Namita Bhasin

Daniel Brusilovsky, renowned teen entrepreneur, wrote a post debating whether or not to go to college. As I tend to do, I got a little emotional in my response, but I find the subject important enough to repost it here.

Daniel,

I really admire what you’ve accomplished already – more than I have at 22 – but I really think you’re young and inexperienced enough that college may have something to teach you.

For you, college wouldn’t be about starting you on your career path. It would be more about finding people (friends, partners, significant others – especially valuable since there’s a relatively limited selection of people your age in your current circles) and expanding your knowledge of other things. Most entrepreneurs ignore me when I say this, but there is (at least a little) more to life than your startup. There is more to learn and be interested in than just what Silicon Valley and your current area of knowledge have to offer. It’s too early to isolate yourself from other opportunities.

Personally, I’m deeply involved in SV too, but I majored in Political Economy and Linguistics, two things that made little practical sense but were incredibly valuable for my own interest and enrichment. Academics aside, I lived on my own, got a taste of a different place and lifestyle, met different kinds of people, grew up, and had a little bit of fun. Four years of college was anything but a waste of time.

I really hope you decide to go to college. Continue what you’re doing by all means – being in school doesn’t mean you have to stop working – but I promise it’s worth going.

Mugasha - the premier destination for electronic music from the best DJs worldwide - has offically opened its doors to the public.

A year of hard work has gone into creating a beautiful and functional portal for electronic music fan community to find sets (parsed by track) by their favorite DJs, along with information about them and tickets to upcoming shows. And there’s a lot more in the pipeline! Subscribe to their blog to keep up to date with all the exciting things they’ve got coming. For those of you that are particularly diehard, they have an auxiliary blog where fans can write posts too.

Mugasha was founded at Startup Weekend in Portland last summer. They were selected to be part of SXSW’s super competitive Accelerator program in March, where they had a bunch of publicity and a bunch of fun (”spring break for developers,” as described by cofounder/visionary Akshay Dodeja).

They’ve been featured on TechCrunch twice already since launch day:

If You Like Electronic Music, You’ll Love Mugasha (reposted by the Washington Post)

Your Guide to Music on the Web

Akshay was intereviewed by Robert Scoble in the early days, and there was a great post about Mugasha on ReadWriteWeb. They have been faithfully followed by Silicon Florist, a Portland tech blog, since the very beginning.

Cofounders Akshay Dodeja and Justin Thiele currently live in Portland, OR. They are the most dedicated startup guys I know, and I know a lot of startup guys. The two of them have bootstrapped the company thus far, but plan on expanding beyond the resources of their living rooms and interns in the future. Meanwhile, they will continue to add new sets by more world-famous DJs and explode the site with incredible features.

So. I’ve delayed the publishing of this post for six months (since winter break) because I feared it would damage my professional credibility. Well, now that I’ve procured employment, to hell with that! I’m about to tell the world what I really do with completely totally idle free time. Hehe.

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I only get a week or two a year to push everything important and pressing off the table, and so it is always an agonizing process to decide how to spend it. Some years it’s travel, some years books; this year I burned through the Twilight series. Silly self-indulgence for sure, but so worth it. It is exactly what time away from the real world should be.

Twilight and Harry Potter

Demographic: A subset of the Harry Potter crowd. Both series are magical and fantastical, a little bit dark, and integrable with the real world, but the fun and details focus in vastly different areas. This is why the overlapping targets are the older, female readers.

Release Patterns: I can see Twilight pulling a HP-like stunt with the movies - dragging them out over far longer than they ought to be - but I think it was smart not to do the books the same way. Harry’s saga (in book and movie form both) will have spanned about 12 years by the time it’s complete. The only reason people my age and older are still entranced is that it was an integral part of our upbringing and we can’t leave it unfinished. As long as the movies are still coming out, Harry is still picking up new fans, which keeps book sales going even though there’s nothing fresh on that front. Twilight movies will help with book sales in the same way, but their original target is going to grow up and get over it. So it’s a good thing all the books are out. The original fan club wouldn’t likely come back for more.

