evansolomon

Microsoft makes $250 billion/year with 25% net margins. If they were not making some hundred million dollar mistakes, wouldn't THAT be cause for concern?

Wow, this thread seems so bizarre to me. Basically a collective sentiment of "I can't believe how stupid they are for having tried this thing that didn't work out."

"Failing" has become such a well-liked buzz word in the last couple years, unless you're a company people don't like, in which case it is awful.

A 4-digit campaign is really not that big, and billboards absolutely work for some companies. Just like TV ads, Adwords, and pieces of paper on cars.

It is far too common to think that less measurable = always bad. It's just not true.

I've never used Foursquare advertising and have no idea if it works, but there are a lot of unfounded "conclusions" here. Think about a restaurant that makes $20/customer, servers 200 customers/day and is open 30 days/month. That's 120k/month. Let's say the 4-digit campaign was $5k and had a 150% ROI, so it generated $7.5k in business. That's 6.25% of the monthly revenue, an amount I could certainly see being hard to parse out due to normal variations.

A/B testing email subjects is not the point, it's a tactic. Email subjects aren't the point either.

One more data point, ComScore shows Facebook growing from about 117m to 122m in the US since February.

Do you think that's really the right solution for content creators that aren't TV studios? You could say that the static video distribution model was solved a long time ago too--release the video as a real time experience (a movie), choose an arbitrary waiting period and advertise a lot, then release the video (VHS, DVD). Of course, that's not at all the way anyone on YouTube distributes their video, so the old "solved" model doesn't always work best.

To be clear, I completely agree that TV studios figured out how to get people to watch live content very well. But I disagree that that's applicable to potentially millions of simultaneous individual broadcasters.

Your "..." actually left out a useful part of the sentence, "— now we’re in the Valley too." This is simply a humorous way to point out that it was harder to recruit people to Chicago than it would have been to Silicon Valley. Indicting him for that seems pretty extreme to me.

It's always a choice. Going out of business is a choice, selling the company is a choice, and the acquiring company shutting down the acquired company's product is a choice. Any way you slice it, no matter what the circumstances, someone made a choice not to honor your purchase anymore, if that's the way you want to describe it.

How could they feasibly do anything else? What do you think happens to your Facebook gifts if the company goes out of business? I bet their terms of service don't include shipping you physical strips of bacon to replace the virtual ones you lose.

This was posted a while back, very entertaining story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385068

Yes, all the video is archived and clips will be made for each talk. We'll post the clips here later.

I like drinking coffee, I do that at work. A nice big stretch from time to time is great, I do at least one each day at my desk. Several times each week I'll take off my glasses and rub my eyes a bit, I don't care who's around!

Sure, there are things you like to do that shouldn't be done at work, but the two are not correlated--or at least not as correlated as you suggest. While you've found some very amusing examples, they're tangentially relevant at best and used more for hyperbole, just like most of the article.

Yes, Android app is coming. It's already in development.

70% 18-49

The difference between $0 and $5 is pretty huge. We would have sold some (maybe even lots) at $5, but about as many? I can't imagine that.

The decision to make it free was a result of the market (how much other apps cost) and our goals (revenue, usage, branding, growth, etc).

"you don't flatter technical people by complementing them; that just makes us feel weird"

Honestly it sounds like we are very nearly on the same page, though this quote is a bit odd to me. I don't think it's fair to define "technical people" by saying that compliments make them feel weird. I should point out that I'm not the one that has talked about flattering as a tactic.

I think we completely agree on having something interesting to talk about as a helpful quality.

I am admittedly not primarily technical, but I don't see that as relevant here. If someone actually has a legitimate way to add value to the person they're asking for help from, then that's great. Often that's not going to be the case though, and trying to fake that is (for me) a recipe for disaster.

To go back to the example of offering an idea to help with whatever, that's really just going to be a waste of time for most people. I'd much prefer the person simply say they want x/y/z and would like to meet or talk. Call it obvious flattery, it's also honest and efficient.

Honestly, I think the 'pick your brain' approach would work better in a lot of cases. Particularly if you are inexperienced, young, etc. Personally, I would almost never turn down a request to meet from someone who wanted to ask me for help, advice, introductions, etc, but as soon as someone says they have ideas for me I get pretty suspicious. Nine times out of ten that guy is trying to sell you something.

Of course, if it's something you can legitimately add value to (e.g. you actually have been diving into crowdsourcing or whatever) then your approach may be the way to go.

Great post.

By the way, if anyone actually wants to buy me a drink at Tres Agaves (which is very close to my office), please let me know :)

It's back on!

