arkonaut

Agree here - That has always been one of the thorns in accepting PayPal on any decent scale. At least with chargebacks, you can fight them and win about 50% of the time with the right docs. PayPal barely entertains dialogue.

Agreed. It's the technical knowledge and the institutional web that, until something causes it to weaken, only gets stronger and stronger each year. I lived in NYC and they said these same things for about three years... And now they've stopped saying it for some reason.

Don't know how you'd quantify this, but I imagine people have a subliminal response to the smile whether they know they see it or not. Like pleasant chord construction in music. I've also heard it's the reason watches in magazines are always set to a time around 10:10 or 2:50 to make it seem like a smiling face.

Agreed. Really wish this was more of the story.

Where can you find affiliate arbitragers like this? Totally get that he/she should be doing this, but how do you find the people doing this effectively? I'm all for paying when someone has figured this out, because the installs I get often make me want to give up trying. Thanks!

Agreed that this should get quite a bit more elaboration to put it in perspective.

Mattermark and their rankings are going to be looked back on as just as useless as a professional blogger. There are hints of positives for you to take away (and make wide sweeping bets across companies with - if you're an investor), but the outliers end up being outliers in a number of ways. Pretty much all the ways that make prognostication like this precisely pointless.

Who has ever gotten that? Zach Braff and Veronica Mars brought their own audiences.. Similar stories for friends that have done KS. Something like Coin however was able to implement a pretty viral referral system that could get your card for free when you get others to buy by hosting it themselves and customizing that part of the flow. That's something I don't think you could do on KS and actually has a viral loop.

Not problem free or 'now' problem free? Would love to know if this solution works. Thanks!

What will the payout time be for it to hit the debit card? Is it instant? This is awesome by the way.

Why is this ironic?

Yeah, I've been following Crowdtilt for a while (interviewed there), and their use case has never really been about the Kickstarter type of crowdfunding. It's more of a bite-size type of crowdfunding model (with A LOT of retention; they mentioned their stats on repeat use) instead of elaborate projects. This app actually makes a lot of sense.

Does it provide a community effect? I know they say that, but they've never really released convincing data that it exists. Over 50% fail, and the average raised for successful campaigns is something like 105%. As for the funding transactions, Amazon handles them, and when you speak to successful project creators, their biggest gripe is that Kickstarter owns their customers and the communication with them (my pebble updates still come from Kickstarter a year and a half after the project ended), so I think there is a concern regarding the technology.

This point isn't very relevant though, because the artist wasn't releasing different media for different devices. The cd release still came with a cassette release, etc.

I so want this to be the case.

Everyone be slightly careful about anything they read on history.

um, this logic is false. you can give money to whoever you want -- this is not the same as hiding a convicted criminal in your basement from the legal authorities.

i can send a $1,000 check to bradley manning (who has actually had charges brought on him, currently in jail), and there would not be a single illegal thing about sending him a check.

$200k in revenue a month for one of the consumer services alone (estimated Lyft rev on 120,000 rides/month) suggests they're solving a big problem/providing a lot of value for consumers...

I've actually tried DropBox for photos, and it's actually pretty awful on this front. Our company just switched from Box to DropBox (because of DB Teams issues), so I have little reason to stay on DB outside of my photos... Someone will come along and do this better (and they'll win this space starting mobile first).

Don't know if the winner will be Loom -- But the "why is there yet-another?" could've been the exact same question for when DB launched. "...Because people feel like the problem is still not solved."

This could be really cool for this post from earlier today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5141995

There's no guarantee of getting your money back if a project fails on Kickstarter though... http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/22/why-this-jilted-kickstarte...

Wordpress?

i agree with this ^. if you're going to launch a project that you hope builds the momentum to fund +$100,000 of your capital needs, it might be worth putting aside $5k or so for strategic PR or hiring a PR person for the launch of your own crowdfunded project.

And Lockitron proved with a product people want and getting people to notice it, you can do really well without Kickstarter (+$2,000,000 to date I believe).

Um, what?

This post can be added to the pile of why HN discussions are getting more and more pedantically lame.

The post adds so little. And even in the post, it acknowledges this, yet has so many words/syllables/phrases to read through just for everyone, even the poster, to come to the same conclusion.

I really don't like being negative. I guess it's the negative pedantry that has bothered me to the point of saying something. If I'm in the minority and just venting, apologies (My comment might just be the ticket to get it out of my system).

also really interested in this ^^.

Or kills people that aren't aware that it can be extracted.

You've crowdfunded an album on Kickstarter, a bus tour across the country on Indiegogo, and a billboard with friends on Crowdtilt. Nice :)

I don't know if many have used all three like you have - Which one was your favorite? Or least favorite?

If you're netflix, I'm sure you have staff/engineers at the office 24/7 during this time of year specifically. At least, I would hope they did.

I've heard this over and over, but the reason it won't become a "trend" in terms of people around the nation talking about it, or even people in tech-early-adopter capitols like SF and NYC, is that founders might try to pattern match what's getting funded (terrible idea and motivation to build a product), but people really just don't care about enterprise/b2b startups (press, startup people, casual americans reading 'Wired' and discussing startups/apps at the dinner table). So even if it's taking off underground, it will only take a few more SnapChat* series-a announcements to shake people back to meteoric growth, no sales-cycle, brand building type of companies.

*Everyone was writing articles about them this week - and with good reason. Startup people (founders, employees, press, wannabes, VCs, angels) love reading that kind of shit and talking about things like 'Will Facebook's X kill Company Y?', etc... If it was a b2b company, it wouldn't have gotten any attention. Not 'just a little attention', but like, none. On top of the great things the consumer sector provides (customers, no sales cycles, meteoric growth, easier to build, etc), this reason above is one of the biggest reasons enterprise will never be a real "trend".