cloudkj

Glassdoor.com seems to provide supporting evidence of this.

I'm also curious as to how you get the data. The fact that there seems to be almost a monopoly by STATS on the data leads me to believe that there needs to be more competition in this space. Curious as to how you guys are going about it.

Hmmm, seems to me there's a business opportunity in providing lower cost, more developer friendly sports data. I remember looking into getting access to sports data since I wanted to do some analytics after I read Moneyball. Old, archived data is easy to come by, but any fresh, real-time data sources seem to have non-trivial costs.

I guess there might be some restrictions on who gets access to the official raw data for various games, depending on the sports league. If the costs for getting that data are high, then the only way to circumvent that would be to collect them yourself. Even then, I don't know if the leagues would come at you hard for gathering data and using team names or player names...

I believe CitySearch was also spun off. That one isn't going so well.

I know there are a few core products that were results of acquisitions, namely PowerPoint and Visio. They've pretty much integrated deeply into Microsoft, so that's always a possibility here.

Just wanted to point out that it's pretty silly to talk about an AI's APM, since its APM is infinite (bounded by hardware limits like clock speed, etc).

Not sure how good this AI would be. It pretty much delegates micromanagement and lets the user make high-level decisions. However, it doesn't seem fine grained enough to handle different situations. The fact that the 8 buttons include unit names is slightly worrying; is this is specifically for Protoss? What if a reaver drop is the current optimal plan of attack? What about scouting? There were no scout units at all. The video just shows the person clicking "attack" and the zealots/dragoons automatically moving towards the enemy base, so maybe the "black sheep wall" cheat is presumed to be enabled. Scouting is one of the most important tactics. How would the system deal with cloaked units, etc? It just seems like a helper system that does trivial things like executing a standard build order, assigning probes to resources, etc.

I also disagree with his downplaying of the importance of branding and design. I definitely remember stumbling across Wesabe a few years ago when I was starting my first job and looking for a personal finance tool on the web. One look at Wesabe made me hit the back button. First, the name was strange and foreign. I didn't know how to pronounce it. Second, the logo (which is the same today, apparently) uses thick, bold strokes that just made it seem less like a legitimate finance product. I don't think I ever made it past a few pages on the Wesabe site before abandoning it.

Mint, on the other hand, had a very direct value proposition to me. As soon as I hit the landing page, I instantly knew what they were offering. The design was pretty, colors were soothing, and the font made me want to read the copy. It was good enough for me to get through the signup process, even though I eventually balked when they asked for bank account login information.

If my experience is anything like anyone else's, I can imagine Wesabe having lost many, many potential customers simply by virtue of having a less desirable site. Even right now, as I look at their current logo, I feel the same way. It's one case where a log actually significantly turns me off towards a service.

The post talked about product design flaws as the second biggest contributing factor to Wesabe failures. I think aesthetics and branding need to be grouped into that. If the appearance of a product isn't good enough to draw potential customers past the landing page, then the design is the bottleneck and the biggest culprit, bar none.

E-junkie is decent, and cheap ($5 for lowest plan). Not the best interface, but it's simple to set up and works well if you're not looking to do too much customization of the checkout pipeline.

This exact thing happened to someone I know. He got a call right as he was leaving his old job on his last day. The guy said something along the same lines - due to changing circumstances, the original position we were offering you has been eliminated. The guy was flabbergasted, of course, but just ended up going back to the old company anyway. I'm pretty sure if you want, you can get your job back. Unless you were leaving on bad terms or there's something more to the situation.

To make it a little easier, you can just join another team at the same company instead. That way it's a little less awkward.

Curious - can you cite any cases to support this?

Cool. Good luck to you guys! One suggestion is that you guys should look into releasing a Safari version as well. Since it's Webkit-based, it takes almost zero effort going from Chrome to Safari. I recently wrote a Firefox extension and was able to port it to Chrome and Safari quite easily, since it's pretty much all Javascript.

From the articles, it looks like the extension isn't listed in the Mozilla or Chrome galleries. Is there a reason for this? How do you think it affects the distribution and exposure of the product?

Looks pretty similar to the Four Hour Work Week muse model touted by Tim Ferris and co. Attractive product page (Wordpress theme), informational product (software templates), outsourced commerce pipeline (e-junkie). Only thing is that he didn't need to use paid ads to drive traffic, since he led with a blog post that led to subscriptions, which meant he already had a customer base. Cool stuff.

The first thought that popped into my head was - this guy sounds somewhat sophisticated. He might even read HN.

I think these emails provide further evidence that this guy may in fact be on HN.

I'm not really in a position to tout startups, but for me it's more about building and creating things that people use, find useful, and enjoy. It's about being artists and creatives at heart - and engineers and programmers by trade. Software is just one way of expressing creativity. I believe that for many people, the allure of money comes secondary. It's a motivating factor, but certainly not in and of itself.

+1 for SQS. It pretty much matches all your criteria to a tee. The replication guarantees messages won't be lost, and will occasionally result in duplicate messages.

I think another potential downside is that the messages get purged after 14 days.