Very interesting articles from Wired where one of their writers tries to disappear and there's a contest to find him:

http://www.wired.com/vanish/2009/08/author-evan-ratliff-is-o... http://www.wired.com/vanish/2009/11/ff_vanish2/ http://www.wired.com/vanish/

Those specific anecdotes were also really useful because they let the audience go home and do more research on their own. If someone says "a company did this thing and it worked/didn't" that's useful. But if they give you actual companies who do a great/terrible job on different things, then you can dig up a lot more information after the fact and keep learning.

I agree with everyone who said it was a great event. Thanks to Paul, Jessica and everyone at YC for putting it together.

Probably because they think a PR agency helps them do a better job on PR. Lots of companies use PR agencies and sometimes they are a valuable service.

Justin.tv is hosting its first annual hot dog eating contest. Please come cheer us on, we need it.

Claiming an embargo is the same or even similar to cash-for-coverage is silly and immature. Is providing a press kit the same as paying for coverage? It makes the coverage cheaper for the reporter to provide, which has a monetary result.

Hating TechCrunch is certainly a popular opinion at times, and there are some reasonable stances to base that opinion on, but this is not one.

It works out better for a two day trip, since that's a much higher gas/day ratio. Also, as someone else mentioned, there is a huge benefit to having a 4wd vehicle in this case, and the premium for that at traditional rental car companies is significant.

I mostly agree re: the 2 day statement.

When you factor in gas, Zipcar can easily be cheaper. If you live in SF, for instance, Zipcar is most likely the cheapest way to rent a car to go to Tahoe. On a trip last year my (Zip)car beat the other car by about $20 after all was said and done. So the $75/day can be misleading at times.

Also, unrelated, Zipcar allows members who are under 25, which makes it much more expensive to rent a car from a traditional place like Enterprise. Being currently under 25, this is a massive benefit.

Cross post from TechCrunch:

Justin.tv employee here.

I want to clear up two things. First, we get more uploaded video than YouTube by about 30% (yes, I am serious) and monitoring all of it is not feasible. Over 150 copyright holders (ex. MLB, ESPN, etc) have access to a tool that lets them instantly remove videos. The request is filed as a DMCA take down notice and processed immediately. We do not take any delay for human processing, it's immediately removed. We could process normal email messages, as other companies do, and take down the videos several hours later. That offers a substandard solution for live content though, so we added this extra level of protection.

Second, the live fingerprinting is a double trigger system. We send our scans to Vobile, who matches it against copyright holders who have allowed us to scan for their content. That is running with Fox and has been tested with the NFL/NBC.

In the screenshot you posted, many, if not all of the rights holders for those broadcasts could choose to remove them instantly.

I do lots of hiring for technical positions (marketing and other business-y tasks) but I couldn't agree more with these two points, and I think they are relevant no matter what job you are applying for. They really make a HUGE difference in whether or not I pay attention enough to remember you, which in turn is probably the biggest factor in how likely I am to hire you.

- Any effort you make to show interest in the company goes a long way. Use the software, come prepared to talk about what you did/didn't like, and have questions for me. Are you interested in working here? Then you should be full of questions!

- Work on cool stuff. This is the #1 differentiator (and it's all about differentiation). If you have 3 links to something really neat you worked on in the last 3 years, that places you well above most other candidates -- it shows that you love what you do.

The NFL has access to a tool (along with over 150 other companies) to take content off of Justin.tv instantly. We are pulling the content down immediately after they submit the form asking us to.

I am the VP Marketing at Justin.tv, this was also not reviewed by a lawyer :)

"DMCA basically gives you 72 hours to take something down"

I don't believe there's any law or precedent that states 72 hours (or any number of hours) as a required turnaround time. More importantly, for the vast majority of infringing broadcasts, we don't take 72 hours (or any number of hours) to respond to a request for takedown. Instead, the vast majority of owners of infringing content (over 150 companies including probably all copyright owners you can name) have access to a tool that lets them take down content instantly without any intervention on our part.

"Livestreaming sites have put content fingerprinting technology in place and often respond very fast to takedown notices"

When you refer to these sites, I'm curious which ones you have in mind other than Justin.tv. We do have live finderprinting and we do respond instantly to most takedown noticed. However, I don't know of other live sites that are doing either of those. In fact, Ustream was sued this summer due to not responding to takedown notices and Fox's content group legal counsel has specifically stated that Livestream has not gone to the same measures to protect copyright holders as Justin.tv.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/17/ustream-sued-by-boxing-...

http://newteevee.com/2009/11/11/justin-tv-live-fingerprintin...

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/110031/JTV/Video/content%20filtering...