SortiPreneur

Grou.ps Launches US Beta

Grou.ps launched its US beta today, with an improved UI.  Emre and team have been hard at work on getting the platform ready for this important milestone.  Grou.ps already has some 150K users and a great need identified with Web2.0 services proliferating without any glue to tie them together.  The US market should be a goldmine for them.

Both the TechCrunch and Venture Beat posts reporting the launch point out critical points:

Grou.ps benefits from being simple like Ning and Wetpaint, yet focused on productivity like Google and Zoho. They present a simple free solution for moderated online collaboration.

The idea is good: Right now, members of VentureBeat read RSS feeds from other sites within Google Reader, Bloglines or another RSS reader service, then chat about them together on a freestanding IM service. Grou.ps would let you do it all at once, in one place.

Congratulations to the Grou.ps team, and their VC backers, GHV.

Repeated Records

Paul Kedrosky's touched on a point that was topic to a dinner table conversation last week among my friends:  How common price records are once you've hit a record and how the repeated headlines on "oil hits record price" carry an amplification effect in people's perceptions.

Paul offers a great solution:

I think we should institute a new rule: No talking about a record price until at least 40 hours day after a record has been set. Call it a kind of market noise abatement act.

Happiness: The Geography Ediiton

Continuing the Happiness meme, Freakonomics blog has a good piece on the correlation of happiness and wealth.

Not exactly counter-intuitive :)

vkontakte.ru Beating Facebook in Russia

I just read on Aydin's blog that vkontakte.ru, a Russian Facebook clone, has reached #34 on Alexa rankings.  I think this is very interesting.

I see Facebook as a game-changing company.  My hypothesis on social networks following the Facebook model are in a race against time.  Some have great early leads in that race, such a StudiVZ, but Facebook is a natural monopoly and will eventually attain the global social graph.

vkontakte.ru may be the case to disprove my theory.  It is a relative newcomer, i.e. Facebook had opened up its email address restrictions by the time vkontakte had achieved critical mass.  Yet, it continues to accelerate its growth.

Through my experience with Mondus.net, I am a first-hand witness to how social networks grow.  I will continue watching vkontakte.ru.  This may really be a strong evidence that it's the seed populations that determine growth patterns in social networks, making it extremely difficult to foresee or plan.  Or, it may be proof that Russia is an extraordinary market, supported by the fact that, as Aydin points out:

Russia is the country in Europe with the lowest market share for Google at 32% (versus Portugal's 94%) and its top 3 sites are all homegrown: Yandex, Mail.ru and Rambler. Facebook might find itself fighting an equally uphill battle in this important BRIC internet market.

Happiness Formula

Last week I was a participant at an event where one of the topics was happiness.  While I did not attend that particular session, I was part of some discussions on whether we can actively manage our happiness.  So I have been thinking about the issue.
Three years ago my family and I made a sudden decision to move back to Istanbul, our hometown, after over a decade in New York, and close to half our lives in the US. We felt the move would contribute to our happiness.  While it is difficult to gauge whether we are proven right, just the feeling of taking this sort of control of the flow of our life contributed to a certain level of contentment felt.
My friend Fabrice has thought and written about the issue as well.  His take away:

1. Don’t equate happiness with money.
2. Exercise regularly.
3. Have sex.
4. Devote time and effort to close relationships.
5. Pause for reflection, meditate on the good things in life.
6. Seek work that engages your skills, look to enjoy your job.
7. Give your body the sleep it needs.
8. Don’t pursue happiness for its own sake, enjoy the moment.
9. Take control of your life, set yourself achievable goals.

And finally, today Emre Erşahin pointed me to a Dilbert blog post on the topic, analytical approach of which I found amusing:

I fantasize about writing a book called The Happiness Formula. The idea would be to create a simple formula for troubleshooting your life and improving your happiness. On page one would be this top formula.

Happiness = health + money + social life + meaning

The rest of the book would be nested formulas that further explain each component of happiness. For example…

Health = sleep + diet + exercise

And then down another level…

Sleep = schedule + technique

And down another level until it starts getting practical…

Sleep Technique  = consistent bedtime and waking time + no reading or TV in bed + no booze or caffeine…

And so on.

Read the comments; they are fun, too.