Biz Dev, Entrepreneur, and Dwolla. Previously at Aviary. Forbes Contributor.
Alex's Tech Thoughts
I’ve been thinking about tools I use everyday and wondered how they stacked up to others.
Here is what I use:
1) Twitter (news)
2) Facebook (distribution of my blog and keeping up with friends)
3) LinkedIn (getting updates on who moved jobs, looking up people, connecting with others)
4) Google+ and Skype (google hangouts with Dwolla team for daily meeting and skype for other calls)
5) Google Docs (I rarely use Microsoft Word or Excel- only if I’m in a spot with no internet)
6) Tumblr (post my blog on Tumblr)
7) Gmail and Gchat (to email and chat)
8) Instagram (when I take photos)
9) Foursquare (using Explore to find places around me or to let friends know where I am)
10) Citibank and American Express (check on my finances)
11) Reddit and Hacker News (I’m mostly a lurker, but peruse both each day)
12) Dwolla (I work there and I pay people back with Dwolla)
13) Eventbrite (I typically have an event going on, so I check Eventbrite frequently)
14) Verizon, Time Warner, Con Edison (check my bills almost daily)
15) Games: Angry Birds, Derby Jackpot (Angry Birds played typically in the subway if no internet)
16) Spotify (I listen at my desk and with mobile app- easily worth the $10 a month)
17) Brewster (I have found it to be a much better address book)
18) Dropbox (sharing files and such)
I’m sure I am missing a few, but that is a good high level overview.
What am I missing? What do you use that is awesome and you can’t live without?
Leave it in the comments below.
One of the hardest strategies in partnerships, business development, and when building companies is betting on growing with partners. But when it works— it can pay off in spades.
Think of Zynga. They bet on the Facebook platform and it paid off handsomely. Other ideas that jump to mind are any popular App that benefited greatly from the iTunes App store.
While I was working at Aviary, there were a few small Apps that we definitely benefited from as they were growing with us (and fueled even greater growth). Betting on and putting time into those relationships improved the company’s situation and, I’m convinced, had a positive effect on building an even greater product.
At Dwolla I try to find companies that are already doing big things, as well as looking out for the up and coming opportunities so that we have the opportunity to grow our payment platform with them. I think this will lead to big things happening in the upcoming months.
I used to be wary of trying new things. I didn’t join Facebook and Twitter until 2010. I also didn’t get an iPhone till 2012. I had been, historically, a pretty late adopter on the technology side of things. I’ve been trying to change that the last two years.
Bijan Sabet from Spark Capital is a notorious early-adopter. Everything from Instagram, foursquare, Tumblr, and others, he was pretty early on the platform. This is why he has become an investor of many of them. He uses the platform early and really tries to understand how the community forms.
I think that once a week we should all try out a new service, use a product offering, immerse ourselves in a new community. It doesn’t take much time and you will probably, in aggregate, gain a ton of utility.
What should I try this week?
OAuth which stands for open authorization, has become quite popular in the past few years. Most regular consumers use it every day and don’t really know that they are. Whenever you go to a website and you click “Login with Facebook” or “Login with Twitter” you are using OAuth. Websites like Pinterest, Foursquare, Skillshare, and others use various one-click sign-in capability.
I like OAuth. Let me rephrase that, I like OAuth for sites that I enjoy and trust. For example, I love Skillshare. I use FB Oauth to sign in. I linked up my Twitter, FB, LinkedIn to better improve my profile. It would be a pain to have to recreate my profile for every new site I join. The ones I like, I love connecting via OAuth.
OAuth allows me to share my private resources (e.g. photos, videos, contact lists) stored on one site (usually FB or Twitter) with another site without having to hand out my info to the new site.
The one issue with OAuth is allowing it for sites I don’t like or when sites wants more permissions than I am comfortable accepting. I’m not sure where, but I remember seeing a study showing some data around the more permissions asked for the higher chance of the user bailing. I think each extra permission added had a drop off of 20%.
Bottom line: If I join a site that I enjoy and plan to use for a long time, I want to Oauth. If it isn’t a site I like or they ask for too many permissions, I think that Oauth is annoying and don’t like to accept.
