physcab

> You do realize that the whole point of these games is socially engineering people into parting with as much money as possible, right?

Isn't this the point of any business?

> If you don't want to make games for addicts perhaps you should stop working for companies that make games for addicts.

I don't believe we make games for addicts. When I show our game to my friends and family they say things like "oh this game is cute", "this creature is funny", etc. The vast majority of our users are people who enjoy casual gaming when they're bored sitting on a plane or on the train.

I'm curious why you consider it creepy. Note that we don't see any identifiable information and all of the metrics I report are all used to improve gameplay and help monetize the product.

They do. But sometimes these bugs are less obvious and hard to spot without data. In this particular case, it was an animation bug that occurred during a tutorial of a game, whereby the animation caused the game to crash, but only on a subset of older IPhones and under certain memory conditions. So even though the build got through QA, it was tough to understand what would happen out in the wild. Well, on that morning I noticed that a large percentage of our users were starting this particular tutorial step but not completing it. And since all of our data is cohorted by both install date and build version, the engineering team knew exactly where to look to fix the issue, despite no knowledge on my part of a bug ever being introduced.

One of my greatest worries going through Engineering school was working on a product that would inadvertently harm people.

I once wanted to work at a Lithium Ion battery start-up because I wanted to help create an energy source free of geo-political and climate turmoil. Then I discovered those sources were some of the most toxic to the environment both in the harvesting and the disposing of the material.

I then went on to do graduate research in explosives detection. We created machines that would help detect bombs in Iraq and landmines left in a peaceful villages. But then TSA used the machines to look at people's private parts and there was a mass privacy scare.

My point is: you can't go life worrying who might use the things you create for harmful purposes. You may be ignorant, but the alternative will drive you insane.

I'm an analyst for a gaming company too, so let me offer my perspective. I consider myself to be an ethical, non-creepy person, and I disagree with what this person says.

Yes, gaming companies are extremely data-driven and they measure everything they can. I'm in charge of dashboards that have over 300 KPI's (key performance indicators) on them. What do we measure? A whole lot of shit. ARPU, ARPPU, HC (hard currency) spend/gained, SC (soft currency) gained/spend, Retention, DAU, Spend DAU, Gained DAU, Downloads, Activations, plus funnels for every page, every user action you can think of.

Do I think measuring all this is creepy? No. Why? Because when I come in the morning, I look at my stats. I'll be able to tell within an hour if the build the engineers shipped the night before had a bug that affected 30% of our users in a certain location. I'll then report this to the Engineering team, they can create a hotfix, and users can be happy again. Engineers are happy knowing that we have actual data to validate and confirm their gameplay suggestions (made during scrum/sprint planning sessions). I also report monetization metrics to the VP's. They want to know if the boatloads of money they are spending on user acquisition are actually paying off. And the PM's want to know if users are playing the game, or how far they get into the game.

Yes, we maximize for users who spend over $10k. These users even have names. They're called "whales" in industry parlance. Why wouldn't you want more of them in your game? This is a business afterall. I feel just as bad as the next person wondering whether some of these "whales" are addicts. I don't want to be creating products for addicts. But what if these users are just rich people who have tons of money to spend off the cuff? There's no way we can know because we never get that data. All I see is what's reported in ItunesConnect.

Do we ever record any personally identifiable information? No. Do we ever sell or distribute this data to outside parties? No. Can any of this data ever be used maliciously? No.

Personally, I like the way game companies work (hence why I work in the industry). It teaches you to measure everything. You make decisions quickly. And no one can argue with the facts. You'll know real fast whether the product is shitty and you can do an about-face, gather the troops, and push out something new.

> the idea that you can't bond, have fun, and have crazy nights without it is all bullshit

Right, and I realize that. You're making the same point the OP did. But I'm saying you can bond, have fun, and have crazy nights with alcohol and thats ok too. It's a personal choice either way.

I get the point of the post. But come on, we're adults. Drinking is a choice. For some people, if having a drink makes them more social and they enjoy it, more power to them. If people choose to be sober and it works for them in their social life, hey, good for them too.

Yes alcohol can be abused. But just because you choose to get shitfaced doesn't mean you don't know how to have fun the "real" way. It also doesn't mean you're an alcoholic. And just because you don't drink, doesn't mean you're the outcast.

