thesash

I haven't used the new version, so can't comment on quality. My point was just that the "biggest thing" part of the announcement was probably based on the software updates. In terms of impact to user, the addition of turn-by-turn directions is a pretty big deal.

Samsung has great marketing, picking a fight is a fantastic strategy. However, this comercial still sells features not benefits. Imagine how much more powerful the comercial would be if they could capture the benefit to the samsung user. How does having 4G improve my life?

When I see this Samsung commercial or the Droid commercial from my original post, I can just picture the company execs giving their ad agency a list of features that need to be included in the commercial, because the features are what's important to the company. The problem is, customers don't care about features at all, they care about what those features allow them to do.

Apple made major updates to the core features that people use every day: brand new maps app, redesigned itunes, updated camera.

Apple understands that hardware is less important than software in the day to day experience of using the phone, they continue to focus on improving the experience of using the device, not the spec sheet. Thats why major hardware changes tend to be battery, screen, and camera: those are the features that most affect the day-to-day experience of the user.

Consumers outside HN aren't going to base a purchase decision on specs, so shiny toys like NFC or wireless charging end up compromising battery life or size, it's probably a pretty easy call for the company to make given the focus on the core experience.

Consumers don't care about product specs, they care about their dreams, goals, and aspirations.

Compare an iPhone commercial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EP1YAatv1Mc

to a DROID commercial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-K71MpwCko

Apple commercial => fun, likable personality using the product, and benefiting from it.

Droid commercial => OMG uber technology forged from a robot beast with a processor and LTE and a bunch of other stuff. 0 product. 0 benefits.

Droid is selling technology, Apple is selling an experience. It seems so obvious which one a mainstream consumer with no interest in the innards of their phone is going to choose. Google understands this concept, judging by their own marketing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqiSE-ukmgc

Maybe now that they've acquired Motorola they'll knock some sense into their marketing strategy

The consumer packaged goods industry generates two TRILLION dollars a year in the US, by selling us things we don't think we need, through branding and marketing. Bottled water is an entire industry that was built on selling us plastic bottles filled with an abundantly free resource by convincing us we needed it through, you guessed it: advertising.

There are many, many industries that rely on brand awareness to sell there goods. There is an amazing quote which I unfortunately couldn't find that goes something like this:

  "In order to reach the small segment of the population 
  that is interested in buying Mercedes, everyone in the
  world must know what our brand stands for."

Ads with intent drive clear, immediate ROI, but they can only ever capture the segment of the market that know what they want. Display ads on the web may not be the future of advertising, but it isn't going to go away, even if cable TV died tomorrow. In fact, the very fact that this discussion keeps coming up makes it pretty clear that there is a huge opportunity to innovate in this market. Maybe the advice should be: don't build a business that runs on static display ads, do try to find an innovative ad model that engages users and works for brands. Ads, for example, like the interactive old spice ad on vimeo. Immediate ROI? No. Massive brand awareness? Absolutely.

http://vimeo.com/47875656

Clickable: http://pinboard.in/

Extremely fast and reliable, no ads, & indexes full text of your bookmarks for search. Highly recommended & absolutely worth paying for.

It's the classic battle of urgent vs. important. It's easy to fall into a trap by always focusing on the most seemingly "urgent" task at hand while neglecting things that are actually more important. Responding to emails, fixing bugs, or hiring a new developer might seem urgent, but what longer-term goals end up suffering? Things like building company culture, fostering business relationships, or developing long term strategy are hardly urgent, but extremely important things that often get neglected when we fall victim to the day-to-day tyranny of urgency.

I wonder if the phenomenon of growth-mindset vs. fixed mindset is related to an ability to delay gratification, (another trait with a high correlation to succes in children [1]). That is, the "growth-minded" individuals are willing to slog through frustration and failure, because they know the payoff will be greater in the long run, while the "fixies" can't look past the immediate sense of frustration

[1]http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_...

A "cliff" refers to a time period that must pass before an employee's options vest. It's typical for startups to offer options with a 1 year "cliff" to keep employees from walking away with equity if they don't stick around.

Say an early hire is offered 4% equity with no cliff. That means that .083% will vest each month, and that early employee could walk away with more than tenth of a point of equity after 2 months, likely before they contribute enough value to the company to justify such equity.

Startup employees should view equity as a bonus anyway, and make sure they're earning a market rate unless they're earning really significant equity, because best case scenario the equity will be significantly diluted before an exit, and more likely, the company won't make it to exit, and the stock options will therefore be worthless.

That being said, if the rumor in the article is true, its still a massive dick move, and it probably also cost the company a substantial amount of money in severance pay.

