Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

GitHub expands attachment types

github attachments

GitHub blog brings us a piece of exciting news – now you can add more attachment types to comments.  The list is no longer limited by images alone.  Now you can attach Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, as well as plain text and PDF documents.  This feature alone will make GitHub Issues into a much more viable bug tracking option for many projects and companies.

 

Startup Metrics

The $4 billion venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is sharing some of the startup metrics that they use (part 1, part 2).  Here they are just for the overview, follow through to the blog posts for details:

  1. Bookings vs. Revenue
  2. Recurring Revenue vs. Total Revenue
  3. Gross Profit
  4. Total Contract Value vs. Annual Contract Value
  5. Life Time Value
  6. Gross Merchandise Value vs. Revenue
  7. Unearned or Deferred Revenue and Billings
  8. Customer Acquisition Cost (Blended vs. Paid, Organic vs. Inorganic)
  9. Active Users
  10. Month-on-Month Growth
  11. Churn
  12. Burn Rate
  13. Downloads
  14. Cumulative Charts vs. Growth Metics
  15. Order of Operations
  16. Total Addressable Market
  17. Annual Recurring Revenue
  18. Average Revenue Per User
  19. Gross Margins
  20. Sell-Through Rate and Inventory Turns
  21. Network Effects
  22. Virality
  23. Economies of Scale
  24. Net Promoter Score
  25. Cohort Analysis
  26. Registered Users
  27. Sources of Traffic
  28. Customer Concentration Risk

There are also some tips and tricks on charts and data presentation, like truncating the Y-axis.  Here is an example:

truncating y-axis

Overall, quite a bit of useful information for analysis of different startups.  No wonder their portfolio is so impressive!

P.S.: Love the creative approach to the domain name as well … a16z.com (16 letters between A and Z in the company name Andreessen Horowitz, minus a space).

On responsive images

responsive images

Toptal runs the article “One Size Fits Some: A Guide to Responsive Web Design Image Solutions“, which discusses one of the trickiest problems of today’s web design and development – responsive images.  They cover several tools and approaches – from HTML5 elements to on-the-fly image resizing and source shuffling.

Much recommended!

Billion dollar club

billion dollar club

The Wall Street Journal compiles a list of venture-back private companies, valued at $1 billion or more.  There’s a table with the list of 120+ companies and an interactive chart to navigate it.

Note: This chart only includes companies that are privately held, have raised money in the past four years and have at least one venture-capital firm as an investor. Excluded from this list are companies that were majority-controlled by an institutional investment firm at one point. Only valuations confirmed by VentureSource or The Journal are included, based on direct investments, not secondary deals.