markerdmann

I completely agree, and I rant about this issue on a regular basis to anyone who will listen. Basic search relevance is an incredibly important feature (seems obvious, right?) that Apple is failing to provide. And the App Store has been open for four years! Perhaps it's the weight of the iTunes Music Store legacy code that I presume the App Store leans on which prevents progress? As it stands, the App Store today is worse than the web before Google.

Great post. Another important change: Apple used to give a lot of weight to titles that exactly matched the search phrase. If you wanted to rank highly for a certain search term, e.g. "flashlight", you could change your title to "flashlight" or "flashlight." or "flashlight+" to show up at the top of results. This trick no longer works... one of our apps went from result #3 to result #37 for the search that matches its title.

Personally, though, I love sudden upheavals like this. If you're paying attention and move fast, it gives you an edge against competitors that have become fat and happy.

Don't discount the speed. Every Craigslist page loads and renders very quickly. The simple, text-only UI helps keep it fast, and that matters.

Her account was affected this morning by the attack reported in the article.

Live from the scene: my partner just found that she wasn't able to log in to her Gmail account because her password was suddenly invalid. Luckily she was able to reset it quickly and regain control of the account. When she checked the recent activity, though, it showed that all logins in the past 12 hours came from her IP.

I'd feel weird about advertising them here. :-) I'd be happy to chat over Skype or email, though. You can find my contact info in my profile.

I made a mobile web app about six months ago, and this is what I heard over and over again from users: "Can you please please please make it a native app?"

Just to get our feet wet, my partner and I proceeded to write two simple iPhone apps. The first did 10x better than our mobile web app (with much less effort), and the second did 100x better. That was enough to convince us, and now we've shelved mobile web development in favor of iOS development.

That's just a personal anecdote, of course. I can't speak for the guys (or gals) behind Coder's Coffee. Overall, though, I think this is responsible for a lot of the interest we're seeing in iOS development.

It also helps that Apple has done a great job with XCode and the iOS SDK. Developing for iOS is really a pleasure.

You're right. In his blog post about the talk[1], he makes it clear that his emphasis is on bootstrapping to profitability.

"The ironic thing about bootstrapping and venture capital is that once you demonstrate some success, investors will come to YOU. When this happens you will be in a much better place to make a more reasoned choice about taking on additional capital and all the complexities that come with it. Talking to VCs with some leverage in your back pocket is an entirely different game from throwing yourself in front of a conference table full of general partners and trying to persuade them that you're worth their time and money. Power is happiness."

[1]: http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/10/18/optimize-for-happin...

I'm surprised by this. Tom Preston-Werner's talk at Startup School 2010, which had a strong influence on me and many of my friends (we still refer to it often), was very anti-VC.

Here is a link to the talk, and a relevant quote from the introduction:

http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272031754

"But for me, I don't have to worry about these things, because GitHub has never taken any funding, ever. So I want to talk a little bit about how you can avoid this mess of VC, if you so choose, by telling you a little bit of my story."

That's a great point.

Are there any startups tackling the local news problem?

This page has some interesting commentary on the purchase:

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-17/why-warren-b...

"As recently as six years ago, newspaper companies sold for more than 9 times Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization). Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Stephen Weiss writes today that Buffett’s company paid around 4 times Ebitda for the Media General assets."

I suppose you could say he's buying a very sick golden goose. He may not be able to save the goose, but at 4 times Ebitda he only needs to collect a few last eggs to get his money back. And who knows... maybe the goose can be saved.

I expected Virgin, the "hip" airline, to be the exception to this rule, but their site is also terrible. Half the time it throws an error at the end of the checkout process and tells me to call a customer service representative in order to complete my order. I've also seen a lot of tweets about the issue, so apparently their site is just FUBAR.

Banks seem to be in the same boat. Has the bidding war for programmers at startups and major tech companies made it impossible for these companies to hire anyone good?

The service is great and I'm interested in hearing about the new features, which is why I personally vote up the posts.

