systemtrigger

> Nowhere on the site are any of the extra charges declared.

Be careful of what you are claiming. The http://videoprofessor.com homepage says "After your 10-day free trial, if you decide to keep the complete set, we'll conveniently bill your credit card just $289.95."

I thought it would be interesting to use Google Moderator to anonymously list and vote on unspeakable taboos.

But it's been 30 minutes and the exercise appears to have failed. Maybe what I should have done is spend some time contributing ideas of my own before opening it up to others. Or maybe I should have linked to the voting page instead of the description page.

My body, starting with my brain. Please provide clear documentation.

So does G. Richard Shell in Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People. Shell, a Wharton professor, cites a study where half of negotiators committed to a goal in writing and the other half did not. Those who wrote down their goals were far more likely to win at the negotiation table. I picked up the book last week after several people here recommended it and am enjoying the many examples from famous people with which Shell peppers his lessons. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0143036971

For me it comes down to taste and respect for norms. I've worked in hacking environments where as long as you've got clothes on and showered yesterday you're fine. I also worked at Accenture where the dress code was "smart casual" which meant "tidy, neat, conservative." I prefer hackers but Accenture paid better.

These days I work at a creative agency and although there's no dress code I have to collaborate with co-workers and rich clients. If I wore my most comfortable frayed, discolored, "liberal" clothes I'd feel lots more creative but would fear for my job. I'm not Michelangelo or a scientist, I'm just building web sites. But there are serious artists here who work with me and they dress "tidy, neat, liberal." When they wear shorts and sandals, it looks good. The reason is, they spend their money on beautiful clothes. There's a conscious way to do progressive and then there's a poor, just rolled out of bed, I don't care way.

I agree Photoshop is the wrong tool. Have you tried Fireworks? That's what I use.

Nice name, gutsy vision. I see this is for anyone associated with a school, to participate in a group blog. That's a big group of potential users. I drilled around a bit and notice you've put a lot of work writing copy, under the hood. There's an inherent chicken-and-egg problem with these social forum projects but with your social media skills I'm sure you could climb that mountain. My focus on the site itself would be to think about how to articulate message in a more obvious way up top.

According to the article, the researcher who "knows the flu-vaccine literature better than anyone else on the planet" calls the vast majority of studies "deeply flawed" and "rubbish." Only four studies were properly designed to pin down the effectiveness of flu vaccine, he says, and two of those showed that it might be effective in certain groups of patients, such as school-age children with no underlying health issues like asthma; the other two showed equivocal results or no benefit.

Others: Adobe BrowserLab and LitmusApp. BrowserLab is fast and free. LitmusApp is much slower and costs us $49/month but it has some advantages - it has a good series processing UI, it links to w3c html and css validation results, and it doesn't crop the bottom of the page.

Mturk > FAQ > Policies: You may not use Mturk for spamming activities. (https://requester.mturk.com/mturk/help?helpPage=policies)

Workers may flag any HIT they feel violates Mturk policy. Flagged requesters risk getting banned by staff.

I wear earplugs to help concentrate. When co-workers chat it does not interrupt my flow. If someone speaks directly to me I can usually detect it. If I make the decision to remove the orange foam in my ears I give that person my full attention.

I sympathize with your situation. I wonder if it would do any good to challenge each person who taps your shoulder. How about: "You really startled me. I was concentrating and your touch felt like a lightening bolt. No harm done but in the future would you mind approaching my desk more from the front? I'd really appreciate it. So would my cardiologist."

Don Quixote

Shogun

text-only version: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/142733/Text/on_writing.html

It's fast. I tried a 17MB flv, chose 10% summary and got the response in 1min4sec. Screen: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/1704650/camapi.png

It filters the boring moments well. The Animals and YouTube ZeitGeist examples opened my eyes.

Just for fun I tried to stump it with a video I had personally edited. See before and after: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/1704650/hlcamtest.html. Pretty good result, all things considered.

Time to plug my own editing startup: http://videothink.com. Host any video file and I will personally cut all the boring moments and serve you the highlight movie. The site is very minimal now but it works.

How I do it: settings > accounts > get mail from other accounts > add a mail account you own

Then select: label incoming messages, archive incoming messages, and Yes, i want to be able to send mail as x.

To read messages from another account, click its label. To send mail as another account, click the From dropdown.

