The most important thing, in my opinion, that goes into building a great product and a company is ‘passion‘. Not many people will differ with me. Atleast not Edwin Aoki a technology fellow at AOL. Speaking at the Future of Web Applications conference at London, he urged developers to create applications out of passion and for the community rather than doing it just for money.
Passion fuels the enthusiasm and optimism required to keep going during good times and bad. Ofcourse, business plans and revenue models do matter at the end of the day but starting a company with a pure business perspective would be akin to working backwards; which is not successful always. Even if it is, the impact it makes is feeble.
On the other hand, starting a company with a passion to create something useful, meaningful and that is of value to the end consumer will sooner or later lead to business plans and revenue models that were not apparent before. Apple is a classic example of a company built with passion as its lifeblood. Driven by passion, Apple made Ken Olsen, founder and CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation, eat his own words : “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.“
My most favorite task at Careeb is web design. I like it much more than writing fancy Ajax or Javascript code or designing a short and powerful PHP function. When I get into design work I spend hours at a stretch, but never does it feel boring or burdensome.
Joshua Porter, a web designer has crafted 5 web design principles. One of them is “Great design is invisible“. Joshua hits the nail in the head with this one. It is absolutely true that great design is invisible. We take it for granted and it looks obvious.
Me and Imdad felt exactly the same thing while coding the search and sorting functionality in the Contacts and Browse Network Members pages. So much effort and work goes into designing a good user interface but at the end of the day it all looks obvious and natural.
More from Joshua:
“An interesting property of great design is that it is taken for granted. It works so well that we forget that creative effort was involved to bring it about. Sometimes, like with the lowly spoon, the object is so simplistic that it seems obvious, and we disregard that at one point in history it wasn’t. Other times, like with the automobile, the object is so sophisticated yet easy-to-use that we’re blinded to the fact that millions and millions of human-hours went into getting it to this point. That’s a shame…every great design has a rich history. And every design has behind it a designer or designers who tried to make the world a better place by solving some problem or another.
Bad design is obvious because it hurts to use. It is awkward, difficult, and complex. In a great irony of the world, bad design is much easier to see than good design. It raps us on the head like a bully. Because of its success, great design is often invisible.”
Phew! Its has been a hectic week since Eid last thurday. We have been busy honing the new set of features for version 2 of Careeb. As a part of unveiling version 2, today we have launched a little feature called ‘User Ranks’.
Your rank is a measure of how popular you are. Among other things, it is based on how many contacts you have and how many new people you have invited to Careeb.
By the way, my rank is 3!
As kids we were taught something like this:
A for apple (the fruit), B for boy, C for cat and so on…
But as the Internet permeates our day to day lives, I guess kids will be taught something like this:
A for Apple (the company)
B for Blog
C for Click
D for Download
E for Email
F for Friends
G for Google
H for HTML
I for Internet, iPod
J for Java
K for Keyword
L for Login, Logout
M for Mac
N for Nerd, Noob
O for Online
P for Programmer
Q for QuickTime
R for RIAA
S for Signup
T for Torrent
U for Ubuntu
V for Virus
W for Web
X for Xbox
Y for Youtube
Z for Zoom
Feel free to post your own version of A,B,C in the comments :-)
- Imdad Ahmed (works at Careeb)
- David Meerman Scott (most impressive internet marketing concepts)
- Seth Godin (Marketing guru, but in my opinion Scott is better)
- Evan Williams (Creator of Blogger and Twitter
- Zaheer Ahmed (Internet enthusiast)