New AWS features often hit the front page as well, so I'm not too worried that there is a Parse conspiracy at play. :-)

I have to agree with Ford[1] on this one... Facebook ads offer a terrific ROI (in my experience). I'm very surprised by all of this negative press.

[1]: http://www.freep.com/article/20120517/NEWS09/205170633/Faceb...

Like you said, a deal's a deal. If you maintain a reputation as a reliable and honest person, it'll be much more valuable to you than the equity you could gain by going back on your word. The SV tech scene is a pretty small world, and a good reputation will help you grow your business in unexpected ways.

Isn't the conversion rate what you're interested in? This experiment will definitely tell you whether one link has a higher conversion rate.

"Herz" is the German word for heart. Do you mean that "hart" sounds like the English word "heart"?

A word of warning for anyone considering funding a software project through KickStarter: they may reject it.

I recently spotted this blog post written by a team trying to fund the development of an iPhone app:

http://famnerd.com/2012/02/update-famnerd-rejected-by-kickst...

Neat project. I built something similar a few weeks ago with Alfred Chan and Michael Grosser that calculates the "gitscore" for startups on AngelList. If you'd like to check it out, the URL is:

http://startup-score.com/

I've been following Parse for a while now, and I agree with technogarden. Their platform is impressive, and they're adding useful new features at a rapid rate.

It would definitely be cool if they open-sourced the platform, but, in the meantime, you might be interested in this project:

http://code.google.com/p/openmobster/wiki/learnmore

Personally, though, I don't mind paying for a service like Parse. If someone is willing to not only build the features I need but also to wear a pager and get up at 3am just to keep my users happy, I'm more than happy to give them some of my money.

Heroku is an impressive example of founders not selling out their users. They had multiple suitors before Salesforce, and any one of those offers would have made them millionaires. They only said "yes", however, when Salesforce agreed to give them not just a mountain of cash but also to let them continue running Heroku as an independent entity.

I wish all acquisitions looked more like the Heroku acquisition. I also wish I had a pony... :-)

I think you're spot on.

A fun game is to ask the person using this kind of language whether they consider themselves an A, B, or C player.

I use the traffic query a lot (e.g. 'traffic google.com'). You can also pit sites against each other:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=dropbox.com+vs+airbnb.c...

Sorry, I guess I went off on a tangent not directly related to the link you posted. :-) You're absolutely right. Have you used the new Wolfram Alpha UIs for anything serious yet? How did you find them?

The problem with Wolfram Alpha is this: it's awesome when a query works, but often it either doesn't understand your query on the first try, or it just doesn't have the data or computation you're after.

Siri has the same UI problem. You either have to read through the list of commands and memorize a few, or you have to deal with the constant frustration of trying something three times before giving up and doing it manually.

That said, these UIs are fun for a coder. :-) It'd be cool if somebody were to track and curate interesting Wolfram Alpha queries in a blog/tumblr/subreddit. The closest thing I could find was this:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/10-search-terms-put-wolfram-alp...

This article tries hard to give coders a warm, fuzzy feeling about how important they are.

As a coder working on a startup, I can tell you one thing I've learned: coding (at least for me) is not the hard part. If your dream is to be an entrepreneur, here's my advice: learn to code and learn to sell, or find a great cofounder who knows how to sell.

Hm... I've only made one small contribution to a python project in the past few months (riak-python-client), but I'll put my name here just in case. PyCon was amazing last year, and I'd definitely love to go again.

http://github.com/markerdmann

By the way, you should absolutely mention your company's name and get some goodwill and PR. I mean, come on... you guys are giving away free Pycon tickets! You deserve it. :-)

Great project!

One bit of feedback: I wish clicking the bookmarklet would keep me on the page I'm bookmarking instead of taking me to bookmarkly.

Another approach, if you want to create something for a lucrative market but you're not a user, is to co-create your product with customers. This piece on how to identify a monetizable pain is great:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanfurr/2011/11/18/nailing-th...

Clay Collins also advocates for a similar approach that he calls the "interactive offer":

http://mixergy.com/collins-interactive-offer-interview/

Does anyone know why companies mostly want to hire full-time coders instead of freelancers/consultants/contractors?