Opportunity · Cost

Сначала никакой экономики не было, а было одно говно и ягоды.
А потом прошло несколько тысяч лет.

Удивительный опус на тему говна. Не требует умственных усилий, однако, скрывает обучающих подтекст. :)

Figuring out your funnels is one of the most important things you can do to increase your quantitative understanding of your website. It's critical to get the starting measurements - the dropoff and conversion rates - before you change anything.  That's the only way you can know the effect of the changes you make. By constantly tweaking and measuring, you should be able to really improve your number of conversions.

Mixpanel has a set of functions that can be really useful for a company in the Web. While I still had no chance to compare their functionality to what Google Analytics provides, other than being real-time, I'm planning to spend some more time playing with it.

Mixpanel has a free 10K "data points" account (http://mixpanel.com/pricing) which is sorta confusing for a person like me. I'm more like thinking in visits, page views or things like that. But thanks to Tim Trefren from Mixpanel, who explained this to me:

"A data point is counted every time you track a visitor action. So, in terms of pageviews/month - if you track one event per page, you will use exactly the same number of data points as pageviews."

And, well, Mixpanel wouldn't be something you'll use to put on every page (like you can do with Google Analytics). You'd want to put it only on subset of them, linking to specific actions. Or you will probably use Mixpanel's API to assign "data points" to some triggers in your Web application' actions. This is, by the way, could be also a pretty useful feature.

В каждом из нас есть немного человека-паука. Найди себя!

You've got less then 24 hours to purchase this Russian Diver's inspired watch by Invicta for just $99. That's is a pretty nice deal.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000R7K3MQ/iwhite-20

They put Swiss quartz movement in, screw-down crown with a cap, very attractive rubber bracelet with buckle, decent lume and 53 mm in diameter (not including crown).

With MSRP of $575 (ridiculous, like there is anybody who pays MSRP for Invicta), however the regular price rarely goes down the $200 bucks and typically is around $249 for a piece.

Give it a shot. Pretty decent watch for those who like the Russian Diver's style but doesn't want to break a bank for it.

The following GMAT idioms list is based upon official GMAT sentence correction questions that the test-makers publicly released.

Practice these idioms using our proprietary sentence correction questions.

GMAT Idiom	Book1	Question2	Answer Page3
Official Guide for GMAT Review (12th Edition)
x is more than y	12th Edition	4	686
unlike x, y	12th Edition	20	694
in contrast with x, y	12th Edition	20	694
in contrast to x, y	12th Edition	20	694
estimate to be	12th Edition	27	698
the same to x as to y	12th Edition	32	700
depends on whether x	12th Edition	34	701
so x that y	12th Edition	37	702
targeted ... at	12th Edition	40	704
rivalry between x and y	12th Edition	44	706
expended on	12th Edition	46	707
the ability ... to	12th Edition	51	710
x is to y what w is to z	12th Edition	58	714
amount of x	12th Edition	74	722
attributes x to y	12th Edition	79	724
not just because of x, but because of y	12th Edition	83	726
distinctions between x and y	12th Edition	96	733
either x or y	12th Edition	109	740
to consider x y	12th Edition	117	745
less successful than	12th Edition	123	748
so x that y	12th Edition	124	748
x is dated at z years old	12th Edition	140	756
Official Guide for GMAT Review (11th Edition)
x is more than y	11th Edition	2	662
in contrast with x, y	11th Edition	16	669
estimated to be	11th Edition	21	671
in danger of	11th Edition	27	673
seem + infinitive	11th Edition	29	674
as much as	11th Edition	30	674
to credit x with	11th Edition	31	674
as many ... as	11th Edition	37	676
between x and y	11th Edition	40	678
require x to do y	11th Edition	53	684
restrictions on x	11th Edition	54	685
not only x ... but also y	11th Edition	55	685
there is no doubt that	11th Edition	58	686
as a means to	11th Edition	60	688
attribute x to y	11th Edition	67	691
as many as	11th Edition	76	695
used x as y	11th Edition	79	696
not x, but rather y	11th Edition	87	700
order x to be y	11th Edition	92	702
just as x, so y	11th Edition	99	706
distinguish between x and y	11th Edition	107	710
both x and y	11th Edition	112	713
so x that y	11th Edition	118	716
Official Guide for GMAT Verbal Review
not...but	Verbal Review	4	256
the rising cost	Verbal Review	8	258
range from x to y	Verbal Review	9	258
except for + noun	Verbal Review	13	260
between x and y	Verbal Review	14	260
to mistake x for y	Verbal Review	17	261
to think of x as y	Verbal Review	20	262
with the aim of + (verb)ing	Verbal Review	25	264
not only x ... but also y	Verbal Review	46	274
prohibit x from doing y	Verbal Review	48	275
more x than y	Verbal Review	50	276
not only x ... but also y	Verbal Review	52	277
so x that y	Verbal Review	58	280
not x, but rather y	Verbal Review	60	281
not only ... but also	Verbal Review	66	284
in order to x	Verbal Review	69	285
as x as	Verbal Review	75	288
worried about	Verbal Review	81	291
either x or y	Verbal Review	84	292
better served by x than by y	Verbal Review	89	295
ordered x to do y	Verbal Review	90	295
both x and y	Verbal Review	93	297
x rose almost as fast as y	Verbal Review	94	297
between x and y	Verbal Review	95	298
more x than y	Verbal Review	98	299
x rather than y	Verbal Review	99	300
isolated from	Verbal Review	106	300
not only x ... but also y	Verbal Review	108	304
as a result of	Verbal Review	113	307

