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Courtesy of jhf of Flickr.com and Creative Commons

Time magazine recognizes Mark Zuckerberg as person of the year, Facebook adds its 550 millionth member, Facebook becomes the most active web messaging service, Twitter is valued at $4 billion, Groupon turns down $6 billion, and More than 50% of videos on YouTube have been rated or include comments from the community. I could ramble on all day about these shocking statistics that are becoming seemingly irrelevant. Relevance is instead being shifted to what we ourselves and our  network of friends find interesting.

We’ve reached the tipping point in 2010, and now we are seeing the explosive growth from the adoption of social sites by people of all ages and interests. Daily use of social sites to share media among our network of friends has reached critical mass. Virtually every business has been reinvented in the context of the social web. Take Groupon for example, they are powering the local deals of small business’s that was once dominated by coupon books. Tumblr has turned the traditional journal into a creative collection of digital media, which is manifested by the inspiration drawn from users with like-minded interests.  Flickr users have now amassed enough geo-located photos so that we can find a point of interest in Google maps, and see photos from the exact location. But there’s more, the social web has moved extensively into our professional lives. Understanding the distinction between personal and professional is of utmost importance to maintaining an online identity in good standing. Yammer helps address this problem with an enterprise level solution that people actually want to use; several multi-national corporations are encouraging employees to collaborate online using private company networks.

So, the question lingers: What’s next? How will I be able to own my future in this virtual world? My opinion on the answer to those questions is to find the right balance between offline and online. We are going to be carrying mobile devices with us everywhere now, therefore staying connected is not the issue. Instead the issue will be: what should we be connected with, and how relevant is it to our lives? Meetup.com does an excellent job of directing traffic at the intersection of offline and online media. I encourage you to start with their advice:

Do something • Learn something • Share something • Change something

In the past few months, I’e been in the process of applying to several colleges. Anyone familiar with the process knows that usually the most important supplementary information in each application comes from the personal essay and college-specific supplement. Schools encourage applicants to reflect on their high school experiences and showcase their best achievements, thoughts, and experiences. The supplement part of each application is designed to challenge the applicant, and offer alternative information about the applicant that the admissions office might not learn otherwise. After all, challenges do not build character, they reveal it. So, take a moment, or two, and think about how you would answer some of these questions. I wouldn’t hesitate to say that you may learn something about yourself if you give the questions considerable thought. These questions have no “right” answer, just think about what best describes your thoughts and feelings.

The Admission Committee members would laugh if they knew I…

What five words best describe you?

What is the most significant challenge that society faces today?

Your favorite website?

For some, it’s politics or sports or reading. For others, it may be researching solar power fuel cells or arranging hip-hop mash-ups. What makes you tick?

Tell us about an idea or an experience you have had that you find intellectually engaging.

Prepare a one-minute video that says something about you. What you do or say is totally up to you.

In our ever-changing society, people have defined ‘equity’ and ‘community’ in many different ways. How do you define these terms and what are the implications of equity and community for our 21st century society?

What outrages you? What are you doing about it?

What final Jeopardy category would ensure your victory?

Who is the person you dream of becoming and how do you believe (Insert Name) University can help you achieve this?

Beyond your impressive academic credentials and extracurricular accomplishments, what else makes you unique and colorful?

Please feel free to comment on this short sampling of questions, or feel free to comment on any other intriguing application questions.

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In the past year, Facebook has been successful in doubling the millions of daily impressions that their U.S. users generate. Facebook has asserted itself as a dominating force in display advertising, now delivering 25% of the total U.S. display impressions. The closest competing firm is the network of Yahoo sites, with a 12% share that has been on the decline.

