254 karma · joined November 15, 2010
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.kongregate.android...
Also, in the blog's comments you were asking if Google will allow the distribution of another App Market to be distributed via the Android Market, looks like they do:
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.appspot.swisscodem...
I could be misreading what you had posted, if so, apologies in advance.
I was in your shoes a bit over 2-years ago and still going at it, so, if I may, give you some pointers.
1. Before you leave your full time job, model your expenses for as long as you can (did that for six months) and make sure you have enough to see you through both good and worst case scenarios. This will also tell you where the stop-loss is for you.
2. Have a list of people who you can lean on for emotional and intellectual support. It only takes one bad day to pour cold water on all the good days. Make sure that you have people who will keep you moored on both the good and bad days.
3. The first month is the toughest one and nothing in the world prepares you for it, especially if you have been securely employed for close to a decade.
4. Make sure you are doing what you enjoy doing & aim for revenue that will take you out doing things that you don't enjoy doing at the earliest.
Good luck, again :)
The key factors involved in such a decision are:
1) Why 2) When
I don't think it is a blanket vote for or against a rewrite.
The important bits come in the end under "Lessons Learned".
Also, 'viable' would mean different things in different contexts. I think it is certainly viable for the current investors to exit with a good return on their investment if the company goes public.
For the company itself, it can be a different story and we need more information to comment on that.
Somehow, I don't think the Wordpress app store is going to make much progress at Automattic. It will require them to put in considerable resources to policing the code than improving the core.
The other way is to have a the Wordpress core bootstrap allow only a whitelist of functions to be called, which would have the effect to severly curtailing the flexibility that is required by plugin/theme developers.
Mind you, these problems are there not just with PHP/Wordpress. You can have the same issues with Chrome/Firefox extensions, bookmarkelets and most of the add-on models where you are running code that has not been subject of a decent audit.
The trouble for Wordpress/PHP is the footprint they have on the web now, which makes them pre-Vista/7 days for Microsoft on the web. You could probably do similar nasty things with a fancy jQuery plugin, but it is much better bang for the for the buck for the evil guy to have a go at something that is so widely installed and used by a large number of people who would not know it even if you were to show them code that does nasty things.
On other hand, a certified/curated theme/plugin/app store for all ecosystems that follow the reactive model to policing add-ons is a great idea for a start-up. I have been amused that nobody's done it so far. I know there are directories, but they don't test/audit the apps. Someone should give it a shot.
There is precious little in the story save what is already provided by Matt Cutts and there is this little gem towards the end:
"Is no one minding the store? Or are they just minding the cash register and turning away from what the customers are up to?"
That entire sentence could very well turn out to be true, but for the time being it is just opinion, which, after enough people repeat it, becomes a fact.
What will qualify as a great company? Is the deciding factor that it does decent revenue or that it uses a pretty nifty technology stack or is it that it does decent revenue in which the technology stack is an enabler?
Zimbra - Well, the point is that Indiatimes did outsource it. Guess I gave you an example that you asked for there. Same is the case with NDTV and Tekriti. They may not be to your liking, nor am I sitting in judgement whether they are 'great' or not, but the fact is that you can build good companies and businesses either way - build or buy/lease.
Coming to what you have said, " As for failed startups, you will never know as a lot of those stories just die with the companies," this is precisely what I am trying to address. That, you just don't know what their reasons are. Just like I would not be able to tell you what is best for Infinitely Beta.
But, I had asked a question in the parent comment - can it be shown that any of the start ups who failed or the ones who have done well can do even better if they did the stack internally?
Try the flip side of the question - how many Indian start-ups would have failed or succeeded if they all built and deployed their stacks on their own?
One of the companies I had worked for once had its valuation done by a pretty big i-bank at $1 billion. We were flabbergasted, but they were also going to be underwriters for the issue.
I am an Android user with a Galaxy GTI9000 and pretty happy with it. So it is not like I am batting for Apple either.