EDIT: It looks like it's Illegal in california (where OnLive is located) to claw back stock options by firing employees without cause [1]. Therefore, if the rumor is true, then OnLive probably had to pay the employees some cash equivalent of the stock options and get them to sign a termination agreement.

P.S. I'm not a lawyer and have nothing more than a cursory understanding of this stuff. This is definitely not legal advice and you should verify everything I say on your own.

[1] http://www.paulhastings.com/assets/publications/1443.pdf

I wish I didn't have to read Techcrunch's hollow journalism to learn about the latest YC class, because many of them seem like legitimate business cases working on fairly ambitious ideas.

The problem is, every Techcrunch post about a YC startup reads like a press release; completely devoid of any independent research, analysis, or, well, journalism. This author's most insightful analysis about the market is that "shipping and distribution" are "an essential part" of global trade. Wow! I never thought about it that way!

What's the size of the "small logistics services providers" market, who are the major potential customers and partners? How hard will it be to compete with established players like UPS and FedEX? How much is the company charging for the product? Isn't it ridiculous that the founder thinks he can pull a viral coefficient of 50?

I know this is nothing new, but seriously Techcrunch: you can do better than this.

Tons of opportunity to disrupt an old industry which has remained largely unchanged since the advent of the internet

I'm starting to notice a trend with this latest YC class-- lots of unsexy products addressing really specific pain points.

As long as the content is authentic and high quality it seems like a win for marketers, publishers, and consumers. However, if the videos end up just being straight up commercials that the user has to sit through it's going super annoying. Is Virool vetting the quality of the content? What prevents marketers from just using commercials?

Concerns aside, I love the idea. Organic content distribution is super hard. For every video that goes viral, hundreds of thousands of videos of similar quality flop. Even ad agencies struggle with getting distribution for content, so this seems like a really useful tool that I would have loved to have had when I was working in the interactive agency world.

A rare glimpse into what successful design means at a company where designers don't have decision making power: guerrilla warfare. The incredible thing is that the team behind "M" or "Metro"(or whatever Microsoft plans on calling it tomorrow) was able to perfect this recipe of 2 parts politics, 1 part propaganda, and just a tiny dash of fundamental design principles that have been recognized for centuries, in order to win support for their project.

I can't believe the comments on that blog post are real. Apparently sarcasm isn't a language everybody speaks.

Learning tools like this would have saved my teachers a lot of headaches if they were available 10 years ago.

As opposed to the classroom model of: [lecture -> assign work -> grade & return with static feedback], students can actually play with the subject matter during the lesson, instead of turning pens into projectiles or doodling in their books because they're bored to death (not that I know anything about that). Then they get immediate feedback, whether right or wrong, by seeing how the instructor would have solved the problem. That kind of hands on learning, where the student learns through their own trials and errors is much more fun than sitting through a lecture that has to accomodate the varied learning paces of a classroom of 20+ students.

The video posted here unfortunately focuses on the live editing aspect of the app, but you can see the interactive lesson function more clearly in this early prototype video[1].

This kind of interactive learning is the same thing that Sebastian Thrun is working on at Udacity[2]. For all the promise of making university courses available for free online, I think this is the truly disruptive stuff going on in online education, because it's way beyond just filming lectures and throwing them online, it's a fundamental leap forward for education.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvaaude_1hk [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75TP3hoPA8U

Consulting, training, and support currently represents the vast majority of revenues generated by the Health IT industry.

In 2010 the top 25 HIT companies grossed over $26.7 billion, but on average, only 22% of revenue for each came from software. http://www.healthcare-informatics.com/article/healthcare-inf...

The EHR incentive program is "working" in the sense that adoption rates among physicians are way up, but it's only because they're being forced, not because the software is any good.

Every encounter I've ever had with EHR systems, whether direct or indirect, has been a complete mess. My online EHR through Kaiser is completely unusable, and according to the people who evaluate these things, it's supposed to be one of the best. [1]

Last week I was at the doctor twice, and both times the doctors were complaining about their EHR software, once because it takes so long to boot up, and the other time because it takes longer to sort through allergy testing results in digital form than it used to take with paper charts.

The problem is, the incentive structure in place forces docs to either adopt what's out there or miss out on big incentives, and eventually get penalized [2]. This creates a twisted incentive structure for software companies where they basically can capitalize on the fact that the docs have to adopt a system. All the software company has to do is put out something that's compliant with gov't standards, even if its totally unusable by doctors. Just take a look at the website of the company touted as a great example of the success of the gov't incentive program in the article: http://www.medfx.com/ Would this pass muster in the consumer internet space? In enterprise SAAS? Not a chance.

