barrynolan

Quick question. When you signed up to your say 20meg broadband contract, did the contract exclude certain services - YouTube, amazon Prime, Netflix?

New in the sense that GoPro has opened access to them - we ride, climb, fall, swim from the persons perspective. I'd wager their perennial popularity on the youtubes drives interest/adoption in action sports

Apple already implements a solution for free trial of apps. They're called Newsstand apps - and sadly, only available to Newsstand publishers.

Newsstand allows a free trial period. Typically it's a month.

If you like the publication enough after your trial, you can pay a monthly or annual fee. From my experience, approximately 2% of users convert to paid plans.

Download Volumes. Free trial app : upfront paid apps - 250:1. The (automated) marketing challenge becomes converting new users into paying customers.

Most paid plans for magazines are circa $4.99/month. This resembles a SaaS fee to use your app and all its wonderful upgrades.

Thanks for jumping in. It's great to get 'the other side'.

That said, where I checking out, my eye gravitates toward that big red 'Continue Checkout' button, not the fact that I'm signing up for $479.40 a year. A more blunt but upfront UX would hit them with interstitials.

Excellent point. But it would screw (even further) with their carrier relations. The carriers hate iMessage and push notifications as it is.

Really nice site and execution.

One of the real challenges with Newsstand apps is the conversion of users (downloaded the app) to paying subscribers (monthly, annually). I've seen conversion rates as low as 1% (not including churn) for some very established publications.

So the challenge isn't just getting the eyeballs, its keeping and charging them to make a business. There are some techniques you can use that make an impact.

Asides from my ever expanding girth, I've never been described as a whale!

It all ads up...from $1,500 for TV sub, plus biz travel with hotel tonight, taxi's here and there, netflix, spotify. You are dead right on games, and that the IAP economy is hidden. Same too, the credit card economy/transactions through apps is hidden. There's a lot of money behind free apps, and everything is ad related.

Is the "developer community energized"?

It is what it is. A great demonstration of developer productivity. And the stack mob API is free.

I was wondering why there are so many dashboard cams. Answer: from the NYTimes

"Some of the numerous videos that quickly emerged of the incident highlighted a distinctly Russian phenomenon: the dashboard cam. As Business Insider recently pointed out, they are commonplace in Russia partly because of the dangerous driving conditions that lead to so many accidents, and with an unreliable police force such cameras can provide valuable evidence following a crash."

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/15/video-captures-f...

Both arguments are correct - mobile is the future of customer engagement, and persistent engagement in mobile apps is hard. It’s especially hard because the tools we use in the physical or virtual world (CRM, messages, updates, tutorials, polls, questions, feedback, dialog, etc), by and large don’t yet exist for the mobile app world. These tools are the grease to iteration to get app engagement to a better place. Today the mobile apps publishers are hermetically sealed from both knowing and communicating with their app users. This is the problem our startup converser.io is addressing.

I hear what you're saying but in my family (Irish so sample size is huge) Dad, my father in-law, my kids (<5), two teenage nieces (admittedly the have access to a Mac, but its probably a 20% use case) are iPad only.

Great advice. Especially documentation: that is your marketing at scale.

Always fascinating to go back in time. Have a look at Twilio http://web.archive.org/web/20081216031744/http://www.twilio....

What's interesting is the consistency of message to this day - simplicity, pay as you go, no Shenanigans Pricing, no contract.

And if you want to see what that looks like from a Fedex angle... http://www.cultofmac.com/192038/look-at-all-these-iphone-5s-...

It's a great validation of developing and iterating the business initially with the small 'mom & pop' business to the point where traction allows you capture the really massive customers.

An example in how to title a blog

So many of the great innovations and experiments happened in the sixties. Feels like we have lost ambition

My first ever job was to demonstrate this to 'enterprisy' land in 1990. It was unquestionably the future. I would launch dial up, make a connection, and showed pages which were actually from CEEFAX. I was hailed a boy genius, neither status which obviously no longer applies.

Who is he referring to here? " For those who have depended on the self-described patent expert for your understanding of this case . . . well, maybe now you will know better than to trust a paid spokesman." FOSS Patents?

Yes - and upfront. Skills, achievements, passion. They are investing in the team

Outside Facebook, Pinterest is the only app the my wife, and most of her friends, use. It's not a tech early adopter story. And it has obvious monetization given the taste graph its curating, and affiliate opportunities.

There is now Chip and pin fraud. With chip and pin the liability is now on the consumer to prove it wasn't their transaction. Customers have had to take the banks to court in the UK to get fraud losses removed. In these cases it has been proven that Chip and pin is infallible. Same applies online with 3-D secure.

None really. A) Fraud liability effectively shifts to you, versus the often waived $50 limit, and B) it interjects an authorisation from your issuing bank into the checkout process oftentimes screwing it up.

Now that Oink is gone...

My pleasure PG.

Wayback is instructive for founders. If ever you doubt the value of what you're doing, and fight desires to hold fire and perfect more features, the wayback machine is a great reminder that those companies that succeeded started somewhere less than minimal too, and executed on from there.

Would you believe, my Irish ISP blocks piratebay access.

Interesting how YCs very first web-statement in 2005 remaines true and current.

http://web.archive.org/web/20050324062234/http://ycombinator...

No copyright was hurt in the making this five minutes of perfection.

Alberts point re pooling startup patents is interesting, and may have relevance for tech on tech litigation. But it doesn't defend against the shell troll entities.