I too, made my first sale as a shareware author on AOL, selling a Tetris clone for the Mac called Blox. I asked for $5 checks sent to my home address, and while I sold less than 100, the feeling of accomplishment and the incredibly nice notes included with those payments definitely kickstarted my entrepreneurial career and taught me to listen to my customers (hence Blox Arcade II released a year later for $10, sold via Kagi, and selling thousands of copies).
Although I agree an AppleTV API is a given, I wouldn't assume this existing private "BackRoom" API represents anything interesting. The current slate of apps have to be developed in something and thus the existence of a private API for doing so shouldn't be surprising.
After all, if Apple wants to dominate in this space (and I believe they do) then I have to believe the actual public API will be much, much more powerful then a bunch of lightweight UIKit inspired layout classes.
It's a fad because you draw your "evolutionary diet" line at the Paleolithic for no reason at all. For 100 million years prior all your ancestors ate a pure vegetarian diet. Why isn't that diet more sensible from an "evolutionary" perspective?
Which spawned Apple's MPW IDE and their MacApp C++ framework, which ultimately gave way to Metrowerks CodeWarrior and the PowerPlant C++ framework. It's actually pretty amazing that for most of the 90s Apple let Metrowerks own the developer experience.
I always thought that Jobs' greatest triumph in pushing Rhapsody was bringing their developers back to using their own tools (though I suppose Carbon could be considered a short term loss).
A year into my post-acquisition "stint" I find the most valuable lesson is to accept that, by design, everything about your startup culture will have to cede to your acquiring company's culture. Don't fight it; how well that transition occurs will help define the "success" of the acquisition, and as a founder you will be judged in the future (fairly or not) on how well the assimilation occurred.
Fucking nonsense. If you are passionate enough you will apply yourself and master your love until you (and perhaps only you) can figure out how to succeed from it. Contrary to the article, abandoning one's passion is what sucks the fun out of people's lives and careers. Everybody does it. Don't fall for it.
I agree. We were an early Crashlytics adopter that also used TestFlight for Ad Hoc testing. When TestFlight launched TestFlight Live and introduced its own crash logging service, we saw no need to keep both in the app and shut off Crashlytics. Anecdotal of course, but I think the theory here has merit: crash logging is a feature, not a business model, and the Crashlytics team made a good move here.
Light guns hit home video game consoles with Shooting Gallery on the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972. Because the included shotgun-style light gun was only usable on a Magnavox television, the game flopped. The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) Zapper then fell into the hands of American kids in October 1985...
A light gun that worked with all TVs was also included with the Telstar Ranger console (a pong game console developed by Coleco and distributed by Sears) in 1977. The gun was used with the skeet games supported by the console and worked pretty well at a distance from about 4 ft (although tracking a large bouncing white block on a black screen was probably not that technically challenging).
Incidentally, my brother and I had our Telstar Ranger gun (black plastic, very gun looking) confiscated by airport security when we, perhaps unwisely, tried to carry the console, paddles and gun in our carry-on.
Ah yes, I used the baby blue version. Probably my favorite terminal until the HP2621a (which had a great character set, "modern" housing, and nice loud beep). Since I used the line editor to program I only really used HJKL as cursor keys in rogue. :-)
Although I agree in general, there is a valid ulterior motive to playing the "stealth startup" game, and that is as a marketing strategy to generate buzz prior to launch and drive user adoption on launch day. IMO this is really no different from a "private beta" strategy or "sign up your email pre-launch" strategy.
However, the only founders who can generate any real marketing traction on the "stealth startup" play are rockstars: "John Doe is working on a stealth startup" is nowhere in the same league as "Naveen Selvadurai is working on a stealth startup." And I would argue the sheer marketing value of the latter warrants the secrecy.
There is a great lesson here. For everyone on the outside of anything that requires experience to excel, it appears that there must be secrets kept by those on the inside that reveal the keys to success. But there are no secrets. You just need to persevere: fail, fail, fail and fail until you succeed. And then one day you'll stare blankly at a young face asking you "what's the secret?" and you'll realize the secret is that you don't care about secrets anymore.
