Via Hacker News we have this video out of the Stanford technology venture program.

****** Spoiler (also from hacker news) ******

She teaches a class at Stanford and offers each team $5 of ‘funding’ in an envelope. She tells them that once they open the envelope, they have 2 hours to make as much money as they can.

She cites three teams’ approaches:

1) First team opens a free stand that offers to check peoples bike tire pressure for free, then charges $1 to inflate if necessary. This team changes midstream to accepting donations instead of charging, and makes more money. Lauded for rapid iteration.

2) Second team makes lots of reservations at local restaurants, and then sells them to people waiting in line for same restaurant. Didn’t use the $5 at all. Lauded for realizing that the $5 constraint was artificial, and that using it constrained their thinking.

3) Third team skipped the exercise, and sold their 3 minute class presentation time as a advertisement to a local company. Made the most money. Instead of presenting, they recruited. Lauded for realizing that the 2 hours was also artificially hampering their thinking.

She hands out two artificial constraints, and then praises the teams who ignore the constraints. “Thinking outside the box” is a great skill and all, but basically all these teams are doing is finding creative ways of breaking the rules. It means the puzzle isn’t “make the most money in 2 hours with $5″, it means the puzzle is “find out how far you can stretch these rules without being disqualified”.

Ignore the rules that don’t matter. Is that something holding you back real? or is it just in your head?

What artificial constraints will you chose to ignore today?

Our only limits are in our minds.

Apparently it’s not just working wives who can’t figure out how to combat spam and therefore let crappy projects fall by the wayside. Google’s letting their Google Groups rot on the vines as well. Score another one for the spammers:

Spammers are now spoofing the email addresses of existing group participants to sneak their messages through. Previously you would’ve seen a delightful “FREE MOVIE DOWNLOADS” spam from “freemovies123@gmail.com” – but now you’ll see it coming from existing group users – or even the group moderators themselves. This cheat completely bypasses the moderation system since the spammers are pretending to be pre-moderated users.

Guess they figure their resources are better spent on products like Gmail, which apparently costs $265 per user if you can sell it to the government.

This goes to show that it’s not the volume of spam that determines the success or failure of a legitimate project but rather the will for that project to survive. Spam is just one of those Darwinian forces that culls the web’s weak.

Tobold has a great write-up that strips Facebook games down to their most basic level and gives advice on what to design to maximize profits:

the general principle of Facebook games. The purpose is rather obvious: Get people hooked with easy rewards, then block them from gaining those rewards as fast as they want, make them pay you money directly or via another company, and encourage them to invite all their friends to participate. It is an extremely effective way to make money with games, because much of the game is in the interaction of the players with his friends, and doesn’t cost the game company anything to produce.

Check out the whole breakdown. I think his analysis is spot on and quite a few people reading it are likely to make a crapload of money via micro-transactions.

This letter is aimed at you men who have woman in an effort to reduce the amount of human pain in the world.

If your woman has full time job and has to take care of the kids, tell her NOT to start a site that requires any kind of effort.

If your women does not know how to use things like (for example) spam filters, then CERTAINLY do not let her start a community website. She will just bitch and moan about it (as women will do).

Then after a while, the bitching and moaning will grate on you and you might break. When you break, who knows what will happen? You might turn into a whiny little bitch yourself.

And believe me; no one wants that.

No one wants to hear you bitch and moan and acting all “holier than thou” about any kind of link spam. Their are enough Heils in the world already.

Sincerely,

QuadsZilla

Via Marcus, Here’s the movie:

Yea – it really was that fun.

The Journey Home – An SEOktoberfest Wrap Up

“Star Alliance World Wide Computer Failure” are some shitty ass words to hear in a morning when you are slated for a 45 min layover in 3 hours time.

Sigh: So now, what do I do that I’ve just been told my 11 hour journey back home just turned into 31 hours. How about an SEOktoberfest wrap up?

First off, thanks to absolutely everyone who attended, spoke, helped, planned or was in any way involved: you all rocked.

SEOktoberfest was amazing: when you get that caliber of people together, great things always seem to happen. The most amusing part had to be Rsnake, who was sincerely concerned beforehand that no one would be interested in what he was going to say.

Those concerns were, of course, unwarranted as he blew everyone away during a 2 hour demonstration that had everyone (well all but 2 people) complete entranced:

“…and that’s how you would force the click to any link on the page. Now lets move on to uploading your content legally to thousands of servers around the world…”

That’s not to say he was the only star. Cygnus showed that there is indeed a use for twitter – and a damn good one at that, Fantomaster talked about the bleeding edge of content generation, and Matias showed me in a side conversation two ways to get #1 rankings without any links.

Yea – I suppose I might be able to find a use for that.

In fact, everyone who took the mic completely rocked it. If it weren’t for the vow of silence that allows for that kind of free exchange of information, this post would be USEFUL rather than just INTERESTING.

Sorry guys.

By this time tomorrow, I’ll be back home and back to work. Expect some good stuff on the blog in the not too distant future: including some hot new tools I’ve been putting off reviewing for more than 2 months now.

What else can I say?

I’m baaaaaaaaaaaaack!