Thomas

Forget about the technical co-founder (and don't learn how to code)

Over the years I've heard and read a lot of advice on how to get a technical co-founder. Having a mostly non-technical background myself, I've been facing the issues of having a "great" startup idea without having the technical chops to build it myself (although I have more programming experience than most business students). In the last year or two a lot of the advice have centered around learning to code yourself....

3 Takeaways from the Global Entrepreneurship Summit

Earlier this month I returned from a 9 day trip to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia where I attended Global Startup Youth (GSY) and Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES). In short, GSY is a Startup Weekend-esque event (on steroids) with 500 participants aged 18-25 from more than a hundred different countries. GES is the brainchild of the Obama Administration, aiming to promote entrepreneurship across the globe and building ties between the US and muslim countries....

LinkedIn Intro: How to Archive, not Trash

The newly launched LinkedIn Intro, the iPhone Mail plugin that gives you the power of LinkedIn right in your inbox, is great in so many ways. It's still a little buggy, but it's a great start. One of the main annoyances for me after installing it was that the shortcuts for Archiving a message had been turned into shortcuts for Trashing them instead. This is because LinkedIn Intro is added as an IMAP account, which has this behavior by default....

Get a free ticket to Pioneers Festival

I'm giving away one free ticket to Pioneers Festival in Vienna, Austria October 30-31, 2013. All you have to do is to sign up for my newsletter (Startup Letters) using this link before Saturday at 11.59 pm EST. Spread the word to any of your friends that might be interested. They will thank you later!...

One Reason Why iOS vs Android is not like Mac vs Windows PC

Sure, there are a lot of similarities. Only Apple is producing devices running iOS, just like they did not want to licence their Mac operating system to OEMs. Google is licensing Android freely, and most noteable OEMs are focusing on Android (apart from Nokia and Blackberry), just like the case was with Microsoft Windows. If you subscribe to this logic, you probably think that Android will eventually end up with 80-90% market share, while Apple in the end will serve 10-15% of the market (the high-end)....

Quibb and Pocket - Bridging the Gap

Pocket has long been one of my essential apps, both on my phone and on my Mac. Everything I want to read I add to Pocket. Whenever I have a few moments to read and get inspired (like when I'm walking somewhere, on a bus/train/plane or waiting for someone) I turn to my Pocket app. This way I always have something interesting to read, while at the same time not interrupting my workflow when I first see an interesting link....

Help Me Write

I recently signed up for Help Me Write, which is a platform to help writers and bloggers to prioritize their writing. Of course I had to create a profile: This is basically Lean Blogging, minimizing waste by only writing what people actually want to read. It works like this: - Log into Help Me Write with your Twitter account - Go to my profile and vote on my ideas for future blog posts to help me decide what to write next...

Why I ditched Aweber and moved back to MailChimp

For the last year or so I’ve been managing my friend Nir Eyal's email list, with thousands of subscribers. In the beginning we used MailChimp, and it worked pretty well. Then we decided to move to Aweber, mostly due to many glowing reviews and the fact that they allowed single-opt in (meaning that a user could add their email to the newsletter without confirming the email address). It turns out that single opt-in is a bad idea anyway....

Photo: Jony Ive + LSD = iOS 7!

Jony Ive + LSD = iOS 7! Re-blogged from a pretty funny Tumblr blog messing with the brand new iOS 7 interface and Apple's lead designer, Jony Ive. Personally I really think the new design is a great improvement, incorporating many of the best elements of the current Android design. Still a funny blog :)...

Tumblr deletes your drafts

Just to be clear, Tumblr is probably not deleting our unfinished posts on purpose - this is more likely a bug in their Android app. Earlier today I wrote a blog post on my phone, using the official Tumblr app. After I was finished, I decided to wait until I was in front of my computer to publish it, so I could find a suitable picture for the post. I clicked back, and a pop-up asks me if I want to save the post as a draft, or discard it....