Sachin Rekhi

Social is clearly one of the biggest trends on the web right now, with the majority of new apps and services taking advantage of your friends to provide a more participatory experience. This extends across desktop and mobile applications as well as across most verticals, including media, e-commerce, travel, and more.

But what’s most exciting to me is what is happening a layer below these applications - the rise of the social data layer. The social data layer provides a set of compelling APIs that any application can take advantage of to quickly immerse it’s experience in social. Just as cloud computing significantly reduced the cost of building web applications, these social data platforms are significantly reducing the friction in creating compelling social experiences.

Today I had the pleasure of attending the Evernote Trunk Conference, Evernote’s first ever developer-focused event. I was excited to attend not only because Connected is an app in the Evernote Trunk, but also because Evernote has been a break-out success story in the productivity space. I thought I’d share some of my thoughts from the day.

Startup2Startup has been on a roll lately with great events and this week was no exception. BJ Fogg, a professor and researcher from Stanford University, stopped by and shared with us his secrets on behavior change. For those of you who are not familiar with BJ Fogg, he has been studying behavior change for over a decade, is the founder of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford, and author of the book Persuasive Technology. He also led the first Facebook Apps class at Stanford, which was massively successful in generating explosive growth for student apps. BJ Fogg has leveraged his insights into how technology can be used to bring about behavior change both in his academic work as well as in industry work, especially in the mobile and health sectors.

His focus for the evening was around how we can leverage his research in our own startups to help bring about the behavior change that we seek in our users. Practically every startup is trying to elicit some behavior from their users, whether it’s getting them to log into your site daily, signup for a new service, or share their content with their friends. And the lessons from BJ Fogg help us to understand the psychology behind eliciting these behavior changes and how we can ensure they happen. I thought I’d take a moment to summarize his 5 key secrets from the evening.

Last night I attended another fantastic Startup2Startup event focused on Interaction Design. The lineup was terrific with Jason Putorti, lead designer of Mint.com and now co-founder of Votizen, Kate Aronowitz, Director of Design and User Experience at Facebook, and Garry Tan, co-founder of Posterous and Designer in Residence for YCombinator. They brought together a breadth of experience in design across all stages of the startup lifecycle.

I thought I’d briefly summarize by sharing five key quotes from the night and some of the discussion around them.

In the wake of LinkedIn’s announcement of reaching 100 million members, I’ve been impressed with the resurgence they have had in the past year. I thought I would showcase some of the recent product innovation from LinkedIn as well as cultural shifts we’ve seen from within the company that have contributed to this growth.