blacktar

Assholery all around, IMO.

Billy is an asshole for deceiving people and breaking the SW rules of no preworked ideas allowed.

Bobby is an asshole for joining a SW with the wrong motivation and breaking the SW rule of no pre-formed teams (and proceeding to whine about being snubbed without any form of self-reflection in the process).

The SW organisers and the facilitator are assholes for breaking the clear SW rule of no cash prizes allowed - ever.

Great to see more startups coming out of my native Norway. Looks like a fun app. Looking forward to see where they are going with this one.

https://fedger.io/blog/#!/article/18345869981806 is still empty for me through USA proxy. Using DK proxy it's OK. CDN issues? Tried deleting the CDN completely? Update: seems to work now.

I'd also love to see a version curated for industry verticals. I think that would be an interesting proposition.

We'll see how it turns out. Bring popcorn.

TNW broke the story in English http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/06/07/paypal-accidentally...

(Mental note to self: Never ever use "clusterfuck" in title when posting to HN ever again. Karma mod trolls do not approve.)

Another German legal blogger chimes in on the gaffe: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=...

PayPal Germany confirms as mistake http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=...

TL;DR PayPal Germany seems to have sent mass-emails claiming German customers have won 500,- EUR when they have in fact not. Kaspersky Labs have verified emails as legit, coming from PayPal.

German law basically dictates that if you tell someone they won a prize, you have to give them that prize, no ifs or buts:

§ 661a Gewinnzusagen Ein Unternehmer, der Gewinnzusagen oder vergleichbare Mitteilungen an Verbraucher sendet und durch die Gestaltung dieser Zusendungen den Eindruck erweckt, dass der Verbraucher einen Preis gewonnen hat, hat dem Verbraucher diesen Preis zu leisten.

There were hype in spades leading up to the iPhone launch, though. And it is not like it was revolutionary in any other way than that it changed the business model of media and mobile phones previously in favor and control of the telcos to one in favor and control of Apple.

Cool. Feel free to steal. :) I think of it as one more channel for feedback, as to not miss out on insights otherwise lost.

Interesting idea. I've experimented with putting non-functional buttons and widgets in the app and register how many tap on them versus how many who complain about it not working. I believe you also have to ask the data, not just the people.

Great insights! I guess I'm no different in that I'm probably going to be pivoting after more real market exposure and feedback. I just want to go faster forwards and believe more radical transparency will help me with that.

Sure, if you're in the US. I'm in the EU trenches and I can tell you that there are a lot of parties like it's still 2005 over here. (edit: plural grammar error)

What do you mean? Could you elaborate how my startup is now in fact different than one hour ago before the post?

I see it this way: The higher frequency of exposure, the larger the sampling pool, the more noise AND the more opportunity to spot a recurring signal in that noise. If you keep your sampling pool low, how will you separate noise from signal?

When you say"support clients", I assume people already paying for what your startup is offering? For clarity, I'm explicitly talking about sharing for pre-product-market fit, pre-validated business model startups. (edit: sloppy fingers)

Your investors believe in product-market fit and huge markets at that. Your patents alone are not going to solve that, though. (edit: grammar)

If you're doing software in Europe like me, patent protection is not available. And that's a good thing.

How do you know to objectively value feedback sources? Why and how does it depend?

How would you define unnecessary noise? Conversely, what do you see as the necessary noise channels? How would you define and know when it is appropriate to open and close? (edit: added last question)

Oh and tl;dr I've decided to put all my bootstrapped startup's prototyping out in the public, declaring death to the cult of stealth startups. Would you do the same? Are you doing it already? (edited typo)

Thanks. I guess I'll use my personal blog to share for now, keeping the startup's blog to share more about why we're doing what we're doing and topics around meeting new interesting people, shaping serendipity.

Have you checked out the completely free course on how to build a startup by Steve Blank? It's not as dumb or cheesy as it sounds. The guy knows a bit or two about what he's talking about. http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/ep245/ Give it a try. Worst that could happen is that you wasted a couple of hours getting slightly entertained.

There's the Evernote "Smart" Moleskine http://evernote.com/moleskine/ though. Anybody had any experiences with it? Speaking of Evernote, they also recently introduced their no-equity accelerator http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2013/04/16/announcing-the-ever.... and stated that they want to get into hardware - so maybe there's an opportunity here for something to happen?

I still use a Moleskine from time to time, but mostly the iPad, to take notes - especially when doing customer interviews. Yeah, I agree. Starting niche is a good thing. The question is if you want to stay niche or if there's growth potential to other niches and out of niche-dom. [edited for typo]

I'm interested to see where this can go, if there's a market of some scale for a paper product for this niche. What do you think?

Could be prettier as an app, but serves the purpose very well IMO. Reminded me to brush up on my pitch too.