QuickOffice was definitely one of Symbian's very few truly great third party software - so congrats for having been a big part part of this!
404 karma · joined June 29, 2011
I also love eating cheese, baking cakes and urban exploration.
Blog: http://mehdi.me
Everything else: http://about.me/mehdime
That one is probably the main reason why companies stick with awful-looking websites. I'll never cease to be amazed at how many people have no design sense or eye whatsoever and genuinely cannot see the difference between an absolutely horrendous-looking logo or page and a well designed one.
In fact, not only can they not see the difference but I often see them preferring the godawful version over the well designed one. There's a reason why every home-made flyer uses Word's multi-colored 3D fonts and wordart - a lot of people genuinely think that they look absolutely amazing :)
Quite frankly, I know I'd be quite puzzled if a message popped up out of nowhere telling me "You might be logged out, please, back up your content and refresh the page!".
What do you mean by I /might/ be logged out? Am I logged out or not? And why would I be logged out? What does this have to do with anything anyway?
And what on earth am I supposed to do to "back up my content"? What does this even mean?
And what is this "refreshing the page" business all about?
To be honest, being a developer myself, I would actually figure out what you actually mean. But I can guarantee you that 99.9% of the people out there won't have the faintest clue of what you're talking about. They'll just do what they always do in this case: they'll click OK, or Cancel, or whatever they think is going to make the annoying message go away.
I get it now. Head a bit fried today so can't really think of a better strap-line right now though.
Of course, I know that some people are making a very good living by doing just this - writing about stuff they know nothing about. But this isn't going to earn you any favours here.
You said in another comment that you're an accountant. Are you a good accountant and do you like accounting? If yes, there's plenty to do on that front. Accounting is something that most people hate and see as being horribly complex. Yet, it's something that all entrepreneur have to do very early on in their business - they just don't have a choice. What about you write about this instead? I'm pretty sure you could end up with something a lot more useful than this "e-book".
Another tip: don't lie. Don't tell me that I'm going to get a book and then give me a 2.5-page check-list that has less content than an average blog post. Don't tell me that I'm going to "dominate pitches" or "speak their language" and give me a copied-and-pasted list that anybody interested in raising VC funding would have read a hundred times already.
A check-list is a check-list. A blog post is blog post. A book is a book. It's that simple. Pretending otherwise will only get you angry customers.
" This is not your run of the mill E-book – this is content that puts you in the mind of the VCs, allowing you to:
Dominate Pitches Understand their perspective Speech their language Get into incumbators " (all spelling mistakes left as-it)
In addition, you are very strongly encouraging people to pay for it and making them feel guilty if they don't.
This is what I got: a 2.5-page PDF document that contains a really basic check-list of what investors are looking for in a startup - the sort of thing you'll find on a countless number of blog posts about raising funding.
Is this a joke?
What I found to be truly nightmarish when looking for a flat was:
1) The immense majority of flats listed on rental sites (either aggregators or the letting agencies sites) are either scams, have already been rented or are just baits that letting agencies publish just to get you to ring them so that they can try to sell you the flats they actually have available.
The result if that pretty much all the online rental listing websites and apps are nothing more than a spectacular waste of time as every time you find something that looks decent, it's either already gone, it's a scam or it was never available in the first place.
2) In a place like London, the rent is only one part of what a flat costs you. Council tax, charges and agency fees are massive and can easily add 20%-40% to the cost of your flat. And these charges can vary a lot from one place to another. Yet, no site ever displays the total cost of a flat. This makes it really hard to compare flats.
To address the first point, I always thought that charging both landlords to advertise and tenant to look for flats would cut a lot of the crap. Landlords should only be able to advertise for a maximum of 3 days (they could pay again to extend for another 3 days). Since tenants have to pay to see the listings, landlords shouldn't get harassed by time wasters. Having to pay to advertise should hopefully keep the scammers at bay. And since landlords have to make the effort to renew and pay every 3 days, it should hopefully reduce the amount of flat still listed but already gone.
Of course, it's likely that scammers and letting agencies would quickly find a way around this - but it'd be worth trying. Might not be your space right now since you seem to be focusing on aggregating from existing sites. But if you want to add real value, I really think you need to re-think the way rental sites operate.
(as a side note, the only rental site in London I've found not to be a big fat waste of time is http://london.spareroom.co.uk/ - pay for access to the latest listings and you generally find genuine and good offers that are still available. And it's not just rooms in shared houses - there are actually quite a lot of flats to rent there as well)
My understanding of the OP's post is that he is talking about server-side issues rather than client-side though. Others have pointed out that he's talking about the design of a specific python library or framework that I'm not familiar with - I'll need to read up on this first.
On a second read, it looks like the meat of the post is about decoupling the implementation of your API from the underlying network protocol. Unless I'm missing something, that would be MVC.
Controllers are completely oblivious to the fact that HTTP is being used behind the scene. The routing mechanism takes care of parsing the request, deserializing the request body, instantiating the appropriate controller and invoking the correct action passing the deserialized objects as parameters. Once the controller's action has completed and returned its result, the View is responsible for serialising the response to HTML, JSON, XML or whatever serialisation format you use, and for setting the correct HTTP status code and headers.
So still puzzled, even after a second read.
Those of us who don't have a problem with keyboards don't bother typing twice. We Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Tab, Ctrl-V, which renders the whole thing pointless.
The ones that rely on public votes are very obviously always worthless but the ones relying on a judging panel are, in their vast majority, just as meaningless.