Your post would have been a lot more meaningful if you neglected the part about the alcohol altogether. I think what's inspiring is that you chose to go down a different path and it led to amazing things in your life. Drinking is irrelevant and takes away from the good message you try to convey.

Launching an app in the App Store is hard. And the App Store is an incredibly stressful environment because essentially you only get 2 weeks to settle into a rank that will be the basis of your success. If you fuck it up, you're pretty much done because discovery on the app store is broken.

I work for a social game company that has invested orders of magnitude more time and money into figuring out the best route to launch an app, and even they recognize that even after all their analysis and beta-testing, they too can fail. But they have the most disciplined process to give them the best shot at winning. I'll offer a few pieces of advice from seeing their launch process:

1) Beta test internally until the app is "good enough" for launch. Bugs are ok. Put in monetization features immediately and test.

2a) Come up with a target rank you want to achieve (both safe and stretch) and figure out how you need to get there. For example, if your goal is to get into the top 10 free games, you need to have around 1.5 million downloads a month. To get into the top 25, you need about 1 million. Understanding these targets helps hone your strategy.

2b) You can't afford to not do some initial projections in your industry. For a free-to-play game as an example, DAU and churn and Lifetime Value are important metrics. You need to setup some initial benchmarks for these metrics, so you can gauge if you're being "successful" in your launch.

3) Don't launch in the U.S initially. As you've found out, you only get one chance, and the U.S is a huge market to fuck up. One great thing about the App Store is that it has geo-targeting built into its distribution, so launch in a much smaller market that might validate your idea. We chose New Zealand, because its a large enough market to beta-test an idea, but "Whatever Happens in New Zealand Stays In New Zealand" as our marketing director put it.

4) If you fuck up a beta-tested market, don't worry, theres about 25 others that you can use before launching in the "mainstream" markets.

5) You will have to pour money into ads, but you only have to do it for 2 weeks because ranking in the App Store is determined by velocity of downloads. So as soon as you launch, target with any ad-system you can get your hands on from Admob, InMobi, Facebook, Google, TapJoy, whatever. This will cost you lots of money, but this is what it takes to succeed. There is simply too much competition in the App Store.

Miscommunications happen. Its a fact of life and its even moreso when you're dealing with a complex legal matter. I'm offering up my time as an unpaid ex-employee to help someone out who seems to be having difficulty. The offer stands to others but not indefinitely because as time passes, I'll know less and less people who work at the company.

Like I said above, feel free to ping me and I'll help connect you with the right people.

Please ping me personally on my email and I'll be happy to connect you with the right people. More often than not, these matters are simple communication issues that can be resolved. Even though I don't work there anymore, I'd be thrilled to help out the community any way I can.

Re:"money" issue. Everyone has a hand in making an artist successful. Yes the artist produces the content and should be compensated for such. I fully agree. But Grooveshark brings the audience, the user experience, the hosting, and the analytics. These services aren't free. Do you get mad when people sell you tap water in a bottle and demand $3.00 for something that costs $0.25?

I used to work for Grooveshark and your accusations are pretty unfair. We've always complied with the DMCA and our terms are equal to what you'd find on any other UGC site. GS also signed up hundreds if not thousands of small indie labels that have loved working with us. Have you seen the Featured section or any of the Artist theme promotions? Yea, many of those are unsigned artists that we promote often for no cost. We've done great things for bands like Skyrocket Love and Tay Dizm. http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/stories/040811grooveshark

> Their staff is rude

You're welcome to form your own opinions, but I can tell you that the people who work at Grooveshark are some of the nicest and most fun-loving individuals you'll ever meet. You have to be humble in this industry. You don't make a whole lot of money and you have to hustle to sign up every act you can. You go to every concert. You meet with every executive. And at the end of the day you give away 70% of your hard-earned money to someone else.

> getting there is the easy part.

Not exactly. It takes 9 months to get to Mars. Aside from all the logistical problems of keeping humans alive in a tiny capsule for 9 months, who would in their right mind want to do this to themselves? You would probably go insane.

