dhfromkorea

Might be slightly tangential, but reading the post reminded me of Rational Optimist[1], a book about how key parameters of our lives are improving despite constant global pessimism. (e.g. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down)

[1]http://www.amazon.com/Rational-Optimist-How-Prosperity-Evolv...

Interesting read. Recently I conceived a similar relationship between boredom and long-term productivity and wrote a blogpost about it. http://www.dhfromkorea.com/boredom-is-powerful/

Interesting. I am new to the world of password guessing. Is there any significant benefit of using this attack vector? Is use of personal data alone able to offer a remarkable advantage?

This looks interesting. I am curious where the main use cases would lie for this CLI vs. the official GUI?

There's also http://brace.io/ which is a YC company.

Precisely the same kind of awe I was in. Even several years from then, I still listen to the WW theme songs as part of my morning ritual. Too bad I couldn't play games like this too much lately...

Thanks. We(Plivo) actually tried PA out for the dev-targeting display ad option. (not retargeting). We didn't feel we had the kind of ROI we wanted at that time.

Incidentally, would the reports from Conversion Explorer be more granular than the conversion reports at Adroll? (with Adroll, it's not possible to see the "who" part, but when and where, yes)

Does Perfect Audience support such testing feature natively? Would be fantastic if I could do that without any configuration on my end.

I totally get your point but I don't think VTC is a total BS. With services like Adroll, which I use, you can set a time window for a view event to be considered a conversion (VTC). (i.e. with 5-day time window, if someone is served an impression and converts after 5 days, that won't count as a conversion). This way, you can get a better net impact of view events.) And I think the default setting of retargeting ads providers won't offer a short time window like 5 days.

This is really cool. I am curious why Chrome on iOS wasn't made available yet? (i.e. if there was technical roadblock that made it difficult for you to do so.)

Really interesting insight, Steli. Did you ever offer a discount up front to get reluctant customers to introduce you to a new business[1]? If so, could you share how it turned out?

[1] those who likely know a business to introduce you to and are seemingly willing to do so, based on the maturity of the relationship with you and them.

That could likely happen. The context matters. Their American upbringing as implied by your comment might have diluted the cultural influence.

"part of you wants someone to notice that you're missing, so that you can be not just doing something important but be a hero about it."

=> Besides the ego, there's also a cultural component. My Finnish friends tend to excel at leaving without saying goodbye or hugging, not because they have weaker ego but because that's a part of their culture. That said, in my culture (South Korea), your saying nothing when leaving will immediately strike people as socially incorrect or weird to say the least.

"Naver’s early attempts to get into big foreign markets went badly" =>

The results were miserable to say the least. The anti-pattern to the failure to foray into foreign markets has been monopolizing the local markets with its gigantic capital. This is not just for Naver, but the one shared by virtually all conglomerates born out of Korea.

This is a nice run-down for those looking to swerve into the U.S. for a valid reason (work/study)

If anyone seeks less-than-a-year-long work, J-1 Visas are arguably the easiest to get if one has some affiliation with a university. (i.e. students)

Proof of concept: I have co-run a non-profit program which connected people in Finland with startups in the Bay Area. I wish there would be more programs similar to http://startuplife.fi (sent close to 100 so far and more than a dozen YC companies have signed up for the program last batch.)

Another related blogpost for the J1 track: http://blog.sendtoinc.com/2013/12/11/silicon-valley-internsh...

Interesting. What's the use case you're thinking?

I've been thinking to develop a simple idonethis & Plivo integration where I need to parse the daily digest email and push the selected text as input for the text-to-speech app built using the Plivo API.

This is more than awesome for my use case.

[edit] Incidentally has anyone found it rewarding to "hear" what you get done for the day? (another pleasure cream added on top of checking items off your to-do list.)

This is quite cool. I've been using calm.com. Any plans to expand the visual/aural set?

Yup :-)

If you're referring to when you, as a consumer, receive a message from a Short Code in the U.S., you will pay the same amount to receive it as you would with a Long Code (the regular number).

On a related note, this article could be interesting: http://www.quora.com/Why-do-US-carriers-charge-for-incoming-...

That is only for the first quarter. In fact, if you compare the rental fees, Plivo is $300 cheaper per quarter.

If you compare the outbound SMS rate, Plivo is 30-40% cheaper than similar services out there.

Rental-fee: $2700/3 months + (one-time $500)

SMS rate:

0.65 cents/sms (outbound) 0.50 cents/sms (inbound)

Also if you lease a new Short Code before March 31, 2014, we give you $1000 off your first invoice.

1.tl;dr

For short codes, our pricing is better. Tech-wise, honestly SMS short codes do not have much room for any difference.

2. long versions (if you're curious, in general, why someone would choose plivo over others)

http://vincedasta.com/p/why-i-went-with-plivo/

http://clintberry.com/2012/why-plivo-cloud-is-better-than-tw...

happy to answer follow-up questions.

Hi, DH from Plivo here. We're excited to launch SMS short codes today. Feel free to ask any questions.

Thanks Song. :-)

Thanks. We believe this can replace a subset of what people do with Skype—quick calls with friends and teammates.

The hubot script will let people do audio conference on chat clients which don't natively support it. The community script is here: https://github.com/dhfromkorea/hubot-scripts/blob/master/src...

At least, I had a problem with "video" calls. It's often too cumbersome and gives too much info about the visual aspect of myself when it's not necessary and when I don't want it to happen. (e.g., getting on a call with a stranger or clients.) Using the "voice" call, I won't worry over washing my face at 9am in the morning.

It's true this app does not "fully" replace Skype, but it does replace the group voice call part of Skype. Also it definitely relieves common pain points you have while using Skype. (install, signup, login, username exchange, approval.) Plus if you want to get on a call with a stranger. You would want to use this.

Hm... that makes me wonder what the key motivation for them to accept so low a level of expected economic reward would be... any insight?

Hi, yes you can. You need to append a 'message url' to your Plivo app:

check out the message section at http://plivo.com/docs/xml/request/

Hi @chinmoy. It's DH from Plivo here.

Interesting question: your old Developer account actually had more limitations than the new Free Trial accounts. For example, you couldn't have made outbound voice calls to regular numbers via PSTN.

You can check out the full comparison here: http://plivo.com/faq/basics/whats-the-difference-between-fre...