This oft alluded to factoid reinforces the lie that building a successful web services startup is all about programming: build a great product = job done.

If only it were that simple.

A startup playlist

Mindful that the gap separating Paul Graham from Simon Cowell gets narrower every day I found myself wondering which songs might best sum the broad requirement for a billion dollar exit?

Clearly, the aforementioned Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger should get a look in as it satisifies the baseline value of creating something robust and scaleable:

Daft Punk – Harder, Better, Stronger [Jess & Crabbe Remix]

Apparently, passion is a desirable personality trait in founding team members, so let’s throw in the anthem of the outlier:

Eminem - Lose Yourself

Of course, anyone who has tried once and failed will tell you that opportunity doesn’t only come once in a lifetime, but we’ll forgive the factual inaccuracy because it’s more than made up for by the self-determinism.

Stamina? You’ll need to be tough to succeed in the great game; put in the hours, suck up the ramen and forgo any outside interests, like family and friends. Here, The Distance seems pretty apt.

Cake - The Distance

Whatever your position in the team, as a founding member you’ll require near delusional levels of self-confidence, what better soundtrack to your 30 sec elevator pitch than Superman?

REM – Superman

If REM’s ditty is too whimsical perhaps the bombast of Queen’s We Are The Champions might adequately describe the self-belief shared by you and your brogramming buds?

The bottom line

If you’ve found yourself nodding along in agreement with my pop picks well I’ve got some bad news for you sunshine: you failed. Lulled into a false sense of box-checking security by a dumb playlist.

In reality the only metric for success is the ability to sell your product for money. Don’t kid yourself into believing that an x number of unique users of your free service will make your fortune, very few have been so lucky; it’s incredibly unlikely that you are exceptional, all that really matters is the bottom line.

Download this

No, if I had to recommend one song that captures what it takes to grow a truly successful Internet business it would be What You Need. Listen carefully:

Galactic with Lyrics Born – What You Need

Though the notion that any business should have a soundtrack is a ridiculous conceit, I will take your dollars, pennies, pounds and pesos.

As you probably know, Dropbox bought Mailbox for some ridiculous amount of money, the scaling problems got sorted, and as of mid-April the velvet rope has been lifted and we’re all allowed to use the damn thing.

Mailbox didn’t suit me at all, it’s Gmail only and it doesn’t ‘do’ portrait view. That means I can’t work with the email accounts I use every day and I can’t thumb-type with my big hands in their most comfortable position.

Were I a happy hack, or techblog commenter, those two failings alone would be enough to launch the invective troll-rocket of a blistering attack on a crap app, frothy company, and overpriced acquisition – doesn’t work for me, must be worst thing ever.

But Mailbox is actually rather good. It’s a kind of client lite for people who hate email and those folk who want to stay up-to-date but dig a UX that’s all hey-let’s-deal-with-that-shit-later. No doubt both segments love those long and short swipe actions that whizz work away from their timeline.

You see, the genius of Mailbox is its ability to convince the user they’re being productive when all they’re really doing is deferring tasks and avoiding action.

And that is the essence of Management.

Functionally there’s not much to talk about either, the app lets you make free and cheap calls and if you have friends, colleagues and acquaintances in the silo the IM is alright.

That’s it.

By dint of circumstance I happen to be one of the 6% of Skype customers paying to make calls through their service. For me this is a legacy issue: a) I always had a Skype account open for comparison route testing when I was doing VoIP stuff; b) sometimes I need to make cheap calls to landlines and mobiles and there’s credit in the account. One day I’ll switch the auto top-up off and choose another service but for now, describe me as occasional user.

With an eye to the little big details, one of the things that really hacks me off is the lack of personalisation in what is, to all intents and purposes, a phonebook app. Amazingly (and stupidly) you are only allowed to upload pictures of your contacts if they use Skype. If your principle use of the app is SkypeOut – making old fashioned phone calls to people, businesses and conference call bridges – then I hope you like the default blue avatar next to your contact’s name because you’ll see an awful lot of it.