So the startups are incentivized to get something out so they can get in on the scheme before the window of opportunity closes, what about the big companies who have been building these systems for years? Well, they make most of their revenue from implementing, training, and maintaining systems, not from licensing software, so their incentives are to sell contracts, not make their software any better, because that ends up hurting their bottom line [3]. All they have to do is maintain relative parity with emerging companies, and get real, real good at sales.

It's really a shame, because there is enormous room for real innovation in this space. There is a truly incredible amount valuable data is siloed off in these systems, thats sometimes not even available to the physicians themselves [4] let alone researchers who could use the data. And that, of course, is not mention the potential to help doctors spend less time wrestling with charts, and more time caring for their patients.

[1] http://thesash.me/who-will-fix-the-ux-of-healthcare-a-3-tril...

[2] https://www.cms.gov/Regulations-and-Guidance/Legislation/EHR...

[3] http://thesash.me/who-will-fix-the-ux-of-healthcare-a-3-tril...

[4] My dad had to hire a consultant to make updates to his EHR system so that he could run queries for certain things among his own patients

The initial discussion about the hugeness and strangeness of AI reminded me of the godlike AIs in Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos, which are so incredibly advanced as to be pretty much beyond understanding in their native forms. The friendly ones end up speaking in zen koans.

http://www.seanparnell.com/Hyperion%20Cantos/Web%20Pages/Umm...

As an entrepreneur, what you really have to ask yourself is: are you pursuing your idea because you think you'll get rich, or because you want to change the world? Are you chasing money, or building value?

Valuations may be high right now, and some frothy transactions may be going on, but that doesn't make building a company any easier. If you can bootstrap, work on a project on the side, and keep a backup plan until you're ready to make the leap, do it! If the problem you're chasing is big and scary and capital intensive, then go raise the capital necessary to tackle it, but if not, you may be better off bootstrapping and building a 5 million dollar company you own all of than a 100 million dollar company where you end up heavily diluted [1].

[1] http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/06/paths-to-5m-for-...

I think this is a positive direction for G+, with some nice, friendly, emotionally engaging UI touches that will help differentiate it from Facebook. However, I think there is one serious usability issue here, and that is the left alignment. On my 1920 x 1080 screen there is a massive gap between content and chat bar on the right. the content area feels uncomfortably crowded on the left, and it's just plain awkward to scan all the way to the right.

http://cl.ly/060H0B3o1q0l1O3g0X03

This makes a lot of sense to me. Back in college, Facebook was a place for communication with friends. Wall posts back and forth had an intimate feel, and no one worried about privacy when it was a closed network.

Somewhere along the way to to a professional career however, I cleaned up my profile, switched most of my updates to public, and shifted towards news sharing and commentary. Twitter and Google+ serve the same purpose for me, and Path feels restrictive since I don't really want to mix family, high school friends, college friends, work friends. This looks like it definitely has the potential to fill that void for private group communication.

Agreed -- I use the news:yc app, but if you add voting/commenting, this would totally replace that as my go-to.

This is fascinating -- I'm Reading Imagine: How Creativity Works [1] by Jonah Lehrer right now, and it's about the science behind this exact principle. Essentially, Lehrer explores the conditions leading up to and surrounding insights, and investigates how certain environments and conditions contribute to creative breakthroughs. Really useful stuff for anyone working in a creative field.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0547386079/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

Yep, it's an affiliate link. Go ahead, help me buy 1/10 of a cup of coffee.

And, they've previously raised ~17M in funding.

Add OMGPOP and the recent "overnight" success of Draw Something to the list. All the articles touting it as the fastest growing game of all time ever painted the story as an overnight success, and failed to mention the backstory of the company. Not only has OMGPOP been around for 5 years, and raised 17M in VC funding, but the game itself has been around almost since the beginning as a web version, but only exploded in usage when it launched for iPhone.

One thing to add to the list: Alltuition (Mint for Financial Aid) has enormous disruptive potential and a very polished UI.

https://www.alltuition.com/

In order to truly compete with Dropbox, they'd have to crack the (extremely tough) frictionless syncing as elegantly as Dropbox has. Anyone know if that's something their software does, or are we just using Dropbox Competitor as a blanket statement for any company offering backup services?

I think that the reason this site is so successful is something that startups often overlook-- content is a key part of UX. Take away the awesome video and the snazzy copy, with the same exact UI and concept, and you'd be left with a service that would be much, much less compelling

Intuit's competitor actually has a really elegant design-- there is an air-filled rubber chamber at the bottom that grips on to the top of the device to prevent movement. http://gopayment.com/how_it_works/

That being said, Intuit's UI is hideous, Square's is gorgeous.