It’s been 1.5 year since I attended Atlanta Startup Weekend. Among startup events taking place in Istanbul such as etohum, webrazzi meetups etc. Startup Weekend Istanbul was the best in terms of bringing a diverse set of high quality people together. The selection process to attend the event combined with great sponsors to make it free resulted in a great Startup Weekend. Short meetings are only good for “networking”, these long events allow you to make stronger connections.

Predictably Irrational is a book about human behavior and our decision making process from a behavioral economics perspective. Each chapter describes a force that affects our decision making process, such as social norms, emotions, relativity etc. The author presents a different perspective compared to standard economics, where we assume that all agents are rational.

What makes Predictably Irrational interesting is that the author has conducted several small experiments among students to back up his claims. These experiments show interesting human behavior that is contrary to what we expect.

Admitting the problem is the first step to a solution. I’ve been exercising on and off for 6 years and given the amount of time and effort I’ve put into it, I’m very far away from the body I deserve. I’ve come up with several conclusions:

i) You can not improve what you don’t measure
For years, I kept going to our local gym where they provided you with all the equipment, but didn’t really measure your progress or keep an eye on you. I kept exercising, without considering if I was improving or not. I was guilt free, thinking that I’m taking action to improve, but I was missing an important piece: diet. I was eating relentlessly, taking more calories than needed, eating desserts and drinking alcohol.

Now that the Netflix Prize is over, Github has a new competition for those interested in recommendation systems. GitHub wants to recommend its users repositories to watch. They have a data set that tells which user is watching which repository. They have removed one watched repository from 4788 users in this data set, so your job is to guess which repositories were removed. Here are some reasons to check this competition out:

Click is a book by Bill Tancer, founder of Hitwise - a company that tracks online usage. This book is about understanding human behavior and drawing conclusions from aggregate online behavior such as search trends. It has a very interesting start talking about adult sites:

• Throughout the year, Thanksgiving is the day with least visits to adult sites since family members are around.
• On a daily basis, adult sites receive most visitors on Fridays, and least on Sundays. Having least visitors on Sunday is explained by religious beliefs but Friday is pretty counter-intuitive.
• 70% of the visitors are male, female visitors prefer erotic literature, whereas male counterparts prefer pictures and videos.

Another interesting claim is that the competitors of adult sites are social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook because their traffic trends show strong negative correlation.

I like reading/learning more than thinking/imagining. But this is a learned habit, and I’d like to change that. So here’s a little thought exercise:

Imagine you are living in a smart home where all your electronic appliances are connected to the Internet. Just like web sites do, your home appliances have APIs that let you programmatically access and control them. Not just yours, but all your neighbors are connected to this home appliance network as well, so you can interact with your neighbor’s devices as well. What kind of mashups would you create?

I don’t read a lot of marketing books but somehow I got interested in this one via recommendations on Friendfeed. But wait, this isn’t a marketing book. I would call it a book on strategy with marketing theme. It’s an old book, written in 1993, but it was very surprising to find most of the examples and brands relevant and still in existince. Somehow the world doesn’t change as rapidly as we think.

Reading mostly non-fiction, Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favorite authors. I feel as if he’s a writer of my generation since he published his books in 2000 (The Tipping Point) and 2005 (Blink). Both of them were best-sellers, and very good reads. This time, he’s arguing that “there is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success.” in his new book Outliers. Gladwell makes several arguments that I found interesting:

This post is intended for people who will attend a Startup Weekend event for the first time.

Why attend a Startup Weekend?

• It’s a better networking event compared to daily events. You’ll cooperate together to achieve a common goal, you’ll suffer together, you’ll have fun together. Overall, you’ll spend more time together, and form stronger connections.
• If you have acquaintances that you think highly of, but never worked with before, Startup Weekend is the perfect opportunity. You can think of it as a laid-back 54 hour interview for identifying possible startup partners.
• You’ll meet like-minded people. You’ll have fun. You might even start a company!

What do I need to do before the event?

I spent this weekend participating in Atlanta Startup Weekend 2 If you’re not familiar with Startup Weekend idea, this is a good introduction.

Friday at 7 PM:  Ninety random people with different backgrounds (software development, design, marketing, business etc.) gathered in a room to work on ideas that would lead to start-up companies.

Although some people were there to start businesses, my goal was to meet like-minded people, experience this unconventional event and have fun by working on a cool idea.