YakShaving

Nan Hu, Paul A Pavlou, and Jie Zhang wrote about J shaped distribution curves for product reviews in ACM. I found it interesting because it cuts across behavioral economics, technology, statistics and visual communication. For some time now, I’ve been interested in how companies can (or already do?!) positively or negatively use user generated content [...]

I have been evangelizing this book, Rapt, recently in small circles of friends. Like Stumbling on Happiness, it’s not a self-help book, it deals more with cognition, attention, and social psych than anything. I thought I’d take the time to post my interesting curations from the book since they are highly related to BettrAt. – [...]

via huffpo I guess they’re down but not out. They certainly don’t show you much, but check this out: The Courier user experience presented here is almost the exact opposite of what everyone expects the Apple tablet to be, a kung fu eagle claw to Apple’s tiger style. It’s complex: Two screens, a mashup of [...]

Okay, as promised, here’s my Pandora makeover. Don’t get scared off by the red text. Pretend this is an undergraduate design critique or something. Here are some things that Pandora might do to truly improve the experience for users and garner more revenue to boot. First, let’s take a look at the current state of [...]

Just an FYI, if you read this in an RSS reader instead of live at yakshaving.net, please point your RSS reader to this link, I made some configuration changes. http://feeds.feedburner.com/yakshavingnet Also, please point bookmarks you’ve previously used directly to yakshaving.net, not http://bhoopathy.net/wordpess Thanks

Lately I’ve been thinking about high concept pitches. I read pitching hacks by Naval Ravikant and Nivi, and I’ve looked over lots of stuff before that says you need to have the simple, high concept pitch. Here’s how it usually goes: 
”We are the X meets Y”
 Most of the time, this is X.COM meets [...]

I enjoy listening to streaming music from Pandora while I’m working. (Special thanks to big Dave for sharing his channel with me so I don’t have to spend time sifting or curating the good stuff) Pandora is an awesome product- it allows for discovery, evolves with me, and is generally a pretty good experience. I’m [...]

This beauty is what I use to commute to BettrAt every day. I just had some work done on it and was taking pictures of it to use for my friend’s bike shop, 312Cycles. As you can see, he did an amazing, amazing job. Thanks, Jonathon! I hope these pictures speak for themselves. Waterloo, Wisconsin [...]

My friend Matt, a kind hearted soul and fellow bicyclist (consequently waaaay faster than I am), is riding across Lake Michigan to raise funds for a classroom modernization project for Claremont Academy, a K-8 school in the Chicago Public School System. He made a website, Pledge my Ride, where you can follow along. Help support [...]

The NatureMill composter is terrible. The waste still smells so much worse than when I put it in… it’s incredibly loud, and the thing is designed so flimsily (Is flimsily a word?). What a sham (also, a shame). I’m returning it promptly and getting my money back. This is the thanks I get for being [...]

Last night I was reflecting on working on BettrAt for the last year… Talking with a friend and commiserating about how no one really appreciates how hard it is to start a company (a meaningful and sustainable one) on the internet and not just be a feature or a commodity. I talked about showing my [...]

It might be vaguely contrarian to make this argument at a time when a certain realtime startup has just raised more capital to put their valuation over a whopping $1B…zomg. (why do you even need to raise money at that point? what enhancements does the app really even need?) There are a lot of other [...]