Just launched another fun project called What Color is Twitter? Predictably, you can find it at: http://www.whatcoloristwitter.com. Here’s a widget you can embed if you want to know every 10 minutes what color Twitter is.

Great infographic from Mashable on the current state of tech & services that make up the average startup’s arsenal. Almost as cool as the spying features you get with http://builtwith.com/, it’s a good validation of the things most of us take for granted. Some surprises (Evernote? Omnigraffle?), but generally a good gauge of what’s out there, what’s hot, and what others are doing. If you’re stumped, just go with Google…

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I had a great professor in business school who used to quote that to us all the time. It was only later I found out there’s a second part. The whole quote goes like this:

Out of chaos, revenue; Out of discipline, profit.

That stuck with me, as it really does hold true across industries and time. Perhaps a look at the ad tech landscape (below) can highlight why there is such a tumultuous upheaval constantly taking place. It’s an ongoing arms race rife with the kind of nuance and industry jargon that ends up making people rich. I wish I understood more, but this is certainly an interesting view of the landscape. Here is the graphic, in all of its dizzying glory:

Chaos, for sure. But discipline?

Click on the photo for a full-size view, courtesy of http://www.adexchanger.com/.    

OMG. What an awesome tool. I just discovered Twilio and I am totally addicted… I mean, I had heard about how easy and powerful the tool is, but wow. The community is intensely helpful, and the documentation makes it easy to follow along and create powerful voice & sms interactivity for your applications.

Case in point: long distance for my parents.

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I always thought people who used this phrase were assholes. Now I’m one too…

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I’ve got a meeting with Bartek Ringwelski, the founder of SkillSlate, this week. We chatted briefly at the Hunch Lunch, but I’m really curious to hear about how he and his team are attacking the problem of fragmentation and (un)sophistication in the urban labor market. My first startup, Fresh Maid Cleaning, attempted to fix this for one vertical, and we tried to do it by intermediating the channel.

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I accidentally crashed a lunch at Hunch, kindly hosted by Chris Dixon and the rest of the team, for a bunch of CBS students. I was an undergrad at Columbia, so the organizer was OK with it.

As usual, Chris makes some great points about entrepreneurship and the VC ecosystem, and reinvigorated my quickly fading endurance. It’s tough out here, but I guess it’s all worth it in the end. As a bonus, I ran into Bartek from SkillSlate, who I was going to be meeting this week anyway. The two of them gave a nice talk. Headlines:

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Like anyone interested in startups, I try to keep an ear to the ground so I can find cool ideas, meet interesting people, or run quickly away from rumbling herds (game mechanics, badges, group purchasing). I’m always trying to hatch an interesting idea and refining kernels of innovation with friends (usually over beer). I tend to keep a mental list, or sometimes a notepad, full of these half-baked ideas in hopes of returning with a fresh face (and lower Blood Alcohol Level) to revisit.

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The idea for this post came to me after I saw the GroupMe / FastSociety dueling presentations at New York Tech Meetup on Tuesday. There was an article lauding the antics of the FastSociety guys in SF Gate (here), but I totally disagree. I think it smacks of insecurity (or immaturity) to go out there and bash competitors at a friendly public event.

Writing about startup rules is something like trying to create an organization for anarchists - it’s antithetical to what they’re all about. If they liked rules and conformity, they probably wouldn’t have chosen to start something new in the first place. Anyhow, these are the first five things I thought of, and my humble rationale as to why. I’m sure everyone has a different list, and I’m certain wiser people than I have probably written about it, but it’s a useful thought exercise nonetheless. This list is a work in progress, and I’d love some feedback/comments on what else belongs on this list (or doesn’t)…

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Most of my spare time during first half of 2010 was spent helping my friend Minal with an innovative travel startup called CleverBootz. She, her friend Shiyan Koh and I worked tirelessly and made it into the semi-finals at the Harvard Business School’s annual Business Plan Competition. The site will solve a problem most people face before they book a trip - deciding where to go and what to do. CleverBootz uses your social graph to help you plan your vacation and recruit your close friends to join you. Pretty ambitious goal, but I think Minal can pull it off.

Part of our strategy was to create an active travel blog to whet people’s appetites about traveling and build a following before launching the initial features. It’s a long rollout, so the blog will be pretty active for a while. Minal asked me to write up a blog post or two to help seed some content, so I wrote about my trip to Laos…

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