Whether or not Facebook’s impressions are desirable or not is another question, but Facebook certainly has more targeted impressions to sell than anyone else. As Facebook continues to practice its mission, “Give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.”, users are becoming more engaged in the ads that they interact with on the site. This will continue to create a more relevant user experience for their users, and provide more targeted advertising opportunities. Advertisers who have not already launched campaigns on the Facebook advertising platform should become familiar with it as soon as possible. Facebook is serving a significant chunk of the pie to millions of internet users, and with their accelerating growth, it’s not far off to say that they can soon control display advertising similar to how Google dominates search ads (78%).

For the start of the upcoming 2010 holiday season, several national brand advertisers have launched their marketing campaigns on social sites. Brand advertisers are finding social sites to be the best platform for their holiday campaigns because they can acquire customers and raise awareness for a charitable cause in a single transaction. For example, Gap launched a campaign last week that asks users to “Like” their ad. When a users clicks “Like” on the ad, Gap donates $1 to a charity, and the users receives a 30% off coupon. The national brand advertisers are locked into more deals on social sites this year, especially considering that the purchases of holiday shoppers are likely to be influenced by social media.

More statistics on this data set can be found in the comScore report.

San Francisco cable car at night.

Earlier this month I traveled to San Francisco/Silicon Valley for an extended weekend because Y-Combinator accepted my application to attend Startup School hosted at Stanford. This was my first time visiting the region in several years and I was eager to make the most of my rare 36 hours in the Bay Area. I am incredibly thankful of Y-Combinator for sponsoring the event, and my parents for supporting my visit. My Mom used her frugal shopping skills to reserve a 50% discounted room at the San Mateo Marriott via Priceline.com, and my Dad used his sharp navigating skills to drive me to each location on time. Just to give you an idea of the significance of this event, take a look at the press coverage on the one day event:  TechCrunch, GigaOM, Mashable, Yahoo, VentureBeat.

Startup School 2010 began with a continental breakfast outside of the Dinkelspiel Auditorium for all attendees and each of the nearly 750 attendees filed in for about an hour until 9:30AM. I think entrepreneurs are drawn to Startup School because it is an engaging event where each of the speakers is highly accomplished in the internet/technology field, and they all offered the personal success story behind their well known work. Not to mention, the attendees themselves are already well on their way to creating the next powerful companies that disrupt entire industries. (More on this point later with Brian Chesky.) My most conclusive observation by the end of the day was that each of the speakers has their own personal success story, but there is nothing close to a specific formula that will guarantee a high degree of personal and financial sanctification. Similarly, numerous ideas presented by the various speakers often conflicted with each other and I learned that even if you choose one certain course of action, there will always be challenges to overcome.

Andy Bechtolsheim was the first speaker of the day, and he offered a fitting speech about how he started his company Sun Microsystems and why he invested in Google before anyone else. Next Paul Graham took the stage and he presented his thoughts on the current state of the venture capital industry, which can be found on his personal website. Then the first website founder, Andrew Mason, offered his story about how he failed first and succeeded in his second idea, Groupon. After a short morning break, Tom Preston-Werner spoke passionately about his personal company philosophy at GitHub of optimizing for happiness and making choices that make us happy. Greg McAdoo, parter at Sequoia Capital, spoke next about how investors choose their portfolio companies, noting that authenticity is imperative. The last speaker of the morning, Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, presented the first clashing thoughts of the day and advised startups to pivot their direction when necessary.

During the lunch break all of the attendees congregated outside of the auditorium to eat pizza, and the majority of the attendees were very friendly to share their own experiences with internet business. To begin the afternoon session, Ron Conway, parter at SV Angel, spoke about his experiences in his most successful investments: Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Then ex-Facebook executive and now founder of Quora, Adam D’Angelo, presented his thoughts on how to gain the most possible advantages as a founder of a startup. Perhaps the most straightforward presentation of the day came from the failed founder, Dalton caldwell, who saw his life work Imeem crash and burn last year due to intellectual property laws. As tension slowly built up in the auditorium, the most anticipated speaker of the day appeared from backstage, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. Zuckerberg did an interview style presentation and he discussed the culture at Facebook and debunked several misrepresentations in the recent hit movie, The Social Network. For the last speaker of the day, Y-Combinator invited their rising star Brian Chesky, founder of Airbnb, to speak about the short but uncommon story of his company. Chesky’s company, Airbnb, is a company that failed to gain critical mass on three launches but eventually made improvements on their idea through Y-Combinator and has disrupted the travel accommodations industry for the long run. To finish off the busy day, Airbnb sponsored a reception in downtown San Francisco later that night.

