A common criticism of Bob is that many of his views are incompatible with each other. Maybe they are. But at a time when people seem scared to have opinions, it’s nice to encounter a man with plenty. Here are some of his gems:

On artists:

• Artists are out of touch with reality. They insist on releasing their work in 70 minute chunks. Who has 70 minutes to listen to an album? When did you last actively listen to an album the whole way through?
• So you can distribute your music easily now – what makes you think anyone wants it? Artists have read ‘The Long Tail’ and been misled into thinking there’s an audience for them out there somewhere.
• Hardly anyone can write hits – so they compensate by networking online and hoping that’ll work instead. It won’t.
• For some reason everyone thinks they can write a hit – it’s not like everyone thinks they can play in the NBA.
• If you’re not prepared to give up everything – if you’ve not thought about quitting or thought about killing yourself – you’re not cut out for the creative world.

On labels:

• Labels are like Microsoft: they used to control everything, but they missed a couple of huge shifts and now they’re totally marginalised.
• There used to be 5000 records released each year, and they were pretty good. OK they missed a few, but that doesn’t mean the whole model was broken.

On consumers:

• People say they want to own music rather than renting it. But they rented cassettes and they rented DVDs…now they’re streaming their movies. People don’t know what they want.
• Stealing music is a pain in the ass. Spotify is like marijuana…the first hit is always free.

On technology:

• The problem we have in music isn’t a technology problem…it’s a music problem. There aren’t enough hits.
• Writing a hit is way harder than having an idea for a tech company.
• If you have an idea for a business based on licensing content from labels, give up. The only way it can work is to steal the content, then they might cut you a better deal later.
• People talk about Zuck meeting investors wearing a hoodie…that’s what musicians used to be like. Now they want to sell themselves to corporations first chance they get.

1. Folyo lets you send your brief out to the site’s 300 hand-picked designers. If some of them want to take on your project, you get a free Skype session with Folyo to help you choose one of them. The service costs $100, which is refunded if you don’t get any takers.
2. Zerply lets you find professionals by skills, interests and location, and lets you browse their profiles. Each person has ‘endorsements’ from other members of the Zerply community, so you can be sure to pick someone who can deliver the goods.
3. Smashing Magazine is a must-read for designers who want to top up their skills and stay on top of developments in the field, so their jobs board is a great way of finding designers who take real pride in what they do.
4. If your style is to be less laser-targeted and you just want as many applications to sort through as possible, you can post your job to Elance for free, and just pay an 8% fee on top of the cost of the job. Payment is held in escrow by the site and you can release it when milestones are met. You’ll need to invest some time in checking out the portfolio of everyone who applies, but you’re likely to get pitches from all over the world and you might just find a gem.
5. Alternatively, if your job’s relatively simple and pixel-perfect design isn’t critical, how about learning to do it yourself? You can quickly pick up enough HTML and CSS by taking Codecademy’s web fundamentals course, then read Bootstrapping Design to grasp the basics of putting together typography, colours and layout that are pleasing to the eye.

Let me know about any I’ve missed which have worked out well for you

“Tech company” and “tech startup” are over-applied labels that have outlived their usefulness. Calling practically all growing contemporary businesses “technology companies” is about as useful as calling the enterprises of the industrial era “factory companies”

Alex Payne, What Is And Is Not A Technology Company?

I vaguely remembered Maslow’s hierarchy of needs from psychology class at school – the gist is that human needs range from the most basic (food and water) to far more advanced (self-actualisation), but you can’t reach the higher levels without those below it being in place.

Here it is. But what’s it got to do with business?

The idea is that employees, customers and investors all have needs, and a great company needs to help each group to achieve their highest goals and reach the top of the pyramid.

For example, for employees, money is a base motivation – it’ll be enough to make them show up, but not much more. Intangibles, such as appreciation and meaningful tasks, are far more powerful in meeting the employee’s higher needs. It’s the difference between a job, a career and a calling.

Customers have expectations which must be met, but great companies also meet their desires and even their unrecognised needs. Successful companies are driven by imagination – customers have run out of needs, and might not know what they want until you offer it to them.

Investors have goals deeper than just making money – which might be excitement, doing good in the world, having a legacy, or access to new experiences. A company seeking funding should make sure that their goals are aligned with their investors’ highest goals – this will engender trust. In other words, investors want to put their money where their heart is.

It seems like the book is largely an interesting way of presenting truths which are widely known, if not widely implemented. But I left the session with a lot of interesting ideas, and I would be tempted to read the book – if that didn’t totally defeat the point.

These are the main points I took away from the Q&A part of the event:

As the cost of building a startup approaches free, the bar for attracting investment gets higher:

• First, ideas got funded
• Then products that had launched got funded
• Now, you need significant traction to get funded

But you shouldn’t need funding in order to get traction – so many marketing channels are free. If you plan to acquire customers by paying, you need to have really nailed your numbers.

There are four ingredients to getting funding. It’s better to be outstanding at one of the four than to be just good at all of them.

