Pajama Entrepreneur

Stylefeeder.com is the latest personal online shopping site that allows you to bookmark items you like (an iPhone, Gucci shoes, Dior bag), find “style twins” (people who share your taste), get product recommendations specific to your taste and solicit advice from others in the community about items you are thinking of buying. It’s a social network and bookmarking site around shopping that tries to match people’s tastes. Stylefeeder makes money by taking a cut on purchases made via your recommendations.

I signed up for a Stylefeeder account and found it very easy and fun to use. The best way to make use of Stylefeeder is to install a browser plug-in button so that whenever you find an item in an online shop, you can simply add it to your Stylefeeder list.

For example, you go to a store, click on an item, click the Stylefeeder button to add to your Stylefeed. A box pops up that allows you to pick the photo you want associated with the item and to edit any information about it. Click “add” and that’s it. You can also edit to add tags to the item, and add it to any groups that you have joined in the Stylefeeder community.

Stylefeeder is like Kaboodle, the other social shopping site that’s been around for a while and has a larger audience. Kaboodle describes itself as “social shopping community where people discover, recommend and share products. Kaboodle’s powerful shopping tools allow people to organize their shopping through lists, discover new things from people with similar style, get discounts on popular products and find best prices. At the heart of Kaboodle is a fun and engaging community of people who love to shop.”

Both sites encourage users to make lists of favorites, to tag items, create or join groups, make recommendations, rate items, etc. Kaboodle was recently sold to Hearst Magazines. The rumored price is $40 million (Kaboodle raised $5 million in VC funding).

I like Stylefeeder more than Kaboodle because Stylefeeder looks better and is easier to use. It’s less cluttered, more “Web 2.0″. Stylefeeder also lets you place widgets on your blog, website, Friendster and MySpace pages, and it has a Facebook application. But Kaboodle has the advantage in terms of the size of the community so if you are looking to join a group of beauty junkies who have already posted a lot of items, Kaboodle is better . . . for now.

There is such a demand for online sites that do taste search, not just for shopping, but also for travel, entertainment, eating out, and home decor. I expect Stylefeeder to attract a large audience very quickly.

Stylefeeder and Kaboodle founders motivated by similar problem: finding things that match their taste

The similarities between Stylefeeder and Kaboodle extend also to the founders. Both sites were started by couples who had difficulty shopping for things online to decorate their homes. In the case of Stylefeeder, she couldn’t find decent lighting in the US (see http://www.stylefeeder.com/about.html). Kaboodle’s About page says the founders were remodeling their home and couldn’t find products that matched their tastes.

Stylefeeder’s founder goes into his obsession with taste search, finding whom to trust when it comes to restaurant reviews, etc. (http://blog.tech.stylefeeder.com/).

I love Wordpress, the software behind this blog and Rosecantine. It’s easy to use, fun and versatile. And there’s a huge community of developers writing widgets and plugins, and creating beautiful templates for it. Mashable posted a list of more than 300 Wordpress tools so if you have not yet bookmarked that page, do so now.

I am on a roll. This week I weeded out time-wasting activities such as Twitter and Jaiku. I closed my account at Linked In, stopped responding to stupid emails, and deleted 75% of my RSS feeds. To get organized and save even more time, I decided to try Backpack, an online application from the amazing folks at 37 Signals, creators of Basecamp (project management and collaboration), Highrise (simple CRM) and CampFire (group chat). There’s a free and paid version. The free version does not include the Calendar and limits the number of pages you can create.

Here is how I use Backpack:

• Created FAQ for journalists who call me and ask the same questions about municipal wireless networks
• Make daily list of things to do
• Created trip planning page for upcoming trips with links to airline ticket, hotel reservation numbers, maps, interesting places to visit, restaurants to try
• Canned email responses I can just cut and paste into a response
• use Calendar to send me SMS alert before appointments

There are many more uses I will find for it, but I just started today and already I feel very organized and calm.

If you want to try it, please click on this link .

Om Malik wrote in this blog about a number of people are turning away from Facebook because it wastes a lot of time (and by implication, does not yield the appropriate return):

We are not using the privacy settings of Facebook, and are too polite to say no to invitations from people who want to friend us. No wonder, the social environment is starting to resemble a crowded nightclub. (You go to clubs to be seen, not talk.) … What we need is something more intimate, more private. It’s not about the number of friends, but it’s about connection.

I wrote a post a few weeks ago on why I’m not buying the Facebook hype. Sure it has an open API, very nice for developers, but now that thousands upon thousands of applications can launch on Facebook, it will, like all portals, suffer from having too much. You will have to wade through endless lists of apps. Another giant time suck.

I took several steps this week to weed out the useless activities that only clogged up my schedule and created stress:

(1) I unsubscribed from more than a dozen mailing lists.

(2) I stopped using Twitter and Jaiku. They were novel and fun in the first week, but extremely annoying in the end. I did not want to twit whenever I was going out running, doing grocery shopping, etc. The people who asked to be my Twitter “friends” would write updates almost every 5 minutes it seemed, so that my Twitter screen would be filled with their useless garbage. Anyone who twits that much is, in my opinion, a TWIT.

(3) I deleted 75% of the RSS feeds on my RSS news reader. 75% of people have nothing important to say to me.

(4) This week, I did not respond to time-wasting emails from people who wanted me to do their work for them. In a number of cases (lazy journalists), I did respond, but gave them a link to the appropriate online resource where they could find the answers themselves.

Deleted my account at Linked In

The boldest move of all was to leave Linked In. Read here about why I left the networking site. It was utterly useless and only a burden (all those people I couldn’t care less about wanting to connect, asking questions and worst of all, wanting me to endorse them).