To summarize: Apple has a passionate user base, Android may not have an user base that is passionate to the same extent. In any case, long lines outside stores don't amount to much - the Palm Pre is a good pointer in that direction.
Fact is that most people won't line up to buy Android and certainly not as many as Apple fans. Does that mean Android won't sell - hell, no. It will only sell more.
Most of the complaints about Android from Apple fans seem to be on the lines of - "hey it is imperfect and a lesser phone but why does it still sell?" For the Android fan club it seems to be a case of itching to see Apple in trouble.
People seem to forget a very basic fact: it is just a phone :)
The trouble with getting a handle on the mobile phone market is that most analysts often pick up only the US market or the smart phone market and form their conclusions based on it.
Another issue is when most of the online discussions on the iPhone/Android competition turns into an all-out brawl with only the usual talking points thrown in.
I use a Galaxy S I9000. I like the phone. It is not perfect. I could probably have aimed for the iPhone, but it was at least $100 more where I live (India). Keep this price in mind, it is very important.
What is the cheapest iPhone you can get today, without a contract? Most of us India buy the phones pretty much at the full price. Even if I assume that the iPhone will be priced at half of what it costs here, it would still be more expensive than some of the Android phones made by the local manufacturers here. I don't ever see Apple doing an iPhone Starter Edition.
There were some 100 million-plus mobile phones that were sold in India in 2009. I am sure that 99% of those were not either a Samsung Galaxy S or an iPhone. Between iOS and Android, the odds are much better on Android to tap into those potential 99 million sales.
This is the reason why Android will grow even stronger next year. But it won't be at the cost of the iPhone.
Longer answer:
What exactly is a 'blogging innovation'? Something that helps you run a better blog? I don't think Quora qualifies as that. I know a few people who are attempting to use the posts feature as a sort of blog, it is not quite the same as an open blog. It is more like a Twitter follow on a access limited account.
As someone loves Quora and is very grateful for it (so far, at least), I can say that they have innovated mostly on the technical front.
Their differentiating factor is actually not technology. It is something that even the best of technology can find hard to solve - curation of content and the community.
One thing I can certainly think of that Quora has done right is to dis-incentivize the A-list. There is no reputation score in Quora, your follow count means nothing in your ability to participate anywhere. You contribute most often because you genuinely want to.
To conclude, I like Robert for his sincerity and passion, but his take on most technology and products are pretty poor.
I switched to a MBP in 2007 since I was due an upgrade on the giant Toshiba I was lugging around. By then, most of the PC options were on offering Vista. By then, I had grown into a significant 'frenemy' arrangement with Windows XP and just did not want to put in anoter x number of years learning another Windows version and get it to behave to my liking. So I went with the MBP and after a week or so I was quite happy and settled with it.
I switched to a Macbook after that (left the job and hated the abysmal battery life on the MBP) and it has been my main work/dev machine ever since.
The reasons why I love the Macs:
1. It stays out of your way. I don't often reboot for 30+ days. Between the Finder, Terminal, Chromium & Textmate I get more work done and less time is spent on understanding the innards of some inane bug.
2. Ability to compile stuff has improved a lot. In 2007 it was a pain to get most of the OSS stuff compiled on it, it is a different story now. But this is also because the people who manage the products are doing a better job of targeting the Darwin as an architecture.
I was a pretty involved Linux user in the day. There was a time when I would get my kicks out of the fact that you had to work hard to get a video driver going. I don't have the time for that now. On a recent Netbook I bought, I tried the Ubuntu Netbook Remix. It worked, but with a lot of glitches and plenty of inconsistencies. Made an effort for 2-days, installed XP on it and been happy ever since.
What OG gives Facebook is the ability to classify and index (not sure if they are doing this) 'active' pages on the internet. Look at it as a cheaper and more efficient way of classifying pages on the web that are being accessed by users. The OG metadata identifies the page content in a structured manner, thus offloading a lot of the classification pains to the content publishers.
