Cristina Cordova A blog on life, technology and startups.1-800-867-5309
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Facebook’s App Center: Controlling the Rise and Fall of Apps
Yesterday, Facebook released App Center, a home for Facebook-integrated mobile applications. Much like Google Play or Apple’s App Store, Facebook’s App Center will promote various apps to users. Unlike other marketplaces, apps are not ranked – each user will receive personalized recommendations. This is a great move by Facebook to promote apps built using their platform and [...]
OMGPOP CEO Lashes Out at Former Employee, But Why Are We Surprised?
Farmville, helping you lose Facebook friends since 2009. Last night I came across the two tweets below from Dan Porter, the CEO of OMGPOP, which makes the hit game Draw Something (recently acquired by Zynga). Porter is now the VP of General Management for Zynga New York. They’re in reference to a former OMGPOP employee, [...]
What A Business Development Role is Like at a Startup
I answered this Quora question today and thought I should post it to my blog since I’ve been asked many times what business development actually means. As I say below, it doesn’t mean the same thing for every startup, but here are my experiences in working at Pulse as we’ve grown from just a few people [...]
Oink’s Data Privacy Breach: Download the Data of Any User with Their Own Export Tool
UPDATE: The Milk team removed usernames from the file download link. Instead of providing a link like http://oink-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/kevinrose-export.zip, links have been changed to http://oink-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/86n0KZ0uSa.zip, which are not attached to usernames. Thanks to Kevin Rose & the Milk team for the fix! When Oink shut down yesterday, I used their export tool so that I could do something useful with the [...]
30% of Mobile Installs Become Active? – It May Be Much Worse
In July of last year, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures noted the ”law of web/mobile physics” as the ratio of registered users/downloads to monthly actives, daily actives, and max concurrent users. Most of the mobile companies he was seeing hovered around the 30% monthly active user (MAU) rate. “30% of the registered users or number of downloads [...]
Using Rapportive: Finding the Email Address of Anyone You Want to Contact
Rapportive is one of my favorite tools to use for business development, but can be used for any role where you need to reach out to external contacts. Technically, Rapportive is a tool to manage and connect with your email contacts. It’s a free extension you can add on top of Gmail, which will [...]
Things I Want To Do More of in 2012
I’ve always hated the idea of New Year’s Resolutions. It makes me think of all those new folks joining the gym who start off the year strong in 2012, but disappear come February. A lot of these resolutions suffer from Impossible Goals – If you make plans to go to the gym EVERY day – once you [...]
Solve the “Woman Problem” by Ending Your Stereotypes of Women
What is this? Mad Men? Penelope Trunk wrote another ridiculously egregious article yesterday on VentureBeat about the “Woman Problem” in tech startups. She’s written similar posts on Techcrunch before: Women Don’t Want to Run Tech Startups Because They’d Rather Have Children Why Diversity is Bad for Startups I’ve always wholeheartedly disagreed with her remarks about [...]
AirBnb: A Lesson in Crisis Management
There is no doubt that the Airbnb vacation rental horror story has been a PR disaster for the company. As I’m sure this isn’t the first time an AirBnb renter has had property stolen or damaged while renting, I am surprised that this was not handled better. While some may be blaming this on the [...]
A Cultural Thing: Why More Minority Women Aren’t In Tech
Reading Vivek Wadhwa’s post on how to encourage more minority women to join the tech industry, I immediately began to think of my own experiences as a minority (Hispanic) female in tech. Thankfully, I don’t have anything but good things to say about being a minority female in tech, but there are a few reasons [...]