I was always more impressed by Google, because of its contribution to technology and company culture. So I read books about Google like “The Google Story” and “The Search”. Before watching the Facebook movie, I read old articles dating back to 2004 about Zuckerberg in Harvard’s student magazine, The Crimson. It was cool to see internet history. Watching “Social Network” helped me realize that there were many interesting details about the early days of Facebook as well. I became more intrigued after watching the movie, so I decided to read “The Facebook Effect”. The book covers different aspects of the early days compared to the movie, and moves on to the later stages of the company as well. It contains first-hand information, with many names and details, which makes it real and valuable. It made me as if I was part of the early days, and was a great motivational read. I even learned a few lessons from this book. Since the early days, they made very correct strategic moves that determined the success of the company:

Guy Kawasaki’s Art of The Start is a book for entrepreneurs. It contains guidance about different phases of a startup, such as positioning, pitching, writing a business plan, bootstrapping, recruiting, raising capital etc.

One cool fact about this book is that he did a competition to choose the book cover. Alternative covers that were not chosen are also included if you look at the back-side of the book cover. In a way, Guy Kawasaki was doing crowd-sourcing in 2004 :)

Jason Fried and David H. Hansson of 37signals have been an inspiration to the startup community with their strong stand on how they do business. Their first book “Getting Real” targeted developers of web-based software. Rework, their latest book, contains more generic ideas that could be useful for any small business. It consists of 100 ideas, each 2-3 pages long. If you have been following their talks and blog, you’ll see many ideas repeated over and over. I bought this book knowing that I won’t find many new ideas, however it’s nice to have all these gems distilled together in one book. You’ll be reading things you already know, but the important thing is to apply these ideas to your life. I’ll leave you with 10 of my favorite ideas extracted from this book:

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.