Show HN: Listen to Growth Hacking & Hacker News on your mobile | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Listen to Growth Hacking & Hacker News on your mobile

soundgecko.com

37 pointsplasma25 comments

Hi HN,

We recently shipped SoundGecko v2 for iPhone with a brand new feature set.

If you visit http://soundgecko.com/hackernews you can get Hacker News & Growth Hacking artucles on your iPhone.

Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry and desktop users can listen too using the web stations view (mobile friendly) - updates to those apps are on their way.

Cheers, - Andrew

What tech are you using for the streaming? Streaming seems such a mixed bag, seems to be pretty low latency. I've experimented with AudioStreamer but there's so many forks

We're currently using MPMoviePlayer but we have a multiplatform C++ streaming/preload/caching library we're working on as we'd like something super performant that we can use on winpho/android & ios

I like the growth hacking feed - who curates it? Is there a way we can get other feeds on the web or just through the app?

We've curated it for the time being after having found a few of our own favourites from the past few weeks.

Is this feed available as a twitter account or an rss feed? Or just something you're curating for the app.

Hey guys, love the idea! I just noticed you had a preferred voice option to listen to the streams. Certainly lends a bit more variety than vanilla podcasts!

What was the design choices of having the particular voices out of the many you could have chosen? Does your data show a particular preference by region?

You guys should do an Ask HN on what people would like to see as the default instead of random. Could lead to some interesting discussion!

Tip: It'd be great to see a 'preview' button to hear what they're like especially the premium

The layout of your front page is a little weird and cluttered.

I would also use a black iPhone or a darker background, as there is not enough contrast, and the edges sort of blend into the page.

Ta for the feedback, we've heard a lot of feedback that Apple prefer to use the black iPhone in third party promotional material. For our green/white theme we use everywhere else though we find the white iPhone fits best for us. I'm sure there's analytics out there that would prove one way or the other, would be interesting to see some hard data on

New iOS app looks good.

Can somebody please explain what's this fad about Growth Hacking? I've been seeing it mentioned quite a lot on TC but haven't had a good definition of what it is yet.

Growth Hacking is a term used by people who are not developers and certainly not "hackers" in it's original sense, it is a term derived by people in marketing who want to jump on the "hacking" bandwagon they keep reading about.

Whenever you see the phrase "Growth Hacking" in any context, stop reading, close the tab, turn the page, otherwise divert your attention as anything following this red herring of a term will be marketing doublespeak and otherwise useless garbage.

Sadly the word hacking has lost almost all meaning and is in it's death throws. Shame too.

Growth Hacking is just a fancy name for growing your products reach by adding functionality that makes it spread faster.

I'm sick of hearing people call themselves growth hackers after adding Facebook integration and sharing buttons.

Despite the "fad" it's a very important area where almost everyone falls down.

The results Mint, airbnb and path got from "facebook integration and sharing buttons" is spectacular and should not be overlooked.

Wait, I thought it was about making yourself into a better person.

Edit: Damn it that's "life hacking" I think. I was wrong. Guess I'm not hackery enough for the hacker club.

How often is the Hacker News "station" updated? It changes a lot so I hope its very frequently.

Cool none the less

Every 15 minutes; or immediately for underlying RSS feeds that support the pubhubsubbub protocol[0] (yes thats a mouthful) such as FeedBurner.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PubSubHubbub

Looks nice! How did you develop this? Was it in each native language, or through something like Titanium?

Are many devs using these products?

I'm a big fan of Phone Gap but havnt done much with Titanium, Appcelerator makes it very appealing

I'm more of a web dev than mobile, but have been diving into Titanium for a week now. Looks slower than developing for the web, but web skills are directly transferable over to building in Titanium, which has its pluses. And since its all JS, that helps too..

Each app is native with a .NET backend on Azure, we use blog storage for the media and a custom TTS engine.

I like that there are different voices but would prefer just the best one or two. Feature?

We support picking which voice if you register (or use Facebook to sign in with) an account at https://soundgecko.com/login

Under preferences pick the voice you want and it will also stick for the app too.

Can you please add these to the popular feeds on the Web App?

You can get both of the stations on our web app at: http://soundgecko.com/station/hacker-news http://soundgecko.com/station/growth-hacking

A “Growth Hacking” feed? This sounds horrifying.

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