First, here  is what I wrote in my comment, mildly edited.

Nikos, I think we should make understood, as emphatically as possible, that startups are VERY risky endeavors. They are not for the light hearted. And you do not want to lure the wrong people in them, as they will most probably quit on the first few obstacles. But attracting the wrong people  is a very probable turn of events in a crisis as the one we are undergoing in our country: you WILL lure them just because they have nothing else to do.

So, if the picture is as bleak as I am drawing it, how startups can ever find the right people to work for them?
There is a simple guiding principle here: economic behavior is about motives and the motive of a startup job is a reward substantially big to balance the high risk undertaken.
Having said that, I do not imply a financial reward necessarily, although this would be a strong motivator.
Since, by definition, startups do not have enough cash to pay big salaries, any kind of financial reward must have a variable element that relates to startup performance. Stock options is the most common such reward. This is the reason I had tried to open the discussion about stock options earlier this year.
Apart from the financial rewards, there are two other equally strong rewards:

• do the things that you really really really like and are passionate about, and
• learn a prodigiously lot of stuff in a very short time.

The first is not obvious. It concerns people with special skills that want to put them into work. If, for instance, someone has made studies in a very specialized area, it is not likely that he can put these studies to work anywhere else than in a startup. So if he really loves his field, he will be willing to undertake the hardships and the possibly less remuneration just to able to work on the thing he loves.

The second has to do with the multifaceted role that each employee plays in a startup. Actually, to be completely honest, there is no role. Not an exactly defined, at least. Especially in the very beginning.
It is, more or less, a broad direction that one gets, than a job description. Which means that he has to have the motive and the guts to pave his own way.

Greenfield’s findings support the view that financial rewards are one of the main motivators, although they appear fourth in the post. The other three are:

• Industry
• Founders’ reputation
• Investors’ reputation

I relate also ‘industry’ to what I refer as ‘specialization’ for obvious reasons, and i tend to agree with Greenfield on his guess that working for a startup that potentially has the power to do social good or change the world in some aspect is also a big factor.

But apart from my beliefs and guesses it would be interesting to hear from others what would attract them to a startup despite the fact that they could possibly get a higher salary in a more mature company. What can counterbalance the financial rewards?

Reblogged from VentureBeat:

Ben Savage is the founder of Spaceport.io, a platform for mobile game developers.

The stage was set with an expected one billion HTML5 phones sold by 2013. Facebook was ready to pave the way. I could repeat many other reasons why HTML5 should have taken off in 2012, but as we’ve seen over the last year, it just didn’t. Mark Zuckerberg…

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Since the health of the body is less important than the health of the mind Mac, I will skip the first and focus on the second

I have a 4,5 year Mac book Air (first generation), with an 80Gb disk. I have managed to keep upgrading up to Snow Leopard and then stopped. I have decided that my next upgrade will be a new Mac book, not a new OSX for the current one.

In the short (or long, depending on the perspective) life of this machine I have experienced two serious problems, both taken care by Apple Support.

Before turning to apple support for this one too, I want to describe it here, hoping that someone might stumble on it and offer a solution that I haven’t already found (i.e.  tried, and rejected) googling for an answer.

Sound

The sound problem looks like  a hardware one. At least, this was my first impression since input and output devices ceased to show up in the Sound Settings in System Preferences.

The first search though, revealed that this is an all too common Mac problem, highly correlated to Air’s and Lions. So with an Air and no Lion I have a  50% chance of a software problem.

The known remedies to the missing sound problem, nicely summed up here, offered me no consolance. Neither the PRAM trick. So, I am afraid that it really is a hardware problem.

Dialogs

The program I use most frequently (next to Chrome) is Coda, since I am doing most of my professional and personal work with it. But today it let me down too, although I don’t think it is strictly a Coda issue, as I noticed the same behavior with a couple of other programs too, namely Mail and SourceTree, but since I do not use them often I did not pay attention.

