aviswanathan

We implemented Balanced into our app yesterday. We allotted a week to integrate payments; with Balanced, it took a mere three hours. Even better, we were able to play with payments with the dummy dashboard.

Really impressed with these guys so far.

Totally agree. One-click interface to spin up an environment.

As someone who went from design (Photoshop) to frontend (HTML, CSS, JS) to backend (Ruby), I can totally vouch for ditching the 'one-stop-shop' sites that claim to be able to teach you everything about programming. In my experience, the most important thing to do is fork, break, and fix. Only if you immerse yourself in programming are you able to understand and start applying the concepts.

Also, I think a huge skill for any programmer is being able to search and find answers quickly and efficiently. It sounds silly, but being able to quickly Google search for a particular answer or abstract a StackOverflow question to apply to your situation is huge when getting started because those are the resources you come to use all the time when you're actually building a product.

Just my $0.02.

Hmm not sure... Haven't actually tried it out yet

One of the coolest implementations of WebRTC is a project my friend launched called PeerCDN (https://peercdn.com/) - basically allows you to reduce bandwidth costs by leveraging the resources of active users on your app.

Although the essay is well-written, this isn't necessarily true. I think the best way to get noticed by a top-notch university is to be damn great at something. It doesn't really matter what that something is, and more fundamentally, I think it's important to have a life goal to be damn great at something (irrespective of college). If you find a passion and work hard at it, applying to college is actually pretty straightforward. From my experience, top colleges (at least the handful I got into) respected me for my extreme passions rather than looking for a stereotypical club president, NHS leader, community service organizer, all-stater, etc. (none of which I had).

Yea, it's obviously important to get good grades and SATs, but beyond that, there's no silver bullet formula. Of course some kids can apply with filler resumes full of leadership positions, etc. and get in, but the majority of kids I've talked to who go to great schools have great passions that they would've pursued college or not.

Ignorance is bliss. I think by not knowing (and intentionally ignoring) how difficult something appears to be, it's easier and manageable to tackle it step-by-step. With that frame of mind, small steps are accomplishments, and you're motivated to continue as opposed to continually thinking about the overall goal and how many steps are required to get there.

I think the marriage of backend as a service and (query-driven) analytics is going to be huge in the next few years. This interface looks really awesome. Look forward to hopefully playing around with this soon

I've never followed Keith much, but it's a bit surprising to see him come out so critically following his awkward departure from Square. Undoubtedly a great businessman (PayPal, etc.), but I think this was totally uncalled for, especially in public context. What really irks me is that he keeps it going and defends it.

I've never been a huge fan of Foursquare, but as a founder, I know my limits in criticizing others' ventures and ideas. My company is my baby. Publicly humiliating someone's hard work is something I think most founders would definitely take personally, so I can relate to Dennis' reaction. This definitely got way more publicity than was necessary, but I think it brings up an interesting reference point in providing feedback and criticism on ideas/businesses.

Fantastic tool. We've used it a bunch for remote collaboration and it really adds an element of 'togetherness' that really isn't possible with other tools.

Well played.

The issue for me is that every unread email is a to-do item for me. So I often just click on an unread email without reading it just to mark it read.

I think this will improve over time.

I totally second this. The learning curve for Raphael is so much less steep than D3 and there's some really nice functionality built into the framework. The only (small) qualm I have is that it's a relatively bulky package, but you definitely can cut out pieces that you don't use that are unnecessary.

Scrolling is really becoming the new thing in UX design. It's an interesting contrast to the 'movie-like' flash animations of a few years ago that required no interaction on behalf of the user.

You beat me to it.

This is really interesting haha. Crowdfunding company seeks crowdfunding. I'm excited to see how the VC climate shakes up in the next few years as crowdfunding becomes even bigger.

To her credit, she probably has the toughest and most scrutinized job in the technology industry right now. Every action she takes will have hoards of supporters and nay-sayers. Kudos to her for actually being bold and ignoring the noise.

