Fast forward almost three months later, I now spend about two hours every month on news when I’m at my laptop. I also spend, probably, another hour or so on my iPad, but I can’t really track that without RescueTime. I haven’t saved a lot of time (and that wasn’t the point, anyway), but I find that my days are much more productive because there’s less noise, less news, less procrastination going on.

I’ve also discovered Flipboard (I know, I’m kinda late to the party), a brilliant iPad app that makes it incredibly easy to go through my only news sources at the moment: The Economist, The New Yorker, Hacker News and TechMeme. Each morning, while I have breakfast, I flip through the sources and click on the articles that seem of interest. The whole process usually takes about five minutes and I’ve realised that the most important bits of news usually surface to the top.

Now, there’s another thing that’s been bugging me lately and I even blogged about it awhile ago. I think Facebook is, mostly, a waste of time. So in February, I’m going to try another little experiment: only visit Facebook on weekends. I wonder how that’s gonna go.

But by far the most exciting thing that happened once I started carefully tracking KPIs for my body has been the fact I’ve become a bit of a metrics buff. A bit, to say the least. What started as a little personal experiment ended up being one of the most important aspects of my professional life: tracking, measuring, analysing and acting on business KPIs. And I’ve learned some stuff along the way, which I’d like to share with you.

First and fore most, set clear objectives. If you’re running a startup, you already have these – revenue, users, clients, funding, etcetera. What we don’t do enough, however, is define what metrics determine whether an objective is being met or not. For revenue, this means analysing the funnel and track leads, meetings, trials and contracts, sales cycle, and so on. So go ahead and make a list of what you consider key metrics. A long one. Don’t worry about the structure just yet, just start tracking. Excel works best.

Secondly, turn data into information and information into insight. Data alone is useless. No, really. Google has a boatload of data. If they didn’t have a ton of kick-ass algorithms to process it and turn it into information, all that data would be useless. The best way to do process data is to look back at the objectives and work your way down. If it takes one month to close one client and a sales person can close five leads per month, you need 10 sales people to close all the clients in a pipeline that has 50 leads. Dead simple, but if you don’t track these metrics, you’re just putting your finger in the air and hoping for the best.

Data isn’t cool, you know what’s cool? Graphs are. A long Excel spreadsheet with 1000 rows doesn’t say much. But throw a graph on top and boom, investors start getting it, your board starts smiling and you, you start sleeping well at night. I think that’s because people have very low attention spans. Including you. What better way to analyse your performance than looking at your graphs & charts, daily. If it goes up, it’s good. If it does down, not so much. Unless we’re referring to costs, doh!

Analyse, eliminate & add indicators as often as you can. In my 4 hour body experiment, I started by tracking about a dozen metrics on a daily basis and ended up tracking just four: weight, body-fat, activity and food, because I realised that these are the ones I need to track, analyse, compare and decide on in order to get maximal results. I realised, for example, that I can lose 1% of body fat in one day by doing an interval training in the morning followed by 30g of protein for breakfast and no carbs on that particular day, something I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t tracked these core metrics carefully. But more on that another time.

“80% of domestic spending is done by women, 80% of commerce happens locally and 80% of considered purchases are driven by influencers.”

That sort of puts things in perspective, although I’m not sure about the first one.

I’ve just installed Blogo, a Mac blog editor that seems pretty nice, simple and has exactly the features I need: close to none.

So far so good. I don’t think it’ll actually make me blog more, but the thought that I don’t have to login into the WordPress console whenever I want to write something is very comforting.

I see that Eric Giler and some very smart MIT guys invented the wireless electricity. Yep, you read it well alright. If you don’t believe me, go ahead and watch the video below. Mr Giler demos wireless electricity. So if you’ve never seen an iPhone charge wirelessly, this video’s for you .

What’s next, guys?

As you already know, I spent most of this week at Mini Seedcamp Paris, where Veevid, the newest product developed by Brainient was one of the 20 finalists. If you follow my twitter account, you also know that we won the competition, together with other four great startups.

I’ve been thinking on how to describe my Seedcamp experience in just a few words, ’cause I’m sure you don’t have too much time to read my posts, anyway. So I decided to briefly write about what I got out of it but at the same time give some advice to those who’d like to participate at future Seedcamp events. Here goes:

1. Be passionate but brief
I met about 50 investors and entrepreneurs at Mini Seedcamp Paris. The minute I started talking to them it became very clear that these guys get pitched at least 10 times per day, so the first 2 minutes are crucial. Show them you’re passionate about what you do, but do it briefly. If they don’t either laugh or ask a question the first minute or two, it means you’ve lost them. Inspire. If you don’t do it, nobody else will do it for you.

2. Don’t go there for the money
Most startups apply for Seedcamp because they want the money. I didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I could use more cash as much as any other startup in this world, but I went to Seedcamp because I knew it’s THE place to meet the right people and because I needed a confirmation that I’m on the right path. It seems I am . Go there for connections, validation and feedback. If you play your cards right, the money will follow.

3. Connect and listen
By far the most important aspect of Seedcamp is that you get to meet a lot of people. Really smart people, passionate entrepreneurs, and a lot of experienced investors. There were so many of them that it made me wonder what am I still doing in Romania. Plus, everybody kept saying London is THE place to be. So I’m considering moving there, but we’ll see. Anyway, listen to what they have to say. Take notes. Read the notes after the event. Improve.

I want to congratulate the Seedcamp team for doing such a tremendous job. Thumbs up to Alasdair, who works non-stop but always seems to be the most relaxed dude in the room, to Reshma, who’s always very focused, precise and very clear about, well, about everything , to Steph Bouchet, who’s the cutest marketing person I’ve met so far and has an adorable accent, and last but not least to Saul, who always makes the right observations and asks the right questions, at the right time. Excellent job, guys! See you soon, in London.

To sum it all up, I believe “it’s all about the people, stupid”, and Seedcamp is the best place to start meeting them.