1. The team. The background and track record of the team can be enough to get funding without even looking at the product.
2. A unique, differentiated product. This is tough for social products, because no-one can tell whether a unique product will attract users or not. Pinterest was one of the most passed-over deals in the valley.
3. Social proof. Who’s investing? Who’s advising?
4. Traction. Everything else is a proxy for traction.

Big ideas take the same amount of effort to work on as small ideas. So tackle a big problem!
(But don’t let investors decide what’s a big problem, or we’d never have search engines)

The typical size of investment is:

• $25-50k for individual investors
• $100-250k for VCs

AngelList wants to get rid of funding ’rounds’. By having information about startups accessible to investors and being constantly updated, startups should be able to have access to a constant stream of cash if they want and deserve it. For example, investors can choose to be notified when a startup passes a certain number of users, or when a person from a particular institution joins the team.

Crowd-funding might become a way to raise cash and reward early evangelists, but it depends on whether the SECC bill is written in such a way that startups will actually want to use it.

Tetris was invented exactly when and where you would expect — in a Soviet computer lab in 1984 — and its game play reflects this origin. The enemy in Tetris is not some identifiable villain (Donkey Kong, Mike Tyson, Carmen Sandiego) but a faceless, ceaseless, reasonless force that threatens constantly to overwhelm you, a churning production of blocks against which your only defense is a repetitive, meaningless sorting. It is bureaucracy in pure form, busywork with no aim or end, impossible to avoid or escape. And the game’s final insult is that it annihilates free will.

Sam Anderson on ‘Stupid games’, New York Times

I recently spent far too much time trying to figure out how to remove all partially transparent pixels in an image in Photoshop. Through some intensive and creative Googling I found the answer buried deep in an Adobe forum, but in case it ever gets archived (even now I can’t find it again) I thought I’d replicate the solution here in case it saves someone else from tearing their hair out in the future.

So, here’s how you identify and remove all non-opaque pixels in Photoshop.

1. Load Transparency Mask As Selection. To do this, Ctrl-click on the image thumbnail of the layer you want to work on in the Layers panel.

2. Create Layer Mask From Selection. Go to the Layer menu > Layer Mask > Reveal Selection

3. Display Black & White Layer Mask. Alt-click the new layer mask icon you’ve created in the layers panel.

4. Go to Image > Adjustments > Threshold, and set the threshold to 255.

This gives you a layer mask where the white pixels are the only ones which are 100% opaque. All the black pixels have some degree of transparency, and will be removed when you apply the mask.

To apply the mask, right-click on the mask’s thumbnail in the layers panel, and select ‘apply mask to selection’.

While a lot of the startups on show seemed (to me) to be solving problems which aren’t really problems at all, there were also plenty of really great ideas and executions. Here are three of my favourites:

1. The Birdy. The Birdy helps you track your personal finances by sending you a daily email, to which you just have to respond with what you’ve spent money on that day (or you can text in purchases as they happen). When you visit The Birdy’s website, you can then see graphs and stats that break down your spending patterns.

When it comes to personal finance, the low-tech approach seems like it should be far more effective in changing your behaviour than automated services like Mint. Whereas with Mint you have to remember to actually visit the website to be depressed by your profligacy, The Birdy gives you a a bite-sized dose of guilt and horror every day. Which probably isn’t one for the marketing materials, but it’s true, and it works.

In other words, The Birdy is for pragmatists, whereas Mint, OneReceipt etc are great for making you feel like you’re taking control then you never check them again. Much like Frosties are just cornflakes for people who can’t face reality.

2. Temboo. Temboo is a universal API, which aggregates the APIs of over 70 web-based services. So if you want to mash up Last.FM with Google Calendar so local tour dates for bands you’ve listened to appear in your calendar, you don’t have to do it from scratch. It also means that if you use their pre-written snippets of code, you don’t have to worry about API changes as they’ll be automatically updated.

3. Kapitall. There seems to be a movement towards using great design and UX to cheer up the most traditionally joyless and drab experiences – online banking and financial markets. In the case of Kapitall, the slogan ‘If you can drag and you can drop, you can trade’ tells you pretty much everything you need to know. Investing is as easy as dragging a company’s symbol into your (real or practice) portfolio, and company data is made to look as accessible and inviting as possible.

For me the gamification element grates a bit and I prefer the pretty-UI-with-no-messing-around approach of Vuru, but it beats the hell out of Yahoo Finance.

And I believe it was Sartre who said, Don't Make Me Think.

I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it…

[incentive-caused bias] is present in every profession and in every human being. And it causes perfectly terrible behavior. If you take sales presentations and brokers of commercial real estate and businesses… I’m 70 years old, I’ve never seen o­ne I thought was even within hailing distance of objective truth.

- Charlie Munger, The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, speech at Harvard Law School (1995)

You know who has access to all the same tools to achieve that same purpose? Musicians. But is the science incompatible with the art, or is that just a convenient reason to avoid facing some uncomfortable truths?

So before you spend a year and thousands of dollars recording a rock opera about dinosaurs based on little more than a hunch, stop and think whether you could gather some data first to test the market. Unless “if anyone else likes it” really is just a bonus.

Read the full article on Music Think Tank