ajones05

An abbreviated version of this story is included in this great post on how 22 now-successful companies got their first users/customers https://www.referralcandy.com/blog/how-to-get-first-customer... (Segment, Tinder, Quora, Reddit, etc.)

I'm doing something similar for local news/events, called SeeAround.me, where people can see/submit local news stories and their locations. But I could see sort of a cross between that and Your Audio Tour as particular interesting for people who want to do their own walking tours, for example.

Project: SeeAround.me - an app to see and share hyperlocal news by location (like Waze for what's happening nearby). All content is user generated, with most of it in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley for now.

Frustration: It's hard to see what's happening near you based on your location (hyperlocal news, events, restaurant openings/closures, construction, etc.) Local news is distributed across so many sources, and it's not easy to see where exactly stories are taking place.

In the U.S. we force children to sit still through hours of classes, wonder why they get distracted, and then medicate them. In other countries kids get more breaks to expend energy and are then more attentive - e.g., http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/06/how-fin... "In every one of the experiments, students were more attentive after a break than before a break. They also found that the children were less attentive when the timing of the break was delayed—or in other words, when the lesson dragged on."

Some of his stories leave me that way, too. Others, even very short ones, have stayed with me every since I read them. Here are two of my favorites that are both very short: "The House of Asterion" http://ddm.ace.ed.ac.uk/project-files/Asterion/story.html and "The Circular Ruins" https://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/00/pwillen1/lit/cruins...

I saw the interstitial example. It looks slick. I think Bre.ad was for influencers, too. Do you know what didn't work for them and what you are doing differently? Are people able to make enough for you to take a cut or fee?

Awesome, thanks for taking a look and sharing feedback!

A few people have been using it in the bay area, mainly in Oakland and Barkeley and a few in SF. Note that in other locations you can still use it, but there isn't much content to see!

Interesting. I like the idea, but isn't this pretty similar to "bre.ad"? -- as far as I know, they weren't able to turn it into a viable business and the Yahoo! acquisition was an acquihire.

That's an interesting thought. My initial reaction is that people wouldn't use that until this was more established, which leads to sort of a catch-22 situation, but I like the idea. Another consideration with the hashtag is that there's a lot of content that already exists, too, instead of being original content (e.g. a news story compared with a Twitter/Instagram post), so relying too heavily on a hashtag approach could exclude that content.

At first I thought I could just try to pull in geo-tagged feeds from Instagram, Twitter, and other sources. The trouble is, most of that content is not actually about the location. Someone might say, "I love lasagna!" and it's geotagged nearby. Unfortunately, I found there's simply too much noise for that approach to work.

Edit: The answer to your first question is, yes, that's exactly what it's for!: to see news within a certain radius of where you are.

You mean there was an issue with Facebook login..? It should only try to open a file from your computer if you're submitting a story and try to attach an image. Re mobile: It's too complex for a small screen, so there's a mobile page that just says there will be an app soon.

The problem: hyperlocal news is fragmented - on news sites, blogs, newsletters, events pages, etc. I built this so the local community can see, submit, curate, and discuss local news, all in one place and with a map.

There's also Twist

"I wish I could offer some link examples of the things I thought EveryBlock did well"

I'm working on a related side project and I'd definitely be interested in hearing those thoughts...

For anyone curious about craigslist marketshare and competitors, this is the best resource I've seen on the topic: http://www.quora.com/Craigslist/Why-hasnt-another-product-di...

In that discussion is reference to this graphic, which does a good job illustrating many of the would-be craigslist-crushers (although most go after niches rather than the whole pie): http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_kwkfi5tqEi1qz...

This is easily applied to software but not necessarily services, which cannot scale the same way. Unless you mean to say that no services company could ever count as a startup.

I think it has more to do with the current state of a company - that is, immature: still figuring out internal roles, processes, possibly no finalized monetization strategy, etc.

Here was Jason Calacanis's take on May 15: "Bitcoin P2P Currency: The Most Dangerous Project We've Ever Seen" -- "We are 100% certain that governments will start banning bitcoins in the next 12 to 18 months. Additionally, we’re certain bitcoins will soar in value and a crush of folks will flood the system and start using them." http://www.launch.is/blog/l019-bitcoin-p2p-currency-the-most...

wow, good karma +50 to Matt on this one

They rarely are, especially in california. My guess would be the same, that there was some other reason and it was more of an excuse. Maybe he wanted to show loyalty to the other company.

SalesForce is piecing together social CRM: integrating social data into their CRM system. This will add to the monitoring (and in-progress publishing) capabilities from the Radian6 acquisition. The triforce is almost complete...

I've been using rapportive for a few months and love it. It provides additional context about the person you're corresponding with - social profiles, crunchbase info, etc. It occasionally displays completely innacurate info, though. Somebody else using it recently congratulated me on a recent multimillion dollar investment... unfortunately that wasn't me, but a VC with the same name.