Premise 2 is flawed IMO. An MVP built by a lone, but talented techie for $5000 / number_of_hours, isn't likely to turn into something 'successful' at all because 1) someone who values their time so little is probably not that talented, and 2) an idea whose perceived valuation is essentially $8K probably isn't that good to begin with.
No. A goods/services provider has "common" trademark protection in the US even if without a registered mark, so this usage is not "within their right."
Although I am in agreement, I believe it best to re-emphasize the qualifiers for such an endeavor (totally IMO):
1) A single founder must have already had an exit;
2) A single founder must be able to speak to their own weaknesses and address how to balance those to potential investors;
3) A single founder must have domain experience.
Finally, although most people anticipate a single founder as a CEO with technical skills, I believe that a better single founder is a CTO with business skills.
Now if Google really wants to finish the job and stick a fork in Siri, they should make a developer SDK available so other iOS apps can use this technology. Right now, the only
ad hoc speech-to-text service available is Nuance's (which yes, powers, Siri) but the API rate restrictions (and pricing tiers) make it a much less than satisfactory option.
They can be called "milk" legally because the definition of milk includes the whitish fluid produced by plants. The dairy industry has tried to argue against its use "to prevent consumer confusion" to no avail: http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2010/04/dairy-lobby-t...
Can someone explain how the economics of scaling this type of business works now in 2012 when it failed in 2001? (most famously, Kozmo). I thought the problem was that the all-in cost of delivery was greater than the flat delivery fee added to each purchase. What's the trick to make this type of business work now?
Parse should offer a dedicated enterprise solution to run their stack (as source code) and warehouse your data on your own servers (or own AWS account). That would offer a real migration path for apps that anticipate reach critical mass in their user base.
Every startup requires some level of the Jobsian RDF to exist around the founders and extend to the core team. The problem is that, for most startups, the RDF will be threatened by real-world events (nobody is using/buying/investing-in your product) and once the RDF is gone, it's very hard to keep going. That's when morale suffers. That's when founders leave. Startups die the same way because the begin the same way (and rightfully so): with a passion about an idea that doesn't necessarily conform to reality.
I'm ok with them taking away a better hamstrung licensed product for a crappy one that will only get better simply because it probably had to happen at some point.
Yes it's been obvious to Apple (and developers like myself since PR1), but the apology is not for making the decision, the apology is for not being honest with its customers about its current quality.
Out of curiosity (since nobody every mentions this), do successful entrepreneurs every apply (and get in?). Obviously someone with a previous exit already has a network of investors, co-founder(s), etc., but could the exposure via YC (and Start Fund funding) warrant applying? Or is YC's mission geared towards new entrepreneurs?
I remember playing with one at Bell Labs in 82 or 83. The mouse was gigantic but looked AWESOME (black orb with red buttons). Not sure if the commercial version had the same issue, but it was slow, especially when spawning a new layer. Favorite thing: the "wait" cursor was a cute little coffee cup with steam rising from it (i.e. "this is going to take a while so grab yourself some coffee").
We could save ourselves a lot of back-and-forth commenting by understanding that it doesn't matter whether this (or any) document on its own is damning or a smoking-gun. What matters is the totality of the evidence. That's what the Jury will consider. Saying "this just looks like a competitiveness analysis" is missing the overarching point. And the same will hold true for evidence introduced by Samsung.
In 2003 I began to supplement my contractor income by writing OS X apps as a sole indie developer and eventually went full time. In the first six years I made enough to live on.
In 2008, mostly out of curiosity, I wrote a free iOS app and started a small company to publish it. This company made no revenue in its lifetime but was acquired this year. My return from that acquisition exceeds the revenue I earned from my desktop business (for every year combined).
Chances that I return to desktop app development? Zero.
To be honest, it is bittersweet. I love the desktop, but that's really not where users are anymore. Skate to where the puck is going to be and all that.
Just to play devil's advocate, there is no such thing as "clearly falling under fair use." Fair use is always arguable and it's up to a federal judge to make that finding.