Showing posts with label Anu Shukla. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anu Shukla. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Techie, Tech Blogger, Iran Democracy Activist, New Yorker

"A former student asked me a few days ago how I learned Ruby on Rails. The answer was that I simply read a lot of great tutorials."


Techie, tech blogger, Iran democracy activist, New Yorker.

What do you want to be when you grow up? I just changed my Twitter and Facebook profiles to read the above. It used to be: Iran Democracy Activist, Tech Blogger, New Yorker.

And then there are distractions: The Movie Business.

Fundraising to be able to do full time Iran democracy work has not been easy: Selling 5% Of Nobel For 50K. I mean, if the Iranian American founder of eBay will not come along, who will?

Tweet 1, Tweet 2, Tweet 3, Tweet 4.

Not only do I not seem to have the knack for small dollar political donations, I think political work is meant to be public service, and so I am not going to discontinue my Iran work, I am going to do it on the side, part time. Insa-allah.

I have a LinkedIn email from Anu Shukla that has me psyched.
Location is southbay or virtual - exciting early stage opportunity. Will invest in training and ramp up for non Ruby engineering talent that are interested in learning. Competitive salary and stock.
This means, if I can get in, I get to telecommute from NYC, and I can spend the first few weeks learning Ruby. I am up for it. Besides this looks like might be Anu's new stealth startup. Anu is a serial entrepreneur. She is bigger than Sabeer Hotmail Bhatia because Bhatia basically disappeared after Hotmail, whereas Anu kept chugging all along, and with Anu it is like you ain't seen nothing yet. Her best is yet to come.
Image representing Anu Shukla as depicted in C...Image via CrunchBase
That is the impression I get. Offerpal Media is a bigger promise than the company she sold over a decade ago for was it 200 million dollars?

She is inspiring. I'd be honored to be part of her new stealth startup.

Mike Arrington Is A Sexist Pig: Say PeeeeG!
The Highlight Of My Internet Week
Anu Shukla Has Found The New Frontier In Advertising
I Just Became Friends With Anu Shukla

I might even be open to moving to the other coast. But for now I should stay put. I think I like the idea of staying put in NYC and visiting the Bay Area often enough. That would be a swell arrangement.

Ruby on Rails
Ruby on Rails: Download
Ruby on Rails Guides
Ruby on Rails - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ruby on Rails Documentation
Top 12 Ruby on Rails Tutorials
Ruby on rails: up and running - Google Books Result
Ruby on Rails Tutorials - Tutorialized
Dribbble: Dan Cederholm and Rich Thornett | the Ruby on Rails Podcast
rails's rails at master - GitHub
Ruby on Rails Tutorial
Tutorial
Ruby on Rails Guides: Getting Started with Rails
Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Rails by Example | by Michael Hartl
Ruby on Rails: the Ultimate Beginner's Tutorial
Ruby on Rails programming tutorials2 - Meshplex
Ruby on Rails Tutorial

Languages: English, Hindi, Nepali, Maithili (very good). Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Tharu, Urdu (good). Bengali, Sanskrit (so so).


