colinsidoti

Meh, I'm currently guilty of using straight bootstrap styles with www.kangacruise.com

I also hate the UI, but I don't think these kinds of changes would be worth the marginal improvement. I know I'll never get what I really want with these subtle changes, so I think I'm better off waiting until I can hire a designer.

I'm guessing many here don't know this, but travel agents today (yes they still exist) often recommend Frommer's guides.

I run KangaCruise.com, we considered syndicating Frommer's guides for destinations, and actually still haven't written it off.

My father's a chiropractor and I just asked him about this. Apparently checking insurance eligibility is a "pain in the ass" and involves a phone call with wait times.

I'm excited to see if I can quickly put something together for him.

I went to a talk with one of WebVan's early employees, who actually went on to found Kiva Systems, the robotic fulfillment system Amazon just purchased for something like $750 million.

He seemed to insist the reason WebVan couldn't be profitable was because fulfillment was too expensive, which served as inspiration for Kiva. Having people walk around was too slow and too big a cost center.

Obviously this is biased, but still an interesting point to throw in here, since it doesn't look like something they've addressed.

Are you pushing voice through data or using call forwarding?

I've had multiple VCs call a potential 1-10MM/yr business a lifestyle business. The pressure to move away from that idea to something with a higher market cap is tremendous.

Regarding your second point, "you promised not to go down the slow path," I think that's true in most cases, but there is some VC money that's too easy to get, and the founder's don't really realize the promise they're making.

I feel like this is particularly true among YC startups, where it seems fashionable to take VC money right after demo day, regardless of other company factors (IE: traffic, growth, revenue, etc). The "invested in the team" argument works for YC and Start Fund, but it feels almost irresponsible for VC's to invest in first time entrepreneurs on the same premise. My sample size is tiny, but I think it puts far too many people in a situation they don't want to be in (which they'll realize X months down the road).

That last part is pretty controversial. Interested in other people's thoughts.

Naughtiness was using CL to seed their site in the first place. After the Cease and Desist, using 3Taps as a source CL data was simply walking into a lawsuit.

Generally, I don't think you want your naughtiness to tie you up in a legal battle.

There have been a number of articles about this. For some reason what pops to mind is: VC's dont really like it, Conway thinks it's good for entrepreneurs. (Who knows though, maybes there's a pretty good chance Conway is invested in both the acquirer and the acquired.)

From what I've heard, despite not liking it, VCs haven't done anything to protect themselves in the event of an acqui-hire. A lot of times the cash in an acqui-hire doesn't go to the company, but rather to the salaries of those being hired. So while a VC may have negotiated preference on the cash that results from on acquisition, they never see the cash from acqui-hire situations.

That said, I suspect it's hard for an entrepreneur to take a deal that screws their investors in good conscience, and they would make an effort to get their investors at least paid back (which still kinda screws them, but might keep things more amicable).

Edit: Regards to sharing investors, in this case they seem to share Sequoia, Conway (SV Angel), and YC, but there are a ton of others including Ignition (which led DailyBooth's A round) that aren't also invested in AirBNB.

I'm interested in everyone's thoughts about Kayak.

My feeling is that slowly but surely, the travel sellers who buying leads from Kayak will start paying less. So while I see it as a successful business, I'm not really sure where they're planning to go from here.

Yea it sucks your dealing with CL and not Facebook or you probably would have been acquired.

I say try and move the traffic to pad. It's certainly a big task, but not "far too big". Pick the region where you have the most significant traffic and start there. I haven't looked deeply into your site at all, but I know you have Garry Tans support, ask him what you need to do to get in YC. Get "Craigslist is the Killer" as a headline on TechCrunch. Piggyback the Padlister browser add-on with other common downloads, then push a popup to users posting apartment listings on craigslist saying "Also list on Padmapper?" There are all sorts of things you can try.

There are hundreds of people on HN that wish they had the traffic you have. Use that momentum before it dies off. http://siteanalytics.compete.com/padmapper.com/

I can't help but think you played this poorly.

It sucks CL isn't going to let you get their data, but I really don't think this workaround is going to change anything (although kudos for the neat Google cache hack from 3taps).

I imagine your development efforts would be better spent by leveraging the small but dedicated following you clearly have. There must be ways to take advantage of it without opening yourself up to more litigation.

Agreed. I'm going to guess when I hit the lock button a second time, and all the lights in the car went on, that was supposed to indicate the alarm was now off? As opposed to indicating the car was indeed locked?