This GMAT idioms list is available in PDF format.

For those who are too cheap to buy himself or herself a copy of Manhattan GMAT "Sentence Correction GMAT Preparation Guide", here is the list of the most popular GMAT idioms that are likely already known by native speakers, and must be memorized by non-native speakers (like I am).

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0982423861/iwhite-20

For those who do own a book, take a look at chapter 9, page 142. I am not sure I would be able to memorize all that, but at least I have one more useful guide to refer to.

The question becomes 'do you want a smaller, highly engaged community, or a larger, less engaged community?' There's no easy answer here; it's more of a think-long-and-hard sort of situation that greatly depends on individual aspects of your startup.

Great blog post on using A/B testing to increase user engagement and some conclusions made.

Yeah, Russians know watches. :) Photos of Russian officials and their watches, starts from a little bit more $1K for a piece topping with $1M for a piece. Nice.

P.S. Don't ask why economy sucks.

Find small blogs (10k-50k subscribers) relevant to your market and offer them 100-1000 signups with a custom-branded demo code.  The blogger likes getting an exclusive for her readers, and the readers like getting insider access to a hot new tool.  Contact a bunch of them at once, we felt lucky to have a roughly 20% hit rate.

Pretty creative, nice idea of bringing people on for beta testing your product. You know, once you release something, it's always a headache: "So what's up now?" Following this advice could give you at least a starting point.

Earlier this month Bank of America started notifying customers like Mullen-Kress that they will be charged a new annual fee of $29 to $99.

Oh no. Four years ago, when I came from Ukraine to US, I was surprised how many people are building their lives around their credit scores. I was, like: "What the heck? The biggest contributors to economy and stability of country are the most affected by any change in this. People who don't care, they keep not paying any attention at all. Banks are taking earners money and throw away to bring more assholes, who just don't care."

I can explain to myself while I keep paying my Bank of America's credit card's fee, which is $29 annually. It was my first one, starting from secured credit card, which I put a $100 to get $500 credit limit (which was actually the best deal I could get around), eventually morphing into more appropriate type of the card, but keeping $29 annual fee (I got it, BofA!). However, any other card that will ask for money will go straight the trash. I'll be the one who doesn't care, but I'm not going to give you any cent more for working my ass off.

I have no freakin' idea how this will work, and how useful is it going to be, but sounds cool. I believe there is a huge part of Mac users who're mostly "netbook"-type, so interrupting anything in their world would be painful, but acceptable.

Facebook has grown into one of the largest sites on the Internet today serving over 200 billion pages per month. The nature of social data makes engineering a site for this level of scale a particularly challenging proposition. In this presentation, I will discuss the aspects of social data that present challenges for scalability and will describe the the core architectural components and design principles that Facebook has used to address these challenges. In addition, I will discuss emerging technologies that offer new opportunities for building cost-effective high performance web architectures.

Jeff Rothschild (VP of Technology at Facebook) talks about scalability at Facebook. Jeff has a long history in IT and was founder of Veritas. Click on "click here for webcast" to see the recorded video from the lecture.