Paul Graham: What Happens At Y Combinator: a portrait of YC is in some ways the complement of a portrait of the average startup .... an event called Demo Day, at which the startups present to an audience that now includes most of the world's top startup investors. ..... the details people omit in more public talks tend to be the most interesting parts of their stories ...... you hear just how screwed up most of these successful startups were on the way up. ...... Startups modify or even replace their ideas much more than outsiders realize. ..... Usually we advise startups to launch fast and iterate. .... real users, whose often surprising reactions to your product teach you what you should have been building. ..... Since there are a large number of points on the perimeter of most existing technologies at which one could push outward to create a quantum blister, what to build first is one of the most important questions we talk about. ...... The larval product should also have a larval business model. ..... Most things that happen to newly launched startups are bad. But paradoxically, these disasters are precisely the reason to launch fast: they all represent problems you're going to need to solve eventually, and the only way even to find out what they are is to launch. In practice they vary from technological bottlenecks to threats of lawsuits, but the most common problem is that users don't like the product enough. ...... the search space is huge ..... Some startups are immediately attractive, and they'll find it easy to raise money. Others are ugly ducklings, who will grow into swans in time ...... because raising money is like choosing an angle of attack for a plane. If you try to climb too steeply you just stall. ....... Once you start to get hard commitments from investors, more investors want in. ....... We still talk regularly with founders from the first YC batch in the summer of 2005. ....... Occasionally investors will say "I'm in" at Demo Day, but most of the convincing happens in subsequent meetings. ....... Getting a startup set up correctly is a nontrivial problem. ...... mediating disputes between founders. ..... Now, 5 years later, the YC alumni network is probably the most powerful network in the startup world. ..... Starting a startup was a very lonely undertaking when we did it ourselves in Boston in 1995. One of the goals of YC's batch model was to fix that, by giving founders the colleagues one would otherwise lack as companies with just 2 or 3 people. ....... even the most ardent boosters of other cities wouldn't claim they're at parity with the Bay Area. All other things being equal, Silicon Valley is the best place to start a startup. ...... Founders from other places are almost always surprised when they get here by the breadth and depth of support for startups. The Bay Area is for startups what LA is for the film industry. ....... The kind of horror stories you hear about investors dicking over startups rarely happen to those we fund. We almost never see broken termsheets. ....... "One of my goals since my last job was to stop working with mediocrity and find/surround myself with people smarter than I. YC definitely provided the quality of people I needed to be around." ...... The only person who's funded more is Ron Conway, and he may not have had such close interactions with all of them. ...... the intensity of YC.
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Monday, September 06, 2010

Offerpal Media: New CEO

Image representing Offerpal Media as depicted ...Image via CrunchBaseVentureBeat: Offerpal Media Names A New CEO During A Tough Transition: Mihir Shah as its new chief executive and president. .... Garrick will become executive chairman. Garrick himself replaced Offerpal’s founding chief executive, Anu Shukla, in October, 2009. During his tenure, Garrick was trying to reposition Offerpal in the wake of a scandal over the legitimacy of the offer business. ..... the whole offer industry was hurt last fall by a storm over offers that appeared to be scams, duping consumers with misleading or objectionable offers. ..... moved to clean up its offers, setting new standards to lock out the scammers..... began streamlining the company and broadened its appeal to advertisers by moving beyond offers. Offerpal also bought mobile ad network firm Tapjoy in March. ...... “The social and mobile gaming spaces are in a transitional and converging period right now, and we have some exciting ideas for using our extensive footprint and expertise to help game developers, social platforms and online advertisers navigate the changing environment."

The Highlight Of My Internet Week
Anu Shukla Has Found The New Frontier In Advertising

Some shady vendors used the Offerpal Media platform to do some shady things, but Google still suffers from click fraud. That does not change the fact that what Offerpal Media is attempting is at the cutting edge of advertising.

It is a new frontier. Mistakes will be made.


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Sunday, August 29, 2010

Mike Arrington Is A Sexist Pig: Say PeeeeG!

SUNNYVALE, CA - APRIL 27:  Yahoo! CEO Carol Ba...Image by Getty Images via @daylifeThe father of Quantum Mechanics Max Planck said once, people don't change their ideas, they die with them. When I think of Mike Arrington of TechCrunch and gender relations, I get reminded of that Max Planck quote. This guy will never "get" it. That's the impression I get. Like Hillary says in her autobiography, how her father was still homophobic all the way to his deathbed. Gays are just wrong. I feel sorry for Mike Arrington. This guy is missing the forest, he is missing the trees. Those who manage to cross over get to experience the richness that women bring to work and to organizations and to excellence that the sexist pigs miss out on. It is like they are color blind or something. They just can't see. It is almost biological. It is as if Mike Arrington was born with a tail and there is no surgery for it.

When Mike Arrington humiliated the female CEO of Yahoo on a public stage in New York City a few months back, I literally cringed. Sexism is the only word that describes the experience. The Yahoo CEO is older, much more accomplished, she is a role model to women. There are so few women CEOs out there that you become a role model whether or not you want to, and Carol Bartz strikes me as someone who really does not want to. But what you gonna do? You are a woman. So put on the pin. You are a role model now.