Think about that for a moment. SkypeOut users – revenue generating customers – are not allowed to personalise their address book: no nicknames, no birthdates, no email addresses, no company names, no addresses, no upload of profile photos; just a bunch of phone numbers if you so please.

What a dull and useless user experience.

Perhaps driven by a notion that the core product improves the more people use it and encourage their circles to join them in using it, PMs have chosen not to add any personalisation to the SkypeOut feature; I’m sure engineering would definitely be gung-ho pro a decision that lightens the load on Skype’s notoriously distributed network, unlike the contact log images would not be stored locally.

Adding pictures to contacts has been a feature request in the Skype community for years. Of course, you can’t trace this back through time as Skype has a habit of ‘refreshing’ its forum, removing old posts (read: complaints) in the process.

Nobody knows whether Microsoft will give a hoot about SkypeOut revenue ‘going forward’ – I think it’s unlikely we’ll see a more enjoyable experience for Skype’s paying customers anytime soon.

As for the failing call quality – how long have you got?

I say ‘for the most part’ because yours truly has finally made it into the big time. As of writing I’m sitting pretty at number 35 with what is, to the best of my knowledge, the shortest Quora answer with the most upvotes.

Eight characters. No spaces.

Remember, folks: upvotes ≠ quality.

And judging by the colour-coordinated key that’s all it is: a pretty picture.

“It felt like faith, like revelation: that things went on, that life ground on regardless, and mindless, and produced pain and pleasure and hope and fear and joy and despair, and you dodged some of it and you sought some of it and sometimes you were lucky and sometimes you weren’t, and sometimes you could plan your way ahead and that would be the right thing to have done, but other times all you could do was forget about plans and just be ready to react, and sometimes the obvious was true and sometimes it wasn’t, and sometimes experience helped but not always, and it was all luck, fate, in the end; you lived, and you waited to see what happened, and you would rarely ever be sure that what you had done was really the right thing or the wrong thing, because things can always be better, and things can always be worse.”

Iain Banks Espedair Street

Sometimes you’re too distracted to cook and don’t feel that you have time to go and sit in a restaurant or cafe; you just want to sit and work.

Bundle this up with a bit of stress, a desire for comfort and the availability of 24 hour delivery to your door and you have a recipe for waistline disaster.

Well aware of my own weakness in this regard I have successfully implemented a lifehack that prevents me from picking up the phone, or opening a browser, to order out. It’s so beautifully simple I thought I would share it here:

1. Identify an international chain of junk food dealers
2. Order food for delivery.
3. When the food is delivered, refuse to accept it because it is either a) cold; or b) late.
4. Repeat.

By the time you reach the third cycle through you should find that you are no longer able to order delivery from your chosen junk food outlet.

Pick another and begin the process again.

Don’t try this with independents in your area, they don’t deserve the lost orders.

Image: Robert Banh

Growing up in America, Isaiah Saxon didn’t ever get to watch Grange Hill - his youth bereft of the joys of Molesworth, and the terrors of Scum.

Great idea though.

Under the auspices of BT’s adopt a kiosk campaign this K6 model red telephone box is now owned by a tiny West Sussex parish. For the collective benefit of the somewhat aged community it now houses an Aivia defibrillator instead of a payphone.

When one considers the alternatives, such as being shipped off to be refurbished and sold as a naff shower stall or novelty greenhouse, this seems a fitting outcome for a former rural lifeline.

Bizarrely, that Vertu Ferrari post continues to yield steady traffic from organic search.

Judging by the bounce rate I can only assume that impressionable young boys and men of a certain age have little interest in Telecoms, Media and Technology.

So, here’s another ridiculously over-engineered design conceit just for you guys – the P9981 Porsche Blackberry.

This stunningly stupid reworking of the Blackberry Bold 9900 goes on sale tomorrow, in Harrods. It’s priced at GBP 1390.

If you have more money than sense (and absolutely no taste) why not pop along and buy one?