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Thanks Tim. I'm definitely not innocent when it comes to making assumptions on the internet. I feel like we've all come to expect a certain standard and forget that companies spend massive resources to provide for those standards where a smaller company may not be able to match up.

Definitely surprised me that this came from a backer through. We get this kind of response relatively often from people who buy on our website, and from that vantage point they don't know it's only 4-5 people in a small office somewhere. But crowdfunding was meant to empower the underdog after all.

Glad you found it useful!

Thanks!

That bad boy has been sitting in our office for a few months now and it never gets old hearing it every time someone goes to the bathroom or something =)

Cool, I'm going through the tutorial guide thing right now. We're ramping up on some big Javascript projects right now for incidenttech and this might be a good chance to learn more about node :)

Django wasn't too bad, I would compare it to Cake, but then again it's been a while!

I've used Django before, but I've never tried Zend.

I'm really keen on trying out node.js, have you heard much about Express? Might give that a shot, and if I hit a wall might switch.

fastfoodandwine.com

<shame> The gTar! </shame>

Of course I have some vested interest in that... But I do think Lit Motors is pretty cool, the new Makerbot Replicator (although I've had limited personal success with it), the new Sifteo is awesome, and I've seen some really amazing early projects that might not make it this year but have some really great promise.

Haven't had a chance to play with the Leapmotion, but that seems like it's really awesome too.

truth

I see this as a very welcome addition to the public stance of Kickstarter with regards to physical products (which it's been relatively quiet about). One of the reasons we chose Kickstarter as a platform to get our product off the ground was the fact that it would allow us flexibility and freedom to get our prototypes to full scale manufacturing, which were already relatively mature in their stage of production (tooling already complete, near final hardware etc).

Lots of things can go wrong at every stage after you have a final production sample. You still need to get the sample certified by a number of governing bodies, set up QC and shipping, and in the case of overseas manufacturing deal with the freight/customs and finally fulfillment of the product.

I'm happy that Kickstarter is taking more of stance on the subject, as we've had to in many cases provide "returns" to people or deal with "customer service" style requests, which we've done in good faith but it really misses the point of launching a product on Kickstarter.

I think this stance will really help back up projects when they need to make an adjustment, or have to deal with something unexpected. Also, it should improve the quality of projects moving forward by making people more skeptical and aware of the time/cost-instability of the manufacturing process. We were lucky to hit a pretty happy medium with regards to initial volume, and unlike some of the blockbuster projects when we have to change things we don't end up on TechCrunch for it, only the Guardian :)

We literally got buried by all of the outreach and attention due to layering the Disrupt / Kickstarter launch, so sorry about the crazy delay...

The dock is removable, you can pop it out using a flat head screw driver pretty quickly. There's a cavity in the body and we're actually making a small change to the design of how the electronics are integrated into the dock itself instead of the underlying assembly so that if the 30 pin changes we can adapt to it. Another benefit is that through a generic expansion port we could also support other phones / devices.

The ability to dock the phone into the body was a really awesome experience, which is why we did it even with the risk of making people concerned with the form factor dependency. However, the gTar has a USB port so you can hook it up to any device that supports USB hosting. This is possible with most iOS devices with the aid of a camera adapter kit. We might eventually be able to produce such a special cable allowing you to hook it up directly to an iOS device.

The gTar tech was not originally intended to be for iPhone, that was a bit of an unintentional pivot we made when we met with a particular iOS app company we had a lot of respect for and wanted to impress them. Long story short, they weren't impressed but our next investor meeting went much better than those before it.

Either this is a bad idea, or it's a bad execution of a good idea. I don't really believe in bad ideas to be honest.

There's no real experience here, as well as no real novelty. I have my own ideas of how this might be made to be useful, but I think you should give a real hard think as to the following questions

    - what is, step by step, the user experience like? 
    - how are they getting to your page in the first place
    - what is their response when they see your page
    - what is their response when they use the page (what do they click, read etc)
    - what brings them back the second time, time after that?
    - why would they refer others to your page?
    - what problem are you solving for them and how can they not get this anywhere else?

I'll give you one point that I noticed. W(hy)TF are the emotions in text format? No one likes to write "happy" when they can ::ninja:: something, also it's much easier to click in a sea of emoticons than to find an arbitrary emotion in a list.

Soundcloud has offices in London. They just opened up a new office in SF recently as well. But you're right in that their main HQ is definitely in Berlin, although were originally founded in Sweden!

Amazing company!

Thanks for posting this. I'm not too knowledgable about the burn rate of others, but I know that we've kept ours very low. Much of this was motivated by the fact that we have a serious hardware play, and lots of our seed capital is allocated towards that.

Regardless, when the problems are interesting and hard enough, we find that our clamp on spending is a really great recruiting filter. The people that join the team are truly passionate about our product and technology. It's painful at times, but spoiled grapes don't taste very good either.

Lots of large VCs will invest as little as $100K to both get in for the next round as well as provide the team with resources they may need that are non-monetary, some will even take on advisory roles.

Investing isn't about the amount at the seed stage. An investor at the seed stage gets a whole lot more equity for their buck earlier on, so they should provide value over that of what the money will get you.

That sounds interesting, and I hope you the best of luck with it! I definitely agree that the realm of academia in general could do with some disruption at large.

The point I was really trying to convey is that, sometimes, it's very lucrative to put stuff out with very little actual value or content. It's better to wait it out, and put something that would generate actual feedback since from this you can iterate and actually improve your product. Putting out content of the opposite nature will turn potential users away and will not really get you much of a benefit otherwise.

But after all, my opinion is worth what you pay for it.

I don't get it, am I supposed to real that novel of a blog post to find that it has NO information about what you're doing?