No you probably haven't. The lessons I've learned as being a part of this community over the past three years have been immeasurable, and that comes from browsing this site daily. Here's a sample from the top of my head, and this doesn't even come close to the edge cases where I've encountered a specific problem in my day job and thought to myself "oh shit, I remember reading an article about this on HN, let me go search for it". This also applies to all the reading I've done for fun and in school.

- Drawing U.S choropleth thematic maps (flowing data)

- A/B testing, Adwords, SEO (patio11's blog)

- D3 framework

- VIM advice

- Product development and importance of design

- Being data driven

- Conversion optimization

- Importance of machine learning on web scale problems

- Stupid business models vs business models that actually seem to work

- Mistakes to avoid

Yes you learn by doing. But you learn just as much through discovery, and discovery only happens when you read a shit ton more than you have to. Discovery leads to idea generation. Idea generation leads to products. Creating products leads to learning.

You should try A/B testing your copy.

I don't understand the concept of openness and liberation as it applies to photos. To me, those are political concepts, not technological ones. Maybe I'm not in your target market, but to me it makes much more sense to tie "sync" and "share" to your copy more so than "open" and "liberation".

For example, if the name of your service was PhotoSync, and then if I went to the front page and saw a comparison between your service, Facebook, Flickr, and ICloud, I'd be very curious to see what you could offer over the options available to me.

Best to ride the coattails of those companies that have invested orders of magnitude more money to educate the market than to educate them yourselves.

You are probably right but this is a war of attrition. There are many, if not the majority, of industry music types who will act this way, but the old guard is literally dying away. So if GS doesn't outlast then a new company most certainly will, it's just a question of when. The power is starting to shift to the artists anyways, and I predict you'll soon start seeing the music industry being run by former artists or artist managers. Take a look at Troy Carter for example, who is Lady Gaga's manager. I'm pretty sure he is an investor in Turntable.fm.

As a former employee of GS I can say that getting sued is nothing new and may in fact be a good thing for them in a wierd and twisted way. The reason being is that sometimes (this was the case with EMI atleast) the labels use a lawsuit to begin negotiations. Getting sued is almost like a stamp of approval. Obviously I don't know anything about this lawsuit but if they can outlast the legal costs and emerge with a stronger subscriber base from their redesign, they'll be ok.

San Francisco, CA - Kontagent

Software Engineer, Data Scientist, Account Manager, Sales, Full-time, Part-time, Intern, Contract

New Office Pics!! http://www.flickr.com/photos/69285966@N05/

Let's face it, as an engineer you can work ANYWHERE. You are in demand and if you're good you know it. You don't want to take the time to interview unless you know a company will be good for you.

At Kontagent, we believe that culture is everything. We have a strong community here and people are excited to come into the office. We're tackling big problems, but more importantly we're having uuuuubber amounts of fun doing it. Honestly, its a blast. Your co-workers will be some of the smartest people you know, but also some of the nicest.

We have:

- A game room for the Rockband literate

- A kitchen stocked with delicious food and drinks

- Nerf guns

- Wine and Cheese Thursdays

- Clients that can't run their businesses without us

- A new office with incredible views

- Catered lunch daily and team lunch Fridays

- Beer

- An ACTUAL work-life balance Read this for more information: http://bit.ly/n4BWGg

If interested, contact me at the e-mail listed in my profile.

I wouldn't doubt it. But they also don't publish any figures so its difficult to confirm. I work for one of their competitors and we most likely have the same availability requirements... anyways, just curious. Here's where we're at, as a comparison http://bit.ly/qLrKOt

edit: looks like they did publish some figures :) http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/01/mixpanel-billion-datapoints...

This is somewhat unrelated, but I remember reading in one of Mixpanel's job posts that they had over 200 servers. 200 for a company of their size that charges by the data point seems kind of a lot. I've worked at a couple tech companies who get by with an order of magnitude less servers and deal with the same load that I bet they deal with. So either they were exaggerating by re-defining what a "server" was in the cloud, they have tons of (costly) freeloaders, or their infrastructure is inefficient.