Apart from the usual seed money do you ever invest more in a startup, either as YC or as an angel?

You described a corporate purchasing card. Purchasing cards are designed to let you manage on-the-fly all kinds of spending parameters e.g. "no hotels in zip code 10001 Friday through Sunday." You'll pay more for these programs of course.

Here's an idea: a card with a magnetic strip on each of its 4 (or 6 or 8) edges. Now instead of carrying multiple cards you carry just one. If you use both sides of the card, you could fit 16 mag strips on an octagonal card.

Steve, you might want to describe your site a little more for us and explain what it is you are hoping to do with thelifethings, what you want visitors to experience, what problem you're trying to solve etc. At this point the site looks kind of rough and so I'm not sure if what you were hoping to unveil is what we're actually seeing. In fact it looks very much like a standard template. Good luck.

The YC startup CO2Stats charges a fee to analyze the energy footprint of your site and purchase an equivalent amount of wind/solar energy, offsetting your usage. You can then advertise your carbon neutrality with a "green certified site" logo like the one on the bottom of this page.

The word free sure gets abused. Read Virgin's ad: http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/specialoffers/netbook.h.... To get a netbook you have to spend at least $1600 on a service contract.

The interview, sans cruft and sped up a bit: http://2009.s3.amazonaws.com/buffett.mov

Whoah wait a sec: you're not using FPS are you, you're using Simple Pay. So with Simple Pay you don't get the error granularity you get with FPS however you do still get a return value in the Return URL: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonSimplePay/latest/ASP.... You're probably getting a return value of PF which is Simple Pay's way of saying "no payment received. we'll spare you the details. reroute your customer back so they can attempt the transaction again." Your app has to check that return value and if it hears PF you need to have it redirect the customer back to the payment authorization screen (after notifying them "the transaction timed out etc.")

I'll bet that group of 5-10% is upset. They probably visited a "success" URI and naturally thought they were charged. If you find them (via the buyerEmail return parameter) don't tell them the problem is with Amazon, the truth is you didn't follow the developer doc: error-checking is your responsibility.

If you were using FPS you would get a more descriptive error. Your transaction status would be something like 'initiated', 'reinitiated' or 'temporary_decline' and for those you don't announce the error to the customer you just let FPS keep trying until you get a success or a (descriptive) fail. Net, FPS lets you better manage edge cases e.g. when the pipes fail.

Keep in mind the payments dashboard is for anyone with an amazon.com account so it's like hacking with mittens. It's not meant to be a full interface to FPS or even Simple Pay. You should not be doing your transaction error checking there. The reason Amazon Payments is "not able to provide transaction partners any information about a failed transaction" is because the failure is occurring within the context of an API and that API already informs you how to interpret all possible errors.

I guess there is another way to reach that error form after all. Looks like a user experience bug. Good catch.

That form isn't for investigating failed transactions, it's for disputing a charge on your statement you don't recognize. To even know about that form you would have had to go to Help > Transaction Disputes > Unauthorized Charges.

"FPS has a thousand error states, and payments fail all the time with little to no explanation."

I am live on FPS and have seen zero failed transactions apart from those in testing I intended to see fail. By chance was your transaction amount in the form $x.7x or $x.8x? If you were in the sandbox putting a 7 or 8 in the tenths place is the documented way to guarantee a failed transaction and receive a generic error.

"Good luck with the resolution process, too."

Did you search the developer forum? If you did and couldn't resolve your issue, did you post your scenario and relevant code? The community and AWS staff are usually very helpful if you are polite and can describe your problem clearly.

As for this new PayPal API, I just read the developer doc and although it's missing a lot of information PayPal is obviously cooking up a service that may rival FPS. Regarding your point about massive complexity I agree the documentation can be a little confusing. Once we see PayPal's full version we'll be able to compare them side-by-side but one thing is for sure, neither was intended to be plug-and-play.

What I'm concerned about with Adaptive Payments/FPS/Checkout/etc is the friction point introduced by the co-branded UI. Each of these payment services requires you to send your customer away to log into PayPal/Amazon/Google and stay there for a couple of screens. As developers the big question is whether the programmatic features outweigh the conversion loss from defecting customers who feel the experience is unprofessional.

