Quick links:

1. Facebook Career Center launches, which incidentally I heard about here.
2. Twitter hits a million messages
3. 71miles, the “definitive guide to weekend trips around major cities” launches.

I promise I’m not obsessed with Twitter and/or Facebook.

One of the highlights of the Y Combinator dinners for me was definitely the moment I shook Monty’s hand (one of Trevor’s robots, you can watch him trying to push over Dexter below). The entire interaction was scarily real. FYI Trevor is one of the co-founders of Viaweb, and a partner in YC.

Anyway, the big news is that Dexter can now walk!

What’s important and historical about this is better explained by PG, but apparently it’s the first bipedal dynamically self-balancing robot.

Congratulations to Trevor, that was 6 years worth of work! I, Robot is a little step closer.

Update: So this week (1/3/07), we got to see Dexter jump one foot off the ground and land perfectly with balance. It crouched like a human does beforehand and then leapt into the air. I’m running out of adjectives, but suffice to say everyone in the room was in awe. This is like Terminator happening before my very eyes!

Y Combinator recently launched a news section for startups on their website (here’s why). This is going to be a great resource. I’ve already found some useful articles.

Apparently it’s a lot like how Reddit was in its early days, content wise.

Here are my contributions.

I went to the “Technology Tasting” event hosted by Facebook on Wednesday. It was fantastic, I got to meet the people that work there, hear the founders Dustin Moskovitz and Mark Zuckerberg speak, and visit their offices, which I must admit I was quite excited about (although this was not the main engineering office). There were probably over a hundred people socialising for about an hour before the founders Dustin Moskovitz and Mark Zuckerberg spoke.

Dustin went through some statistics, and the bits that stood out for me were:

1) the biggest growth demographic is 25-34
2) there is big growth in the 50+ age group
3) facebook serves 70,000 photos a second. A SECOND.
4) they have 700m news stories generated (per month I think)
5) they are adding *half a million* new users each week, which should mean 50 million users by the end of the year
6) they are guesstimating they have 1/10th the number of search queries Google does worldwide internally on facebook
7) over half of their users log in daily (compare to say, 15% ish for MySpace, if they’re lucky)
1% of all internet traffic is generated by facebook (correction: it’s 1% of all internet time is spent on fb)
9) At any given time, there are maybe 1-2 million people online, that’s larger than most US cities

I could go on, but you get the picture. Something incredible is being built at Facebook. I respect the fact that they had enough balls not to sell out, and are thinking big, really big. It was a little moving to hear Zuckerberg talk, here is a guy younger than me building a company which is just behind Google in terms of internet traffic.

Anyhow, congratulations to the guys working there. Keep it up, it’s an inspiration to us all.

**Update: sweet, facebook just officially blogged about the event. Another impressive stat I just remembered, the average page load time is 0.11 seconds, and their target is 0.04 seconds.

*I drafted this back in December, but am only publishing this now as I feel slightly more confident in expressing an opinion about internet stuff.

I just read Chris Sacca’s explanation about why he twitters. It got me thinking about the reasons why something like Twitter catches on, and I soon realised that the reasons why Twitter is sticky and attractive are the same reasons that Facebook is also so successful.

Namely, I think Twitter and Facebook are powerful because they tap into two human instincts:

1) the desire to advertise information about one’s self
2) the desire for information about other people

Perhaps I’m over-simplifying a little here, but really, on facebook, when filling out our profiles, putting up photos, adding friends and so on, we are driven by the motivation of letting everyone know our identity. It’s a powerful motive.

What’s really clever, is that this personal motive works perfectly in tandem with the social incentive of adding useful information to our community. When someone fills out their profile, they are creating value for themselves, but also for everyone else in the network. Long live network effects.

Despite the fact that some people early on questioned Twitter’s potential, I’m happy to say it is doing fantastically well.

It’s a brilliant way to stay in touch with friends, but more than that, it creates a different type of connection between individuals. It’s really hard to explain, you’ve gotta use it to understand what I’m trying to say.

You can follow me here, or if not, maybe Steve Wozniak, or Janina Gavankar? Cool.

How cool is this? Congratulations to Thomas Whitfield for winning Oxford Entrepreneur’s Idea Idol 2007! I think the idea is brilliant (quoting Thomas):

“It’s basically a website where, for $1 a minute, people can buy moments in time and can display special moments of their lives for eternity, like their first kiss or the moment they won Idea Idol. It came about from just sitting around and brainstorming but we never thought something like this would happen.”

Well done to Rajeeb as well for generating some buzz around the event, the story was reported on CNN (though I can’t find the original link). I’m happy that the original vision for a Varsity finale to Idea Idol is also going to be realised!

In different news, there is talk that Index Ventures might set up a Y Combinator style incubator in the UK (it’s right at the end):

“This summer we will aim to bring together some of Europe’s best entrepreneurs and investors to start supporting and seeding talented developers who have ideas that they think they can turn into world beating businesses.”

It will be good if it happens.

We just had ‘prototype day’, in which all of the Y Combinator fundees did a quick demo on what they’ve built so far to the other startups.

It was extremely useful. It forced us to start thinking about the upcoming investor day, where we present to a roomful of 70 of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley, which happens in less than a month.

And this has made the past few days quite hectic. The fear of having to show exactly what you have been working on to all your fellow entrepreneurs is a strong motivator. But that’s meant that we have made real progress, and we should be able to release our new product this week. Woo.

So my first viewpoint piece has been published on the Beeb. It outlines some of the reasons that motivated us to come out here, but I hope it doesn’t come across as too negative about the UK scene, as there is good stuff starting up here and here. Also, we did raise our first Angel investment from British investors, which goes to show, that if you are persistent, it’s possible to find that investment.

It’s just that the ‘ecosystem’ is not as good as out here - I wish there were more people willing to take early-stage risk when it’s just an idea, an entrepreneur and a market.

All in all Y Combinator has been fantastic so far. I’ll be writing more updates soon.

ps: you can contact me at kul at boso dot com.