Startup School is a rare opportunity to collaborate with this dynamic group of people eager to make a difference in the world,  and learning about the fundamental values shared by some of the fastest growing companies in the world is a priceless experience. I look forward to taking these timeless ideas and implementing them in my own startup one day.

Here are the informal notes and ideas that I jotted down throughout the day:

• Google is extraordinarily profitable because relevant search is incredibly important, and relevant ads are effective.
• #1 industry attracting venture capital investments is biotechnology.
• Apple spends the least % of revenue on R&D among tech giants, because Apple has the least number of products.
• Value your external input. Discover, design, deliver.
• The horizon effect: humans generally don’t pursue goals beyond the horizon.
• Understanding how what your doing makes a difference is critical.
• VC’s measure performance in rate of return per year.
• The only thing that can kill a good startup is itself.
• Advantages of the web are instant coordination and group collaboration.
• The tipping point: when the other option becomes the better option.
• You’ll probably fail.
• Your product needs some sort of virility.
• User experience is relevant, tech specs are not.
• Optimize for happiness.
• Read the books on this reading list by Tom Preston-Werner.
• You want to have as many choices as possible, and you want to be happy with those choices.
• Don’t throw $ at problems, throw ideas.
• VC’s are company builders.
• Authenticity is people caring about the idea they are solving.
• Users use what they encounter.
• Entrepreneurs must test early, pivot when necessary.
• See how fast other people are going to figure how fast you should be going.
• It takes guts, but anyone can do it.
• Join a startup for learning experience, then start your own company.

Last Friday October 15th, I was fortunate to have an opportunity to go on a private tour of the Google world headquarters in Mountain View, California. I have always read things about the unique company culture loved by so many of Google’s employees but it wasn’t until I got an up-close look that I realized how unique the company operates. All of the employees are treated to free food in drinks in kitchens located on every floor of their buildings in the Googleplex. Googlers also benefit from free services such as on site laundry, car mechanics, bikes, shuttles into San Francisco, a world class gym, and much more.

I could definitely see how the Google company culture instills a sense of “thinking big outside of the box” and how the employees leverage their ideas to change the world with their labs experiments. One of the recent projects I would like to pass along is a simple slideshow that shines a spotlight on some of the most interesting creations on the world wide web. Browse through the slides, click on a few interesting links, and embrace the creative sites showcased in this Google project.

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Courtesy of Arjan Almekinders of Flickr.com and Creative Commons

I’ve always believed that succumbing to the phrase “they are naturally talented” is one of the most pessimistic attitudes to explain a truly extraordinary act. The simple reality is that a person is whatever they repeatedly do on a consistent basis. Using the excuse of “natural talent” to explain how a person achieved a perfect score on a test or how they set a record on an athletic team is completely ignorant. The mastery of any field requires incessant practice, and the uncommon results of high achievers are likely the result of a tremendous amount of focus and execution in practice.

Sometimes I come across motivational material that is so powerful that I believe it is worth sharing; I was recently reading the New York Times best seller SuperFreakonomics by economists Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. Here are a couple short paragraphs that explain the conclusions of the most up-to-date research on understanding talent:

K. Anders Ericson is now a professor of psychology at Florida State University, where he uses empirical research to learn what share of talent is “natural” and how the rest of it is acquired. His conclusion: the trait we commonly call “raw talent” is vastly overrated. “A lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they were born with,” he says. “But there is a suprisinigly little hard evidence that anyone could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it.” Or, put another way, expert performers–whether in soccer or piano playing, surgery or computer programming–are nearly always made, not born.