So what is this problem? Every time I attempt to open Coda I get stuck with the dialog below. I cannot close it, press a button, or make it progress. It stays there eternally.

What the dialog says is true. I indeed got stuck saving a remote file, that forced to quit coda,  and since then…

My thought was that if I cleaned the local copies the dialog would disappear.

I tried to clear the cache but had problem finding it.

I deleted the Cache.db file in ~/Library/Caches/com.panic.Coda and all the entries in ~/Library/Coda/ (which look unrelated, but did it nevertheless). Then I looked at ~/Library/Application Support/Coda/Logs but the folder was empty.

In short, I did not find the cached remote files.

As a last resort, I also attempted to reinstall Coda. I got exactly the same result.

The funny thing is that if I click on a document that normally opens with Coda, the document opens nicely but then the accursed dialog kicks in.

So here I stand, or, rather, I lie, with no other solution left only than to beg you, kind reader, for one, before I make apple support richer.

Update 1: 

I managed to get rid of the annoying dialog by cleaning some cache files in /Library/Caches.  More specifically, after cleaning blindly all the cache files and folders that had a date close to yesterday, I opened Coda, saw the dialog again but this time clicking on cancel actually worked. Then, it asked me for a key, as I had reinstalled it and after putting the original purchase key, the confirmation dialog got stuck again. This time I knew where to look and it appeared that the only newly created cache file was /Library/Caches/com.apple.DiagnosticReporting.Networks.plist. I deleted it again, reopened Coda, repeated the above steps but this time, after entering the license key, the confirmation dialog worked. Of course all my setting were gone with the cache cleaning and reinstallation which is already a loss. But, at least I have Coda working.

Now, the property list file mentioned above, did not appear to have anything special inside. As a matter of fact, the one I initially deleted and the new one generated were identical. So, I cannot tell why it helped.

Update 2:

It took me sometime to make the connection: the two issues are related. In a very simple and stupid way: the dialogs get stuck as they attempt to play a sound. And since the sound system is dead, the dialog hangs up waiting. So, what I did, was disable the interface sound effects and, voila, dialogs started behaving.

Update 3 (7/12/2012)
Sigh! I was wrong. The dialogs problem is still there. And not only in Coda…

I hate that even when we are vigilant; when we are perfect patients; when we receive & comply with the best treatment; cancer can return.

I hate that the women I think of as mentors, guides, my anchors and my guiding light through cancer; that it can come back in them.

—
Xeni Jardin (@xeni) October 05, 2012

I hate that cancer comes back for women who love their babies so much that they choose the hardest, torturous treatments, to buy mom time.

—
Xeni Jardin (@xeni) October 05, 2012

I hate that this disease comes back in mothers who want more than anything in life to see their kids grow up. To kiss grandchildren.

—
Xeni Jardin (@xeni) October 05, 2012

I hate this disease. I hate that some profit from it, & lies about it. I hate pink. I hate falseness & pity and save the tatas & boobies.

—
Xeni Jardin (@xeni) October 05, 2012

I hate the stigma we live with. I hate that we can live clean, exercise, eat good food, follow all preventative tips, & cancer still hits.

—
Xeni Jardin (@xeni) October 05, 2012

But I love the men and women I have met who, like me, have cancer. The women with metastatic disease most of all. The friends. Moms. Heroes.

—
Xeni Jardin (@xeni) October 05, 2012

I love the children of these men & women. I love the partners, families, friends who love them. I love the gifted doctors, like my own.

—
Xeni Jardin (@xeni) October 05, 2012

Love, truth, compassion, anger:all of these are stronger than fake pink. All of these are stronger than cancer. Even when our bodies aren’t.

—
Xeni Jardin (@xeni) October 05, 2012

I hate that cancer takes people I love. That it threatens to take others I love. And that it is always there, threatening to take me, too.

—
Xeni Jardin (@xeni) October 05, 2012

I do not know how to respond to that existential void. That great chasm. The horror. The only thing that makes sense in response is love.