It is a smart way of attacking the subset of active pages, but it can't compare to the indexing and classification of a larger web - which is what Google does.
The quote below is enlightening:
"This is a somewhat different Zuckerberg to the one the public knew just a year ago. In recent months he has transformed from an awkward wunderkind with a preternatural ability to anticipate where the web is going, into an amicable executive unafraid of laying out his grand plan."
So, Mark has become better at communicating the vision of where the web is going. And what exactly is this vision? It is that Facebook will grow and expand and with one of the largest audience platforms in the world, any move it makes into adjacent domains (places, deals) will be instantly successful. Talk about self-realizing prophecies and stating the obvious.
Next:
"In other words, the world will be experienced through the filter of one’s Facebook friends."
If you think this is a strength, it is actually not. On the open web the universe is the set of all indexed pages. On Facebook, this universe depletes to what your connections know/discover and now the pages that have the opengraph data on them. I do think that we are quite safe from a world which is exclusively experienced via Facebook because it can't, as things stand, represent the actual universe of information out there.
Facebook is a big and important company, but it is also at the height of a frenzy in a domain that is desperate to realize some of the potential it holds - thus the breathless accounts from media, bloggers and of course, the investors. We keep hearing about 500MM active users, but last I checked, they had about 130MM visits in a day, which is not too far off from what a Youtube gets at 103MM. Some degree of perspective is badly required in analyzing these companies, especially when you have nearly zero public data to rely on.
The fun aside, it boils down a matter of ROI on effort. It is not trivial to detect duplication (save exact matches) on URLs. If the community is enabled to deal with it in a non-automated way, it is not worth the trouble dealing with all the threads about false positives and other similar troubles.
They are a cash machine, which, sitting idle in the bank will invite ire from investors. If they invest in something, they will still get hell, since, there is a valuation bubble and anything worth picking up will wind up with them overpaying for it.
In Google's case there is little that they can pick up in their core domain - they already slurp up most of the decent emerging talent related to search even as their dissertations are being drafted. The online domain has very few companies that even justify a billion dollar valuation even in adjacent domains that Google makes its living off.
p.s: I'd love to have this problem.
The ones you need to track wind up being a mix of the following:
1. Page views: Track overall growth
2. Page views per user: Track engagement
3. Visits: Track overall growth.
4. Unique visitors: largely useless metric since every tool out there disagrees with each other on the number.
5. Revenue per user: Track user segmentation.
6. Revenue per page view: Track infrastructure costs.
7. Active users: Finer measure of engagement and churn.
8. User acquisition/retention cost: Track cost of marketing/outreach.
(1) is important if you are selling inventory on CPM.
(2) is needed to get the mix of organic growth with existing users to increase, while keeping a different focus on acquiring new users.
(3) mostly needed for the ad sales pitch. No point getting a million visitors if you can't retain them, but sales needs inventory.
(4) has always been ~10% off between different tools. Can be an indicative measure of engagement.
(5) helps you keep ceilings in place for acceptable cost per user
(6) can help you make decisions on infrastructure where you need more than what you can buy.
(7) possibly the only user-related metric that should matter internally.
(8) can help you understand why bidding on that $5 CPC keyword does not make sense when what you make per user is $3.
1. There seems to be a lot of confusion between the platform generating revenue (FB Credits) and revenue generated from being on the largest platform (using your Twitter/FB account to generate leads). The latter will massively overshadow the former and yet the latter will have a greater impact in the enforcing the hype/bubble that is connected to social.
2. If you look at the Top 50 for Comscore October, 2010 for US, you can count about 5 companies that belongs to the 'social' genre. Assume that each of them are doing a billion in revenue a month. That is still an $60 billion a year annually for a domain in which a single company is valued at well over $40 billion. A bubble? Certainly. Is it a bad thing? No; as long as you don't wind up being the sucker at the end of the line, which none of the current investors are going to be.