ZocDoc is the new king of New York start-ups. The company, which lets patients book medical appointments online and from mobile devices, raised more than $150 million, increasing its valuation to about $1.5 billion, based on a recent filing with the state of Delaware, where ZocDoc is incorporated. via Pocket
Monthly Archives: July 2014
Quote
Reply
It took us six years, or until 2012, to get to 1 trillion objects stored. Then it took us one more year to get to 2 trillion. So that’s an indication of the speed of growth.
“Talking the Cloud Business with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels” on Recode
Great interview piece on Recode with Werner Vogels on the state of AWS and how they’re approaching growth moving forward.
Link
The more screwed up your company, the more people will complain about it and blame you. If we take these two together, it is easy to see that without intervention, the larger your company becomes, the more people will complain and blame you. via Pocket
Link
For centuries people have found meaning — or thought they did — in what they could see in the sky, the shapes of the constellations echoing old myths, the sudden feathery intrusion of comets, the regular dances of the planets, the chains of galaxies, spanning unfathomable distances via Pocket
Link
CrossFit advocates, explicitly, proper mechanics and consistency in the execution of those mechanics prior to scaling the heights of intensity. via Pocket
Understanding CrossFit and the Intensity Prescription — The AF Project @ JonGilson.com
Link
When a customer service call is described as “Kafkaesque” and “hellish,” you pretty much know how it’s going to go down before even taking a listen. But in case you haven’t heard the condescending, tedious call that’s lit up the Internet, here it is: via Pocket
Comcast ‘Embarrassed’ By The Service Call Making Internet Rounds
Link
The design flourishes that most people never even notice.
I love the “breathing sleeping light”. So peaceful. 🙂
11 Tiny Design Features That Show Apple’s Insane Attention To Detail
Image
“How Coolness Defined the World Wide Web of the 1990s”
If you weren’t online in the mid-1990s, you might have missed the tremendous effort devoted to curating, sharing, and circulating the coolness of the World Wide Web. The early web was simply teeming with declarations of cool: Cool Sites of the Day, the Night, the Week, the Year; Cool Surf Spots; Cool Picks; Way Cool Websites; Project Cool Sightings. Coolness awards once besieged the web’s virtual landscape like an overgrown trophy collection.
Link
A common annoyance for web users is when websites require browser technologies that are not supported by their device. When users access such pages, they may see nothing but a blank space or miss out a large portion of the page’s contents. via Pocket
Promoting modern websites for modern devices in Google search results
Quote
For example, he says at the company everyone knows what a developer does and what a product manager does. But those roles need an overhaul, and that’s what he meant in his memo when he said “nothing is off the table.”
“Satya Nadella: This Is How I’m Really Going To Change Microsoft’s Culture” via BusinessInsider
I saw the role of the Program Manager change only slightly in my ten years at Microsoft. The explicit separation of the Program Manager’s responsibilities from the non-code side of the business – marketing, business development, KPI’s, etc. – made it such that you could get really good at designing a UX interface but have no idea if customers liked it (or really needed it in the first place). Not every team or individual PM had such clear separations, but it was definitely less than common.
I’m still in a bit of the honeymoon phase of working for a tiny startup where everyone’s roles are naturally wider (due to the work vs. resource balance). Yet my short time here has convinced me that for the PM role to evolve at Microsoft, it absolutely must move more towards a Product *Management*-style discipline, one driven by metrics, KPI’s, and customer-driven development. This was happening on my last team where we were building Mail, Calendar, and People on Office 365, and I hope that the style of work we were beginning to embrace (more agile, metrics- and customer-driven development) continues to spread.
#neato 