Startups, databases, iPhone app marketplace, and how to launch:
- Weary of Looking for Work, Some Create Their Own (NY Times) — a story about a new tide of entrepreneurs forced into it by the economic times. The goal for many entrepreneurs nowadays is not to create a company that will someday make billions but to come up with an idea that will produce revenue quickly, said Jerome S. Engel, director for the center for entrepreneurship at the Berkeley Haas School of Business. Mr. Engel said many people will focus on serving immediate needs for individuals and businesses.
- Redis — another key/value pair database, but this time with atomic operations to push and pop. The reinvention of databases continues apace ….
- Gaming on the iPhone–Natural Selection in Real Time — as the number of games has risen, the price has dropped. But that’s where things have begun to settle, just a short time after the App Store started featuring games for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Five bucks is to the iPhone what sixty bucks is to the PC: the high end of the price scale. And the expectation is that, if you’re gonna tempt someone to fork over a Lincoln for your hard work, it had better be something special […] The iPhone is a relatively easy platform for developing games, where you can generally create a game with a small budget and short development time, and be looking at potentially large returns. But the market has become so crowded with casual games that it has become incredibly hard to get your game noticed.
- Don’t Launch — an eminently reasonable answer to the question I’ve often been asked. Don’t chicken out and do a closed beta; get real customers in through real renewable channels. Start with a five-dollar-a-day SEM campaign. Iterate as fast and for as long as you can. Don’t scale. Don’t marketing launch. I love everything this guy writes. If he ever publishes a collection of his laundry lists and telephone doodles, I’ll preorder it on Amazon.