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matdwyer

268 karma · joined November 26, 2010

20 something entrepreneur from America's hat (YYZ), tons of ideas and not enough time. Hoping to learn more programming/tech in spare time.
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matdwyer··on Rejected By VCs, Pebble Watch Raises $3.8M on Kickstarter
Good, I'm glad they were rejected - If they weren't, I wouldn't have known about them, nor would I have purchased one.

This way they get their money in the form of guaranteed, up-front orders, and I get a cool new product "before" anyone else. I feel exclusive and I'll have the hot new gadget to show off.

It's a win-win, and I hope more companies opt for this route - it is true market validation.

(On a related topic, September can't come soon enough. I want mine now)

matdwyer··on The Royal Canadian Mint just announced a new alternative to BitCoin
You're forgetting hockey. There is always a new hockey coin. Always.
matdwyer··on In Manhattan Pizza War, Price of Slice Keeps Dropping
As an outsider, I prefer the $1 slice to Grimaldi's, not sure if that's one of the better places but it was the only other pizza I've had in NYC
matdwyer··on Support for Startups?
I'd spring for this. I spend a ton of time doing customer support that's pretty unnecessary, but not enough to hire an additional dedicated person. Outsourcing the whole thing would be a good idea.

I'd assume a basic per monthly fee of $xxx with a $x amount per interaction ($x for an email, $x*1.5 for a phone call, etc)

matdwyer··on Tacocopter - Flying Robots Deliver Tacos To You
Imagine your mail could be delivered to you like this?

Something tells me Amazon will run with this in 10 years and take USPS/Canada Post/etc out of business

matdwyer··on Tacocopter - Flying Robots Deliver Tacos To You
They can add revenue by flying drugs back across the border!
matdwyer··on Free ride from SFO if you test our app
Cool idea, wish I could take advantage of this. You don't happen to need testing on a flight to San Francisco too? ;)
matdwyer··on IAmA NASA Astronaut who recently returned to Earth and I am new to reddit
I find the reddit interface extremely annoying with AMA... I want to see all the questions and answers, I don't want to see the random ones that don't get answered, etc. Just show me everything in a neat organized way. Love the guys that summarize everything at the end.
matdwyer··on Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million
I've seen some hilarious Lil' Wayne & Tebow drawings though! Much more fun to me, but you're right, this is a world wide game.
matdwyer··on Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million
It's actually surprisingly fun. My girlfriend spends like 10 minutes drawing these elaborate pictures for strangers.

The only thing that infuriates me is when people know what it is but can't spell the word and then give up.

matdwyer··on Show HN: Free Unlimited Private File Sending (Beta)
Do files download over HTTP or through the app on the recipients computer
matdwyer··on Angry Birds in space
Talk about priceless press... the Rovio marketing team were probably salivating when they heard about this
matdwyer··on More than $215,000 stolen from Bitcoinica in Linode incident
I'm not trying to troll here at all, but if "$215,000" worth of bitcoins are stolen, do the authorities investigate as they would $215,000 worth of cash?

Is there taskforces that recognizes this? or is it just the wild west?

matdwyer··on Ask HN: 423,430 views in 1 day on YouTube, any ideas how he does it?
I don't know if this is what they did, but many embed their video in a pop-behind when buying traffic (for far less then a penny per view), and as the video is played behind the site, they get a view.

It's a bit pointless though.

matdwyer··on VoiceBunny: Fast and professional voiceovers (with an API).
Sounds like we have a different understanding of "good" voices - I found four or five quickly and picked "naplesdave"

I don't think you are giving me the same low fiverr price, considering the estimate I had yesterday was in the $45 range for my sample script...

matdwyer··on VoiceBunny: Fast and professional voiceovers (with an API).
I use Fiverr for all of our phone message / voiceover work and it really did impress - to think that these guys can make money doing 100 words for $4 (after fiverr's cut) is pretty crazy.