Twilight and Danielle Steel

When I was younger - 9, 11, something like that - I had a trashy romance phase. I would rush home after school to catch every possible minute of General Hospital, and my library lending history only further confirmed my true self to be a bored, middle-aged, under-sexed housewife. In my defense, I didn’t understand the naughty bits. I just liked the drama, excitement, and intrigue; I was captivated by the idea of falling in love in just that way.

Twilight is trashy romance for teens. If I were a decade younger, or even in high school, I would be obsessed. At the *ahem* ripe and mature age of 21, I still appreciate it for what it’s worth. Not literary genius by any means, not a brilliant exposition on any topic, but some good almost-clean wholly-engrossing fun. Something to sigh over and lose yourself in and yearn for, with some irrational part of your brain.

Props to Ms. Meyer on writing very graphic intimate scenes that safely illustrate nothing indecent but certainly have an indecent effect. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt tantalized by “sweet breath in my face” and “golden eyes boring into my soul” in quite that way. Heh. I turned so red that I was afraid to read in public.

Twilight and Real Life

You can picture it happening for real - the rich, aloof family in the dreary little town; mysterious inexplicable deaths and miracles. But the realistic context isn’t where Twilight’s ability to connect to the actual life is most valuable.

I agreed to read Twilight just to see what the hype was about, but the single strongest reason I read the entire series and came to like it was that it reminded me of some amazing things I’d forgotten, and was happy to remember. I remembered what it was like to be 16 and utterly consumed with another person. To fall in love young enough to be without caution or restraint. I remembered the drama and constant desperate analysis, and working around what was forbidden. I remembered the electricity of every tiny moment of contact and the feeling that it was never enough. I remember the unthinking and automatic commitment, despite not knowing where it was going, because I was so lucky to have it at that moment.

In the intervening years, I’ve gotten older and harder and too much more practical and careful. I could never give myself up with the same abandon now, which makes me a bit wistful even though I know that it’s better, safer. I suppose I’m fortunate to still have the same person to remember it with, though. <3

So thank you, Twilight, for reminding me of several private but vital phases of my life that I’m glad I haven’t forgotten.

Here’s the second installment of those personal finance notes I promised. This module was more complicated -mortgages, insurance, financing a house and car. Nasty stuff, but vital nonetheless. Yay for being an adult.

(You can find part one here)

Personal Finance - Risk Management and Securing Assets

http://www.web2expo.com/webexsf2009/public/content/landing?_discount=websf09pd1

Posted via web from namita’s posterous

Google 3, Mozilla 0.

Once upon a time, Google played warm and fuzzy and gave non-profit Mozilla a bunch of money to embed their smooth and sexy search in Mozilla’s super-cool new browser, Firefox. So far, so good; everyone’s happy. Google search grows and they aren’t being evil, and Mozilla has the money for R&D on awesome new things.

Years pass, and Google quietly develops their own browser in-house. Plenty of people figured they might do that, but plenty of others figured there was no point - wasn’t that what the Mozilla partnership was for? Personally, I don’t know what that partnership was for. Mozilla has plenty of money for now, but Google isn’t going to be using that distribution channel after 2011, so they’re going to have to find a new source for 88% of their income. Uh-oh. Like any company whose business lies on the web, that won’t be easy.

Why did Google renew the Firefox deal right before releasing Chrome? I can’t find numbers on what kind of market share Google grabbed through the Firefox channel, but given that the open-source browser is still working on critical mass, I’m going to assume it wasn’t a great ROI for the search behemoth.

Anyway, today it appears that others are jumping on the screw-Firefox-let’s-use-Chrome bandwagon: Flock, a ’social browser’ with less market share than the discontinued Netscape (even though it’s been around for 3 years; I tried it back in ‘06 and didn’t derive any value from it. For their sake I hope it’s improved). They claim Mozilla folks are unresponsive and Chrome is easier to work with. Is this the beginning of another browser trend? Or is it a silly decision by one small company that just happened to attract TechCrunch’s attention (Flock is a TC darling, after all)? Is anyone else going this direction? I’m waiting to hear the followup on this story.

Something else to think about - the mobile web is exploding. Microsoft bundles IE with Windows Mobile , just like they do with computer operating systems. Android phones will soon offer a version of Chrome. Apple’s Safari is spreading with iPhones. Even Opera, barely found on 1 of 50 computers, has ridiculous command over the tiny screen. But who’s pushing mobile Firefox?

