kunle

Fair point actually - didn't consider that the cost is embedded. That said, How often are those the data hogs? (Anecdotally from myself, I rarely come near the data caps). My assumption is that even today, video apps are the most data intensive - outside of those, are folks hitting their data caps on a regular basis?

Curious - all of our parents' preferred methods of communication cost money...letters, long distance phone calls, mobile phone calls. All of Josh's sister's (and her peer sets) methods of communication cost nothing (Instagram, Facebook, Kik, Twitter, Tumblr). Just an observation. Implications of this? Will companies one day pay us to talk to each other?!

Separately - isn't Skype basically Facetime over 3G/4G (and not just wi-fi)? What is Skype lacking here?

> "Try taking a screenshot, scribble some notes on that, and email it."

This only matters if such a multi-step flow is a large human need. I'm not sure it is.

> they're doing it because Elon is a master of public relations and has promoted SpaceX heavily.

While this may be true, one point that your comment doesnt address is that Boeing/Lockheed (and most of the defense industry) are incredibly adept at promoting their business within the broader Gov and DoD. It's both incredible that Elon/SpaceX achieved this milestone amidst intense opposition from the current defense industry, and that the statement from the industry basically defends the practice of massively overshooting on costs and passing that on to the taxpayer.

> Facebook has the resources to take any idea from anywhere and turn it into an app that gets a heap of attention and rockets to the top of the App Store chart in less than a day.

The scale of Facebook resources (or Google's for example) makes it easy to clone pretty much any product that fundamentally enables two or more users to interact. At a certain scale of resources, most software products are easy to clone because rarely are they based on some fundamentally new/patentable/distinguished technology. What's hard to clone is the interaction, and it's for that reason that this probably wont make much difference to Snapchat. I've only used Snapchat a couple of times in the past and the type of interaction it enables doesn't relate to the way I think of Facebook at all (and I suspect this will be true for most Snapchat users). Ultimately, almost any app, at infancy, is easy to clone - Facebook could have cloned pinterest/twitter/path/quora etc (and at times it tried), but that's not what killed them/would kill them. If they do die, it will more likely be from not tending to their community & executing on their vision. Frankly having Facebook clone your product is probably worth its weight in press alone.

They never took it seriously to begin with, and now that its clear that this is a serious market, they're too late. I wouldn't put it past them to invest additionally in GoPro (or some competitor).

Separately - who are GoPro's competitors?

Similar to the logic behind the stagnation of microsoft stock over the last decade - institutional investors just owned as much of it as they were allowed to.

I'd seen the elevator example, but didn't know the airport one. Sort of diabolical but I guess it works.

The agony of waiting also extends to software. One thing I truly despise is waiting for web pages/apps to load or update, but I've noticed that I'm measurably less irritable when the app I'm using includes an "interesting" waiting/loading indicator (eg a hamster running in a wheel).

Does anyone have any idea (anecdotal or broad) how often this happens in startups dealing with large companies? Was the Best Buy case the exception or the rule? Pretty egregious.

You know you're winning when your competition knows that the only way they'll win is by changing the law.

Was in the batch with these guys - kickass product. I love when I run around the web and I see it in use by a random group of folks I didn't expect would know about it (eg Fred Wilson from earlier this week : http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/11/mba-mondays-the-revenue-mode...)

Agreed - a natural shift (somewhat mirroring what App.net is doing vis-a-vis Twitter). Curious to see how it turns out.

Separately it looks like this argument carries more water when talking about digital-only/communication products? Because when considering apps/services such as Uber, HotelTonight and Cherry (I hate picking exceptions) that provide an offline product or service, mobile first seems to have worked just fine. Perhaps the true underlying argument is that mobile first works best when the LTV of your customer is massive.

Ayo from Hipmob here - We've been watching all the news coming out about Black Friday/Cyber Monday and it's clear this will be a breakout year for mobile/tablet shopping. Will round up some more analysis later this week!

Wonder why they wouldnt just add 50k STEM Green Cards instead of swapping them out? Seems like posturing.

Hah! No users have asked for this yet, but if you can think of features you'd like that would make this super easy, we'll build em. :)

Thanks for flagging this for us. Can't replicate the error at the moment, but will take jQueryIsAwesome's advice. Meantime, if you get a sec please send a screenshot?

You're not completely lost at all - your description is correct. All connections are made with a server in the middle.

Hey everyone - Ayo from Hipmob here. We published Couple a few days ago and thought it would be helpful to show how we put it together. We've also published the source on github (https://github.com/Hipmob) so you can take a look at the server & client side bits if you want. Would love feedback at ayo@hipmob.com

Ayo from Hipmob here. You make fair points (I've actually had a number of conversations specifically about this in the last couple of weeks) particularly in light of some recent political scandals. I have you thought through what an alternate (non poly) app/language set would look like? How would you describe it to the people who it's for? (Asking for my edification - such apps would be trivial to build on Hipmob, so if we're going to do it, I'd welcome some feedback on how - can discuss here or ping me at ayo at hipmob dot com.

Hey everyone - Ayo from Hipmob here. We released Couple as our first open-source chat project. The focus is to show any developer how to build a user-to-user messaging app using Hipmob's libraries - we'd love any comments, suggestions or feedback! (ayo at hipmob.com) - sorry this isn't reflected in the title.

Ayo from Hipmob here. Apps like Pair serve a specific niche in that their private/undistracted, and in addition using an app format as well as data (rather than pure sms) allows you to do more interesting things (Pair for example has shared sketches, video chat and the "thumbkiss"). Our specific goal at Hipmob was to release something lots of developers can play with, that's pretty simple, so they could get comfortable writing chat/messaging apps with our libraries.

Hey everyone - Ayo from Hipmob here. We released couple as our first open-source chat project. We're showing anyone how to build a user-to-user messaging app using Hipmob's libraries - we'd love any comments, suggestions or feedback! (ayo at hipmob.com)

Hey guys - Ayo from Hipmob here. TL:DR; we've made it super easy to use Parse for push notifications, in an app with Hipmob installed. We're actively developing more stuff like this - making Hipmob easier to work with tools you already use, so if you have any ideas/integrations you want to see, we'd love to hear about it! Leave in the comments or email me at ayo at hipmob.com

EDIT: Also - iOS is coming soon :)

Only if it actually generates growth. Ask me in a day :) In all seriousness - just sharing what we learned. We learned a lot from HN and we definitely want to contribute also.

Got some pretty interesting results we're still parsing through: the short version is we our click-through rate on the page was 5x what it's been otherwise, and Tony Hsieh responded through an assistant. Sharing the results to pay it forward.

Probably as important as a physical store is developing a customer base of early adopters, tinkerers and modders who will support/modify/bugtest/buy early hardware projects. Whether you reach them via a store/site or events (annual/monthly/quarterly) is less important, than for a hardware startup with a new product to know that YOU are the place to go to launch the product/find beta testers etc.

Hit me ayo[at]hipmob.com!!

CS infrastructure is quite a bit different from Zappos (Amazon doesn't provide live chat support for example from what I understand), and as entities, both their customer service philosophies (while focused on keeping the customer happy) are quite a bit different - Zappos is very high-touch, and Amazon is not.

Didn't mean to sound dismissive. My reply wasn't stating that we're unprepared; we're absolutely prepared and we think about this ALL DAY. We're also seasoned enough to know that behaviors sometimes deviate from test environments while in the wild.

Hi there - Ayo from Hipmob here. You raise a fair question - we believe we can handle the scale challenge well (we're built on Heroku & AWS), and we've deployed with that in mind. That being said, only time (and deployments) will tell.