win_ini

Would you prefer it to be a mobile app?

I think your place of wonderment is misplaced. If someone can save 4 MINUTES of an activity they HATE to do - it is worth learning an app.

There are all kinds of companies that basically help you save time doing what you hate: Premium Pickup Laundry Services, On-demand Valets, On-demand cars. When was the last time you said "fuck it I'm going to take a taxi because I don't want to learn this new UBER app"?

Companies reimburse BILLIONS of dollars to employees every year.

Expensify goes a step further and gets a person to look at your receipt photo and then enters/confirms the information and enters it as a text into your expense report. It turns pictures into expense report rows.

Totally agree - when I saw the pivot to Slack, I thought "That is REALLY interesting, more interesting than their failure at mobile"

Are you using Expensify's "SmartScanning"? It's worth the $0.20 per receipt image. It basically send the receipt to a person, who then extracts the info from the receipt and enters into expensify FOR YOU....

Try it out!

Expensify: Take a picture of your receipt. It gets sent to someone in India/Phillipines/etc. Who then look at the total, the name of the plae and ENTER ALL THAT INFORMATION FOR YOU.

When you get back to your office - it's available in an excel sheet.

I'm not following your argument...

It's funny - I had the same reaction at the first parts, but I thought the Slack bot pivot was genius actually. Very different than expensify and the "others".

No UI...is the New UI.

1) I have never heard of you. Does this mean anything? No. He just admitted his app failed, they do no marketing and they have problems getting people to use the app. If you HAD heard of them - you would likely be spewing off "it's a mobile app with no desktop web app WTF". So - your first point is really just a jab - centered around you, not the app he wrote about. 2) concur is another provider in the space who existed before the rise of mobile apps. They are implemented across fortune 500's and many more. They have a huge install base. They are used by companies and imposed upon their employees. They have 'distribution' - which is what Birdly needed from my reading of the post. I can assure you, as a former user of concur - many people hate it. Or try TriNets incredibly terrible expense app.

I was surprised there was no mention of Expensify - which I suspect is the business they were looking to disrupt - their UI is not awesome. BUT the UX is great. Take a picture of you receipt and done, email receipts handled, etc. but I use it mostly on desktop to submit reports - and use my mobile to take pictures of receipts.

Anyhow - your last line is a bit of a doozy. Are you suggesting that someone who wrote 2000 word post about their pivot to a better solution (this slack idea is great IMO) should just shut up because it might dissuade others from making the same mistakes he did? Based on your "counter examples" - I think he did the right thing. I hope OP keeps sharing his learnings - because it encourages me to keep trying different approaches. AND I'm going to install his slack bot for my whole company (giving them distribution). I hope you can hide under a rock so you don't get dissuaded from doing something. Sharing is caring, even if they failed.

I'm always happy when the up voting system works and the most useless, least constructive comments make it to the bottom. As the other commenter said - the universe of offensive pen testing is a small one compared to the IT security playing field.

Here's another funny bit:

  To: Rick Moncrief				1 of 4
  Fr: Jed Margolin
  Re: Status Report
  Dt: 15 June 1992

"... CUT ... "

  Texas Instruments
  -----------------
  Phil Davis, the TI guy they gave me so I wouldn't bother Thom Dempsey, came to
  see me without an appointment.

  When I went out to the lobbly he explained that he had actually come to see
  someone else and thought he might as well see me, too. (That me me feel
  really special.)

  I asked him if the 128Kx8 VRAMs had been production released yet. He said
  he didn't know anything about it but he would look into it and get back to
  me.

  I asked him if they had evaluated the dead P15s yet. He said they hadn't
  been able to work things out with Rich Moore because of his recent trip out
  of the country.

  I explained to him that we had been using the P15 for security and no longer
  had a use for it since it had been ripped. He expressed surprised because
  he seemed to think it was such a terrific part that we were using it to
  run the game.

  I wanted to see how much he actually knew about the part so I mentioned
  that it was difficult to interace anything to it because the address bus does 
  not go tristate except during Reset; unfortunately the internal Data RAM is 
  dynamic and does not get refreshed during Reset. I had, of course, developed
  several very successful techniques for interfacing to it.

  He said he didn't know anything about it but would look into it and get back
  to me.

  I informed him that I hadn't asked him a question, that instead, I had told
  him something.

  This guy doesn't know anything and he doesn't listen. He is an idiot.

Don't worry about some asshole picking apart stuff. Your writing is clear enough that if someone has a hard time parsing it - that's their loss. I've been in Saas for over 10 years helping sales and marketing teams convert and close at higher rates. The article hits home for several tech founders who understand customers but don't understand prospects. The post captures some learnings that many other people never ask or dig into - but make all the difference. Thanks for sharing, I've shared it with several people who will not think this is obvious - and they won't need to "pickup a standard book" to learn some snippets.

Question: how much better does the salesperson perform compared to your previous attempts? How long will you give him to prove himself?

SaasTr is a great sales resource if you're looking.