And yes, just as your grandmother always told you, practice does make perfect. But not just willy-nilly practice. Mastery arrives through what Ericsson calls “deliberate practice.” This entails more than simply playing a C-minor scale a hundred times or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Deliberate practice has three key components: setting specific goals; obtaining immediate feedback; and concetrating as much on technique as outcome.

The people who become excellent  at a given thing aren’t necessarily the same ones who seemed to be “gifted” at a young age. This suggest  that when it comes to choosing a life path, people should do what they love–yes, your nana told you this too–because if you don’t love what you’re doing, your are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good at it. (Page 61)

There you have it, talent level is precisely the result of how much proper execution is practiced. The thing I love most about this philosophy is that it applies to any discipline, whether it is academics, arts, athletics, and beyond. In short, if you love what you are doing, your chances of succeeding are far greater. Perhaps the description of remarkable talent should be described as a “natural process” rather than “natural talent”.

Early one morning in your high school career, there may have been a guidance counselor walk out on stage and proclaim that you should not worry about finding a college, since in the United Sates alone, there are over 3,000 accredited institutions. You can begin choosing which college you want to attend by flipping through a review book, but after a few minutes of initial search it becomes similar to flipping through hundreds of TV channels and then saying there’s nothing on TV. Tim Harford, a reporter for the Financial Times, makes an important note on choice theory: “We are often offered an apparently pointless choice between two equally good products, not appreciating that they are only good because we have been offered the choice.”

With hopes of choosing the right school, the renowned psychologist Barry Schwartz describes how we decide on choices for almost anything. The first step would be deciding on your goals for college, and decide which goals are the most important. With a dozen or so potential options that can fulfill your goals, Schwartz writes on the importance of evaluating whether or not each choice can successfully fulfill the goals. Whether they are academic, athletic, artistic, financial, social, or any other combination, many students often find that there are multiple options that they would be happy to choose. The dilemma lies in the thought that if we decide to go to one place, we will be unhappy because we are missing out on x, y, and z which is better somewhere else. Claire Williams, co-author of The Choice Effect chimes in on this idea:

“What stops so many of us from making a commitment is our fear that once we make a choice we have to close the door on all the other options… Choosing doesn’t limit choices—it just changes them. So feel free to pick that  [college] knowing that even commitment brings a whole new set of options to be excited (and angsty) about.”

Perhaps the area where college choice is paradoxical is admissions. It’s up to the admissions office at each individual school to make sure your choice meets there criteria. Even with a narrow list of safety, target, and reach schools, more highly qualified students are applying to college than ever before, and rarely is any decision guaranteed. Other elements of the admissions process can make students even more happier, such as the choice between commitment binding Early Decision and the freedom of Regular Decision. But that’s a completely different topic with a whole other set of costs and benefits to analyze. Whichever college you do choose, I encourage you to be a satisficer. “Satisficing is a term psychologist Herbert Simon used to describe people who have criteria and standards, but are not worried about the possibility that there might be something better.”

This past summer I garnered a lot of attention and reaction on a few pieces of content published on this blog. Most notably this past weekend my project aiming to map out the Hacker News users has been up-voted on the homepage of news.ycombinator.com for well over 24 hours. This recent project harnessing the attention of thousands of Hacker News users has launched my overall unique visitor account twofold for the summer. To be precise, I just surpassed the 10,000 unique visitor threshold this hour for my total summer count. I’m extremely happy that visitors from numerous referral sources have been interested in accessing the content on my blog over the past three months. Thank you!

