dshipper

I think that's to be an angel investor but I could be wrong. Plus I think there's new legislation that makes anyone able to invest in startups, which is why Funders Club works.

As a Penn entrepreneur I couldn't be more excited for this. They opened up a completely new office on our campus and in addition to the fund are offering student entrepreneurs free office space. The way this has happened has honestly been a dream come true. It sure beats getting kicked out of coffee shops every few hours or trying to work in the library.

If I had to guess, I'd say that at least a few of my friends who dropped out to go to the Valley or NY would probably still be at Penn if this had happened a few years ago.

We chose screensharing over a word like "cobrowsing" because we felt that people understood more clearly exactly what was going on. It's definitely not an exact term, i.e. you can't see the whole screen, but it is screensharing in the sense that you absolutely see part of what's going on.

We'll definitely have to go back and reconsider though, if people feel like it's misleading.

#1. Good catch, changing that now. The button also has the ability to be hidden and the screensharing activated via Javascript or keyboard shortcuts.

#2. IE9+ with IE8 coming soon. Good catch, thanks!

#3. That's actually a screenshot from an outdated code snippet. We've gotten rid of the requireJS completely and now just use our own JS to load everything in.

Thanks for the feedback :)

That's a great point, we're thinking about allowing you to record sessions down the line and re-use them. For many companies screensharing is an integral part of the support process already, it's just slow and requires downloads. We're solving that problem for them.

There are definitely many companies that don't need this. E-commerce companies for example tend to get support requests that don't require screensharing e.g. "Can I get free shipping?" That reality is totally fine with us, because it allows us to concentrate our efforts on a small group of companies that really need this.

Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for the feedback, admittedly we're hardly video experts :). We'll get that sorted out in the next few weeks or so.

We may do that in the future, but for now we're concentrated exclusively on screensharing.

Technically it's co-browsing software. So basically what we do is grab the DOM from the customer side and transfer it to the representative's side. There's no screenshot involved which gives us a number of advantages

1. It's more private. The rep doesn't see your whole screen, just the contents of the page. 2. It's more secure. We can redact DOM elements with sensitive information like passwords so that they never hit our servers and are never seen by the rep.

Thanks for the tip. We'll get that sorted out today :)

Hey guys, I'm Dan Shipper one of the co-founders of Firefly. Just to answer a few likely questions:

1. It's download free because it runs completely in the browser with Javascript

2. We're differentiated from other similar services like GoInstant because GoInstant has a completely enterprise strategy. They're not self-serve and they work with big companies. We're tackling the lower end of the market.

3. We're helping to solve the distribution problem inherent to marketing to SMBs with a screensharing API. The API basically turns us into a Twilio for screensharing meaning that anyone can introduce our screensharing technology into their customer support apps with just a few lines of code.

Any feedback about the product you have would be incredibly helpful. Thanks!

I had to work on it. Every day. I'm pretty shy normally. Around the end of freshman year I started to get tired of being nervous every time I met with someone. So that summer I tried to meet someone new or reconnect with someone old every day. And I did.

I talked to so many random and interesting people that summer (many of whom I still keep in touch with). I actually reached out to you, but we never found a time that worked for us :)

But yea it's a skill that you have to develop like any other. Pays dividends when done honestly and earnestly.

Really glad you think so :)

That's absolutely the way it was meant to be read.

Thanks for the reply zipop I really appreciate the other perspective. That said, you said some things in your response that make me think that the way I wrote my post may have lead you to misinterpret the point I was trying to make. Sorry about that, let me try to rephrase slightly.

To be clear: I know how tough it is to teach yourself how to code. When I was teaching myself as a kid there was no StackOverflow, no Code Academy, and no W3Schools. It was just me and my programming book, and either I figured out the problem for myself or I had to give up. It was really hard.

The point I was trying to make wasn't that you could become a master engineer in 6 months. That's absolutely untrue. The point I was trying to make is that you can teach yourself enough code in 6 months to build SOMETHING, to move yourself along far enough to get to the next level.

I know this is possible because I've seen people do it. One of my best friends from school went from not knowing a how to write a single line of code to being the lead technical founder on a YC company in less than a year.

The real point here is that it's very easy to tell yourself something is too hard, and that you don't have enough time to learn it when that's really just a personal constraint. The point is that it's easy to get distracted doing things with short term rewards (going to events) rather than doing things with rewards that are played out over the long term (building skill). It's more written as a way to shift perspective than anything else. Again thanks for the response, hopefully that cleared it up a little bit.

EDIT: Original post is here if you missed it: http://danshipper.com/the-now-syndrome

Interesting take, although I think that there's more at play here. I agree that they could start charging for the API and add premium accounts, but all of those major changes runs a big risk of irrevocably altering their service. Whether that's for the better or worse is up for debate.

I'm very curious to see where it goes from here, but was mostly intrigued by the parallel I see to small startups. Thanks for the comment :)

Thanks, really glad to hear it :)

Interesting, I've never read that book. But that's a nice take: your feedback loop isn't functional enough to notice diminishing returns. Putting it on my list.

It's funny I've never read that book but love Jason Fried. Thanks for the comment :)

I agree with your point. I based my definition of sexy on what tends to get media coverage - which are generally ideas that college kids want to use. But I certainly agree that sexy companies exist that no college kid has ever heard of.

Thanks for your thoughts. "Your own personal heuristic approach is all that's going to matter in the end." I absolutely 100% agree.

Thanks! Yes we are.

See: http://milo.com. Sold to eBay a few years ago for around $80 million.

I agree it's definitely not one size fits all. But I'm curious to know, had you been exercising at all before you started out on P90X? Or was it just one day to the next you were working out full time?

You're right about that. The traveling salesman is slightly different than Hamiltonian path because it's looking to find the lowest possible distance, but I thought it worked nicely as a metaphor. I should have said that instead of referring to it as the traveling salesman problem.

Thanks! I removed the part from the footnote, and added " solvable in polynomial time by a deterministic machine."

Still thinking about how best to explain determinism vs. non-determinism but perhaps that's best left for another post. Thanks for pointing those things out :)

Got it. Thanks for the clarification.

I edited that part out to be safe. But I'm curious. I was trying to explain why P problems were in NP and my off the top of my head reasoning was that deterministic non-polynomial time solutions exist for P problems as well as deterministic polynomial time ones.

If that's not why P is contained in NP, what's the real reason?

Hey thanks for the comment! I don't think I ever said that NP was an abbreviation for "non-polynomial" although I guess that could be inferred by a reader since I never explicitly said what it stood for.

I did kind of address the deterministic vs non-deterministic aspect of P v NP in the P.S section without explicitly naming the terms I was talking about. I can understand what you're saying and you're right I chose to leave some things out to make it more digestible and because I felt like a rough knowledge of the concepts was enough to understand the larger point.

Sorry about that Jon!

Thanks for the feedback Evin! I like your point about persistent constructive dissatisfaction. I think the distinction that I'm making is that when people get to wrapped up in their progress they get persistent destructive dissatisfaction. That produces frustration, which leads people to stop trying.