171 karma · joined April 23, 2007
No Value Proposition. No Call to Action. No Immediate Offer.
No idea what you sell?
Online, Offline, Come hold my hand and teach me?
Do I have to be a nerd to use this?
Is there phone support.
How much does it cost.
How do you secure it so that I can be assured no one else can get it.
And I roll my eyes when I see hyper claims like
"Reinvents Backup"
You have 15 seconds. You lost me at 3....
And black makes me feel dead...
Thank you Bill...
Twitter.
Is a real time revolution.
Twitter names are the gold rush. You kids better get in there and preserve your spot. This is the best way I have ever seen to build a vertical slice of 30-50 thousand followers, without all the SEO/SEM, PPC, hoopla.
I am running multiple twitter accounts, using auto follow tools, auto content tools, and cannot believe how much traffic to my sites it generates. Better than PPC!!!
2 centavos deposited...
LOWER THE PRICE.
Thank you....
Academia - $8.00 per hour...
Industry - $80.00 per hour...
Don't you just love college interns....
;)
;)
McDonalds
Burger King
Wendy's
In n' Out
Jack in the Box
White Castle
They all sell burgers.
Nuff said...
Keep going...
You get locked in because after 2-3 years of churning out work you have both comfort with one technology, and a base of libraries and routines that took you 2-3 years to write, and know.
Once your down that rabbit hole, switching becomes much harder as you have to abandon the mind share you created in the languages you used. And in the case of .NET since so much of what you do there is unique to MS alone, and mostly due to the "LOCK IN" to their OS, walking away from it is not FREE or EASY.
Worse yet stay with it long enough and watch your world crumble to nothing when MS seeking revenue enhancement decides it needs to release the next great language, and obsolete years of your work, with an upgrade. Don't think so? Ask the VB 6.0 crowd and the thousands of COM component vendors whose industry disappeared overnight when MS pulled the plug on them and forced .NET as the standard.
I don't agree that students should expose themselves to as many technologies as possible, if among their choices one technology could cause them harm...
april fools
egos deflate ;)
Who in their right mind as a developer would integrate with a service that by its own admission cannot be considered secure, does not guarantee its service, can shut you off for any reason, has no liability if in doing so causes your business to fail, and can change its TOS as it sees fit and you agree to any change they might make in advance.
When Lawyers and Accountants start running your business, you might as well get the bankruptcy documents rolling.
Just a few of the idiotic terms are listed below. To see the complete list of reasons why you should not do business with these guys, go here:
https://spreedly.com/info/terms-of-service/
# Spreedly has the right to modify or terminate the Service at any time, without notice.
# Spreedly has the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason.
# You bear all risk for your use of the service.
# Spreedly does not warrant that the service will be available or reliable.
# Spreedly does not warrant that the service will provide accurate data.
# Spreedly does not warrant that the subscriptions that you offer through the Service will meet the expectations of your subscribers.
# Spreedly bears no liability for any losses of any kind that you may incur through the use of the Service.
#Besides credit card information (which is encrypted), no information that Spreedly stores is guaranteed to be secure.
But they do guarantee that they will bill you once a month and you get a full 2 weeks to audit that bill, and if its wrong and its 2 weeks and a day later, that's just tough luck.
Nice.......
It was their fancy methods of making money that stole the money for my retirement, my children's education, and home improvements. I wish they would take their 2 trillion dollars and fly to the moon.
These people are scum. Harvard is just a fancy school for thieves. You can dress up a pig, and its still a pig.
When these folks wanted to make money they changed the bankruptcy laws, freed up credit, and started charging 30-40 percent interest on credit card loans.
They freed up credit in the home loan markets and allowed speculators to drive up the price of homes 3-4 times their value. And then when the bust comes, they cry their eyes out because they are afraid to invest.
They are fear based because the days of thievery are at an end. It sickens me to see someone post this stuff as if they are our only answer to the future.
The real answer has several components:
1. Tie our money to a real standard. Gold.
2. Loan money to middle America from Banks ran by our country and limit interest earnings to 1 percent. This means housing, student loans, car loans with a cap of 1% payback for fiat money borrowed to pay for it.
3. Get rid of income tax. Sales tax only.
4. Eliminate sales of stocks which do not provide a minimum dividend payment monthly. You can't pay your dividends, you go bankrupt. Period.
5. No more funny money games with derivatives, credit swaps, bundling, blah bu blah. To hell with free wheeling economics. It does not work and it only helps the greedy bastards that continue to screw us middle Americans that only seek stability in our futures.
6. Money = Greed. Control how much any one entity is allowed to own based on productivity. Cap it based on ability to produce goods, services, or IP. No CEO should be paid more than 50 times the lowest level employee in the company. Think we would be talking about minimum wage if this were the law?
7. Force people to save by taking 1% of all sales tax paid every year and allocating it to a privatized social security account.
8. Eliminate Unemployment. If you can print money the way we do, then spend it on creating government jobs meant to help people. If money is not tied to a gold standard, then its really just perception anyway. Print it and give it directly to folks that will use it to live better than poverty levels.