The important ones do keep making it to the top - it's important to have the pattern recognition and telling others that even though we're saying "not now" for a feature...that can change if it comes up more and more often. The hard part is that people don't tell you when the issue occurs again because they "know you already said no to that..." It's a tough line to follow.

I direct all feature requests go on a list that CS owns and we review it with our customer team, vp eng, myself and qa in a weekly meeting. We talk about the problems, get shared understanding and we collectively agree if we can say "not now". "Worth looking into". "This is easy let's do it now". "This could be tough or easy - needs more info". This is basically what partly feeds a short backlog (~20 items) that gets prioritized during sprint planning. Plus longer term roadmap stories.

Roadmap - a ppt with: Next 3 months (most detail) Next quarter (high level, use cases identified) Next Half (broad themes)

Or go to the Google and ask it to find the title of the article. Click from Google and it works. FT gives away the article if you visit it from Google.

I think this is a fabulous idea. I will caveat that I don't code (yet) but can follow along several of the examples and I think I "get it"...let me know if anything below is BS/way off.

I was thinking about the same problem a few weeks back when LinkedIn was s̶c̶r̶e̶w̶e̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶o̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶d̶e̶v̶e̶l̶o̶p̶e̶r̶s̶ improving their users experience. It's basically a fancy online resume with a graph that connects to so many people now that it's a crapshoot if people actually remember how they got connected in the first place. But I digress.

Thinking about how this sort of framework you've developed might be useful for an aggregated profile that can then be opened up as a proxy to various service/apps instead of actually giving direct access to your accounts (maybe have something like IFTTT to import your various social profile info into the Me API as it is updated):

- Hate to allow apps to see all your github repos? Filter it via this service.

- Dislike giving random apps access to your facebook likes, profile and other info? - use this service as a proxy to only present the info you feel comfortable with (maybe a maximum of 5 posts, or posts within a certain area/geofence, etc). Basically, you can create app permissions that are more granular than Facebook's out of the box preferences.

Of course - all this would need support from apps to tap into this data source (the Me API). It's an interesting idea.

Taking this a step further - I think it would be cool if it was somehow possible to obfuscate my identity - while sharing SOME of the "Me API" data with other services.

Some examples I'm thinking of (which may not be really possible - I realize the data provided could provide enough clues to be used to "uncover" my identity by piecing the datapoints together):

- Allow a photo editing app to pull my SmugMug photos through the Me API endpoint, but keep my SmugMug account info obfuscated (ie: do not provide direct URL to my smugmug site's photos), but still pass over my actual photos.

- Allow a mapping/analysis application to access my Yelp reviews by location, without knowing my actual yelp account info/nickname.

- Pass over my LinkedIn graph (that I've manually downloaded as a CSV and ported into my Me API datastore) without providing access to my LinkedIn name or profile info. This could be used to help friends find jobs - without exposing my identity to a random webservice.

- Pass over all my Google map searches/saved locations but don't provide any that are within 100 miles (+- 10 miles) of my home. Provide access to my phone number area code, but not my email address. etc.

The Larger Idea here: There are apps that can use your data to provide useful results/info/insights but ultimately the user (Me) should retain how much info is in fact exposed to the service. Maybe the service only gets a HashID or a Nickname - but can access a bunch of data that I give permission for it to access. Another application may get my whole profile, but not detailed transaction data. The webapps that leverage my profile info should "own" the graph of data they collect from Me and Others - but the user (Me) controls how identifying it is.

Sorry for the rambling, hopefully this isn't too crazy or off the wall. Either way - great idea and thanks for sharing!

"We want to thank all the developers who have built on and continue to build on our platform. We look forward to working with you as our program evolves."

Yeah, fuck you.

I wonder if there will be any sort of impact longer term as a result of them basically cutting off developer access to their current API. Login, Sharing, and some other stuff remains - but you can't access someone's network graph. Very similar to Facebook's move.

I know everyone always says "don't build your business on another platform" which I agree with. And several businesses have recently closed because they did just that.

LinkedIn claims this change is because they want to have the best end-user experience. Well - I think the main reason I have a professional graph is because I want to leverage my connections. And frankly, LinkedIn's use of that graph info is primarily focused on Finding Jobs and building Social Capital for your career.

By cutting off developers from the graph and community - I think Linkedin is actually NOT providing a better end-user experience... for other apps - LinkedIn is now a glorified Professional Resume served up via an API. BUT as a LinkedIn user I want to leverage my graph in different ways - reconnecting with old connections, keeping track of people's careers, connecting with vendors, and other use cases I can't imagine - but other app developers can.

As usual, I know nothing will change LinkedIn's mind. Except they have changed my mind, about using LinkedIn on a regular basis except for finding jobs. Over time I find Glassdooor is becoming better for that anyhow.

I personally have some feeling of Schadenfreude when I see them miss and only hope that cutting off developers hampers them in the long-term. But I also recognize developers are a small part of their users and can effectively be ignored.

Fuck you, Linkedin - I wish I knew how to quit you.

