tworats

Useful, and a neat trick to auto-size based on the browser being used (I assume by detecting the user agent).

However, why is it free?

Advice: don't.

I switched from iPhone to Android, and while there are some advantages (mainly: I'm not on AT&T), overall it's not nearly as nice an experience.

Top complaints: poor battery life (I'm using a Samsung Galaxy S, but I think iPhone4 beats all Androids), inaccuracy of keyboard, and overall lack of fit and finish - eg. sometimes the phone will freeze for a few seconds and then come back to life.

Not sure why, but I immediately understood what the site does. Congrats on that, that's one of the most difficult parts.

Suggestion: I'd want the service to allow kids to claim things they've done to earn points, for which they'd get their piggy bank filled. Eg. did homework, cleaned room, washed car would translate to x piggy dollars, which I'd then translate to real money in their bank.

- Email/Cal/Docs: Google

- Hosting: our own servers at colo + EC2

- Expense tracking/management: Xpenser ( http://xpenser.com/ )

- Invoicing: Billing Manager ( https://billingmanager.intuit.com/billing/free-online-invoic... )

- Version control: git

- File sharing: Dropbox

- Analytics: google

- Todo: http://wisetodo.com/ (invite only ATM)

- IDE: mostly Eclipse+Pydev+Aptana

- Screensharing: Adobe Connect

How do you peel of the cruft? I've been using it for a while, if I can get rid of the extraneous stuff I'd be even happier.

What carrier are you on, and how stable is it? I'm assuming the install wipes all data from your phone? Is there a good way to back up your contacts and restore them?

Anyone who's attempted to or successfully installed an unofficial ROM, would love to hear your experiences in terms of difficultly of install and stability. Please include what carrier you're on.

100% travel is pretty tough, but if you're up for it you'll have the opportunity to spend time with a multitude of clients who are willing to pay money to have their problems solved. You'll make many contacts, and if you're any good you'll likely get plenty of job offers from the clients. It'll be a nice way to move your career forward.

The travel will be fun, but you'll have little opportunity to build a home life or deep personal relationships.

You can take a product development job anytime, but consulting and 100% travel are only doable for a brief window in your life (typically when you don't have a wife/husband and kids). If you're ok with the travel, give the consulting gig a try. You can always go back to civilian life later.

Worked for me, seems useful, bookmarked.

Not sure it's a startup though, more like a useful utility.

Had lasik 6-7 years ago. Went wonderfully well, easy recovery, my only regret was not doing it sooner. I was 20/20 after the surgery, not quite as good now.

Here's how I found the doctor: I asked a bunch of other doctors who'd done theirs. Most of them had gone to the same guy. I booked him, paid a bit more than I might have paid to someone else, but I went it in with confidence.

Overall highly recommended.

My internship at a large company was most useful in cementing one idea in me: working at a large company is not for me. Things move so slowly you want to hang yourself, and you see the daily ritual of political jockeying in full force.

At the end of the internship the company offered me a nice position, but I was entirely uninterested. Instead I founded a company with a friend from school and have never looked back.

Money should not be a deciding factor at this point in your life. You will learn an order of magnitude more at a startup. If your goal is to spend your career creeping your way up the corporate ladder, or if you're unsure of your ability, work for the man. If you see entrepreneurship in your future, it's a no-brainer: go for the startup.

Looks great. The homepage is dead on: simple explanation of what it does, a live example, and a prominent signup button.

One issue to think through: companies would likely want to integrate the user management with their existing apps. That is, if a user is signed up for my web app, I'd like for them to have the same identity when on kroud. Sort of a federated authentication scheme. Likely not easy to do, but that'd be the major point preventing me from adopting kroud instead of hosting something ourselves.

Who did the design? I really like the simple and clean look.

Had it done 4-5 years ago. Quick and painless, made me wonder why I hadn't done it earlier.

My main concern was developing myopia again after the surgery. Sure enough my eyesight today is poorer than it was immediately after the surgery and I expect it'll continue to get worse over time.

Here's how I found my surgeon: I asked the various doctors I interviewed who'd done their eye surgery. Surprisingly many of them had used the same person - he was generally regarded as the best by the other surgeons. Once I found that out I was willing to pay more and go with the best.

Overall I had an excellent experience, my only regret is not doing it sooner.

I've tried quite a few of these, yours is nicely done. I was surprised at some of the beautiful domain names it generated. Now I just have to control my urge to register even more domain names I'll never actually complete the project for...

Loading gmail is sometimes relatively fast, sometimes incredibly slow.

Search is consistently slow.

Displaying a message after clicking on it is sometimes very slow, sometimes ok.

Sending messages can take an inordinate amount of time on occasion.

Receiving email is still generally reasonably fast, but occasionally a message will take an hour to show up (messages before and after it showing up just fine).