False sense of guilt is the biggest offender

As Om Malik mentions in his Facebook fatigue post, the reason we accept invitations to be friends with someone on Facebook or other social networking sites, or in my case, to endorse someone on Linked In, is that we feel guilty about turning them down. We don’t want to hurt their feelings. So we do all the things we don’t want to do and waste time and energy. I decided that my time is very precious and that if someone I don’t know wants to waste it, I need not feel guilty about saying no.

A lot of social networking sites today, including Facebook, have privacy filters so we should use them more often. It’s time to put the guilt back where it belongs: on lazy people who want you to do their work for them, pathetic connection hounds who have no friends in real life, people who have no direction or purpose other than to waste their own time, and “noisy” people (those who run around doing ten things at the same time - multitasking - but accomplish absolutely nothing).

We need private networks that are like private clubs

I am sure these exist already, but the time is really ripe for these things to spring out of the ground. Ning, a social networking site, allows you to create a private social network. It’s time to bring out the virtual doorman.

I had just finished writing my post “Why Linked In does not work” where I explain why I left the business networking site (decluttering my life, stop wasting time), when I saw this post by Om Malik entitled “Can privacy be a premium service” about whether there is a business in providing people more privacy. Om says:

Time and privacy are two aspects of our modern lives that are in short supply . . . Time and its management are highly personal issues, but when it comes to privacy, the chinks outweigh the average person’s capabilities. And that prompted me to as the question: can privacy be offered as a value-added (premium) service by carriers and web service operators such as Google.

The most obvious way to save time is to:
- unsubscribe from mailing lists
- pare down the list of blogs on one’s RSS news reader
- delete (and refuse to respond to) time-wasting emails (from people who want you to do their work for them)
- stop using Twitter or Jaiku
- minimize use of social networking sites

To protect one’s privacy, it’s best not to join any online business or social networks. But there are certain services that may be very useful, e.g. Google search and location-based services, that inform others of what you are up to, either in your head on physically. Om points out that search engines do a poor job in privacy protection probably because they sell ads around the searches.

Is the concern over privacy an age-related one, with the under 30 generation not at all bothered about having their revealing photos and intimate details online for all to see?

It’s been a week since the launch of the iPhone. Walt Mossberg (Wall Street Journal) and David Pogue (New York Times) have posted their very positive reviews. A lot of people in San Francisco rushed out to buy it including my friends. At dinner the other night, I had a chance to play with the iPhone and I’m very impressed by the interface and the quality of the screen. If you own a Mac like I do, a lot of things such as widgets will be familiar. In fact, it feels like a Mac but on a portable device. Web pages are easy to read thanks to the beautiful crisp screen. Video is also extremely impressive. It also has Wi-Fi.

With all that going for it, I am disappointed with the choices Apple has made during this first launch:

- You need to sign a 2-year contract with AT&T. It would have been better if the iPhone were unlocked and you could pop in the SIM card of your choice. More people would have bought it, not just in the US but also in Europe and Asia.

- They crippled the Bluetooth functionality on the phone so you can’t send and receive files from other Bluetooth devices such as laptops. I don’t understand this decision, given that AT&T isn’t even subsidizing the phone. US carriers have a bad habit of castrating mobile devices.

- The first version of the iPhone does not support 3G, only the slower, more ancient EDGE network in the US.

- You cannot put applications on the iPhone. If you like Gizmo Project or Skype, there’s no way you can install it on the iPhone and use it to make calls via Wi-Fi. If Apple had opened it up for any applications, there would be a universe of applications developers making apps designed for mobility. Too bad.

No wonder hackers are already at work trying to open up the iPhone. And there are reports that they are making progress towards unlocking it. DVD Jon claims to have figured out a way to activate the iPhone without AT&T: The point of Johansen’s coding exercise, as he explains it, is that there are many potential iPhone purchasers who do not want to enter into a 2-year contract with AT&T, but do want to use the device for WiFi, web, email, video, music, calendar, contact management, and other features — basically, treat it like a bomb-ass iPod, forget about the phone part. (from BoingBoing)

This weekend, there’s even an iPhone Developer Camp at the Adobe offices in San Francisco! There’s such a demand to open this beautiful, revolutionary device. I don’t understand why Apple has launched it locked, crippled and castrated.

I would have run out and bought the iPhone but I refuse to do that until it becomes a computer in your pocket, as it is designed to be, with freedom of choice for the owner. I want to put MY apps on it, pick my own mobile carrier, and use it as I see fit (3G or Wi-Fi, depending on the circumstances and my budget).

Resources: www.iphonehacks.com

I have been a Mac user since 2002, when the first generation of newly designed iMacs were introduced by Apple. Before that I used Windows on a boxy Dell desktop and a heavy Dell laptop. Today I have an iBook and would never even consider going back to Windows.

First, Macs are just more stylish. People like to be surrounded by beautiful objects and the Mac, in its desktop and laptop configuration, is a beauty.  Second, I never have to deal with malware, spyware and all other types of horrible-ware that Windows users have to wrestle with everyday. Macs are a big timesaver. Third, Mac software is easier to use, again, a big timesaver for busy entrepreneurs.

If you have a small company or are operating on your own, you have no IT department to call on when Windows starts acting up. Macs are easier to maintain.

But when I try to convince people to switch to the Mac, they say Windows machines are cheaper. That’s the conventional wisdom. But are they really? According to Scot Finnie, in his Computerworld article, Macs are cheaper than PCs with the same features. What makes Macs seem more expensive is that there are not as many mid-price range Macs as PCs. Read Scot’s article and doubt no more.