Being a fellow founder of a company that's been in "quiet mode" for way too long I have this little bit of information to give you. If you don't have anything of actual value to give people, then wait until you do. Balance is of course important, but what you posted is effectively this: http://itsthisforthat.com/ without the entertainment factor.

They don't support a bunch of other stuff too, those are just the features that I was looking forward to.

According to this:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2011/09/12/10209291.a...

They still don't support initializer lists and variadic templates.

non-static data member initializers as well, but they're more of a nicety. Definitely was one of the nice bonuses whenever I did any c# stuff. Especially when you have to overload constructors so you can avoid massive initialization lists.

Hooray! Anonymous Functions in C++!

I know VS2011 already supports some of the C++11 specification, and it looks like GCC has got a number of those features implemented for some time now. Anyone know how long it might take for people to sync up to the spec completely?

How long did it take with c++03? I remember I started seriously messing around with C++ around 01/02 and I noticed with every new version of VS then that things would just randomly change every few years and took a while before it became uniform.

What if it was made out of an erector set? Then after that you moved to a hand crafted duct tape garage prototype? Then to a small scale SLA prototype to model it's characteristics. Then maybe a scale replica using CNCed parts?

Burt Rutan used to build small scale models of his concept planes and mount them to the roof of his car to test their aerodynamics. Last time I checked he managed to turn that "Lego" project into a manned space vehicle.

Thanks guys, great resources! I have a massive flight coming up so I'll have a chance to get into Forth during that!

Congrats, this is really impressive. Hopefully I'll have some free time in the next few months to try it out. Never used Forth before, so I might give it a bit of a go sometime soon. Any good further resources other than the wiki page?

AngelList is an amazing resource that can really not only get you funding, but also provide you with some really amazing connections and even friendships! There is a really great investment community on that site and in general a really great culture as well.

With that said, you need to be aware that going online, setting up an AngelList account and spamming investors won't get you anywhere either. I think AngelList is a tool and it's up to you how to use it. Combined with "old fashioned" networking AngelList makes it much easier to get a seed round (or series financing) together.

You just want to make sure that, if nothing else, the investors you contact on AngelList have at least heard of you somewhat, or someone they know has. You can meet them by trying to go to events where these people are speaking or hanging out. Talk to them about your start up, maybe set up a coffee date. Once you've talked a few people (don't even mention fundraising at first!) then drop the hint that you guys are looking to raise some money. AngelList will then provide the gears, but you've always got to be the engine!

A few months ago I had just taken a meeting in Palo Alto and went down the street to sit at a Starbucks to wait for a ride since I rode the caltrain and had no way to get around. I was doing some work when Steve Jobs walked in. My grandfather passed away from Pancreatic cancer and was by no means walking around having a coffee with friends at this stage. It was really inspiring to see him pushing through the condition and refusing to give up.

Some jerk kid walked up to him and asked if it'd be alright to take a picture with him. Steve dismissed him with such a confidence you wouldn't expect. I think in general a guy like that with such amazing ideas has to have this extremely thick shell to the world, but underneath I'm sure he's an amazing father, husband, and friend. I was really lucky to be there that day, definitely changed my perspective on a few things.

Now just make a kick butt flash implementation and you'll get $1M internet dollars!

No but seriously, this is super cool.

Great work guys! Definitely a really interesting field to continue to dig deep into. Start ups come in all shapes and sizes, but the underlying patterns are extremely interesting and important!

Definitely worth the experience, but not really too useful for most practical programming projects. The big advantages of writing assembler come from understanding the real time nature of a processor (at least for me). Writing code in assembler is truly an art since at that level you can actually interweave code in such a way where blocks of code are both functional in scope as well as globally (such as using a block of code as a delay for a different action, caching the result until later using it, used often in video code). Great assembly will generally beat a compiler significantly especially on embedded systems.

In my experience learning assembly language is not so much an action but more of a process. Build yourself a nice little cheapo MCU circuit (AVR, PIC, ARM) , or get your hands on an emulator, and try to actually program it using assembly language. I'd highly recommend doing this using either a RISC instruction set over making an attempt at a CISC one like x86. Not hating on x86, but my experiences with it did not really teach me much about computers, rather taught me about x86 (if that makes any sense). I'm not a massive fan of how they always teach MIPS in academia, but it's a good place to start since most RISC architectures are very similar if not based on MIPS.

Also, understanding assembler will help you in understanding how CUDA works under the hood. CUDA is C based, but underneath its implementing some interesting SIMD stuff, so at least a basic feel for how instructions are fed into a processor could legitimately aid in optimizing code for CUDA where a 1% difference could be very significant.

My start up, Incident Tech, is always looking for new interns especially those versed in any kind of C language. We are still running mostly stealth but on a top level are developing a new kind of music entertainment experience oriented an consumer electronics device you dock your iPhone into which then connects you to our online platform. Our tech stack is nearly all of the C's (C/++/#/objective) and on the web side of things we're running a pretty standard LAMP stack.

Our internships have both salary and equity components. We're located in Santa Clara for now, likely to move up farther north in the next few months. Willing to talk about relocation. The length of the internship is flexible but typically it's 3-6 months.

our teaser page: http://www.incidenttech.com

Truly amazing things take a while to do. I think most people will attest to doing a bunch of experiments to test the waters before they dip into doing something crazy and hard for the long run.

Even that simple example of buying the diner so they add hash browns to the menu is a good example of that. Buying a building, not to mention one already occupied, is not exactly a 5 minute transaction. I think it just comes down to the fact that rich people tend to understand the relationships between time, money and potential returns.

Really cool and creative use of webkit!