Months before that Mike Arrington hounded Anu Shukla who has been a trailblazer. Some of her cutting edge company's work is equivalent to the ongoing click fraud with Google's AdWords, but that does not change the fact that Google's money minting machine is a revolutionary product. (Anu Shukla Has Found The New Frontier In Advertising)

Mike Arrington is dripping with sexism.

And I actually like the fact that the guy is the founder of the top tech blog in the world. That tells me the only reason at least half of the excellent work done out there has not been done by women is sexism. I dig it that this dude's product is so very visible. On a non sexist planet, the founder of TechCrunch would have been some Maya Arrington.

Sexism is like communism, it is like Islamofascism, it is an ideology, it is a worldview. And Mike Arrington is dripping with it.

Tech, Women, Diversity
Mike Arrington: Too Few Women In Tech? Stop Blaming The Men.
Fred Wilson: Women In Tech and Women Entrepreneurs Discussion
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Wednesday, June 09, 2010

The Highlight Of My Internet Week

Image of Anu Shukla from FacebookImage of Anu Shukla
The highlight of my Internet Week has been my two hour lunch Monday with Anu Shukla at Tamarind. She is just this fun, cheerful person. And she has Sabeer Hotmail Bhatia stature in entrepreneurship. It feels great to be friends with her. She happened to be in town, and we had lunch we had been planning to have for months. The lunch had nothing to do with Internet Week, of course. It just happened to happen on the first day of Internet Week.

Anu Shukla Has Found The New Frontier In Advertising
I Just Became Friends With Anu Shukla

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Sunday, April 04, 2010

Farmville Farmer's Market: My Idea


A few days back the image above started showing up when I loaded Farmville for me. And I am like, yes! I suggested this directly to Mark Pincus. He said he liked the idea, but that was a while back. Looks like finally he has gotten around to doing it.

I came to Farmville late. I have not been much of a gamer. But Farmville was talked about so much in the blogosphere. And the TechCrunch dude Mike Arrington had just given the game quite a beating. Some of my friends were on the game. What had most got me interested was there were reports Farmville was using the Facebook platform to beat Facebook itself in the monetization game. That piqued my interest. It also helped that I grew up in a farming family. Have you watched the milking of the cow/buffalo - by hand - the milk that you drank an hour later? I have.

So I got onto the game and was hooked. So hooked I went on to become the richest farmer in my neighborhood, bought a million dollar villa, and so on.

My Facebook Photo Album: Farmville

Note, Anu Shukla is one of my neighbors. She just might be my very best neighbor. And, by now, she has the most beautiful farm in my entire neighborhood. She has really taken to farming these past few weeks. There is something to be said of people who sell their companies for hundreds of millions of dollars. When they take to farming, they really take to farming.

Anu Shukla Has Found The New Frontier In Advertising
I Just Became Friends With Anu Shukla

I have said several times in Fred Wilson's comments sections, (Fred Wilson's Insight) and I will say it again, Farmville is the media savior, it is not the iPad. Look at the Farmville business model, 99% of the users do not pay anything, and Mark Pincus is not up in arms about it. In fact, Farmville has been teaching Facebook how to make money. Trying to walk away from the browser is not a good idea. Trying to create artificial scarcities and artificially high prices is not a good idea.


And, while you are at it, call the firefighter.



This is from Social Media Week in early February. (Social Media Week: The Best NY Tech MeetUp Ever)

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Anu Shukla Has Found The New Frontier In Advertising

Image representing Anu Shukla as depicted in C...Image via CrunchBase
Michael Arrington going after Anu Shukla a few months back would be like Michael Arrington saying Google is an evil company because click fraud happens, link farms happen. Click fraud happens despite Google's best efforts. Crime happens in New York City despite Michael Bloomberg's best efforts. "The safest big city in America just became safer."

First Anu has to work within the FTC guidelines and she does, or she would not be in business very long. Then there are the Facebook guidelines, and Facebook has chosen to have higher standards than the FTC because they don't want to compromise the user experience in any form or fashion. And if Anu did not follow those Facebook guidelines, some of the games Anu is involved with will no longer be on the Facebook platform. But they continue to be. That is to say they follow the Facebook guidelines. And Anu's company Offerpal Media has strict guidelines of its own. Because they know not compromising the user experience is good for their bottom line. And Anu's company allows its vendors to kick out individual advertisers from their platforms without having to explain why. You don't have to be a fraudulent advertiser to get kicked out. If a particular game does not like you, you are no longer welcome on their platform.