I am considering amazon fps for a project mostly because I'm using several other aws services and am comfortable hacking with those. I haven't had a merchant account before so I wonder with fps what advantages I'd be missing over authorize.net, braintree or paypal.

I think you've manifested nicely a good business idea. I tried the web version as well as the Mac download and although I didn't send anything to a printer the Print Preview in each case looked functional. I like how in both versions you: de-dupe the word list, give the user a Cards Per Page option, and make the center square and game title customizable.

One small observation I have about the web version is that in Step 1 the "words you've added" section felt a little redundant. The user already sees a nice preview of the Bingo card as it is being updated. So each word the user adds to the card eventually appears on the screen three times. Since the Bingo card updates lag the "words you've added" updates the resulting user experience is a little confusing. But functionally everything I tried in this step worked, so good job on the word-lists controller - methods new (post) and edit (put) handled my mistakes (e.g., too few words) flawlessly.

Steps 2 and 3 in the web version made sense and the resulting pdf I downloaded looked great. You make a decent case for registering during step 3. At first I didn't understand the line "use 604 bingo activities any time you want to" but I soon realized that's a reference to your library of premade cards, which I tried and thought was a super feature.

When you introduce this web version into the home screen layout, you might want to pump it as the #1 option above the PC and Mac versions. Otherwise it might be too confusing because while the copy on your site is well-written it's pretty verbose. I would want to abstract out some of your sales pitch and whittle down the benefits - although this is maybe personal taste. As you iterate you might try to get the "a picture is worth a thousand words" screenshots higher in the flow. Also you should update those screenshots because the end result today looks significantly better than your images. That may be affecting your conversion.

As I understand you, the sole reason for purchasing a license is to remove the watermark and footnote. I notice however that neither the watermark nor the footnote seeps into the Bingo card. Since people are already using a scissors or a paper cutter to trim the (multiple cards per page) hardcopy it seems trivial for them to also crop away your branding. Assuming it's technically feasible I might inconvenience the nonpayers a bit more by positioning my watermark directly on the cards. But I see you have 1,800 paying customers - so it is me who should be asking you for suggestions.

Flagged for being linkbait. The actual content is just audio of a narrator reading poorly.

The movie on YouTube isn't smooth so I downloaded the standard quality version which fixed the jerkiness problem. Mirror: http://planet.s3.amazonaws.com/home.mp4 (420 MB)

Forget the HD version unless you have a wicked graphics system. /homeHD.mp4 (1.4 GB) choked my MBP and bounced an AppleTV.

> For our site http://browseology.com, it's unclear if the idea is just not clear and understandable enough for PR to write about...

Before you solicit more PR for Browseology I would tighten the story focusing on the homepage. You have a pleasant, simple aesthetic but IMHO the homepage contains too many words and options. The result is an unnecessarily confusing first impression. My notes: http://idea.s3.amazonaws.com/browseology.png

You might want to gear Browseology more toward women. Women love shopping and they're more social about it than men. I can imagine your app serving their sensibilities better with a little wordsmithing. This might make PR easier for you because it would focus your messaging on benefits rather than features.

I live in Phoenix and you're right, some of these cameras are set up to photo every license plate that passes regardless of whether the box detected a traffic violation. It's billed as an Amber Alert mechanism so when authorities identify a suspect they plug in his license plate and every camera sniffs every vehicle. The problem is the organizations involved have been very dodgy about revealing the scope and logging details. So we're left to wonder if in addition to catching bad guys Big Brother is tracking innocent non-suspects. I'm not convinced they are and it's not necessarily bad if they did but given the track record of our government the past 8 years we should probably demand transparency.

Originally we were told all these boxes did was equitably enforce speed and red-light laws efficiently at a great profit over human officers. But now it's turning into "Oh and by the way we'll be photographing the innocent non-violators too." Maybe we need an outside group of hackers to act in an oversight capacity. Or maybe we should just design that license plate switching feature from Knight Rider so if you do speed you're giving someone else a ticket. (Note to Sherriff Joe: I'm just kidding.)

I am reminded of that scene in the movie Brazil when a bug literally falls into a government computer, the suspect's name gets misspelled and an innocent person is punished for what another (innocent) person did. I just hope the two Phoenix based companies working on this camera technology, Redflex and American Traffic Systems, operate on a higher set of principles than GoDaddy headquarters which is just down the street and given its turnover possibly a significant source of traffic company employees.