I would quit too. I love Apple products but they come at a huge human cost. One of my best friends works there and he's always extremely stressed out. He works like 15 hour days, 6 days a week. He's constantly bailing on his obligations because Apple decides to run a conference call at a ridiculous hour of the night, or right before we go into a theater to watch a movie. Nevermind the China trips that get dragged out for weeks. I've heard from him on several occasions that there are few people who have worked at Apple longer than a few years because of the burnout.

While I love Dropbox and have it installed, I think they are right to fear ICloud. After getting a 4s and being able to simply type my AppleID, I instantly had all my contacts, videos, photos, music, settings, and bookmarks instantly and seamlessly synced. Best part of it all was that I didn't even know I was using ICloud. I didn't have to setup or download anything. It was so simple. Since I'm a mac user, I really don't have much use for Dropbox anymore.

San Francisco, CA - Kontagent

Software Engineer, Data Scientist, Account Manager, Sales, Full-time, Part-time, Intern, Contract

Let's face it, as an engineer you can work ANYWHERE. You are in demand and if you're good you know it. You don't want to take the time to interview unless you know a company will be good for you.

At Kontagent, we believe that culture is everything. We have a strong community here and people are excited to come into the office. We're tackling big problems, but more importantly we're having uuuuubber amounts of fun doing it. Honestly, its a blast. Your co-workers will be some of the smartest people you know, but also some of the nicest.

We have:

- A game room for the Rockband literate

- A kitchen stocked with delicious food and drinks

- Nerf guns

- Wine and Cheese Thursdays

- Clients that can't run their businesses without us

- A new office with incredible views

- Catered lunch daily and team lunch Fridays

- Beer

- An ACTUAL work-life balance

Read this for more information: http://www.thedatascientist.com/2011/09/21/curiosity-or-why-...

If interested, contact me at the e-mail listed in my profile.

Stripe is a game changer. I've been using it for a few months and honestly its the best API I've ever used. The documentation is clear and concise. Its customized to your account so you can literally copy and paste and see the result. Just like it says, it gets out of your way. I was up and running and accepting recurring payments in less than an hour or so. I actually began to think of larger "swing for the fence" type of ideas that I would have never considered if I were stuck to using Paypal because it was so painless. Looking forward to them eating every other payment processor's lunch.

I'm not sure saying "revenue fell in half" is accurate. It looks like they are clarifying what revenue it actually makes ie, instead of counting the full value of the coupon as revenue, they are now adjusting revenue numbers to reflect what their cut of the coupon is. Still sort of shady that they were quoting the first number to begin with...unless that is totally common, which I wouldn't know.

Consider for a moment this alternate viewpoint. What if submitting a song to <insert music distribution service> was kinda like submitting a blog to <insert blog service>. You don't get paid for blogging, but if you produce enough good content, you can create an audience and then sell them other things later on. Smart bloggers give out their content for free, then charge for premium services and products like consulting, books, podcasts, screencasts, merch, etc. Seems like the same model could be applied to independent artists as well. Then the questions become, which platform can you use to stay connected with your fans? Which platform will allow you to upsell other services for which you can make real money on? Which platform allows you to publish your content effortlessly to a potentially limitless audience?

I'm not sure how true this would be for the general public. I like human interaction when I'm out, but I typically only avoid restaurants that have bad food.

This is excellent insight. As a developer, my gut reaction is to say but look at all these features and people will pay for that. But thats not really the case. In fact, it seems what people actually pay for is an efficient solution to something that takes them far too much time (or makes/saves them money).

This is exactly the type of problem I have been encountering with my app FitLabs (www.fitlabs.co). Its an app catered to people who do Crossfit and are used to paying $150/month in gym fees. So I thought, "hmm if people are already paying that much, they wouldn't have a problem paying a premium for a tool that lets them get more out of their workouts". Wrong. I built the tool, and people balked at the price. They said I should lower it to $10/month, but even when I did that they still didn't sign up.

Thanks! Great feedback. I'm actually currently testing between multiple price points. I had a higher price point but a lot of my testers said it was way too much, so I'm lowering it and seeing what effect it has on my conversions.

Right now there is not much differentiation between this and other fitness tracking apps. Its specifically catered to Crossfit athletes though. I do have some ideas for making the graphs more revealing. I also want to connect workouts to nutrition much better other than just listing stats. We'll see...lots of experimentation to do!