Design

An Important Time for Design (January) // Important essay by Cameron Koczon: “The ideal team includes both design and development, working in tight communication and mutual respect from the beginning. This is an enviable dynamic and surprisingly uncommon.” Good to see this kind of symbiosis sprucing up in the startup scene!

iPad Keyboard Prototype // Very promising proof-of-concept video by Daniel Hooper – deservedly got loads of attention; I sure hope it got Apple’s. (via @creednmd)

Time Zones // The other day I needed to convert New York time to my local time, and I wish I had remembered this little gem by Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs.

Focus in Startups

Heroku’s early history: 4 home pages that made $212 million // Fascinating story by Francis Irving of how Heroku started out, aggressively pruned their offering to focus “just” on Rails deployment, and only then – after they had better understood what users really needed – began offering features (“add-ons”) on top of their core product.

**Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 5 Notes Essay ** // Short lecture by Peter Thiel (PayPal) followed by a fascinating conversation with Max Levchin (also PayPal) and Stephen Cohen (Palantir) on building culture, when to fight and when to explore, talent compensation, and when diversity of opinions helps (not always: Startups need to get off the ground and get shit done, fast. Overly diverse teams discuss too much.)

iOS Dev

iOS 5 Tech Talk: Michael Jurewitz on iCloud Storage€“ // I wasn’t accepted to the iOS Tech Talk in Berlin, presumably because I had, at the time, been developing only in-house-distributed enterprise apps, i.e. nothing to my name on the App Store. Thankfully, Ole Begemann wrote up some of the talks extensively – kudos!

Society

Geschlechterverhältnis: Das verteufelte Geschlecht (in German) // Fierce but well-reasoned rebuttal in respected German weekly ZEIT on modernism’s women-are-the-better-humans fallacy.