How to Build an App Empire: Can You Create The Next Instagram? Chad Mureta runs his seven-figure app business from his iPhone. (Photo: Jorge Quinteros). I first met Chad Mureta in Napa Valley in 2011. Two years prior, he had been in a horrible car accident. He’d lost control of his truck in at attempt to avoid a deer, hit a median, and flipped four times, nearly destroying his dominant arm in the wreckage.
While in the hospital for a lengthy recovery, a friend gave him an article about the app market. “In just over two years, I’ve created and sold three app companies that have generated millions in revenue. After finishing rehab, Chad was able to leave his real estate company, where he’d been working 70 hours a week, to run his app business from his iPhone… in less than 5 hours per week. “Apps” are the new, new thing, thanks to major successes like Draw Something (bought by Zynga for $210 million) and Instagram (bought by Facebook for $1 billion), among others.
Last but not least, don’t miss the competition at the end. Enter Chad Mureta. Double coconut muffins. I hadn’t meant to disappear on you, and what’s worse, I have a terrible excuse: I took a nap. In the same week that I conquered my cooking Mount Everest — a lasagna I’d only dreamed about for the better part of six years, one that still took me many tries in the kitchen to get right and more than a week just to write — I was going back and forth with my publisher over the page designs for my cookbook, and (no doubt) giving some poor book designer some gray hairs.
One day, I’ll remind my editor about that time I said that I didn’t care how the book looked, “just make it pretty!” And she’ll snort coffee out her nose. It will probably be a while. Nevertheless, the day after I posted the lasagna recipe, we finally found something that made everyone happy and now they’re designing the remaining hundreds of pages and that night, I think I slept a million hours. We’re also officially in the part of the year I affectionately call The Dregs of Winter. Double Coconut Muffins. Jagannatha | Define Jagannatha at Dictionary. Winter 2012 Preview! | Random Curiosity. It feels like 2011 went by in the blink of an eye, as I haven’t even had a chance to look back on my favorites of the year. Before I do so, let’s first take a look at what’s just around the corner in the new year. Winter is generally not one of the busier seasons, but there are actually 23 offerings in 2012, which is pretty close to the 27 this past fall.
Of the new titles, some of them stood out immediately — the sequel to my favorite romance of 2010 Amagami SS, the horror series Another, the sequel to Sousei no Aquarion, the TV version of Black Rock Shooter, the sequel to Bakemonogatari, and the fourth and final season of Zero no Tsukaima — but as is often the case when I put together a season preview, I discovered many are a lot more interesting than they originally appeared. Best of all, there is a wide variety of shows from various different genres, so there’s a good chance there will be something for everyone. Care to find out which ones I’m talking about? Then do read on. HOWTO bake a brownie in an eggshell.
Dave Rapoza. Free College: How to Audit Courses From 7 Elite Schools Online. Danny Gallagher is a freelance writer, reporter and humorist who also contributes to TruTV's Dumbasablog.com, Playboy's TheSmokingJacket.com and TheFW.com. He can be found on the web at dannygallagher.net or on Twitter @thisisdannyg. Getting accepted to a prestigious Ivy League school has its perks — and its price tag. But thanks to the Internet, you don’t have to take on mountains of debt to snag a piece of that educational pie.
SEE ALSO: How Online Education Is Changing the Way We Learn [INFOGRAPHIC] Image courtesy of Flickr, Paul Lowry. OpportunisticRefactoring. Refactoring tags: From the very beginning of when I started to talk and write about refactoring people have asked me how it should be incorporated into the wider software development process. Should there be refactoring phases in the software development lifecycle, what proportion of an iteration should be devoted to refactoring tasks, how should we figure out who should be assigned to refactoring duties? Although there are places for some scheduled refactoring efforts, I prefer to encourage refactoring as an opportunistic activity, done whenever and wherever code needs to cleaned up - by whoever.
What this means is that at any time someone sees some code that isn't as clear as it should be, they should take the opportunity to fix it right there and then - or at least within a few minutes. This opportunity can come at various parts of implementing some new functionality or fixing a bug. Sometimes you see an opportunity when you're in the middle of something else.
