Stanford University and local high-paying employers attract the best ambitious technical talent, and facilitate immigration through visa programs. The rigorous interview process for these institutions acts as a first-round filter for investors. Entrepreneurs form startups during their academic studies or use savings/equity from their well-paid jobs. Initial seed funding is readily available from a...
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1. Grid Align all elements to a grid. Use a framework like 960.gs if you want, but you may find that the gutters between columns are too narrow or your page elements don’t fit neatly into the pre-defined grid. It doesn’t take much effort to set up your own self-consistent set of widths in...
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Yesterday we launched Mingle, our awesome free iPhone app for New York and San Francisco. The app does a lot of cool stuff with geo-social data aggregation (from Foursquare, Flickr, Instagram and Twitter) and visualisation, and I thought that I’d put some stats together from the data and share it with you. A quick...
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The title says it all, really. I’m currently running two almost-identical scripts that pull data from the Twitter API every half an hour. The first version of the script runs at :00 and :30 minutes past every hour, and the second version at :05 and :35 minutes past every hour. The on-the-hour/half-hour script fails...
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I try not to write too much personal stuff on this blog, as I can’t think of more than about three people in the world who actually want to know what I’m doing. Even so, this is going to be one of those posts, albeit a short one. We’re so hectic at the moment...
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On my first trip to the US, I stored some luggage at Newark airport. The security guard asked my name for the label, and as I started my surname, “Zed… Ay… Em…â€, he interrupted: “Wah?â€. I tried again, ‘Zed, Ay…â€. “Huh?â€. I mumble at the best of times, but I was fairly sure I...
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If you spend a lot of time online, it’s easy to become disillusioned and bitter. You only have to start reading the comments on a Techcrunch article to think that everyone on the planet is an angry, opinionated buffoon. The web is a mess of criticism and negativity with everyone vying for their little...
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As usual, my work schedule prevents me from writing a comprehensive post, but I wanted to quickly jot down a couple of “thoughts in progress”. “Minimum Viable Product“. This is an extremely useful pattern to follow – develop and design only what you need to test and deliver the first version of your idea....
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We’re still snowed-under with work, but we’ve just moved into a new apartment in Shinjuku, Tokyo, where we’ll be for the next 6 weeks. I wouldn’t normally post anything about toilet-roll holders… but I love the simplicity of the one in our apartment. Simple, robust and fast to change. Great design.
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I’m still snowed under with work at the moment so don’t have time for a long post, but thought I’d quickly post this little thing. I was conversing with Carl Morris of the excellent Sleeveface (amongst other things) last week, and we got to talking about when it makes sense to put Amazon Associates...
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