that's not true. I can not delete my account at this very moment. You have sucked in 6 of my accounts and have not showed me an ounce of value. That was a terrible decision.
241 karma · joined October 21, 2009
Sidenote: It sounds like apple has you paranoid.
FourSquare didn't grow to 2m users on $1m. Last month before they publicly closed their financing, they had 25 employees and were expanding (http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/28/checking-in-to-foursquare-a...). Maybe Dennis used his own cash but it certainly cost more than $1m.
Secondly, as a former hotel manager, i see this as a hack. You're selling me a replacement to my existing system. The value is in saving a few bucks but my security concerns go up.
The real problem is that if a master key gets lost, every hotel door needs to be recoded manually with a new card. Fix that and i'm sold.
congrats on the launch.
dailyD
yipit
This week, NuCaptcha launched a video captcha offering. They have solved the readability and sweat labor issues that have come about. It's a true security offering that also improves input accuracy to 99%.
Disclosure: I've advised with NuCaptcha on a pro bono basis.
Google is transitioning from search to content. The travel industry is now shitting themselves. Hotels will be next. Everyone else better watch out.
1. Funding is usually open for employees to participate. Founders love taking money from employees rather than VCs.
2. VC's like this because the team is invested to win. No, they love this.
3. Be like a VC and be diversified. Don't put all your eggs into one basket.
4. putting in new bucks likely won't bump you up close to founder-ish levels of equity.
5. Timing has a lot to do with this. Don't force the issue if any tension arises that can take away from your core responsibility of doing a good job.
VC's don't invest in ideas that are not defensible (protected by patents). I'm sure there's an exception but you'd have to have a great working product to convince someone to give you cash in the wake of IP violations.
I'm guessing that it cost $30m to insure that prize. (src="http://scapromotions.com)
This book is gold. but when berkun said that the job is essentially just creating/updating lists for people, i liked my job less and the book more.
I've been thinking about the value of social sharing. Especially, quantity vs quality.
Broad social sharing ('quantity' AKA buzz, tweet, like, etc) returns little back to me. I've shared tons of links on twitter and essentially nobody says anything in return. But i check bit.ly (by adding a '+' to the url) and see some real use. I feel an obligation to only tweet interesting links for reputation purposes but it's not apparently rewarding.
Contrast forward to HN (quality). Far less traffic, but great community interaction with the content. For me, the discource here is more valuable. Heck, down voting my comments is really valuable feedback (notice how on twitter you never get someone replying back to you with "that tweet sucked" (exception being, you threaten their reputation). Thus, HN completely alters how i interact with content.
HN is only good at distributing certain things and we try to keep it unique here. For content creators, HN can be part of the social strategy but for content consumers on HN each comment seems more valuable than a retweet. Maybe that's why we are not tweeting links to HN discussions (things get less valuable in public).
Does the quality of the HN community hurt the potential quantity of links spreading virally?