tylerrooney

It's ironic that one of the product shots includes a child using a $599 laptop while wearing $549 headphones.

I worked at Amazon 2005-2008 as a Software Dev Engineer. To hammer home company culture, there were two awards which could be awarded at the Quarterly All-hands meeting * The "Just Do It" Award which recognized someone just fixing some obvious problem at was in front of them but not responsibility * The "Door Desk" Award for frugality, named in honour of the basic door-frame-four-leg desk everyone worked on.

In many ways, the Door Desk award was for simplicity. I remember, one time, someone got an award for getting rid of some dumb operations room with some big unused LCD TVs. When you won these awards, you rarely got any kind of reward. It was just acknowledgement at the meeting. But that time, they literally gave the guy the TVs.

I realize this article is one data point but I'd offer that I have a completely opposite data point.

1. We accidentally turned off our main Intercom in-trial campaign for a segment of users during an AB test and were surprised how much lower the conversion was. We re-ran the test ensuring both sides had our Intercom in-trial campaign on. It increased in-trial conversion by 25%.

2. We do pay a lot for Intercom (10 person support team, tens of thousands of users, hundreds of thousands of leads) but we also use it a god damn ton for new customer campaigns, activation, churn prevention, reactivation, etc and by in-app, email, and mobile notifications. Replacing all of this would not be cheap.

3. Intercom can definitely be a crutch for bad UX. But you'll only know of those problems if you're actually getting this feedback. It's then on you to have the internal process for addressing common questions or requests in order to reduce the volume of help requests for specific topics.

Perhaps I should have added more context to the title and text as the purpose of the post seems lost to most commenters.

Rebecca Meyer is the daughter of Eric Meyer who you may know through through his two decades of work on behalf of web development and web standards. He is the author of Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide and the widely used Reset CSS (http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/).

I would assume that many (if not most) users of Hacker News have benefited from Eric's work.

Rebecca died from cancer on Saturday on her 6th birthday. As per the link from Jeffrey Zeldman's blog, there is an effort to get #663399Becca trending today, (June 12th) in a show of solidarity.

We have a staggering number of customer who pay us through PayPal because they don't have a credit card or a debit card which clears through Mastercard/Visa (which is the standard in most countries).

Perhaps someone who runs their own company can answer this question for me: If you don't use PayPal, how do you receive payment from customers who don't have credit cards?

Are your customers exclusively in North America? Or do you just write those customers off (which is a valid option if PayPal integration would be that painful)?

Adding PayPal as a payment option has been an enormous pain for us but a non-consequently amount of our revenue comes from customers either without credit cards or with cards which always fail on international transactions. I see no alternative to PayPal for these customers.

I don't know what the cash/stock split was, but it's worth mentioning the LinkedIn's IPO raised $352M* so buying SlideShare was just under 34% of all the money they raised.

* http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-18/linkedin-raises-352...

Yes, the 100K is based on a back-of-the-envelope, but for a startup with zero revenue every development and design hour we can spare helps us focus on the real task at hand: figuring out our market fit and making a great product.

This is less about supporting this browser or that browser and more about making sound business decisions and putting our users’ needs first. We’d like to think they would rather see requested features over support for a browser they don’t use.

I think you could just use Chrome Frame if it was absolutely required but it's just never come up.

Nope. Not even IE10. If they pop Webkit rendering into IE maybe we'd consider it.

There also just aren't that many users showing up to our site using IE. That graph in the article is straight from Google Analytics for our main landing page.

The sites generated by 4ormat support IE so our user's customers can definitely see their work in every browser. It's the app itself which you can't use in IE which is the overwhelming majority of our development.

I went through the exact same process 2 months ago trying to set up payroll. In general, Canadians get some pretty horrible value out of any small/medium business service.

I was going to go with Ceridian but their web app doesn't support Mac. Because we're still small enough, I actually just rigged it up myself in Xero and then just have to use the nastiest 90s era website from my bank. That at least saved me the step of massaging exported data into Xero.

If you want some real price transparency on payroll apps, this is pretty hard to beat : http://wavepayroll.com/pricing

I had been meaning to do this for so long and never did because I preferred Gmail over any native app that was available.

Luckily I tried Sparrow (http://sparrowmailapp.com) about 2 months ago and never looked back. I think the initial download of my "All Mail" folder took 12+ hours but I can rest assure I have a backup of my email on my hard drive and my backup hard drive (for which SuperDuper is awesome: http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper).

Considering how tight-lipped Amazon is about everything (including the fact that they've never divulged the number of Kindles sold) I'd imagine Jeff Bezos and Tom Szkutak might be less than happy.

I find it pretty obnoxious that someone leaked this. This is classic "ruining it for everyone".