Summer 2010 Traffic Fast Facts:

• Visitors came from 109 countries. Most popular countries in the following order: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, Germany.
• 93% of the visitors were accessing the site for the first time.
• 12,000+ page views sitewide.
• Most popular site content: Hacker News page, Air France Concorde story, The State of the Kindle.
• Most popular referring keyword: “playlists for parties” (“John Marbach” was 7th with 9 referrals).
• Most popular traffic sources: news.ycombinator.com, google.com, twitter.com.
• Web browsers used: Chrome (44.4%), Firefox (27.9%), Safari (19.3%), Internet Explorer (03.6%)
• Approximately 50 social media reactions.
• Most popular mobile devices: iPhone, iPad, Android. To support the argument of rising popularity in the mobile web, about 1 in every 11 visitors accessed via a mobile device.

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Interesting fact:

The most popular operating system was a near tie with Macintosh (Apple) edging out Windows (PC) by less than 80 visitors. 3,788 for Mac and 3,714 for Windows, or 37.97% Mac versus 37.23% PC.

Let the Mac vs. PC battle continue!

Take a look at almost any tech blog today, and there is a high chance that you will notice a headline related to a startup incubator because of a company that is associated with one of the various entrepreneurial seed funds. These programs have attracted a lot of interest in the past couple years, as many people lost their jobs and are now interested in founding their own company. Programs such as TechStars, Y-Combinator, Dreamit Ventures, and the Founder Institute all have numerous portfolio companies that have graduated from their programs and have gone onto being highly successful companies. In fact, the jobs creation and local economic stimulation by these programs has garnered interest from New York City Mayor Bloomberg, who initiated a public fund for entrepreneurial pursuits in New York. In exchange for the seed funding, each of the programs typically takes a small share of the company. This way the programs can continue to fund more successful and not successful companies to their credit in the future.

Adeo Ressi, founder of the Founder Institute, has the most geographically diverse set of startup incubators in tech centers around the world. His mission is to found 1,000 companies per year through his semester long programs. People such as Adeo are bringing a vision to entrepreneurial communities across the world, showing them that they can be part of an accelerated startup if they posses the necessary characteristics to execute their ideas. I believe that the best part of these startup incubators is that they are instigating a wave of innovation that will ultimately improve the lives of others and make the world a better place.

Do you already have an idea that was scraped a few months back because of some common excuse? Follow Adeo Ressi as he guides you to making your idea happen for less that $2,000.
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In the past few months I have been driving around dozens of college campuses, in search of a school where I will be happy at studying as an undergraduate. The process has been very lengthy thus far, and certain resources have made finding the right information a lot easier. Essentially the admissions office at any school is the sales team for their institution, and almost all of the schools today start sending out information e-mails and brochures years before fall of senior year. A lot of the brochures are helpful to understand some of the statistical information at each school, but I’ve found that nothing replaces the individual conversations with students on campus or student review sites. The most insightful information that I have come across is through little tips on college tours while school is in session. Seeing and hearing students interacting on campus is the best way to understand if the students at the school are the people you would enjoy being friends with for the next few years.

For the times when you need more in depth information about either the questions many people are afraid to ask, or just want a second opinion on a certain issue, the web has become an excellent resource.

My favorite site that provides up to date and straightforward information is Unigo.com. Pronounced “uni-go”, the site launched a couple years ago with a mission to bypass the misinformation told in college information guides and offer valuable student reviews. Each school has a general overview written by one of the Unigo editors, then visitors can navigate to the individual opinions from current and former students. They have recently partnered with The Wall Street Journal to provide various video segments on a wide array of topics in the college admissions process. Similar informational sites based around student reviews include StuVu.com and CollegeProwler.com.

One interesting resource that a I stumbled upon a few months ago is the service named WiseChoice. The service works similar to a dating site profile, where you answer several thorough questionnaires about your likes and dislikes. Personally, I haven’t used the site extensively but they claim to match you with the best school for your needs.

Many students know about these sites today, and ask why colleges would bother sending informational brochures in the mail and email invites to open houses when that surely costs the institution a great deal of money. In reality the schools are actually very capable of affording these promotions. Go figure: School X sends out information book, total cost $1. Student applies to school, school generates $50 for application fee. The ROI is pretty substantial, especially if the student chooses to enroll.