931 karma · joined November 23, 2008
At some point, increasing demands from local government are destined to provide a competitive advantage to businesses in other locales. The interesting question is how much of an advantage being located in Silicon Valley is, as compared to the cost. By their nature, bureaucracies tend to ratchet themselves larger and larger. At some point, the balance has to tip.
I've got a couple of clients who've been mumbling about needing mobile apps, and I'm probably going to steer them to jQuery Mobile instead.
My weekend project a couple of weeks ago, an attempt to solve this sort of problem. I was picking up a friend, and there was no easy way for his smart phone to tell me where he was. So I wrote a site to let 'im. I haven't finished testing it, but folks might be interested.
I remember teaching classes in '99 where I needed to explain XML. I could do it in five minutes -- it's like HTML, but you get to make up tags that are case-sensitive. Every start tag needs to have an end tag, and attributes need to be quoted. Put this magic tag at the start, so parsers know it's XML. Here's the special case for a tag that closes itself.
Then what happened? Validation, the gigantic stack of useless WS-* protocols, XSLT, SOAP, horrific parser interfaces, and a whole slew of enterprise-y technologies that cause more problems than they solve. Like COBRA, Ada, and every other "enterprise" technology that was specified first and implemented later, all of the XML add-ons are nice in theory but completely suck to use.
XML has changed from a mildly verbose but eminently human-readable and machine-parsable data representation into a "technology" that has become over-specialized and covered with encrustations to the point that it is approaching regex's on the "now you have two problems" scale. JSON just gets back to a format that both the machine and I can read reliably and with ease.
I think they lost their way after the end of the cold war. I didn't find any mention of Magnitsky on their website. It's rather depressing.
As an example, one of the inputs is percentage of alumni who donate. So one large school has a gigantic push every year to get just one dollar from every alumni that they can. I actually sat in on a seminar where somebody from the university broke down all the bizarre things they were doing with admission, freshman retention, alumni relations, and so-on, just to game US News and World Reports.
"If an ETF is comprised of large cap stocks like Microsoft and Dell, that’s fine, but if the index is composed of smaller companies like the Russell 2000 index, those companies with very few shares outstanding are in for a wild ride. One ETF, IWM-Russell 2000, is the largest shareholder for more than 800 of the companies in that index."
That's messed up.
If I were in your position I would structure your take as a percentage of the gross sale price. They should pay you an advance[1]. That gives them some skin in the game, and keeps you from eating up your runway making money for somebody else.
[1] Be careful that things are constructed such that you keep the advance if they screw up in any way.
My number one goal is to provide a deployment environment with as few additional restrictions on the developer as possible.
First and foremost, your design is lacking. I'm not good enough at design to explain exactly what's wrong, but I can kinda wave my arms and say it needs more texture, some richness. You need a design partner on this with some illustration skills, I think. The grey and orangey-pink isn't working for you. I think for a site like this, you need a bit of richness. A nice picture-frame for your users, without being too overt... If you can't get somebody with enough graphic skills to chip in, maybe you need to get starker. Black and white and one bold accent color, maybe.
Most of the links are broken when I'm not logged in. You need to be super-friendly to non-logged in users. Talk me into doing some work putting together some awesome catalog of what I like to wear, so I feel like I'd lose it if I don't create an account. Maybe you have that already, and the broken links are keeping me from seeing that.
If those are actual people using the site, and not models, you've got to have some of your less attractive and model-looking friends provide you the initial seed ;)
All that said, good luck! I've been pondering how there are possibilities for some sort of fashion site like this. I was thinking more along the lines of having people assemble clothes from Amazon and then running daily contests for best outfit... Buttons to share via facebook and twitter, all that stuff. I think what you've got here has a lot of potential! Sort of a wardrobe reddit...
The viral loop probably lies in encouraging people to sign their existing friends up so that we can better classify the kind of people a user gets along with. I think people would use it, given that it had some mild game mechanics and some real social benefit. I'd push hard against making it in any way useful for dating and hookups at first, otherwise it would quickly get a stigma.
I had an interesting chat with some salesguys a couple of months ago, where we talked about an application that lets you say, "I'm in Denver on a layover for four hours. I'd love to grab a beer with somebody who sells into the enterprise software space and has some time to chat." That's one possible revenue source. Permission marketing is another one.
If I were to go the social-media-startup-route, this is the problem I find most interesting.
http://www.njl.us/social-networking-but-the-other-way-around
http://www.njl.us/rotating-picture-of-the-earth-as-ubuntu-wa...