I was in the bay area I worked out of a few different "Shared Work Spaces". There are a tons of them in San Francisco, through Silicon Valley all the way to San Jose. Probably more than anywhere else on earth, obviously fueled by the startup community. Shared work spaces are offices where you can rent a space for your team, an individual desk or pay to just hot desk (sit wherever you can find space). The office is stocked with everything you need including security, printing and scanning, conference and meeting rooms and kitchen space. Many of the spaces also hold events targeted at the startup world and have relationships with mentors, investors and service providers. While these spaces are awesome, I think we can do better ;) **IDEA - "Work and Workout Space"** I envision a shared working space which is half office, half gym, half health kitchen (and yes, I know 3 halves don't make a whole). Companies would pay a premium for access to this space, but would get a whole lot more than a simple work space. The premium cost would also be off set by the fact that employees don't have to pay for food or gym costs. Imagine a large warehouse type space with a cross fit gym, fully stocked kitchen with fresh organic foods (you could even bring in a chef if you so wanted) and a complete locker/change room for both guys and gals. Companies could rent out spaces or hot desk - just like a standard collaborative working space - but also gain access to all gym facilities and eat free from the kitchen. This kind of set up would make it almost impossible to not be healthy. Since you are working in this space with a bunch of other people who are all working out and you only have access to healthy foods. The space could bring in instructors for specific sessions and run competitions between the community members. Regular exercise and a healthy diet is proven to increase productivity, so there will be genuine returns to business owners. Plus having the gym and kitchen in the same space will increase the amount of time employees spend in the office. A tactic that some of the big dogs already employ (Google/Facebook). Plus it can't hurt to have a team of happy, health and good looking staff ;) Additional ideas for the Work and Workout Space - Standing and treadmill desks - Ergonomic desks and chairs - Smoothie bar fully loaded with protein and supplements - Training on exercise, nutrition and supplements - Cooking classes so you can keep up your diet for dinner and on weekends I am about to move to Costa Rica and want to create a similar environment except its going to be a "Work, Live and Workout Space on the Beach". Would you want to work in a space like this? One more post that complements this topic is Startup Idea: Evernote for Spreadsheets, especially around startup.

How to get Asana (and other web apps) onto your Taskbar

I was so happy when I found this I just had to share it. I LOVE this trick. Basically, it allows you to add browser based web apps to your task bar when using chrome. This is what it looks like: Below is a YouTube video that shows you how to do it. Takes 2 seconds and is built into chrome. This has already save me hours browsing through tabs and opening multiple chrome windows. One more post that complements this topic is Idea: Create Separate Instances of Browsers for Separate Web Apps, especially around apps.

How Much Money Does the Facebook Ecosystem Produce?

Facebook went down the other day for the first time I can remember. Got me thinking about how much money is being lost every minute they are down. I know individuals who spend upwards of $50,000 each day on Facebook advertising, which is actually nothing compared to the big brands. If you take into consideration: - All the revenue being lost by Facebook themselves - The opportunity cost of a large portion of Facebook's employees not being able to do their jobs properly - All the hundreds of thousands of advertisers who's ads are not being displayed - Hundreds of thousands of brands who's posts are not being read of their fanpage walls - All the apps that have gone down, including massive platforms such as Zynga - All the third party Fabook developers who cant work right now cause Facebook is down - Social media managers who cant do their jobs - Loss of data from 3rd party analytics companies - Probably many other things I cant think of. Facebook is SO massive that anything it does has a massive ripple effect. I once read a while back that the Facebook ecosystem had created over 220,000 jobs, that number is probably much larger now. Crazy to think about. To go deeper on facebook, check out Venturebeat on Facebook Blacklist!?.

Ingredients of a Successful Bootstrapped Startup?

I've been meeting lots of people and getting lots of feedback here in San Francisco. Here are some of the consistent ingredients of successful startups I have collected from observation and feedback. Note, these elements will probably not leave you with the next Facebok, but just know, for every Facebook, there are 1001 companies who tried to be Facebook and failed. - Solve a problem - A focused product of which the core feature set can be built relatively fast and cheap - Recurring payment model - The core feature set (MVP) should be good enough that you can actually charge people for it - There is the ability to grow out to different markets/features to increase your customer base and how much you charge (aka scale potential) This is similar to what 37 Signals teaches. Basically this will remove the NEED for funding, but you can still take it if you want. It will allow you to grow based on revenues of your company, and the fact that it is recurring will create a more stable model. Vitoto - has almost none of these ingredients. But then again, we want to be the next Facebook :D Quite the conundrum.... If you're digging into startup, you'll probably also enjoy Looking for a Co-Founder for New Startup - UI/UX.