This whole post seems like contrived bullshit...clearly he doesn't understand the concept of SaaS and recurring revenue. Investors are betting that box can generate a large amountof recurring revenue and THEN reap profits based on those recurring revenues in the future (as marketing and sales costs drop). Free customers also basically cost almost nothing - no support, sales or marketing costs. Sure, some "storage" cost, but really - almost nothing.

Also - Box does not sell "storage" they sell collaboration, auditing, and security assurances (ie: HIPPAA compliance is NOT something Dropbox ever offers).

>>If Box has to spend almost everything it makes from current customers to win new ones, what is the use of giving its product away for free, aside from boosting the size of their user base to impress investors?

Uh, so people who are not paying users who are outside the organization can “see” and collaborate on those files? This also indicates his clear misunderstanding of the benefit of creating corporate users who will not churn - thereby recouping their CAC within 12 months.

>>And, more importantly, Dropbox and Box still have to support all those non-paying customers. There is simply no palatable way for them to eliminate free users, and the costs associated with them will continue to rise as the need for storage increases. As more free customers are added into the system, those costs continue to grow, creating a death spiral.

then three sentences later….

>>Dropbox reduced the price of a gigabyte of storage by 90 percent. That is a clear indicator that, over time, the price of cloud storage will continue to reduce to zero.

So how does something dropping to the cost of “zero” equal “..As more free customers are added into the system, those costs continue to grow, creating a death spiral."

My favorite part is the ending: "Andres Rodriguez is CEO of Nasuni, a Natick, Massachusetts-based cloud storage-as-a-service company.”

Yeah, good luck with that.

Best. Wired. Article. Ever.

Interesting - but why? I will assume this is a service that is useful for UK companies who need to verify that someone buying something from them is not a "Terroiriste"?

What is the use of knowing if someone is a "Politically Exposed Person" (and how can I become one??!)

Just curious. Basically - I'm asking: who is YOUR customer?

I don't work there - but that's what I thought when I read that article too. Picturelife has made it onto my homescreen and has supplanted several of the other apps I used to use. Good work!

I like how picturelife: - has location based searching - shows "very rough" thumbnails if you browse quickly - Can handle my 9000+ pics on my iphone easily - doesn't REQUIRE me to backup to the cloud (but has that option)

Like others, i'm still looking for a good desktop solution to keep track of my RAW photos from my SLR that is in multiple LR catalogs - it all ends up on my NAS bu t unbrowsable really. Mosaic has been a great fit to help see my LR photos in iOS - better than LR mobile. http://www.mosaicarchive.com/

I came were to say the same thing. Was not disappoint. :)

> The difference being, nicotine's psychoactive effects are minor compared to hard drugs. People don't die from a nicotine overdose.

Correction- People have died from Nicotine - and with e-cigs there;s concern that it may become more common:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine_poisoning

"The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned in report released today that the number of phone calls to U.S. poison control centers related to e-cigarette use has increased from just one call per month on average in 2010 to nearly 200 calls per month in early 2014." http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2014/04/03/e-cigarette-po...

Note that the "article" is sourced from a "gamifier" called http://ambition.com Sounds a bit like second generation gamification for enterprise. First gen companies included companies such as: Badgeville, bunchball, Gigya.

Ambition's tagline? Ambition Makes Companies More Money: Transparency increases efficiency, competition boosts production.

What is this? It doesn't load anything in my browser....

I'd probably stop calling Women "Girls".

Imagine this headline was "Hiring boys is difficult (because very few work in the space)" I would think you'd be having a hard time because kids ("boys"/"girls") aren't usually into coding coding in Kindergarten. Look at your words - they convey a lot.

Ask yourself if you would ever work for a company that was looking for "boys" (not Men). It seems quite disrespectful to women and I'm just a "boy".

I agree with most of the statements - but one aspect I think a lytro camera is better at: street photography.

Quick, shots of street moments. Shots where you have no time to focus properly, but want to focus the field of view on a subject...a lightfield camera is great for these situations and I think isn't played up enough.

Check out Stripe.com

This is probably what you're looking for: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-stripe/

If you take part of the URL of any nytimes article...pop it into google and then click on search result...it's free.

Yes, you can do it.

Yes, it is harder potentially.

After submitting - you may be asked for proof you have the "equivalent" work for an undergrad degree. Iirc - it's 8 yrs of relevant work experience.

I got a job offer at FB in 2009 - went through H1-B process and was eventually declined (by the DHS) because of my lack of degree...the equivalency came up but it would have taken some time and effort to get it done...so I didn't end up getting the h1b, but I did find out you don't NEED a degree.

Depending on your level of risk taking, you may be interested in something like this from eBay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/MOBILE-HOTSPOT-FLASHED-TO-VERIZON-PP...

The units are flashed and use Verizon's prepaid Internet plans but are effectively unlimited - if you prepay your account for a year - you get unlimited 3G data during that time for about $100/yr.

I couldn't quite believe when I stumbled across it - but it reminds me of hacked satellite encryption back in the day. Hard to believe this would actually work - or keep working for a long time - but based on some questioning - these eBay vendors stand behind their products....

Perhaps someone has a better idea of how these actually function....I don't.