robbfitzsimmons

Admitting it's totally beside the point, what is the deal with the "trademark" Campfire emoji at the end of the post? Soon(tm)? In-joke?

I still don't really see the pants, but have in the past been guilty of designing, and using for two months in production, a logo that a focus group decided was "swastika-esque."

So maybe don't listen to me.

Just GPG on a text file, checked into a private Github repo.

It's actually a great excuse to give business and designer types an intro to Git / command line.

No worries! It actually got me to click; I was curious how one would accomplish that for a CRM, something that is nothing but a database.

Mods - I think this should be "CMS" (content management system) instead of "CRM" (customer relationship manager), as it's a blogging tool.

Completely agreed (and would also kill to pay); what I meant at the end of my comment that it's that it's a nice opportunity predicated on being a quality app right when the market starts to shift.

Which I think is what Will's betting on.

As a primarily-iOS user / developer who also has an Android tablet (last year's Nexus 7), completely agree with both points made here. [The first being that Android development is better, and the second being that the vast majority Android apps currently suck compared to the iOS equivalent, making for a nice opportunity.]

It's hard enough to peg a real user need and deliver on that need in a satisfying, sticky way. It's at the core of what a startup needs to do to cultivate that product development discipline as a team, and tools that make that harder are insult to injury.

As others have mentioned, though, none of these app startups are launching just for a smooth development experience. And Android just hasn't shown that users will reliably upgrade their OS, much less pay for apps like iOS users do. Until that changes, even if the better dev experience will accelerate a shift, it's sort of a chicken-and-egg problem on app quality.

Looks gorgeous, and recording quality has been fantastic on my Nexus 7 (have been testing the alpha).

Makes me significantly less twitchy in meetings - I'm a compulsive note-taker, and it actually has really changed my note-taking behavior towards summarization and takeaways versus "minutes" style.

Nice work, guys.

The most interesting part to me here is the MSN butterfly on the video. Microsoft has a YouTube competitor - who knew?

I'm not the OP, but this definitely happened several times at Dartmouth (BlitzMail) when I was there 2006-08.

Love the addition of printed reports (revenue!) but this seems (quite literally looks) like Path in terms of the layout. Given that you are pulling from other networks and adding other improvements on Path's model, why not change up the look a bit to differentiate?

Google has the capacity to make this really easy; the fact that they haven't makes me wonder how difficult it is to aggregate search and other data into one user profile, as that seems like the primary argument against easy Gmail (and thus Google) account mashups.

By far my biggest frustration as a 5-account, 3-OS (plus mobile) GMail and Apps user is the client. Two personal accounts, an academic and side project, and a professional one. Oy. Thunderbird provided some cross-platform consistency, but was far too clunky to last in my workflow - not surprised it died.

What I've done for the last six months (before recently experimenting again) was keeping the six accounts completely separate and using Sparrow on OSX/iOS as the primary means of access. It kept headers from getting all effed up with Gmail aliasing, but was a real pain when I would occasionally have to log in via web (signing in/out multiple times to check inboxes, etc.).

I've now decided to keep all non mission-critical forwarded to the same account (for me 5 Gmail/Apps accounts, for you would be your personal and side project accounts) and the professional account (Apps) separate. With Google allowing a max of Gmail and one Apps account at the same time, this works fine, so long as I'm willing to have my headers display stupid "sent by [me] on behalf of [my other email]" text. Which I am at this point for a little simplicity.

Agreed that an aggregator/navigator plugin would be killer (even if it just forwarded you to an incognito tab with your mailbox, to keep you from having to sign out of your main Google account) but the implementation details are onerous/likely impossible.

I must admit, that was a head-scratcher... an amazing accomplishment when they're still crediting an author from the 30s.

I'm in China right now and simply astounded at the apathy I see from even very well-educated folks, though. Local Chinese roommate works at Oracle and is completely fine with censored search, doesn't use VPN, etc. And this is beyond the less technical people, many of whom aren't even aware of the firewall.

I think this is still a clever and classy move for Google, though I just wonder if it motivates people beyond those already intrinsically motivated (a relatively large % of current Google.CN users).

I tend to feel as though the word "entrepreneur" might just be better left to die altogether. It's a title for people who aren't title people.

When you get down to what early economists were thinking when they coined the term, it seems to me like it's about giving it a shot in the face of uncertainty, rather than about the type of work (or even the work's success). (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Cantillon)

If you're selling underwear subscriptions, calling yourself a weekend-website "CEO" or taking silly seed investment to avoid missing paychecks, maybe you're not really risking.

You don't need to come up a title for that - you kinda already know it's not the same thing.