Idea: Create Separate Instances of Browsers for Separate Web Apps

I always get lost in my browser tabs. I am a heavy heavy internet user and often find myself with 20-40 tabs open at a time in Chrome. Many of them running web apps that I like to keep open all the time: - Multiple gmail accounts - Google Calendar - Google Docs (Drive) - Asana - HasOffers - Cacoo The annoying thing about tabs, compared to icons on the bottom of the screen (applies to mac and PCs - I use both) is they its very easy for them to change position. For example when you open links from a web app, it opens a new tab and pushes all the other tabs over. Meaning your reaction to go back to the 3rd tab to check calendar, is no longer there caus its been pushed along. What if there were a way to create browser tabs that broke off and could be pinned as an icon to the bottom of the screen. All they did was launch a new Chrome window, but that window was mapped to that icon in the task bar and made it easy to navigate between different chrome "instances" or "apps". I know it would make me more productive... UPDATE: Turns out this feature is already built into chrome :P - Click here to see how to do it. If you're digging into apps, you'll probably also enjoy How to get Asana (and other web apps) onto your Taskbar.

Google Apps Removes Free Version Completely

I just got an email from Google stating that they are removing the free version of Google Apps completely. This is not going to effect existing accounts but new users will not be able to sign up for the free version. I am a heavy user of Google apps and use it on 20+ domains. This is a sad, sad day... > | **Hello from Google,**Here's some important news about Google Apps—but don't worry, there's no need for you to take any action. We just want you to know that we're making a change to the packages we offer. Starting today, we're no longer accepting new sign-ups for the free version of Google Apps (the version you're currently using). Because you're already a customer, this change has no impact on your service, and you can continue to use Google Apps for free. Should you ever want to upgrade to Google Apps for Business, you'll enjoy benefits such as 24/7 customer support, a 25 GB inbox, business controls, our 99.9% uptime guarantee, unlimited users and more for just $5 per user, per month. You can learn more about this change in our Help Center or on the Enterprise Blog. Thank you for using Google Apps. Clay Bavor Director, Google Apps | | > | --- | --- | If apps is relevant to what you're working on, this is worth reading next: How to get Asana (and other web apps) onto your Taskbar.

Live Bidding for Drinks in a Bar

Imagine a bar that had a live bidding system for the price of drinks. The bar could purchase a whole bunch of discount alcohol and start the prices really low. Every time a customer makes a purchase, the price of that particular drink goes up for the next person. The price could go down if that drink isn't purchased for a certain period of time. There wouldn't really be any tangible benefit to this system, it's more a gimmick for the bar to use to give people something to talk about. Plus some days you might be lucky enough to grab a discounted beer. A useful follow-up on business is Vitoto Editing Features Launched.

App Idea - Turn iPhone's into Public Hot-spots

So you already know that you can turn your iPhone into a hotspot, but a PUBLIC one? that anyone can use? Here is the idea. Its an app that allows you to create a public hotspot that anyone can access with NO password. But for the user to access the hotspot, they need to watch a 10 second video advertisement. Video ads pay anywhere form $30-80 CPM (cost per thousand impressions). The app provider can organize rev share with its users, so that they get a percentage of the advertisement revenue (say 50/50). This could be a great additional revenue stream for cab or bus drivers, or just a great way to offset your phone bill costs. A useful follow-up on idea is Idea - Thoughts to Extend the iPhones Battery Life.

Email Optimization

I've been working on email optimization lately. Here are three plugins I have found that are awesome: Snooze your Emails - allows you to set a reminder to re-visit that email at a later date, instead of just losing it in your inbox. Yesware - allows you to track who is opening your emails, and create templates that you can fill in with just the click of a button. Boomerang - allows you to schedule emails to be sent at a later date. Check em. Oh, and make sure you are logged into Chrome with your Google Account, so that your plugins and settings are synced across all your computers. To go deeper on email, check out Emailing Awesomely – The Definitive Guide to Email Structure.

About Abstract Living

Thoughts on building startups, scaling businesses, productivity, travel, and living intentionally.

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