Fixing my app was easy. I was checking for empty? but now I'm checking for nil? or empty?

I still think it's weird Facebook would do this.

We'll see how it plays out, but I imagine the notion of a file will continue to decline, and end up replaced by APIs.

APIs continue to provide interoperability, but instead of having the user select a file to upload, they select an image through the Facebook API. This should ultimately improve the user's experience, but there are some downsides during this transition period (IE: photoshop touch lack of sharing features).

While you could argue FilePicker brings back the file, you could also hedge your bets the other way, and work as much as possible to abstract away the file. Instead of grabbing Facebook photos as a set of files, what if I could easily grab the set of photos than contain me and a friend?

For me it was Angelfire, but basically the same thing.

IMO, the place to go today is PHPFog for their free Wordpress hosting. Wordpress as a CMS is a million times more sophisticated than Geocities, but when you're ready to make the jump into something more complicated you have access to the codebase (unlike Wordpress.com where you have to pay to customize the design).

I feel like I may have missed something with all of this new talk about the Facebook phone.

About a year ago, it was announced that Facebook had partnered with HTC and would be releasing a phone in 18 months. I believe it was reported to run on a forked version of Android with an HTML5 front end (presumably to avoid the software update issues that Google is facing)

Is there any reason to believe that's changed? I feel like they still have 6 months before I really expect to see anything

HubSpot?

I guess you haven't really taken a stance on whether this is good or bad, but it just doesn't seem bad to me. The best tech has never necessarily won, and good blogging is good marketing.

(Site's down didn't get to read it)

He should really salt that security function...

I loved how he got in the box and pushed the tickets through...Awesome.

My roommate did a 3 part blog post on Exporting Non-Exported functions in Windows PEs with Python:

http://burrowscode.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/exporting-non-ex... http://burrowscode.wordpress.com/2010/02/20/code-snippet-to-... http://burrowscode.wordpress.com/2010/02/22/exporting-non-ex...

Couldn't tell you what it does exactly, but I remember him thinking it was weird he did it in Python

"The company does not charge a transaction fee to people using its service to send each other money."

This was a good hook that cost them a lot of money. But it's changing to be more Dwolla-y...from an email I received a few days ago:

Until May 1st,

    You can continue using Venmo the way you do now.
    You can opt to switch to bank payments at any time by following a few simple steps. Click here to switch now.

Starting May 1st for you (and starting today for new users),

    To continue using Venmo for free, you must switch to bank payments.
    If you still want to use your credit card, you can set it as your funding source, but you will be charged 3% to cover credit card processing fees.

I'm trying to remember more, he spoke at a class I was in.

His office was his small apartment with a whiteboard. In the morning he would go out for a cup of coffee, and when he came back it was his office. If he didn't do that, it wouldn't feel like an office.

Previously he had worked with Webvan, and one of their costs that was unexpectedly high was product fulfillment. Kiva was built partly as a solution to that problem (though it was after Webvan went bankrupt).

Their initial prototypes (we saw pictures of them) we're extremely scrappy, and I believe too big to realistically be used. I think they raised money with the prototype and computer simulations?

The robots are talked to wirelessly, and apparently wireless represented a major technical challenge (it was before wifi took off I believe).

The co-founder with robo-soccer experience was targeted. He said something along the lines of "If you can make a robot play soccer, you can definitely make a robot follow a grid and pick up shelving."

I got the impression that he gave up a lot of equity to get co-founders at seemingly late points in the game, but didn't regret it. I think people normally put a ton of effort into maintaining equity, sometimes at the risk of losing a great team member. It looks things worked out.

The great thing about this company is that it's indisputably the best solution available, although high costs mitigate some customers. He told the story of a stress test they did with one major brand name. To simulate high buying season, they held up regular orders for three days, then pushed them through at once without an issue.

Other cool benefits: despite having to power these robots, the power bills with Kiva end up being less expensive because of savings in lighting, heating and AC. Most fulfillment solutions require the entire warehouse to be lit up and heated so a person can comfortably work, while Kiva keeps the main warehouse dark and temperature doesn't matter much.

At the time, they were the fulfillment solution of some companies that Amazon had acquired, but not Amazon itself. I suspect that's going to change.

Kiva Systems was started with almost no money...

It's actually one of the better stories I've heard. The founder basically found various phds that were researching in related fields and convinced them to work for equity.

MIT still hasn't figured out a great way to teach physics, I'd look at this as another attempt.

