aviswanathan

I'm super excited to start playing around with this. Although there is still friction in moving from one app to another, this API is a first step in weaving together what is now a disjoint mobile experience. Also, a great way to growth hack: I see app developers viewing URX as a toolkit to piggyback off other apps' audiences/views. Congrats to the whole URX team!

We need more female entrepreneurs with attitudes like this. Although awareness for equality issues is undoubtedly important, Collin hits the nail on the head by re-focusing on the undeniable truth: running a company is just plain hard. Sure, being female, minority, short, nontechnical, etc can all be drawbacks, but I'd argue that they all pale in comparison to the difficulty that is successfully running a sustainable company. Full disclosure: I am relatively young (20) male hacker of minority descent, and I used to use some of these factors as excuses but now I treat them as irrelevant. Those things simply don't matter to me (in context of running a company or building a product) because it's not really in my power (and not really my overarching mission) to change the culture of the valley and the rest of the tech world. Just my $0.02.

Interesting demo site design as well. Not sure if I love it, but the speckled header was definitely memorable.

D3 is the reason I got into animation in the first place. The general ease-of-use combined with the hackability of it is awesome.

Crowdery (YC S13)

Super glad that this is on the frontpage. Dashboard design is probably the single biggest thing that analytics companies overlook when building product. It took us nearly 5 iterations to get our dashboard to a decent point.

What's worst is when offering free trials of an analytics product and then realizing that all freemium customers engage with a dashboard once, and then dropoff forever. Event tracking and various stages of a/b testing can be dangerous because they steer engineers to local minimums in designing a product.

Having a logical understanding of every element of the dashboard is the best way to approach the design.

Great post, we need more resources like this out there.

I'm sometimes a skeptic of flat design, but the flattened Dropbox icon looks awesome on the new site.

I think the article is great, but I'm not sure about a few particular industry segments. For example, in SaaS, it often may make sense to actually charge for software up-front before even having product-market fit to see if there's even any viability in making it a business in addition to experimenting with pricing. Often times, the drop-off experienced in going from a completely freemium product to a priced one is fatal and gives you inaccurate data about the market's reception to your product.

In consumer web, the product -> strategy -> business model approach makes complete sense, but I'm unsure if it carries over to most things in B2B.

Looked at the screenshot, is this using some sort of integration with Screenhero? After playing/using Screenhero, I've been excited about the possibility of incorporating it into web apps.

A bit confused; the TC article says all of the startups in the current batch are B2B, but Boxbee seems to be B2C. Am I missing something?

Love the tech, but the design is spectacular. I'm one to get turned off pretty quickly if things aren't obvious/well-designed, but this is the exact opposite. Kudos.

I love the idea. An immediate thought is whether this technology can be abstracted for use in different departmental infrastructures (training a new frontend dev on the platforms/tools the rest of the dev teams use, training a salesman on the CRM tools/communication protocols, etc.) and for the lessons to be customized to the needs of a specific company. Obviously that would require a lot more API work, but I think it'd be super valuable for different types of teams. I think I'd pay for it.

I believe the raw data can be exported as well - the graphs are just nice to be able to glance through and quickly digest

First of all, I think this technology and application is awesome. Glass really is pushing the boundaries of what can be done in the physical world with contact to software and the internet. I just worry that it's approaching communication platforms a bit too swiftly, especially in light of recent controversy regarding usage while driving (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/technology/personaltech/go...).

Really hope that some sort of legal precedent is set so that us geeks and developers don't have to worry about distribution if we want to invest time/energy into building apps for Glass.

I can attest to this. Initially, I was extremely skeptical that the Tesla was anything great (electric cars haven't been the highlight of the automotive industry despite repeated attempts by established manufacturers). A few weeks ago, however, I had the chance to drive a family friend's Tesla and I was stunned.

The Model S seems like a car from the future. Forget the fact that it's completely electric and charges via an alien-like, glowing plug. The interior with the large, beautiful touch screen, a voice-activated system (that, contrary to Siri, actually works) coupled with access to the internet, and the gorgeous trim and accents really make the Tesla a standout.

Moreover, it's every geek's dream. You can remotely control the car with a smartphone app, monitor the car's efficiency and performance via beautiful graphs, and even have presets for charging cycles.

Best of all, the pickup is like none other (as one would imagine). Flooring it in a Tesla has a completely different meaning. Pure acceleration and no roaring engine noise.

I think it goes without saying that I'm very excited about this company.

Cool idea. Seems pretty similar to http://www.tweetspiration.com/. After putting a decent spam-filter on this, maybe there's a way to introduce crowd-supported mechanics (ala upvotes, comments, relevant mentions/hashtags)?