Despite these half dozen layers of policing, some slimey stuff does end up happening. And that can be talked about. That has to be talked about, sure. But to make that slimey stuff the center of the focus is to miss the fundamental point, which is that Anu has done nothing less than found the new frontier in advertising.


Image representing Offerpal Media as depicted ...Image via CrunchBase
Yahoo used to do banner ads. Then Google came along and said no to that. They said, we don't want to have any ads on our main page, and we want to offer contextual text advertising. At some level that was like going from color movies to black and white, from colorful ads to text ads. But Google had hit the new frontier in advertising at the time. Zuckerberg said search contexts are less relevant than the social graph. And that was the new frontier all over again. Anu has come along and said, wait a minute. Banner or text, context or social graph, you are missing the point. The real action is that people are interacting. That is what gaming is about. The ads and the money transactions have to be part of that gaming experience, not a banner apart. Now that is fundamental insight. That is a paradigm shift.

More than 160 million people and counting play Farmville. Of those less than 100,000 file complaints. Most of those complaints are people saying I paid real cash for virtual coins, and I did not get my coins. Farmville takes care of all those complaints. Usually it gives players more coins than they paid for but say did not get.

Michael Arrington wrote 22 posts on TechCrunch about those 100,000 people. I look forward to seeing 35,200 posts on TechCrunch about the rest of the "scamville" users.

I Just Became Friends With Anu Shukla

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Monday, January 04, 2010

I Just Became Friends With Anu Shukla



FarmVilleImage via Wikipedia

I just accepted a Facebook friend request from Anu Shukla. I am guessing the friend request is a direct result of a long comment I left on TechCrunch earlier in the day: Zynga Investor Calls Scamville Debate Irrelevant And Unfair.
Fred Wilson is one of the pillars of the New York tech community, and he has been a brilliant investor for over a decade. I have lost count of how many times I came across a truly exciting company only to find out later that was one of Fred’s portfolio companies. If he were not a big investor, and only a blogger, he would still be considered a brilliant visionary.
As for Zynga, both Fred Wilson and Marc Andreessen are investors. I’d give an arm and a leg to belong in the same club as Marc Andreessen. Wouldn’t you?
I have not read all 22 of your “Scamville” posts. And I don’t pretend to have followed all the nuances of your argument.
And TechCrunch is my favorite blog by far. I read it more than I read any other news outlet of any kind, period. So I have respect for its founder and mascot.
You seem to suggest something murky might have been going on, but now, thanks to your work, much of that has been corrected. If that is the case, this story has had a happy ending.
As for Farmville the game, I can vouch for it personally. I have been an avid player for weeks. I never spent a single dime on it. And I am about to buy a million dollar villa there.
I had an email exchange with Mark Pincus only a few days back. I suggested he add a Farmers’ Market to Farmville. He said that was a good idea.
I am glad all three of you are around. What can I say?
By the way, I read those comments by Fred in the original at his blog before I saw them here. Good to know you and I sometimes end up at the same blog in some of the same comments sections.
My first email to Anu was standard. I have more than 130 lingering friend requests from people I don't know. My privacy settings on Facebook are lax. They are set to everyone. So you don't need to be my friend to be able to visit my full Facebook page. But if I don't know you, I am not accepting friend requests.  
Hello Anu. Thanks for the friend request. I am open to online only friendships. But we are going to have to exchange a few emails, get to know each other, and become friends first. :-)
My second email to her a few minutes later: 

Hey. Wait a minute. After I sent you the email, I googled up your name because it sounded kind of familiar. You are t-h-a-t Anu Shukla. Arrington dragged you into a controversy a few months back. I remember reading in real time.
I am honored you should send a friend request my way. I am accepting it right away.

I am guessing this friend request came from a looong comment I left on TechCrunch earlier in the day. I am going to leave more such long comments in future! :-)

Hello friend. 
And so that is that, I got myself a new friend.






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