I’ve told a lot of you about the personal finance class I’m taking - one of my very last fun classes at Cal, *sigh.* Anyway, it’s an incredibly valuable and practical course because it lays many of the (admittedly common sense) guidelines for planning out your financial life. It’s alarming how many people my age have no idea how to manage money. Some can earn it, everyone knows how to spend it, most of us are well-versed in asking for it… but hey guys, we’re about to graduate, and that means financial independence along with the salary, endless bar tabs, and swanky yuppie apartment somewhere in the Mission.

Here’s the intro: the basics of credit, budgeting, loans & mortgages, and taxes, for your perusing pleasure. Enjoy.

I ditched (one) class Friday afternoon to go judge the Global Social Venture Competition. Someone had reached out to ST@B to see if anyone wanted to be a student judge for the Berkeley applications, so I signed up. After all, I’m interested in how ventures’ intentions can actually be socially beneficial. I didn’t know anything about it prior to - or after - volunteering, but I figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get some ‘formal’ experience/training interacting with business plans.

I’ve had plenty of exposure to business plans via classes, internships, and talking shop with my dad, but I have this weird habit of seeking further instruction on certain topics whether I think I need it or not (why I keep going to stuff to “learn about social media,” for example). Story of my life, actually. I know a lot of stuff, but I’ve never gotten any kind of structured lessons on much of it, so I don’t know if I’m doing it right/well/properly. Perhaps that’s what business school is for, but that remains to be seen. I’ll let you know in a few years if I decide to go.

So I show up and walk into a room full of MBA students. Oops… didn’t get the memo on that one. Luckily someone asks me if I’m in one of his classes, so I suppose I didn’t appear too out of place. Actually, a few people at the She’s Geeky Unconference also assumed I was a grad student; I wonder what makes people think that. Anyway, instead of swooshing right over my head, the task at hand was totally manageable.

I’m rambling as usual, so here’s my point: It turns out I am well able/qualified to read and evaluate executive summaries that had taken MBA students presumably months of research and planning and writing to formulate. Yay for me, right? The sad part is, some of them were awful (I’m not an MBA so I don’t have to be politically correct!). I encountered badly written plans, full of typos and illogical sentence structure, and one that could have been amazing - if the core idea made any sense at all. Still another looked like the product of an hour of brainstorming over coffee with zero research backing it up (at least not in the summary). There are real judges that will decide which plans continue in the competition, but since they asked for my input, I strongly feel that some of those should not.

Does this mean I’m The Shit when it comes to business plans? Hah. I think it suggests that I can trust a lot of what I know even if it isn’t formally delivered information. It may also mean that I can continue learning for my career in the way that I have been so far - nonacademically and sometimes haphazardly. I’m smart enough to discern what’s important. Indicator: when people ask what I’m majoring in (Linguistics, International Political Economy) and what kind of work I’m looking to do after grad (the non-technical side of the tech industry), they no longer ask what the relationship that can possibly be. I just talk about what I’ve done outside and around school, and they’re satisfied.

Well, at least it looks like I know what I’m doing.

(okay, so this isn’t quite live. It was messy and contained too much stuff I didn’t want to publish so I edited very very slightly before releasing. *insert props for Wordpress iPhone app here* *also insert plea for netbook*)

Session 1: Being a woman entrepreneur

I think I’m fortunate to be a female in a ridiculously male-dominated industry. I never really realized that until the current session. I don’t encounter “boys’ club” discrimination like many of these women say they do. I don’t think people see me as bitchy, or inferior, or as the secretary. I think an advantage of how people see you is, well, that they see you. And then you gauge how to deal with them accordingly - impression management was a big point here.

check out: Springboardenterprises.org

Importance of business plan - half say very, half say eh. I say very. Will explain why in a GSVC post.

Session 2: Social media beyond Twitter

I’m hoping this session will help me figure out how to get my get-people-online deal going.

What’s your aim? Personal brand, community management, customer acquisition, sales? Be where your audience as competitors are (duh).

