CodeLesson Offers Instructor-led Tech Courses Online to Challenge University Model

WHAT: Online courses in the latest programming languages and platforms, with demand driving new courses. Instructors are vetted experts who communicate with students and answer questions via message boards. A course start date is set once enough students have signed up for it.

Courses typically last four to six weeks and cost around $300 depending on the technology being taught. Passing the course earns the student a "badge" on their CodeLesson profile page.

Students come from all over the world, and some instructors are from outside the U.S.

LAUNCHERS: Jeffrey McManus (CEO) was eBay's first technology evangelist and co-founded/led the Yahoo Developer Network team. Ernie Hsiung, a developer, has worked for Ning and Yahoo (and is founder/editor of the 8asians.com blog).

Read More

Vibe.me Brings Emotion to Social Graph to Change How People Connect

WHAT: Share what you’re feeling within Vibe.me’s social network (asymmetrical like Twitter) as well as on Twitter and Facebook, or keep your check-ins private. There are 12 color-coded vibe categories -- six positive, six negative -- and dozens of adjectives and phrases in each one. Earn "karma points" for updates and getting new people to join. You can also send a vibe to someone in the network or via email. Web only right now.

IN THE WORKS: Integration with foursquare and Tumblr among others, ability to “vibe” about YouTube videos, news articles, etc. iPhone app coming in late 2011/early 2012. Same time as app will be analytics dashboard for viewing emotions over time.

LAUNCHERS: Kevin Fremon (CEO), Will Mason (CTO) and Dustin Brown (COO). Kevin founded the boutique digital agency Don’t Blink Design, where Will is CTO and Dustin handles business development.

Read More

When Management Misdirects Employees -- My Response to Ben Horowitz

By Jason Calacanis

Yesterday Ben Horowitz published a solid post "When Employees Misinterpret Management," which should have been titled "When Management Misdirects Employees."

He gives three examples, the most fun of which is him trying to get his sales team at Opsware -- the company he and Marc Andreessen famously rode through the bust to a huge, huge win -- to not cram all their sales into the quarter's last week.

In order to flatten the hockey stick of 90% of the deals coming in the final moments of the quarter, he generated incentives for booking earlier in the quarter. The result, as you might guess, was sales people holding deals and dropping them in the more lucrative first months of the next quarter.

This of course created a nose dive in the current quarter.

Incentives, huzzah!

What this shows me more than employees misinterpreting management is the absolute insanity of being a manager. Dealing with a rabid pack of sales wolves is perhaps one of the hardest management challenges in business.

Read More

When Employees Misinterpret Managers

We're huge fans of Ben Horowitz, co-founder and general partner of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, and his must-read blog (sign up here). With permission we're syndicating his important post on management. Please post your questions and thoughts in the comments below.

By Ben Horowitz

Time is money, so I went and bought a Rolex
—Wiz Khalifa, Phone Numbers

When I ran Opsware, we had the non-linear quarter problem also known affectionately as the hockey stick. The hockey stick refers to the shape of the revenue graph over the course of a quarter. Our hockey stick was so bad that one quarter, we booked 90% of our new bookings on the last day of the quarter. Sales patterns like this make it difficult to plan the business and are particularly harrowing when you are, as we were, a public company.

Read More

Nginx Creator Plans Company to Better Serve Millions of Sites Using Its Web Servers

WHAT (TECHNOLOGY): Nginx is an open-source, high-performance web server that is designed to serve static content quickly and provide accelerated proxying capabilities to application servers, which run things like Python, Ruby and PHP.

Nginx uses an event-driven, therefore asynchronous, approach to handling requests, and it also has a very efficient reverse-proxy caching layer. A master process is responsible for configuring tasks and launches a number of single-threaded worker processes. In turn, each worker is then capable of handling many simultaneous requests.

Event-driven servers are lightweight compared to servers like Apache that use a process or thread per request because of the overhead of using more and heavier threads. Performance does not drop when Nginx has thousands or more concurrent connections because having only a few small and efficient workers doesn’t require as much RAM. Also the server does not have to waste time switching threads. Nginx is available for Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and Windows.

Note: many sites deploy Nginx with Apache.

[Editor's Note: We have slightly revised this description based on information from the Nginx company founders.]

WHAT (COMPANY): Nginx the company intends to improve support and documentation as well as introduce new features and speed up patches and fixes.

Read More