George Dyson | Evolution and Innovation - Information Is Cheap, Meaning Is Expensive | The European Magazine. Oversaturated: Is Instagram’s Popularity Changing Photography? How to Measure a Company's Most Elusive Element: Culture. Your organization has a set of values and a culture, whether it was engineered or not.
Most organizational cultures tend to revolve around the personal values of the founders, even if the company has been around a long time. Young companies tend not to think much about culture because they are too busy focusing on customers and shareholders. As companies' age and the founders retire or die, they tend to do more inward looking and often want to make sure that the values that made them great in the beginning still characterize the company. Southwest Airlines is one of those rare companies that has maintained it culture of humor, focus on the customer, and efficiency, long after founder Herb Kelleher stepped down as CEO. 3M is also a company that has been through leadership changes, yet stays focused on the core value of innovation.
Most mature companies tend to see a major culture change in a negative direction when the founder steps down. Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice. If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity. It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering. This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer. The goal is to make you happy, by filling in the gaps in your education regarding how the “real world” actually works. It took me about ten years and a lot of suffering to figure out some of this, starting from “fairly bright engineer with low self-confidence and zero practical knowledge of business.” 90% of programming jobs are in creating Line of Business software: Economics 101: the price for anything (including you) is a function of the supply of it and demand for it. There are companies which create software which actually gets used by customers, which describes almost everything that you probably think of when you think of software.
“Read ad. Anyhow. Sharpen the Saw for Developers. Don’t Be Trapped By Dogma. For me, the greatest lesson that Steve Jobs taught is summed up in this statement from his renowned 2005 Stanford Commencement speech: “Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.” Steve, and the companies he built, proved highly resistant to dogma, to other people's thinking. No one could imagine what someone would want with a personal computer until the Apple II came along. The Macintosh was initially dismissed as a toy. How could Pixar ever think people would sit through a feature-length computer-generated animated film? Who is going to spend all that money on an iPod?
Most companies are dogma machines. Dogma isn't just about what you make, but how you do it. Companies also have to be willing to question their own dogma. Apple, under Jobs, continually remade itself. Mourning and rememberance are important and good. The Great Tech War Of 2012. Stephen Asher Consulting, UK and international, business or personal, tax planning consultants. Residence and Domicile As part of our UK and US tax return preparation service ,we will help you to understand your tax status in the UK. The extent to which you will be liable to UK tax will depend on whether you are: Resident; and/or Ordinary resident; and/or Domiciled in the UK These terms are not defined in law but the rules are largely based on case law.
The Inland Revenue’s interpretation of the rules, which are accepted in practice, is given in their booklet IR20 which can be found at: There has been much publicity over the last couple of years about reviewing the rules and their application following the publication of an Inland Revenue consultation document. How can Stephen Asher Consulting help you? Whether you are coming to the UK, are already working here, or are leaving the UK, it is important that you seek advice as to: If you would like an initial consultation, please call or email Alison Asher. Rip Rowan - Google+ - Stevey's Google Platforms Rant I was at Amazon for about… Meaningful Play. Getting »Gamification« Right. Gamification. Categorization[edit] Gamification in a narrow sense is used in a non-game context, is built into the service system, and is aiming at an infinite experience.
It does not aim at creating a game but offering a gameful experience. In a broader sense gamification also includes game context such as in serious games and finite and infinite games.[20] Another categorization compares gamification with other gameful approaches by looking at characteristics such as spontaneity, rules, or goals:[20] Techniques[edit] Gamification techniques strive to leverage people's natural desires for socializing, learning, mastery, competition, achievement, status, self-expression, altruism, or closure. Another approach to gamification is to make existing tasks feel more like games.[27] Some techniques used in this approach include adding meaningful choice, onboarding with a tutorial, increasing challenge,[28] and adding narrative.[27] Applications[edit] Gamification has been widely applied in marketing. HitoshiAriga on deviantART.