You are right about it being hard to explain the difference between block and inline, even to smart people who want to learn. My argument is that there could simply be more people who want to learn, having been exposed early on to similar concepts, and that an increasing number of those people won't necessarily come from CS backgrounds.
I can see this being valuable for developers who aren't interested in learning how to configure / tweak a VPS themselves (and I do know a few of those); not sure how big that market is, but there's definitely a market.
Out of curiosity, is there any open-source solution out there (i.e: configurable script) to automatically pre-configure a blank VPS out-of-the box with a list of frameworks / libraries - something like EC2 images, but for a vanilla ubuntu server for example ?
I have a hard time believing that people (other than the close circle around the founders) would actually buy into this concept. Do you know of any data that supports this ?
Unforortunately, from what I can see, the "promote us to get an invite" feature is built into LaunchRock at this point, which means we'll have more and more of this lazy "marketing" model popping up everywhere, regardless.
Nicely executed, the video is well done. Will be interesting to see if real-life examples of viral content come out of this kid of model.
IMHO, users need to choose to share content themselves in order to go viral : it's not the link-posting (which is the basis of all twitter spam) that produces the virality, but the passion and wording of the people describing the content AFTER they've seen it that gets their friends to check it out.
Unrelated question : how does an article with 0 comments get to the top of HN ? :) Would love insight into the HN algorithm on this one.
Hate that I have to save it to my iphone desktop in order to use this ; not being able to try it out on my desktop was annoying as well, but I think enough people already expressed that sentiment. Other than that the app is ok, just not sure I'd necessarily want to spend much time learning from this source since it esssentially skips over what makes HTML5 cool in the first place.
great service - already can see so many possibilities. One problem I ran into : the craigslist search result URL I'm trying isn't being recognized http://montreal.fr.craigslist.ca/muc/
Add a bug reporting feature !
If AirBnB fails, it won't be because some competitor comes and takes the market, it will be because the whole model of renting apartments doesn't work. And given the success they've had in such a short time, safe the say the model DOES work. EVERY SINGLE COMPETITOR will face the same online/offline hurdles. Don't think AirBnB won't copy whatever their competitors do better in a second, and they'll still be recognized as the trail-blazers in this industry.
Not really surprised, I just went to unsusbcribe from their newsletter this morning, was getting increasingly tired of their over the top sales shpeel.
I'm sure it's great - however a link to the product that's not impossible to find without reading through this big sea of promo crap might help in getting people to try it out!
There are so many of these bland, one-sentence + email box sign-up landing pages that it's hard to really care about your product until you give people a reason to. I would try to do something more original than this, maybe taking a cue from the fact that your product is centered around email, maybe design the splash-page like an inbox? (this is just one idea, the point is to differentiate yourself from every other landing page that took 2 minutes to make with existing one-click "create a landing page" services).
Also, a video or snapshots, or a few use-cases/scenarios would be good, possibly in a separate "about" section.
My 0.02$, in any case good luck!
After SF, Boulder, New York and Vancouver, it's time for the european capital of North America to get an accelerator program.
Pretty much everyone who comes to Montreal ends up wanting to stay here, so this is a golden ticket for anyone looking for a bit of variety!
Looking forward to seeing what talent we attract - the advisor list is pretty impressive in any case.
Nowjs does looks cool - however I think Darshan should be giving Node.js more credit when he talks about the startups that "couldn't/wouldn't" have been built without their tech.