Vooza Mobile App
vooza.com
vooza.com
We too ran into a spot of legal trouble with our initial concept, but lawyers have assured us that if we pay them enough money, they can insert wording into our terms and conditions that means we can steal anything we want from anyone and be completely immune to consequences such as negative press, criminal prosecution, or not sleeping at night after finally accepting the ruthlessly exploitative and completely unethical nature of our business model.
We think we've built a great service and have complete confidence in our future revenue generation potential, but as luck would have it, we've just closed an acquisition deal with a totally above-board company called PatentULike, Inc anyway. They have given us written assurances that they are experts on collecting patents like the one we are about to receive and, despite not producing any tangible product or service so far, they have a sustainable business model that will allow them to exploit those patents fully in due course.
We feel this is the most socially acceptable exit under our current circumstances, leaving the fruits of our hard work in safe hands, providing a solid return for our early investors, and coincidentally also making us richer than Donald Trump's hairdresser.
But we'll have to ask these Vooza people to stop stealing data from mobiles, please.
Or, another way of putting it, 'Hasn't everyone on Hacker news been exposed to the same articles/knowledge/humor I have been exposed to?'
If something seems old and tired to you, yet is still getting upvotes, the answer is probably 'no'.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/18/jotly-parodies-our-mobile-l...
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/13/jotly-lives-parody-app-goes...
The second video making fun of buzz words (cloud, social, local), acronyms (RSS, API) and startups being oblivious to making money is a really tired and overdone joke.
I laughed, a lot. Win!
"We believe in the power of iteration, we originally started out as StumbleMonkey, which was like AirBnb but for online-dating, so when you left town you could rent out your spouse or partner. Great idea, but then we found out it was illegal, so we had to pivot.. So we changed our name to Googoprrrrrr. That's 6 r's. And that app was like Spotify, meets Grindr, but for rental cars, but ran as if it were for a hotel. "
Based on the way headlines are edited, this seems to be on purpose.
EDIT: Wow, downvoted into the ground for trying to be nice and explain constructively what I disagreed with. I don't mean to complain, but I would like to suggest that readers consider what kind of discourse they'd like to see before blindly downvoting.
But I'll point out two examples from just this week where article+headline completely failed. First is Aaron Winburn; I had no idea of why this was on HN until a commenter helpfully pointed out he was a Drupal developer. Second is "Trello is now half-million strong." The headline, nor the article, told me what the heck Trello was.
Maybe this is conscious decision on the part of the HN moderators to keep out newbs.
How is that a problem in that particular case? This was not an introductory post for Trello. Introducing you to the product was not its purpose. This was an update on the product's blog telling you that Trello now has 500k subscribers. But if you for some reason clicked on the article wanting to know what Trello is, I'm pretty sure they have a link to the actual product right there. Including an introduction to Trello in the article text would have been a waste of most people's time.
Get a grip.