9. Free Health Care for everyone. Pay doctors the same level you pay a money manager and the doctor shortage is gone in 6 years. HMO's? Private medicine? How do you justify this in the worlds richest country with 42 million men, women, and children, not able to afford it?
It is only a matter of time before we eliminate money entirely. 500 years? A thousand? One day nano tech and robotics are going to completely eliminate labor required to fulfill our basic necessities. Star Trek Communism will replace this greed driven economy.
Live long and prosper...
San Diego is not a startup town. To expensive, not enough talent, and everyone good longs to head north. I love this place and have had marginal success working here, but the politics here, and the folks that have money who drive it, are to conservative. You would be happier in the valley in terms of surrounding yourself with like minded thinkers.
Nuff said...
As a beta tester it was a very nice gesture, to receive that letter with the comment "Prove us wrong!" hand written as a P.S. to the form letter. That letter hangs in a frame and every day I use it to remind myself that the only person that needs to believe in me, is me.
Today, many years later, I thank my lucky stars for that rejection. I went it alone, no co-founders, no frigging investor BS, and did not take a dime from anyone.
This year the 17 employees of MY privately held company drove our sales to 61 million dollars in online transactions.
The satisfaction that comes with proving investors wrong can't be bought, only earned.
Those that can, DO. Those that can't, find an investor.
1. Self-limiting software
2. Vanishing functionality through invalidation
3. Removal of media capabilities
4. Problem-solving prohibited
5. Limited mobility
6. One transfer only
7. Stealth Installs with Windows Update turned OFF...
8. Restrictions on your rights to use MPEG-4 video 9. Windows Update file deletions of 3rd party software
Reference:
http://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2006/10/19/forbidding...
And thats just the EULA. Once you actually install this piece of malware you find that if you watch it with a net snffer, even while completely idle, after several days with no interaction, it is constantly sending stuff across the net. Try it for your self with Snort. Its spooky.
If you value your privacy, the security of your company, and give a damn about protecting your investments, you will read the EULA for yourself before you rush down to the beach with the rest of the lemmings.
Talk to Verizon about an idea now and your sure to see your idea pooped on or stolen. An open system would let everyone have a hack, and talk about investors opening wallets for companies with ideas. Deja Vu, the internet reborn yet again....
If your like me and have made your bones, and bucks, the risk is non existant. Necessity being the mother of invention, I forge ahead alone, though I often wish I had a partner. I have heard the comments by VC that a single founder model usually fails. I think that is valid. In my circle, I don't know any other single founders, so subjectively speaking it seems that the VC guys are right.
I believe it takes a psychologically unique individual to go it alone. We are as a species evolved to work best in a tribe. Those who stand apart from the tribe and are successful are few and far between.
My list of downsides are:
You make every decision alone.
By definition there is no synergy in a singularity.
VC perception is against you. If your not self funded, your going to have a hard slog finding funds from this group. Keep in mind that poltically speaking, manipulating founders is part and parcel of the VC game. A game made more difficult in a single founder model.
During the early stage, pre employee, you have to be a bright and lucky person to make every right decision on your own. You will make more mistakes.
You better be disciplined. If not your going to fail alone.
The upside you ask?
Only one that I can think of and that is that at the end of the day, since the system is so stacked against you, if you make it, you own it. And that has tremendous rewards. For me it meant very very early exit from traditional work patterns. CHOICE, CHOICE, and more CHOICE about every aspect of what I do. No one interferes in any way when you pay your own way. But, the old saying that its lonely at the top, is no lie. If you can handle that, the rewards are worth it.
I would like to hire you.
Answers that question, doesn't it....
Being nearly 50, having ridden the first communication wave called BULLETIN BOARD SYSTEMS, the second wave called HTTP (the internet existed long before the graphic web), and the third wave called CELL PHONES, I learned that "INHERENTLY GETTING IT" doesn't matter for squat.
The only true form of "GETTING IT" that matters can be summed up in three words and it applies across all generations, fads, and follies.
Follow the money.
That's it. Thats all there is too it. Give me a bleeding edge wave of any sort, comprised of a significant member class, young or old, and the only metric that matters is who makes the money.
The rest of this crap about how some group "GETS IT" inherently, is mental masturbation. The only person who truly "GETS IT" is the old fart VC who cashes the biggest checks while getting the young and the dumb to paint the fence. Praise be unto him, Samuel Clemens was right.
As I grew older, and discarded the arrogance of youth, I changed my focus. The metric that matters most in terms of inherently "GETTING IT", is determined strictly by your position in the cash flow. I don't need a myspace reddit delicious facebook account to get that!
I need a dumb kid willing to take up front money for an idea so that they can feverishly burn through a few years of their life, and in the end get their well deserved and fully diluted 2% return.
Give me that please, with sugar on top. The youthful are there to be exploited. Period. They beg for it with their arrogance. I for one am more than happy to oblige them. Why would I care about what they inherently GET?
I don't.
In fact I hope that every one of them I meet has this particular chip on their shoulder because it makes it all the more easy to steal the fruit of their labor, which is what I "INHERENTLY GET".
Its all about...
Me.
Arrogant - Having or displaying a sense of overbearing self-worth or self importance...
yawn....
Pick two.