Technology

Charlie and his partner Alex are taking a very open the kimono approach to their startup, Path 101.

I’ve always believed that if you have an idea, there is bound to be someone else who’s also had a similar idea. So execution is nine tenths of the battle¹. Given that, their approach makes a lot of sense. In addition to sharing what they learn (thereby helping other entrepreneurs), they also open themselves to feedback from many more people.

One of their more recent posts was on how they’d like to work with LinkedIn. I loved this post for a number of reasons. Ever since Charlie has come up with the idea for Path 101, he’s always expressed that he wants to leverage great products that are already out there and get his users onto other platforms as well. I agree completely. Many of the ideas he suggests will result in expanding the value of Path 101 while at the same time expanding the market and network of LinkedIn to a market it does not currently capture – college students and recent college grads. Read the post – some interesting ideas.

If you want to follow a startup from inception including details like their weekly meeting schedules, head on over to their blog.

_{Disclosure: I’m involved with Path 101 in advisory and other capacities.}

1. another reason why entrepreneurs should not bother with NDAs ↩

I missed the Democratic Debate on September 26th. So, I decided to catch up on it on the NY Times website. They have really done a great job.

The visuals are accompanied by a transcript on the right hand side. The visuals and the transcript are synced together – moving the video along automatically adjusts the transcript to the correct spot. Selecting a spot on the transcript moves the video to the right place. Broad sections are also provided so you can jump to them directly.

Perfect execution.

So far, the only option was to pay to unlock your phone. Now, the open source team has done it! The iPhone can be unlocked for free without paying anyone, without sending it anywhere… This version is still for the tech-savvy. A GUI version will be coming out shortly.

And yes, I know this blog has become just about this one topic. That shall soon be fixed. When, exactly? Soon!

While you hold your breath, read more here and here.

This morning I was in a meeting and finally held a real iPhone and played around with it, but told the group that no, I wouldn’t be getting one quite yet. BUT…

It is here!! The UNLOCKED iPHONE! Yes, it was just a matter of time.

Engadget reports that the iPhone has been unlocked. And they’ve used it on T-Mobile. You can now use it with any GSM carrier around the world!

Again: we can confirm with 100% certainty that iPhoneSIMfree.com’s software solution completely SIM unlocks the iPhone, is restore-resistant, and should make the iPhone fully functional for users outside of the US.

And it is restore-resistant. Of course Apple will try to wipe this out with an upgrade, but it is supposed to be upgrade resistant (not not sure about that, but we’ll see).

Yay! I might just head out and get myself an iPhone – finally!! 🙂

I’m a bit late on this news from last week¹.

On Wednesday, Kaboodle was acquired by Hearst Corporation. Congratulations to Manish and the entire Kaboodle team for all their hard work in building a great site.

I became an advisor to Kaboodle early last year and have had a great time working with Manish and his team. A very passionate group, they were willing to change their focus to ensure they were sucessful and provided a valuable service to their users.

I couldn’t be happier for them. I hope they continue to cool things as an independent company within the Hearst organization.

1. Apologies – have been fighting off a stomach bug I picked up in India ↩

Finally, the NY Times outs the Forbes journalist behind the very popular blog.

Ending the online manhunt that went on for months, FSJ admits he’s been outed. Ah, sad day. I just hope he continues to be his acerbic self.

This is a first… the African “multi-million dollars are coming to you” scheme has now reached Skype. How could it not?

Dear friend,

We want to transfer to overseas ($6,000.000.00 USD) six million United States Dollars) from a Bank in Africa. Iwant to ask you to quietly look for a reliable and honest person who will be capable and fit to provide either an existing bank account or to set up anew Bank a/c immediately to receive this money, even an empty a/c canserve,as long as you will remain honest to me till the end for this important business,trusting in you and believing in God that you will never let me down either now or in future.

Blah, blah, blah

For now, I just blocked that user. But if it starts to be a real issue, here’s what you can do –

• Go to Preferences > Privacy
• Set “Allow instant messages from” to “Only people whom I have authorized to start”.

Now this means a new friend can’t get in touch with you, but it is probably worth it if spammers start using Skype actively. I hope Skype also adds a “report this user” functionality before it gets out of hand.

We knew it would happen and it has. A group of intrepid hackers are hard at work trying to unlock the iPhone.

The issues are probably complex since the iPhone is activated via iTunes connecting to verify your credit etc. So, they need to get around something that is more complex than most regular cellphones use.

The other difficult part they need to solve is that most of the phone functions need to continue to work after unlocking it. So say I use my T-Mobile number, I am fine if visual voicemail doesn’t work, but I won’t be happy if I can’t sync contacts or use Google Maps.

You can follow their progress on their wiki and on the MacNN forum.

Do I think they’ll crack it tomorrow? No. But I do think they will crack it. How well and with how little disruption to the software is yet to be seen. And how they deal with firmware updates from Apple will be another interesting thing.

But, for all these reasons, I am cheering for them to free the iPhone!

Even though I was very excited about the iPhone when it came out, I always believed the business decisions around the phone were plain silly. The decision to lock to AT&T is stupid.

And only because of that, I won’t be getting an iPhone quite yet –

• T-Mobile has better coverage in NYC
• T-Mobile’s plans are significantly cheaper
• I don’t need visual voicemail (the only feature that requires carrier integration)
• I travel interationally and refuse to be trapped by a plan that will charge me $5/minute from India when I can just as easily pop in a local SIM card
• Ensuring that even the iPod won’t work without an AT&T SIM is beyond the pale

Finally, here’s a question – what if I get the iPhone with the egregious contract from AT&T. I wait two years. The contract ends. Would I THEN be able to put any SIM I want into the phone?? If the answer is no, that is a first for any carrier, any phone. And would only exacerbate an already stupid decision by Apple.

I wonder how they will do this internationally. If you buy the phone in India it will only work with the Indian carrier? Huh – talk about moving backwards on international travel and international convenience…

Once upon a time, Google’s image search used to be pretty good. If you did a search for a person, on the first page of results, you would get a photograph of the person if there was one on the web.

Here’s what I think Google used to do: show an image where they know the image matches the keyword you typed (good)

Here’s what they now seem to do: Find the keyword you typed on a page and then show you *any* image that shows up on the same page even if it is completely unrelated to the keyword (bad)

Huge, huge difference. And it makes a significant difference to the results.

I tried this with multiple examples, but for safety, I’m going to use the example of an image search for my name¹ and there are five pages of results. Not a single one is relevant (i.e. none of them are me). They are almost all images from pages that link to my blog and therefore have “Shripriya Mahesh” on that page in text. Why does Michael Roberts’ image show up on the list? Because I wrote an HBS case with him in 1997 and so my name is on his page. Ta-da. Er… wrong!! With other examples I used, it brought back both photographs of the person and the multiple pages of random nonsense.

Is anyone else seeing this? Does anyone know if they have indeed changed how they do things?

1. I used my full name Shripriya Mahesh. If I tried just Shripriya, I got 27 pages of results, none of them relevant ↩