The only thing that could be more desired is a faster turn around time, although I'm not willing to pay 10 times the amount that this is estimating.

matdwyer··on Is Google removing copyrighted files from GMail?
I have at least three mp3's that were ripped like 8 years ago that I've sent to myself over the past couple years (2009 is most recent). They are all there and still good, and artists that I'd assume would be taken down if this was true.

You can check if you have any by searching, adding ".mp3" to required words and clicking check attachments (I also added from me to me)

matdwyer··on Show HN: A simple project i made to learn node.js
Very neat game, congrats. The GF was loving it
matdwyer··on Steve Blank's new book - The Startup Owner's Manual
First 33 pages are up on Stadford's site for free

http://www.stanford.edu/group/e145/cgi-bin/winter/drupal/upl...

matdwyer··on Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)
I haven't, but margins arent exactly high enough to be paying a per image fee. I looked into ftping everything to India, but I was looking at somewhere in the range of 10-11 cents just for a crop and basic enhancement.
matdwyer··on Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)
I've got a question that I don't really know where to go with, and my research so far is giving me nothing.

I regularly get large jpeg files that have either multiple pictures inside them (think like multiple photos in a scan) or have black space around them (and only one picture inside). I want to crop those to create individual JPGs out of each photo. Photoshop's command doesn't work well in my experience, and I can't find anything. I'm willing to get it developed somehow to save me the time of doing it by hand, but I don't know where to start language / requirement wise.

So, what would suggest for this? Any easy options I'm not thinking of?

If I can figure something out, dinner's on me in south Florida!

Thanks!

matdwyer··on Dreamliner spells out "787" & Boeing logo over US during test flight
Can't wait for the green-team to have their arms up about wasting fuel to do this (even though it's a scheduled test flight)
matdwyer··on Instagram Founder’s Girlfriend Learns How To Code For V-Day, Builds Lovestagram
This is cool, and a great advertising story for instagram (which is almost more of a present!)

I think my valentine gift will be "why didn't you make the reservation earlier?! Where are my roses???"

matdwyer··on Yelp advertising is a rip-off for small advertisers
The scary thing is that enough people blindly pay this rate. If they didn't, they'd lower it to a more reasonable level...
matdwyer··on Show HN: Fed up with WebEx, so we built a way to screen share in under 20 sec.
I need these to be dead simple as I use them to help walk my Mom through simple tasks on the PC from 2000 miles away.

Thank you for helping keep the hair on my head

matdwyer··on Sh*t Entrepreneurs Say
The original "Shit xyz says" are funny because you know people who actually say those things - i.e. my girlfriend has done 90% of the things in shit girls say.

In this you have basically the comic book guy from the Simpsons saying a bunch of buzz words and phrases that wanna-be entrepreneurs might say.

Title should be something like "Shit bad entrepreneurs say"

matdwyer··on Show HN: Our 5 month project Airtime for Email
I use standard images (three of them) linked to my Facebook, Testimonials, and Twitter - they do end up getting a lot of hits so I see the benefit in something like this. Not sure if I would go through the hassles of tracking email opens for my conversations with people though.

I also find that when the emails are coming back it is quite annoying to have all the image placeholders in the conversations.

matdwyer··on US bars friends over Twitter joke
It is actually pretty funny that they have a saved search for "Destroy America". Better watch what I say for the superbowl, don't want to talk about killing the patriots or anything...
matdwyer··on The Cost of Laundry
I could see an app in this space working. I used to work in a laundry place when I was a kid, and the quarters thing was certainly annoying (and some machines didn't work all the times, etc). The owners don't particularly like filling/depositing them, etc.

Big problems are a) Adoption (selling the system to SO many independent shops. If you can get in with big REIT companies then that's easy, but 90% of those have smart cards anyway b) Outside of the the super high rent areas (New York, San Fran, etc) most people that use laundry mats are lower income, who may not have smart phones and/or credit cards.

matdwyer··on The Inside Story of a Small Startup Acquisition
Interesting. I'm going to take the trial for a run shortly, may write a review about it in the future.
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