Recently Read: “The Accidental Billionaires”

As a “startup guy” who also happens to be from the Boston area, I am embarrassed to admit that until very recently I didn’t really know much about how Facebook got its start. I have heard people from the Boston startup scene lament from time to time about how Facebook started at Harvard before skipping town to Silicon Valley and subsequently catching fire. But aside from knowing Facebook as the poster child for our regional inferiority complex, I knew next to nothing about the backstory behind its rise.

I recently attempted to remedy this by reading “The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal” by Ben Mezrich. (My initial take at the time: If the title is any indication, he is either way overselling this, or it is a total travesty that I don’t more about this…)

I had previously read Mezrich’s two books about the MIT blackjack card counting teams, “Bringing Down the House” (later adapted into the movie “21“) and “Busting Vegas.” Both were pretty good reads. I read “Bringing Down the House” cover-to-cover on a flight, a rarity for me. I have mixed feelings about Mezrich’s writing approach. I am a non-fiction guy, so I like the fact the most of his books are based on true stories. However, in his books, he creates a significant amount of dialogue for real life characters. This is part of what makes his books page-turners, but it also offends my non-fiction sensibilities a bit.

He used this approach for “The Accidental Billionaires,” which was particularly “ballsy” given that he apparently had zero cooperation from Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, the main character. In any event, when I read Mezrich’s books, I usually forget about three pages in that the dialogue is made up, and this time was no exception.

Overall, I enjoyed the book. While I don’t really consider it a true business biography, I think it will appeal to fans of that genre. It is also a light and engaging read for any casual Facebook user who wants to learn more about how the whole phenomenon started.

“The Accidental Billionaires” delivered on the twists and turns suggested by the title. It definitely left me wanting to learn about more about Zuckerberg. The book presents him as a cunning genius who deceived and exploited a number of people who put their trust in him. In spite of this, I found that I couldn’t help but respect Zuckerberg’s brilliance and drive. The story was clearly presented through the lens of the “victims” due to Zuckerberg’s lack of cooperation, so I came aware wondering about his side of the story.

Pulsar: Sirius XM Internet Streaming on Your Mac

I decided to run through the Five Applications I Can’t Live Without in reverse order, starting with Pulsar.  Pulsar is a relatively inexpensive ($15, free trial download available) application that does one thing very well: streaming of Sirius XM Internet radio to computers running Apple OS X.

This is definitely a niche product, but one common theme you will find whenever I discuss applications is that cross-platform support is huge for me. I primarily use Windows 7 for business, but off the clock I am a Mac enthusiast. Between my wife and I, we have four Macs, two iPhones, and I don’t even know how many iPods kicking around. As a result, I am really big on things that work on both a PC and Mac. If it works on PC, Mac, and iPhone, well, that’s even better.

As someone who spends most of my waking hours either in the car or in front of a computer, I have come to appreciate Sirius satellite radio and its Internet radio option. The only problem is that their Internet radio player has a dependency on a Windows Media Player plug-in, so while it works like a charm on Windows I was having no luck using it on the Mac. Sirius claims Mac support by way of the Flip4Mac plug-in (which I have), and I also tried a number of third party players like StarPlayr and a random Firefox plug-in I found. In all cases, the results were less than satisfactory.

After giving up on it for a while, I finally stumbled across the answer through a “happy accident.” I was doing some research on recording podcasts via Skype and came across an application called Audio Hijack Pro from a small Boston-area company called Rogue Amoeba. As I was on the Rogue Amoeba site, I happened upon Pulsar and the Sirius / XM Internet streaming goodness that had eluded me for so long.

The free trial download worked like a charm, and I loved the fact that I could just enter my Sirius credentials once.   The browser-based Sirius player makes you log in every time and requires one of those annoying CAPTCHA challenges each time, so password programs (LastPass post coming soon!) don’t help. It didn’t take too long to justify the $15 investment. In my case, I didn’t even end up parting with my $15.  Rogue Amoeba gives you a free Pulsar license with the purchase of any of their other nifty Mac applications, so I ended up getting a free license by dropping $32 on Audio Hijack Pro.

At the end of the day, this application is not doing anything overly sophisticated. However, it solved a problem for me in a very elegant way. Now, whether I am in the car, on a PC, on a Mac, or on my iPhone (thanks to the Sirius XM iPhone app!), I have access to commercial-free music.

Five Applications I Can’t Live Without

I have have been spending quite a bit of time lately interviewing people for a product marketing position. In addition to the normal paces about the fundamentals of the job, one question I pose to everyone I interview is:

Tell me about a new computer application you tried for the first time during the last 12 months and now can’t live without.

It’s kind of a softball as quirky interview questions go, but it trips up a surprising number of people. Why do I ask this? I am trying to understand whether the person I am talking to has a natural curiosity about technology and a drive to innovate. Anyone can tell me they are creative and don’t just do “paint by numbers” technology marketing. Show me how you apply creativity and innovation to your personal productivity every day. At a minimum, tell me about a bit of technology that got you excited or solved a problem. If this isn’t in your DNA, you can’t work for me. Simple as that.

I obviously wouldn’t use this as a standard if I couldn’t apply it successfully to myself, so here are five applications I had never used before 12 months ago that have become indispensable to me:

1. Evernote: Electronic note-taking and information organization application and cloud service.

2. LastPass: Secure (I hope) password generation, organization, and synchronization plug-in for popular web browsers.

3. JungleDisk: Simple and seamless interface for using cloud storage providers such as Amazon S3.

4. TweetDeck: The application that gave me the “ah-ha” moment on how to make Twitter useful.

5. Pulsar: Native OS X application for streaming Sirius / XM Internet radio.

I am going to do an individual post on each of these to describe how they have made me happier and more productive.