Note to self: check out Pipl - the ‘creepy’ way to stalk people on the internet

Private vs. public personas: should they be separate? People that think so seem to generally be concerned about security and conservative audiences. I said no and I think the gap fell largely around generational lines.

Check out radian6.

Adobe and social media: press releases on Twitter, blog posts, facebook… Sounds like that’s all. Okay.

Importance of consistent branding? Maybe not so much.

Social media is a channel for marketing, PR, engineering, customer support, etc. (no way)

Finally, something not-Twitter: RSS to collect information. (no WAY!)

Basically, nothing I didn’t already know or haven’t yet beaten to death here. I was intrigued by the “beyond Twitter” part of the title. Oh well.

Session 3: Voiding your warranty

I came here to see what other toys I could screw around with besides my jailbreak-able iPhone. They showed us a lot of snazzy hacked electronics, and I saw E-Ink for real for the first time since I heard about it ~3yrs ago! The women running this session were REAL hardcore geeks and they were awesome.

Adafruit.com. Wiihomebrew.com. Xoxbox.

Session 4: Finding a job in this economy

I won’t include the usual suggestions because everyone knows them already, or should. Experience, networking, job boards, etc. You know the drill.

check out Sdforum.org

Volunteer to get time away and do good things and get glowing recommendations.

PARS: problem assessment result solution

Sunnyvale EDD one stop career counseling (free!) novaworks.org

Simplyhired.com, Indeed.com, Startuply.com, Cupertino rotary club

New rounds of funding have to be publicly announced, look for places that info might be

People here are uncomfortable asking for help. I don’t think I am, and I think that’s a good thing.

Sometimes a person with less than enough experience is better hire because they are trainable and not set in their ways.

Ebawis.org (women in science)

Session 5: Semantic web

I was super excited about this. Soo ready to hammer out a solid definition for what this really means.

First things first, apparently web 2.0 is “silly.” I disagree. We won’t get into that.

Does semantic web rely on tags? It shouldn’t because people suck at tagging. Myself included; it’s a wonder anyone ever finds my blog.

Is it for marketing? For ad suggesting? Cultural context is important.

Important info sources: APIs and geotagging, IMDB, Yelp, Amazon (opened their database).

Natural language is important because not all web content is in databases.

See ‘linking open data,’ Freebase

Conversation has been on the verge of technical linguistic topics many times, but so far I’m the only one that’s said anything close to that effect.

Web grows decentralized and organically. Will that die with the semantic web? Doubt it. Moving on…

Open social graph (google), Alex Iskold (adaptive blue)

I introduced this crowd to Searchme and Cuil. Someone else just brought up Twine - oops, I think I played around with it in its early days then forgot about it. I also mentioned my disappointment with Powerset.

There are lots of librarians here.

Check out Aurora browser

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Those are my random cursory observations from today; full detailed notes from all sessions on both days will be available on a wiki at shesgeeky.org.

Today I signed up for Path101, a career guidance site currently in alpha. I forget how I heard about it - probably Twitter, because that’s how I get most of my information these days. Anyway, I decided to sign up because I (a) like to play with new toys and (b) am trying to get a career started here, and any advice is welcome.

They offer a ‘personality test’ that gauges your traits and skills and presents you with career options accordingly. I have my doubts about the test, since all questions are vague and answered by a sliding scale or ranking options, but it’s a good start and leads to some degree of introspection if nothing else. There’s also some form of resume analysis, where you upload your resume (didn’t work) or link them to your LinkedIn; I’ve given them the latter but haven’t done anything with it yet. Lastly, I checked out the questions section and answered a few. It appears that more features - additional quizzes and such - are in the works.

The site is a good idea and has the potential to turn into a valuabe resource, especially with so many people now out of work (or about to be) and average-career-switches-per-American on the rise. They don’t specialize in any particular field, which could be a good or a bad thing, I haven’t decided. It’ll either give them a foot in the door in a variety of industries, or cause them to miss out on offering services that could make them indispensable in a particular field. Maybe they could increase traffic via an application on LinkedIn, or maybe they’d be better off doing that instead of a destination site. I suppose it’s too early to tell. I definitely support their mission, though, so I’ll be checking in periodically and playing around some more