Entrepreneur Geek

Paul Graham’s Y! Combinator organized “Startup School 2008” a while ago. Dharmesh Shah’s onStartups blog summarizes key take aways from the event. I am taking up even refined points, and recommend you to read the full post on Dharmesh’s blog.

David Lawee, VP Corporate Development, Google; founder, XFire.
Hurry Up.

Sam Altman, Founder, Loopt.
If you can avoid having to raise money, then don’t raise it.

Jack Sheridan, Lawyer, Wilson Sonsini.
Some legal decisions that you may make early on never go away.

Paul Graham; Founder, ViaWeb, YCombinator.
Build something people want

Greg McAdoo, Partner, Sequoia Capital.
The surfer has to pick the wave, but can’t control the wave. Know your market.

David Heinemeier Hansson, creator, Ruby on Rails, partner, 37Signals:
Create a great product, and charge money for it! You don’t need to be acquired to make money.

Paul Buchheit: creator, Gmail, founder, FriendFeed.
Interpret your users’ feedback to determine what the real problem is. Then find a solution to that problem.

Mike Arrington, blogger, TechCrunch.
Stand out; and have a compelling story.

Marc Andreesson, Founder, Netscape, Ning, etc.
Be so good they can’t ignore you.

Peter Norvig, Director of research, Google.
Start small, go fast, iterate rapidly. Leverage data; especially other people’s data.

And you will find full videos of the conference on Omnisio.

The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari is one of my favorite books. A book that changed my life. I became a big fan of Robin Sharma after that and have read almost all his books.
Last week, I saw Gujarati edition of The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, and picked it up immediately. My dad is reading it now, and he’s started sharing with me his thoughts after reading the book so far.. It’s amazing how this book impacts people!
I plan to read the Gujarati edition soon!
There are other languages available for the book, and I strongly recommend getting one for your parents if they are not comfortable reading English!

We are working on some rich web applications and Ashok sent a link on How they built Google Docs. That was actually Suw Charman-Anderson’s notes from the FOWA 07 (Future of Web Apps 2007) conference, where Jonathan Rochelle gave a talk on how they developed Google Docs over the years. What decisions they made, what experiences they had, and what they learned.

I collected some more resources on the topic. Things are sketchy, but still worth a read. There are many interesting (some well known, but seldom practiced) principles of product development. Anyone interested in product development will find this worthwhile.

So here are the references:

• Suw Charman-Anderson’s notes from FOWA 07
• Stuart Colville’s notes from the same talk
• A very well done mindmap from the talk by Lars Plougmann. On Flickr. I am also including the image below.
• And including the slides from the presentation too below!

| View | Upload your own

We developed a video capture system using Flex and Red5 for StoryLink – an online networking and educational site for the creative community. I was testing that and saw their login page. And I was impressed!

(click on the image to enlarge)

They have taken so much care on the login page. Not only do they offer forgot password link, they can even create a new account for you right on the login page. The text labels used and the organization of the page is just fantastic!

You feel nice when you are working with such clients! Don’t you?

Do you have any clients you were impressed with?

Since XHTML MP is based on XHTML, certain syntactical rules must be followed. Making syntactical errors is a good way to learn a programming language, but so that you don’t get frustrated with them, here are some rules you must follow with XHTML MP! Remember, HTML is very forgiving in terms of syntax, but make a small syntax error in XHTML MP and the browser may refuse to show your page!

Overall, XHTML elements consist of a start tag—element name and its attributes, element content, and closing tag. The format is like:

<element attribute="value">element content</element>

XHTML Documents Must be Well Formed

Since XHTML is based on XML, all XHTML documents must adhere to thebasic XML syntax and be well formed. The document must also have a DOCTYPE declaration.

Tags Must be Closed!

All open tags must be closed. Even if it is an empty tag like “<br>“, it must be used in the self-closed form like “<br />”. Note the extra space before the slash. It’s not mandatory, but makes things work with some older browsers. If you can validate within your editor, make it a practice to do that. Also cultivate the habit of closing a tag that you start immediately—even before you put in the content. That will ensure you don’t miss closing it later on!

Elements Must be Properly Nested

You cannot start a new paragraph until you complete the previous one. You must close tags to ensure correct nesting. Overlapping is not allowed. So the following is not valid in XHTML MP:

<p><b>Pizzas are <i>good</b>.</i></p>

It should be written as:

<p><b>Pizzas are <i>good</i>.</b></p>

Elements and Attributes Must be in Lowercase

XHTML MP is case sensitive. And you must keep all the element tags and all their attributes in lowercase, although values and content can be in any case.

Read the full article on Packt Pub

This is an extract from my Mobile Web Development book.

You can read the full article on Fundamentals of XHTML MP over at Packt Publisher’s website, and buy the book too from there.

The book has received great reviews

The book has already received two great reviews on Amazon.

Michael from USA gave 5 stars to the book and said Mobile Web Development is a “Great Book for converting traditional web developer to mobile world“. He further wrote:

I am doing mostly Java, PHP, RoR development. Has never done any mobile web development before. To cater my curiosity of mobile, I ordered this book using 2 day shipping. I was wondering why this book didn’t have a cent of discount. Now I know why, it is a great book which worths all the money.

I read it from beginning to end in 6 hours. I simply could not stop. It covers most important aspect of mobile web development. Now I am very anxious to try build a mobile version of my website.

Examples in the book are deep enough and very easy to understand.

I highly recommend this book