Firebug

Greasemonkey

S3Fox

ColorZilla

DownloadHelper

Vacuum Places

... and a shameless plug for Compass, a Firefox/Chrome/Safari add-on I wrote that adds a "table of contents" to various e-commerce sites to help you find stuff faster. Search for "compass" on the various extension galleries if you're interested.

Along those same lines - I started working on my first iPhone app and added a simple feedback button to gather user feedback. Then it occurred to me that this feedback mechanism itself can be offered as a service. Kind of like a Get Satisfaction or UserVoice for mobile apps.

Anyone think this would be useful? Would anyone actually pay for something like that? It'd probably have a lightweight library for the various platforms, and any app can integrate the feedback button with just a couple lines and an include. Initially it'd just gather raw feedback - probably with a interface that helps let the user know what the form is for - and later on adding more community-based feedback features that other web-based feedback services provide.

I know there are a few companies that offer mobile feedback integration, but none that are very active or solely focused on mobile.

What do y'all think?

Despite not being an employee, I have close personal Microsoft ties, so I regularly hear about what goes on in Redmond. Anytime I'm involved in a discussion about Microsoft's future, the first and foremost point I bring up is how Microsoft needs to divest its investments in order to succeed in the future, or have any impact on shareholder value with respect to its stock price. Microsoft is more of a giant company with several distinct product silos. The Windows and Office product silos are cash cows, while the other ones often struggle to catch up. It's like a giant, lumbering robot trying to move through molasses. Microsoft needs to divest and spin off some of its various smaller divisions and allow for more autonomy. Let them operate as they please and allow for the market forces to take effect.

It also allows them to serve more ad impressions at a much faster clip.

Out of curiosity, how'd you drive traffic to the MVP/smoke test landing page?

+1. That's exactly how I view Twitter - as a modern version of "away messages." I remember looking forward to the always-on Internet connection in college dorms as a way to set long-lasting away messages so friends can see what I'm doing or some witty remark I thought of.

Just read the comment you made re: RescueTime. I guess that's the MVP/dry testing tactic. I recently learned about it and am fascinated as well. Getting customers before writing code - a simple, yet brilliant idea that a lot of hackers aren't used to, myself included. The dry testing approach can even be applied to free consumer apps. "Launch" with mockups and screenshots and invite users to sign up for a beta test.

The biggest question I'm struggling with these days is how to even drive users to your barebones landing page in the first place. For pay-to-use consumer apps or B2B apps, you can often seek out direct leads or use advertisments. For general consumer apps, it's much harder to generate a buzz. How do you even get started on driving traffic to something like that?

Simultaneously reading the iPhone dev book and going through the Objective-C manual from Apple. Objective-C is pretty easy to understand as long as you understand object-oriented programming and have a solid grasp on C. It's just learning it AND the iPhone platform at the same time that is a little harder.

I'm in pretty much the same situation as you, fast-forwarded a few weeks. However, I decided to take the plunge into learning iPhone development. Once you start playing with it, you'll realize why the iPhone is such a compelling platform and such a hit in the mobile apps space. Apple made it really hard for anyone to build a crappy experience.

Tangentially, I'm not really enjoying the learning experience since going through the book (the grapefruit book) is pretty much the same as doing a bunch of tutorials. I still don't feel like I understand the overall architecture of an iPhone app and how the various pieces connect. Anyone have good book recommendations?

Yup. For a social web app.. using PostgreSQL for high-value, low-volume authoritative data and MongoDB for high-volume, low-value non-authoritative data (like news feed items). Works like a charm.

I recently created http://feedbark.com with pretty much the same idea as this. You use the service and submit anonymous feedback against someone's identity. That portion just never seemed to gain traction, at least amongst the small number of users I had try it out. There was a restriction that feedback had to be approved before it's shown, which I suppose slightly detracted from the "instant gratification" of submitting unsolicited feedback to someone.

Ultimately, I cut out that part of the service because in order to do it "right" (i.e. avoid slander and general hostility), the feature just doesn't have enough juice to get traction.

After searching for a bit, it looks like Unvarnished has a similar idea. It's a Yelp for people. Not sure how much traction it's getting.

Berkeley all the way. North side of campus is quiet and cheap, and I'm sure you can get rent down to the $700s if you share a house/apartment. It's also close to all the engineering buildings, so any interns you want to hire will be within shouting distance. South side has more (cheap) food options though, but it's also less quiet and more messy (Telegraph, etc).

Was the startup building solutions around generating content for dry tests? Like a skeleton landing page generator? That thought crossed my mind as I read through some of these articles.

Wow, I feel really late to the game. Had no idea what MVP stood for and had to look it up. This looks like a pretty awesome approach to test the market for new product ideas instead of building blindly and hoping it sticks. This also reminds of the "ghetto testing" practices I've read about, especially within the social gaming realm.

Can anyone recommend other articles about MVP? The article's author also mentioned that he used HN as a good starting place; does anyone have links to those posts?

EDIT: Looks like the original post was just from a week ago, and I actually read it :) It's here for anyone that's curious: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1482834