—
Xeni Jardin (@xeni) October 05, 2012

Reblogged from VentureBeat:

• 

Scientists at Stanford University and the J. Craig Venter Institute -- remember the Human Genome project -- have simulated an entire organism in software for the first time ever.

Using a 128-node computing cluster, a team of scientists led by Stanford professor Markus Covert incorporated data from more than 900 scientific papers and 1,900 experiments to simulate every molecular interaction and the effects of all 525 genes of the smallest known free-living bacterium: the parasite…

Read more… 293 more words

We need a paypal mafia of sorts. There’s enough old money in Greece to put this together, but it’s mostly in shipping and trading businesses, so it’s not connected to the tech scene in meaningful ways. This connection must be made and nurtured. I don’t know how this problem will be solved, I am not the right person to solve it. But here it is, laid out for the more creative minds out there to ponder.

At first, the thought seemed right to me but, pondering on the subject a bit longer, I finally  came to a different conclusion. History  and experience elsewhere (not only Silicon Valley but even in our continent) teaches us that it is the entrepreneurs themselves that become angels and VCs. And not any kind of entrepreneurs but the ones that have, broadly speaking, worked in the same areas and the same fields as the those they later opt to fund.

I don’t think we will see money from shipping flowing in internet startup investments in Greece anytime soon. And if we do, the expectations will most probably be wrong and the management of the investments not appropriate.

There is nothing wrong with the shipping people. They are not morons of some sort that miss to see the ‘lucrative’ opportunities of the Greek startups. On the contrary. They are extremely cunning and capable businessman, used in dealing with bigger and harder issues.  But they happen to have have shaped their mindset, practices and goal setting in an entirely different sector. And this makes all the difference.

Tech startups and internet startups are not traditional investments that can easily fit to appraisal models and have clear cycles and signs of rise or fall. A startup is not a vessel. Its business model is, in most cases, unknown. Or, changing too often. It is unlikely that, if it doesn’t proceed according to plan, it can be sold as scrap. The money that a ship owner can put into startups is money wasted for him as there is no shortage of investment opportunities in his sector with more foreseeable returns.

In my career I have experienced something like this twice. Not from ship owners but from bankers. Once as a simple employee, in the beginning of my carier, and the other as the executive who was supposed to run the ‘investment’.
In both cases the investor was a banking institution and the investment an IT company.

If there is one thing I can immediately pin point as the reason of failure (as they both were failures) it is this: the banking people thought of these companies (:their investments)  as mature businesses and tried  to manage them accordingly. Actually, for a long time,  I thought the same way. It was only after a lot of effort and pain that I realized that my role was not to run the business (as per my job description) but to find the business I was assigned to run. Unfortunately, Steve Blank had not come up yet with the The Four Steps to the Epiphany and he did not save me valuable time.

If there ever is going to be a crowd of angel investors from Greece, for Greece and in Greece, it must arise from the Greek startups and their successes. Which means it is going to take some time. It will not appear before we see some substantial exits and some real wealth  transfered to founders’ pockets. Once we have them both, then there will be angels.

Fortunately, it was just a couple of hours work, the new version is available and functioning. Enjoy. 

Reblogged from VentureBeat:

Reblogged from paidContent:

Simon & Schuster is adding QR codes to the back jackets of all its hardcover and trade paperback titles starting this fall. The publisher hopes to use the the codes to build direct-to-consumer relationships, but will readers actually scan them?

Twenty-six percent of Simon & Schuster's sales are now digital, and the QR codes are seen as a way to link digital and print.

Read more… 358 more words

I was looking for new blogs to follow and I turned to wordpress Explore Topics which is nothing more than a tag cloud, obviously aggregated from all the wordpress.com blogs.

Now, the tag with the bigger size is “Reviews” which is an interesting insight. Are reviews really the top reason why people blog or is the bigger proportion of blog posts about reviews? This means that out there a treasure of data mining is awaiting to be discovered.