This is actually why entering awards is a great strategy for cash-poor startups who can't afford to pay a PR person. Anybody can win awards. In fact, I haven't personally tried that strategy, but I'm certain that you don't even need to have a product, or a business at all, to win awards. Put together a pretty looking web page for a non-existent product, write a convincing enough description, enter a few random awards and, soon-enough, you should be the proud owner of an award-winning non-existent product.
There are two reasons why it's worth spending a few minutes from time to time entering awards as a startup:
- Many people don't understand how awards work and believe that they actually mean something (well, they do mean something: that you're better at winning awards than your competitors). So having an award-winning product does increase your credibility with clients.
- More importantly though, the reason people organise awards is generally to generate PR for themselves. So they'll generally have a PR company lined up to make sure that the award gets covered in the media. Which in turns means that the winners get free PR. And that, for a startup, is priceless.
(this measures the total time to download a static Hello World HTML page 325 bytes in size hosted on IIS from an EX 4S server in Hetzner's DC15 data centre).
Northern Ireland for example is a startup paradise. InvestNI, the government body in charge of giving away free money, recently had to give back a whooping £39m (that's $62m!) because it couldn't find enough businesses to give the money to quickly enough.
Sadly, many entrepreneurs in these places have never experienced what doing a startup in the "real-world" is like and they don't realise what an incredibly competitive advantage these grants give them. So instead of leveraging this opportunity, many spend most of their time whining and complaining about the paperwork and bureaucracy involved.
Issue #1 The SIM card, as a piece of plastic used to identify your phone number and mobile operator, is indeed pre-historic technology. It's quite unbelievable that we're still using such a system in 2012. Unless I'm missing something, what a SIM card does could easily be done in software and this is part of what the OP is suggesting. I don't think that there is any doubt that the SIM card, as a data / identity storage system should be retired.
Issue #2 The issue of operator-issued mobile phones being locked to that specific operator is unrelated to whether or not the phone uses a SIM card. A phone can be locked to a specific operator, regardless of whether or not it uses a SIM card. In many countries, operators lock all their phones, meaning that you can't use a SIM card from any other operators in your phone.
If you live in a country where all phones are sold unlocked or where phones can be unlocked after a certain period of time, it's almost certainly because mobile phone operators are being forced by law to do so. Not because the phones use SIM cards.
So the freedom to switch between operators at any time isn't a technical issue linked to SIM cards. It's just a matter of whether or not operators can legally prevent you to do it. If operators can legally lock their phone, they'll obviously do it. Why wouldn't they?
It's worth noting that if you want an unlocked phone, you can always just buy it straight from manufacturer - there's nothing that forces you to buy a phone from an operator (apart from the price, but I'll touch on that later). So this issue is actually already solved - it's just that many people don't think their freedom to switch between operators is worth the upfront cost.
Issue #3 Being tied to a long contract and not being able to switch between operators and plans at anytime is another unrelated issue. But then, it's a pain you choose to have. There's nothing that forces you to sign up for a contract. Most operators offer pay-as-you-go plans with no contracts. In the UK for example, well over 50% of the population is on pay-as-you-go (or was the last time I looked) so pay-as-you-go can definitely work.
Obviously, operators much prefer when you sign up for a contract. Just like tech startups go crazy for subscription business models - it's nice to get money automatically every month. So they try to trick people into signing up for long contracts by offering subsidised phones. And many people fall for that.
What it all comes down to. Most, if not all these problems, arise because of the perception by people in most countries that mobile phones should be free or reasonably cheap. People don't find it a problem to spend £600 on a laptop. But tell them they have to spend £600 to buy a new phone and they freak out. This is despite the fact that many people do the same thing on their phone as they do on their laptop and use their phones a lot more than their laptop.
It's this way of thinking that results in far too many people signing up for long contracts with operators, allowing operators to subject them to their every will. Changing this perception and making people buy mobile phones in the same way as they buy laptops (i.e. without subsidies and straight from the manufacturer) is what we would need to really change the statu quo. Whether or not phones use SIM card is merely a small technical detail (but one I'd love to see fixed nonetheless).
1) A tragic but isolated incident occurs.
2) Our dear President jumps into action, calls a press conference and, with a dramatic tone of voice, announces that he will pass a new law that will protect us all against this happening again.
3) The media happily reports this. The public is happy - our dear President is looking after us. The media however blissfully ignored the fact that, in French democracy, the President has no power whatsoever to create new laws, let alone to tell Judges who should be punished for what. There is this thing in our constitution called "separation of power" that both our President and the French media seem to be unaware of.
4) What happens next depends on the PR situation:
If another story quickly takes the top spot at the 8 o'clock news programme, the new law proposal is quietly buried by the legislators never to be heard of again.
If a new law really needs to be passed for PR purposes, a new law, comprised of nothing more than a rehash of existing laws, is passed. It's then added to the already huge pile of laws that never get enforced due to lack of resources in our judicial system. The end result is an ever growing and more and more complex set of laws containing an increasing number of redundant and useless laws, resulting in an even slower and inefficient judicial system. Maitre Eolas's blog is worth a read to get a better understanding of what actually happens with these new laws: http://www.maitre-eolas.fr/
So yes, business as usual. I'm sure there are plenty of lessons to be learned here and applied to doing PR in a startup though.
Joel Spolsky's blog post, mentioned in the discussion, is worth a read too: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...
And so is this post: http://blog.boundary.com/2012/03/02/selling-in-2012-its-comp...
As the later says, it's complicated. Personally, as most of HN readers I guess, I also can't stand this sales model. But some buyers demand it. And they happen to be the ones with the most cash to spare.