Currently MIT offers 4 classes that count for the 8.01 (mechanics) requirement: 8.012, 8.01, 8.01L, or 8.011

Before they even place you in a class, they have you take an analytical exam to determine which class is recommended. This happens during orientation before classes begin, and it's the first of many things MIT does to help you pass the 8.01 requirement.

8.011 is the easiest, but they don't let you take it unless you've already failed one of the other subjects.

8.01 and 8.01L cover the same content, but 8.01L offers an extra month to go over that content. If you try and pass 8.01, but end up with a D (non-passing), they'll let you switch to 8.01L for the extra month.

8.01 is also a TEAL class, which is specially structured (and costs a lot of professor time) to encourage students to work together, and offers time in class to individually work on examples (as opposed to just listening to a professor).

The amount of effort MIT puts in to getting kids to pass the 8.01 requirement on their first try is exceptional. But with all their attempts, many still need to take 8.011.

I don't have numbers, but I'd guess that MIT spends more money teaching students mechanics than any other single graduation requirement. That probably made it a good guinea pig for this course, being that it's focused on education research.

While I understand why this was downvoted, you must get how it's frustrating to see tuition rising every year while great potential revenue streams are being ignored. I'm still wondering what they're doing with dividends from Bose :/

Holy hell, can't they charge everyone $10 to help cover my tuition?

Say 100,000 people ordering a book makes $1,000,000 for Amazon.

Say if those 100,000 people came through an affiliate link, they only make $900,000.

If you're Amazon's affiliate manager, indeed your first thought is, "Wow, Pinterest is great! Look at all these sales"

But your second thought is, "Wow, if I just drop Pinterest from my program, I'll make an extra $100,000." In its current state, Pinterest will not do anything to stop these sales from being generated, so the merchants are just throwing away money.

The real problem here is that Pinterest doesn't deserve the commission, Pinterest's users do.

You're right, it is ridiculous, but if you were a merchant why would you want to pay out Pinterest? If you didn't pay Pinterest for their leads, wouldn't you still get the same number of sales?

Currently, Pinterest doesn't have a foot to stand on if the affiliate programs simply kick them out. They can do things to bias certain merchants, but that's a riskier play.

Even on Google, that doesn't affect the user at all. I wouldn't mind.

However, it would definitely piss off the affiliate program...who should just boot Google from their program.

Now that I think about it more, that's the real problem with this. The businesses are most likely getting sales anyway, and pinterest can't argue that they're doing anything special to generate the sale. Since pinterest can't censor links to these merchants, they'll probably end up getting booted from their programs.

It's awesome that skimlinks exists...years ago I worked for a company that relied on affiliate revenue and we had someone working full time to maintain relationships. I imagine they lose some of the pickier affiliate programs, but this is an awesome way to test out the revenue model.

It also brings up another interesting point. If this revenue model works for pinterest, it means it could also work for pinterest users. Someone can create a browser plugin that automatically converts user links to affiliate links when they get posted to pinterest, and kicks back the commission to the poster. Probably too hard to distribute the plugin, but still thought it was worth mentioning.

Solving the talent dilution is as simple as paying the talent a ridiculous salary, and/or giving the talent work they enjoy.

Getting by in the US is incredibly easy for a programmer, especially young ones that live off virtually nothing. I can freelance for a week and live a month without a problem. I don't really need more money.

Unfortunately, my work options are usually narrowed down to these: 1. Freelance a little on things I'm not wildly interested in, but save enough money to spend the majority of time working on something I actually like.

2. Spend all my work time on things I'm not wildly interested in and have some more money, but nothing ridiculous.

Maybe I'm weird but given the choice, I'm going with #1 every time.

However, there are two circumstances where I might end up working for someone else: 1. Give me ridiculous compensation 2. Let me work on something I want to work on

Paying a ridiculous salary is easy in a lot of cases, but nobody ever does that (and honestly, I don't know why).

The better option, IMO, is just letting people work on what they want to work on. I don't understand why companies are so awful at describing the positions they have available. If you have positions that are appealing to work on, I'm sure you can find people to do it. If not, whip out the checkbook, or expect poor quality talent.

Having interviewed with Asana for the Product Engineering role, I could say I still have no idea what I would have been building had I gotten the job. This made it impossible for me to be excited, I was running purely off the fact that "product" was in the title. Luckily, they had #1 (private chefs and a normal work day sold me), but I imagine they want people excited about the work too.

Tell me what you're doing, let me understand how I can help, that will make me more excited.