Stressball 2.0

I sort of understand the reasoning behind App.net, but I'm worried that its developer focus will prevent many average users from joining the service and prevent it from really providing the social layer that's necessary to actually build something network-driven out of it.

The reason Facebook and Twitter are popular platforms are not necessarily because of their particular features or user data but because of the massive networks they represent. By tying our products to their ecosystem, you're able to leverage their technologies and data while still having a large enough addressable market. This is definitely not the case with App.net (at least so far).

I think what App.net might have that's unique is an active developer community (as opposed to a mass of average users), so perhaps it can standalone as a developer-friendly social platform, but I'm questionable as to whether anything of mass market value can come out of it, especially on the B2C side.

They basically just ran a (very extreme) Groupon. Most companies that do daily deals lose money on them in hopes of turning some of those initial customers into recurring or lifetime customers or to increase awareness for their products.

This 'mishap' may have similar yet increased effects because of the impressive way they handled the situation. For example, I doubt Razer would have ever imagined their story landing on the frontpage of a high-traffic site like HN, but now that it has, I (and probably hundreds or thousands of others) have gone to their site to get more info.

Really shows that with smart and agile situation-response, you can turn an unpleasant circumstance into an opportunity.

I think turnaround CEOs have the some of the toughest and most public jobs in the industry. The particularly difficult roles are for those individuals that already have a successful past (Mayer with Google) that are then implicitly 'expected' to bring new energy and vitality to companies simply because of those past successes.

Look at Ron Johnson, for example. His genius did wonders for Apple but the same concepts failed with a different industry in his tenure with JCPenney. There's no silver bullet, and what Mayer's doing with Yahoo may have some similarities with what was done early on with Google, but in order to cement Yahoo's independent identity, she's going to have to pursue some goals that aren't identical to things she's done before.

Ending WFH is perhaps a start. The externalities (noisy lashback from media, etc.) don't help, but she's going to have to face a lot more of that in order to institute long-lasting change.

I think Phish's style is really similar to the Allman Brothers' back in their heyday. Although I doubt they profited massively from it, Live At Fillmore East is a jam rocker's dream album.

This article brings up an interesting thought: back in the '60s and '70s when most rock bands extended improvisations into their concerts (Led Zep, Hendrix, Floyd, etc.), did none of them think of recording and distributing each live show as a standalone piece like Phish? Or were they perhaps already 'mainstream enough'?

I do think there's a fine line between being resilient and becoming unfazed by failure (the latter of which is bad). As the article points out, failure is important as a learning tool, but by the same token, trying to avoid failure isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, startups that consciously navigate uncertainty efficiently and mitigate risk as much as possible tend to be much more sustainable.

Sometimes I think entrepreneurs err a bit too much on the side of being too 'okay' with failing and pivoting (buzz word), but I'm a big believer in planning, executing, reflecting, and repeating. Sure, for some things you just have to jump straight in, but I think caution, thought, and preparation all go a long way.

Any idea which college she goes to?

The logotype reminds me of Font Awesome for some reason

I can totally attest to this, but for me the story played out a bit differently. My v1 designs for the company I'm working on now look like trash, but at the time, I tried to convince myself that I liked them a lot. Deep down, I know they weren't fantastic, and people told me this, but I equated the quality of the work with the number of hours I'd spent.

Turns out, a lot of what I spent time on was learning specific UX techniques from different places that looked pretty ugly when they were all smashed together. I think it's analogous to programming (when you learn a concept, you kind of want to force it into the project you're working on, even if there is little to no relevance).

All in all, I agree with the message. Becoming a great designer takes a lot of patience, hard work, and iteration. You have to be okay with throwing entire pieces away in pursuit of something better.

I bookmark articles I want to read and spend a minute reading (roughly how long my pushes take) during pushes. My full routine is here: http://adityaviswanathan.com/new/my-nightly-routine/

I think multitasking is very possible, but has to do more with optimizing for the various senses and developing a discipline and habit around repetition (code, push, read, repeat, etc. every 30 min).

Around 4am usually

I think the concept is interesting. I'm particularly interested in the 'personal productivity' aspect. As in, what if I could monitor my productivity over the course of a month and have a way to quickly figure out which days were really productive and which days weren't?

Just fixed it, thanks for the notice.

I really enjoy these posts by Danielle. For entrepreneurs head-deep in product and not at the fundraising stage yet, these posts are really informative and paint a quick picture of the venture scene. Kind of wish there was a dedicated site that pulled data like this in from Crunchbase, etc. on an ongoing basis and produced reports/graphs. Side project idea maybe?