Overall it feels quite sluggish, nothing like it was a year ago.

The new Yahoo Mail on the other hand is surprisingly fast and slick. Quite a role reversal.

Redesign of our homepage and a few informational pages, which should be fairly straight-forward design work, and design of the product interior pages as well, which will require more thought on usability, layout, etc.

Out of curiosity, where the designers US based or abroad somewhere?

Haven't tried any crow-sourced sites. I have some sort odd of mental block when it comes to these; I should get over it and give it a try.

Years ago we connected with an undergrad, paid him well, and he did fantastic work for us. When he graduated we put in several recommendations for him and he ended up doing well. Would love to get into the same situation, but I haven't had much luck finding another student.

I'm looking for little "d", but with good drawing and coloring. Haven't tried 99designs, that might be a good way to go. Ideally I'd like to have a long term relationship so we can keep going back to the same person as new needs arise.

I'm willing to pay much more than $10 per hour, so long as I find someone good. Maybe I'll try posting here, that's an interesting idea.

I'm shocked nobody's recommended Douglas Crockford's ... well ... everything:

http://javascript.crockford.com/

Watch the "Javascript: The Good Parts" presentation:

http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/06/08/video-crockford-goodstuff...

Also check out Dustin Diaz's stuff:

http://www.dustindiaz.com/

I found his screencasts where you watch him program to be incredibly helpful:

http://www.dustindiaz.com/screencast-episode-01/

Start your javascript programming with jQuery. Good javascript style is not at all like Java, so forget everything you know about Java and see how jQuery does it.

Not to hijack the thread but I also ran across http://www.opengateway.net/ , an installable (as opposed to SaaS) recurring billing solution. Was wondering if anyone had tried it or had feedback.

Doesn't mention dunning specifically but does say "automatic emails which are sent during specific events such as a new charge, new recurring charge, expiration, cancellation, upcoming expiration, upcoming charge, etc." .

Clickable link: http://www.opengateway.net/

Fair enough, but either option is going to be much more than you'd get in a basic VPS.

I wouldn't necessarily agree with renting as long as you can.

You can buy a very cheap server that's much more capable than a cheap VPS server. Here are some decent servers for about $300; you can often find good servers for $150:

http://www.geeks.com/products_sc.asp?Cat=821

Colocation at a good facility costs $60-100.

So for $150-$300 upfront and $60-$100 monthly, you can have a capable server hosted at a good facility at a much cheaper cost than the equivalent "rented" server.

You can use a VPS or something like EC2 as a hot backup, setup replication, and have a very capable setup for not a lot of cost.

This assumes that you have sys admin skills.

> they'll be spending a lot of money on airline tickets to warm and sunny places trying to get merchant accounts from banks

The merchants bring their own merchant accounts. Chargify doesn't give you a merchant account; they use the one you bring.

Here's the feedback I just submitted to Chargify:

While I entirely understand the need to charge and make money, I find the sudden and significant change in pricing jarring. Many people just went from 0 to $1200 per year.

I'm guessing the cost of supporting the formerly free (0-50 customers) tier is close to zero from a technical/infrastructure perspective, but relatively high from a support/feedback perpective.

People in the free tier will either grow or go out of business. For those that grow, your cost is the same - you'll have the same questions whether you charge them day 1 or day 100.

So the real issue is the cost of support for those who signup for the free tier and either flake out or go out of business.

In my opinion, the rate of customer growth you'll get from having a free tier is worth the extra support cost. With no barrier in place, people will try Chargify, see that it's a high quality product, and if they have a viable business, will use it. That was our experience.

With a barrier in place ($100/month from day 1), they'll do a lot of research and probably try the cheaper options before trying Chargify.

For our particular case, I'm quite happy with Chargify as a product, but quite unhappy about the way the pricing was handled. With the former pricing tier we had the luxury of growing in cost as we grew in revenue. With the new pricing structure we have an immediate unexpected cost.

Now we have to go and investigate the other recurring payment options, which bums me out entirely, since I was hoping we were well past that.

You should, at the very least, grandfather the old users into the old plan. In my opinion you should keep the free tier around, but find ways to reduce your support costs. For my business, we treat support questions as the leading indicator for where we need to make the product more intuitive. We invest in improving the product, thereby also reducing costs.

Of course that's just my opinion.

Thanks for the love :-)

Xpenser for Business is the commercial version of the product for businesses, and it's bringing in a good bit of revenue. At the moment it's by request/invite only, but will be generally available soon. Anyone interested in an invite can send an email to feedback@xpenser.com .

Users sign up for the free product, like it (or love it it :-) ), and ask to use it in their company. The free product is acting as a very good way of bringing users to our commercial product, so it's remained free.