Faster Web Pages Makes Users Happy
Steve Souders, the creator of YSlow and the author of the book High Performance Web Sites, is one of the most respected experts on website performance in the world. We here at Pingdom are big fans of his work, and decided to probe his mind about the excellent YSlow Firefox add-on for evaluating website performance (which he created while working at Yahoo), his work at Google, and his thoughts around the ever-important issues of website performance and optimization.

The need for speed: Making Basecamp faster
Analysis: We relied heavily on New Relic’s outstanding RPM performance management suite to give us insight about the parts of Basecamp that were accessed the most as well as those that were most in need of improvement.

Caching: We’ve begun using Memcached in a variety of spots. Caching can be tricky with dynamic apps like Basecamp since different people often see different things, but we’ve implemented it carefully where it could be used to its best advantage.

MySQL optimizations: We’ve been working with a MySQL performance consultant to help us optimize our database calls and queries. We’re still early in the process but we’ve learned a lot so far.

Hardware upgrades: We recently made some significant upgrades to our database servers. We went from servers with 2 x Dual Core 2GHz processors, 32GB of RAM, and 6×73GB 15,000 RPM SAS drives to servers with 2 x Quad Core 3GHz processors, 128GB of RAM, and 8×73GB 15,000 RPM SAS drives. We’ve also upgraded our load balancers and have new switches coming soon as well.

When a sprinter runs the race and win a gold medal despite a whole bunch of odds, but misses the commentators expectations by 1/100th of a second, who is wrong? The commentator? or the athlete? Who should get punished? Do we respect the athlete for his/her performance or based on how commentators view the whole event?

In the wall street, always, the athlete gets punished. Even when they miss, Analysts continue to sell their reports and analysis, by writing why companies did not meet their expectations. What a spin?

Does every investor in Wall Street do their own due diligence and trade stocks or do so based on TV Shows and projections from salaried Analysts that write reports. When Analysts forecasts are not met, why media always points to the company and say the company failed. Why don’t they even doubt the analyst’s report that report missed the projections.

Company Results: Google net income grew by 35% to $1.25. 

Wall Street Reaction: Google, You missed my projections, You failed. Shares fall by almost 10%

On Friday, Google announced its results for the second quarter. Despite the falling markets and thrifty spending by many companies, Google racked up its income, an increase of 35%.

Google’s net income grew 35 percent, to $1.25 billion, or $3.92 a share, compared with $925 million, or $2.93 a share, in the second quarter of 2007. Revenue climbed 39 percent, to $5.37 billion, from $3.87 billion a year earlier.

Google Earnings Are Below Forecasts, and Shares Fall - NYTimes.com

Company: Citigroup reports $2.5B in losses

WallStreet Reaction: Citigroup, you missed my projection too. You failed. I am surprised. Shares of Citigroup rose $1.38, or about 8 percent, to $19.35

For the quarter Citigroup lost 54 cents a share, and reported write-downs of $7.2 billion on its investments. On the consumer debt front, the bank also announced $4.4 billion in net credit losses and $2.5 billion to increase credit reserves.

NYTimes Article

Here is a snappy does of Startup Wisdom.

Excellent analysis on UI. After reading this article, I looked around in my car, what kind of UI the car designers created that made driving so fun and effortless. They definitely looked at pragmatics rather than naive or new user. Once the glamour is gone, the pragmatics is what keeps user sticky.

I can’t believe, there are 500-600 startups coming up every year in India?

Learning from “bad” UI
Following fashion and the status quo is easy. Thinking about your users’ lives and creating something practical is much harder.

The Future of the Startup Workforce : OnDemand Talent?
So according to one entity’s claim, there are 800 startups in Bangalore. I know that as part of tracking startups, we see an average of about 500 - 600 new startups coming up every year, and these are just in the Technology space, and product focused.

The early days: How 37signals built buzz out of the gate
When 37signals first started out, we didn’t make products. We did client work. From the beginning, we allotted plenty of time for side projects. Things that would get us attention (eNormicom), experiments with new ways of selling our services (37express), ways to show off our design thinking (37Better Project), etc. Here are a few of the key non-client projects that enabled us to build up an audience before we launched Basecamp:

Seems like great happy hours to learn every 2nd Friday, if you are out of Delhi. Otherwise, you may still catch some action on the video.

If you are a technology entrepreneur and based out of Delhi, you should book your date with NASSCOM’s Friday 2.0 sessions. These experience sharing talks are organised on the 2nd Friday of every month at the NASSCOM office in Chanakyapuri, New Delhi.

These talks are not new- in fact, they have been organised for a couple of years now, but given that 2.0 is the ruling flavor these days and symbolises maturation, growth, repositioning, re-orientation etc., they decided to christen the sessions NASSCOM Friday’s 2.0.

Check out this page for details about previous sessions.

Source: Entrepreneurship storytelling with Nasscom’s Friday 2.0 sessions

“A thought which does not result in an action is nothing much, and an action which does not proceed from a thought is nothing at all” - Anonymous. Few notable thoughts that are worth sharing and spreading.

Are you sure you want to be in San Francisco?
If San Francisco, the Bay area, and Sillicon Valley aren’t good places to start a web business of the 3P variety, where is? Well, I’d say just about any place but. Basecamp came from Chicago/Copenhagen, FogBugz from New York, Campaign Monitor from Australia, Shopify from Ottawa, Freshbooks from Toronto, Blinksale from Texas, and there are tons of other applications of the same ilk that come from all over the world.

The silent majority
It’s easy for people to think that the interaction they witness on the web is a complete reflection of the world in general. Often it’s quite the contrary.

Will eBay Hang Up on Skype?
The Financial Times thinks so. The British paper quotes eBay’s CEO John Donahoe as saying the online auction firm will test Skype for “synergies” this year and if those synergies aren’t strong, reassess the division. eBay purchased Skype in 2005 with a potential payout of $4.1 billion. However, last year eBay wrote down the value of the acquisition by $1.4 billion, essentially admitting it overpaid.

In the HuddleChat Debacle, a Lesson for Web 2.0 Startups
As open source takes hold — in the form of software, platforms and even the development environment itself — the ability to imitate will only increase. In such an environment, the only meaningful defense for Web 2.0 app developers and startups is their ability to build a community in large numbers. The data of a community is the only defense, and perhaps the only real value, in a Web 2.0 company. And unless they can achieve this quickly, many Web 2.0 apps/startups are going to meander into mediocrity, only to see their ideas inspire larger players to roll out their own versions of their apps.

Google App Engine for developers
On Monday Google launched Google App Engine, a hosted dynamic runtime environment for Python web applications inside Google’s geo-distributed architecture. Google App Engine is the latest in a series of Google-hosted application environments and the first publicly-available dynamic runtime and storage environment based on large-scale propriety computing systems.

Why do we plan up front?
Uncertainty. It’s the same reason why so many people balk when we tell them to throw their functional spec out the window. I care so much about the design and feel and function of my condo-to-be that I can’t stand the uncertainty of not knowing how it will turn out. I want to know NOW so I can stop worrying about it. And of course, it’s impossible to really know what the best design will be without actually building the real thing step by step. But still, I don’t want to wait for such realities. And so I plan, and I plan, and I plan. Plans are a strategy against uncertainty. The problem is, they only make you certain of your imagination.