That app, when I worked at Amazon, was open to any employee. It would totally suck if they had to restrict access because of some idiot. I always thought it was pretty awesome that I could randomly query all sorts of data at Amazon.

Credit card penetration is really low so your other options are bank transfers and CVS (paying at a convenience store). COD is actually quite popular but I can't imagine any SaaS could implement that effectively.

I don't have any experience with direct bank transfer systems in Japan. I believe that a lot of Japanese Banks now offer NetBanking as a payment option for CVS payments but I'm not sure how widespread the use is. I'm also not sure what is culturally common in Japan for billing recurring online services.

Perhaps someone on HN who lives in Japan could comment.

Not sure who you're using as a gateway but I do have memories of being on the line with technical support and a Japanese translator.

Best of luck to you!

I used to work in Payments at Amazon and I don't think people have an appreciation for how complicated and expensive payments in Europe can be. Credit Card penetration in certain countries (Germany and Switzerland for example) is really low and to get competitive rates you'll need a processor in the UK, France, and Germany. Then, when you have a problem, I challenge you to get technical support from a French bank after 5pm and, while you're at it, make sure you have someone on your team that speaks French.

At least it's better than Japan though.

Please come to Canada!

And it's worth pointing out that their site is Shopify : http://shop.angrybirds.com

I'll second my vote for DNSimple. We were using GoDaddy before and we had an issue where they were returning faulty DNS records from certain hosts (which was such a pain to diagnose). After trying to deal with support at GoDaddy we were done.

We switched everything over to DNSimple and I'm happy paying them $3/month so I never have to look at another GoDaddy config/upsell screen again. They also have a status page (powered by Pingdom) http://status.dnsimple.com.

I've never thought about this before but it actually makes a lot of sense. I can think of countless times that I've highlighted a piece of text while reading an article in a browser just to use as a bookmark while scrolling around.

Thanks for all the responses on this thread. I've found it incredibly interesting.

I'd also highly recommend Thinking With Type. It's a very quick read (as most of the book is visual) and gives you a great foundation for understanding and designing with typography.

http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Type-2nd-revised-expanded/dp/...

There's also one choice moment before this point where a developer is asking what Apple can do about getting beat up in the press and the stockmarket.

For emphasis, in December of 1997 AAPL hit an 11-year low of $3.53 (split adjusted). Today, mainstream media eats out of Steve Jobs' hand and their stock price is, as I type this, $332.

1,900 in Seattle in a 3-month span is a huge number. Knowing that, perhaps they are spending an insane amount of developer time just interviewing more developers.

There's also a forward fulfillment center in Bellevue which might count as Seattle headcount.

Whoever Jack Dorsey hired to do his PR should win some sort of award. In under a year this guy went from almost zero media presence to:

* having a glowing profile written about him in Vanity Fair

* appearing on Charlie Rose

* being anointed as the second coming of Steve Jobs by TechCrunch

* having the media at large make Evan Williams look like a jerk and return to Twitter as Executive Chairman

* getting The Wall Street Fucking Journal to title an article "Visa Backs Jack Dorsey's Square"

I love how this article is speculating on what crazy things Amazon must be building by adding that many people. I'll tell you what they're building: fulfillment centers and call centers.

About 5 years ago when Amazon had around 15K employees worldwide and they only had 3K in Seattle and only a few small dev centers around the world. So even if every single person in Seattle was working on development that still only accounts for 20% of the workforce.

I can't find up to date numbers on the number of people in each location but considering there's now 40 FCs worldwide I don't think my math can be that far off. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com#Locations)

If I had to bet, I'd say 2000 of 11000 new employees are either developers, dev managers, or project managers.

It might also be worth asking when the headcount for Zappos got tacked onto Amazon.com.

If you liked Maverick, you should definitely check out Seven Day Weekend by Semler. I found it much more readable and relevant. It's crazy that it's out of print in the era of the Kindle

http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Day-Weekend-Changing-Work-Works/...

I would recommend against "picking sharp or piercing ringtones". I once had a horrific on-call schedule and, like any mammal, I developed a Pavlovian response to the sound of my pager which resembled those door buzzers that retail stores use. Friends of mine told me that I used to jump when I heard them go off.

So realize that whatever that ringtone is you'll associate it with this kind of anger: http://www.jeckels.com/photoDetail?PhotoId=4586&Category...

I second your thought. Nguyen has a crazy track record.

He sold OneBox in 2000 for $850M (I realize that's insane-o bubble money), then started Seven (which is used by pretty much every carrier I can think of), and then sold LaLa to Apple for $80M.

"The 20-article limit begins immediately for readers accessing NYTimes.com from Canada, which allows the company time to work out any software issues before the system goes live in the United States."

We usually have delayed launch dates in Canada (like iPhones and iPads). Really caught the fuzzy end of that lollipop.

That said, I'm almost certain I'll start paying.