As an iOS developer, I can say that I agree with the statement that this would be beneficial for non-game apps as well.
As for the strategy, I would highly recommend you read "Business Model Generation" if you want to flush out this idea a bit more. It seems like you're on the right track, but maybe need to clarify a few points.
Lastly, have you considered going with a monthly subscription based service? Possibly even tiered? I just think that you're more likely to get people to pay $10/mo (with the first 30 days free or something) than $99/year. For recurring subscriptions done easy, check out recurely.com.
The only way they have to sustain $277 million in expenses is if those are fixed costs. I suspect that a lot of them are variable costs that are dependent upon a few scaleable independent variables. That being said, their profit margin does seem unnervingly low.
I agree. I stopped checking about 2 weeks ago because there were only about 3 people that ever posted anything. I like the concept, but it needs to hit critical mass and I'm wondering if the hype they received is going to be the thing that ultimately kills them.
As someone who has only been in the software development culture for about two years, I can firmly say that it truly has some incredibly helpful people. People are always eager to help others (I.e. Stackoverflow, Lean startup circle, etc) and interestingly enough, humility is more common than one would expect from a group of absolute geniuses.
It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how beneficial it would be. There is a segment of the population who does learn better this way, but not everyone. I suspect that this would be more beneficial for extreme beginners than people who have experience.
And that's the difficult thing. It's inspiring to hear about how a team's long-running lack of constructive feedback finally led to success, but what about the 20 other teams who have gone 3 years and still haven't found it? Don't get me wrong, I like reading stories like this, but there is a lot more at play.
This is an interesting addition, but I have to agree with the other repliers that: a sorting mechanicsm is desperately needed and more information about each framework would be nice. (screenshot, etc) Other than that, this is a great way to stay on top of these frameworks. I'm sure you thought of this, but gitHub has a few lists that do this as well that you might want to take a look at.
I'd be interested to hear the decision making process that twitter used to implement the new interface. Were the changes driven by the users? What metric did they use to determine if the change was a success or not? Was it successful?
Good advice indeed. The process of analyzing ideas itself is implicitly difficult so, at the very least, it's nice to have an opportunity to hone that skill.
Not entirely an accurate depiction of equity calculations, but it is nice to see as many people as possible doing these back-of-the-napkin sketches to educate. Mark Suster has some great posts about equity math.
From this thread, it almost seems that a founder dating section of HN would be pretty beneficial to a lot of people. Granted, there are already too many find-a-cofounder sites out there, but the caliber of people and ability to see the past posting history of a potential cofounder on HN seems to be potentially valuable.
It hasn't hit the critical mass to make it worthwhile. There is almost no value proposition to the user over their existing social networks where they know their friends are posting stuff. I agree that google should be using the considerable resources at their disposal to get more users.
I think the biggest issue is that you would need to get buy-in from the major manufacturers and it doesn't seem to be in their best interest. The further divergence of the platforms, in tandem with the conscious raising of switching costs, is one of their main strategies.
I've always been a per-project type of person. If the requirements are clearly defined up front, you as the developer don't need to worry about scope creep. Obviously, this is a double-edged sword if you find yourself in a position where something takes you longer than expected. But if that's the case, that's really your own fault - not the client's. It seems to be the most equitable basis IMO.
While I agree that iTunes is a very cumbersome piece of software and it is more difficult to use on Linux, the amalgamation of educational videos is the big step forward. The technology has been around, like you said, for a long time to post videos online - but what good is it if those videos are hosted on a thousand different websites? iTunes U aggregates them all into a platform that can easily be searched, as well as enforcing a minimum level of quality in order to provide a higher quality learning experience. Is Apple truly that magnanimous? Probably not. But it's an ad-hominem fallacy to dismiss the quality of iTunesU on the basis of it's creator.
iTunes U was a big step in the proliferation of higher-quality education to the masses. It's nice to see Universities like Stanford spearhead revolutionary innovations to give the opportunity of learning from world class academicians to people who would have otherwise never dreamed of it. Bravo!
I really like that they are perpetuating this methodology as far as possible. Steve Blank and Eric Ries are developing a logic and ration driven scientific approach to entrepreneurship - very exciting indeed.
Not sure I agree with this. I believe that some people have the ability and desire to objectively analyze an idea without considering the source. In fact, considering the source before the object (in this case, the idea) is an ad hominem logical fallacy.
Also "Only about 1% of proposed ideas are ever accepted.": I would love to see the empirical testing that led to this conclusion.