It seems inevitable, but I have difficulty imagining a world (at least one in the next 10 years) where full scale projects are created on smaller devices. The complexity and sophistication of a computer is a developer's joy. I don't see that kind of openness with the tablet/smartphone market. Undoubtedly both are fantastic tools for content/app consumption and perhaps even content creation, but it's hard to imagine people building full scale applications solely from tablets and smartphones.

Seems complementary to a service like EDITD (www.editd.com). I'm curious how Semantics3 determines which ecommerce sites to crawl. I remember reading somewhere about how even Amazon only stocks something like 2% of all ecommerce products.

Have you experimented with any sort of feature-request pre-order tier where the entities that pre-order early have direct say in what gets built? I know that you're obviously building for them, but is there any way to stroke their ego and make that part of the package?

I think it's nice for entrepreneurs to read these once in a while to remind themselves that VCs aren't perfect and that they are capable of accepting their mistakes. But in reading this article, PG's words about how ideas that seem flat-out crazy can have potential to succeed in a big way (Starbucks is the one in this article that rung a bell) is really evident.

Nosedive as in potentially disastrous. It's a matter of semantics.

Pebble sold $10 million of units via Kickstarter. Mainstream or not, I'd consider that a mild form of success at the least.

And Apple has been able to do that, but their technology/APIs are already being used by third-party companies for similar purposes, so in this case, it seems like they're playing catch-up, at least ideologically.

Funnel is a big one. I don't think anyone else has this (besides D3 - but you can do basically anything with D3).

Patents and suing aside, I think Apple's nosedive into the watch industry is a really interesting one considering their past. Traditionally, they enter new product lines with great hesitation and deliberation, but it almost seems like in this case, they're trying to catch up with the market (Pebble's massive success, etc.).

As a hardware company, they're playing with human real estate. They've already got us locked in our desks and on the go with our phones, but now they're trying to add yet another level of convenience with the watch.

I'm pleasantly surprised that this product passed Kickstarter's (increasingly) stringent guidelines for acceptable projects

I'm curious to see how the whole 'forking/cloning' concept is replicated here, especially if Pixelapse is seeking to become the Github for design. I'm fairly certain that the restrictions for use of graphic content in a public format is a lot more prohibitive as opposed to software (there's not really such a thing as 'open-source graphics' besides measly clip art galleries).

The true social value of Github is in its community-oriented approach where any developer anywhere can fork code and contribute changes. That doesn't seem as possible with imagery, and my impression is that designers are more concerned with protecting their work (nothing wrong with that - just an observation).

Following the Peter Thiel point, I think that the education system is currently flawed in the way that it sets up the end goal as being college. From the beginning (elementary), kids are trained to get good grades to get into a great college, but there's very little active discussion with students about careers and life in general at the early phases. Everything done at an academic level is to get into a good college, rather than learning for curiosity's sake and building something of value. I know this because I fell for it when I was in HS, and it's something that needs to change.

But most online retailers implement some sort of 'popular' tag. Maybe Storenvy has more sophisticated algorithms behind-the-scenes that I'm unaware of

Storenvy has an interesting model, but I'm a bit skeptical about their scalability. I started a fashion brand in HS (backpacks, apparel) and we launched a Storenvy store pretty much off the bat since there was no cost. The issue is that they don't seem to have accountability for their customers. They didn't run any checks to make sure my business is legitimate (obviously it is), that we actually sold product before, that we even had a website. This is polar opposite to Amazon, which runs several screens to make sure sellers are legitimate (getting our products on Amazon took nearly two months).

Perhaps even more importantly, the marketplace model for e-commerce does not align with individual sellers. Marketplaces are focused on expanding, adding more sellers, and expanding product portfolios. Sellers, meanwhile, prefer to be one of few on marketplaces so that they have greater visibility. With Storenvy's model (basically no barriers), I don't see much value being provided to sellers. Even if there is 0 cost to the seller, there is little incentive for them to invest time into building out a profile and attracting customers on the platform.