briggsbio

I don't think this is the greatest advice. That said, it can be exactly like this and worse.

You really need to evaluate who you're receiving money from. Are they the right person to invest in your company? Will they support you in the low times and not try to screw you in the high times? If you think this will happen if you take money from your particular friends and family, then inuhj's advice is solid.

But it sounds more like expectations weren't managed. If you haven't told your investors how you're going to spend their money that is your fault for not telling them and treating your investors how they should be treated. Every investment dollar should have a purpose. (Yes, treat your friends and family like investors. Not like family. If you treat them like family who gave you money, they'll treat you like family who took their money, as in inuhj's example.)

The golden rule of raising from friends and family: If you're trading on relationship, then you put the relationship at risk. If you're trading on merit of the investment, then the relationship is separate.

This then allows you to at least somewhat evaluate whether the investor will freak out if you lose their money. As with an angel investor, they need to be willing and ABLE to lose every penny they put in. TELL THEM THAT. If they have a problem, or you sense a problem, don't take their money.

This then blur's the line between "friends & family" and "angels." VC's or VCs-in-angels-clothing are a separate category. This is not a firm that "does angel investing" this is an individual high-net-worth individual. Could be friend, family, or other.

And this is coming form a guy who will never have a relationship with his Godparents because a business deal between my parents and my Godparents went south when I was a baby.

When I was a musician we had a saying: "Playing and performing are like food and water. Writing is breathing." - You play, you promote. You maintain, you sustain. - You write, you build. You create, you grow. Buffer will succeed by building and improving, not maintaining and sustaining.

There's the rub. All due respect to Leo and the guys at Buffer. It's a wonderful product. And he's sharing his learning process. I'm not dogging on them. However The email exchange with Noah Kagan is shows the mentality that so much of startup culture is stricken with: "how can I sell my soul to hit it big" not "educate me on building a sustainable business."

Happy to see this name in the news again, and excited to see them blossom out of YC. Good luck guys. Any metrics on total users?

Are you guys monetizing yet? Would love to talk re: clinical trial recruitment.

Last question: Can anyone provide the citation behind the giant prevalence numbers thrown out by TC?

I work for a startup in drug development in IBD and those numbers are the biggest I've seen. (1.2m US and 2.5m worldwide are biggest I've come across). Would love to know if they have merit.

Email: briggsbio {at} (Buchheit created me)

This is one of those "wow, so perfectly obvious no one has never done it." This could (and probably should) the hiring process at many retail and service jobs. In my teens I would have been all about proving myself by taking whatever quiz or prescreening training available to get the job. This could have micro impacts on allowing the most tenacious to get the job rather than the most experience, which for the level of jobs they're focusing on initially could be a positive force. Just imagine if Wal-Mart was filled with the most proactive, not just the one with 6 months more of register experience. Certainly many caveats to these statements, but with some evolution and execution this could have really important impacts on the way low-level wage employment is conducted. The interesting aspects would be to see it move up the org chart. Also love the customer development of them walking the unemployment lines to understand the market.

vladd, while I completely agree that "HN is mainly goodwill for YC," I think potentially your subsequent parenthetical statement shows misunderstanding of a different business model, the VC model. Or, maybe it was just ambiguous language easily misinterpreted by me (and, I'd assume, others as well).

Many content-based companies would love to acquire HN and its audience (e.g. Conde Nast's Reddit acquisition). VCs would love to invest in an HN spin-out to reap returns from said investment via a sale of the entity. However, "VCs would pay a fortune to have HN and its audience," reads more like VC-as-owner/PE rather than VC as investor.

Maybe I'm digging too deep in the semantics here, but this seems to be a point that is often lost and VCs vaunted (or derided) as less investors-cum-advisors and more private equity slash-and-burn corporate raiders.

Might a VC chime in here?

*edited for spell check and readability.

Agree with other commenters, re: more important things to spend your time on than this list, but WHOA.

I'm borderline offended that this article would claim that getting social media accounts for your Startup would come after ANYTHING. For me, checking availability and reserving social media accounts comes all the way back at "what should I name this thing" and am searching for domain names. Sure, some are vastly more important than others (Twitter, FB), but holy moly. And of course, picking a name comes WAY down the list after finding a business model and some customer development. But, when you get down to picking a name...

Getting/reserving FB/Twitter accounts should be part of the process in choosing a name and domain (Branding!). I've heard of bots that will try to grab your Twitter handle as soon as a domain is registered with that name.

Netflix showed this importance of this with the weed-smoking Elmo and the @Quikster fiasco.

“We started at the very top with these outliers like Facebook and Twitter, but the aim is to work our way down to much less high profile companies.”

I don't see how SecondMarket is going to fill the void left by FB, Groupon, and Zynga with long-tail trades. But that doesn't mean I don't want to see that happen.

But all I've heard is the headache caused by these types of trades on the company. Sure, disproportionately on Facebook, but if I or one of my coworkers posted and actually sold shares on SecondMarket from our little company, it would be a major annoyance, and spark a lot of internal hand-wringing and tension.

I see it difficult for SecondMarket to create a long-tail market in the smaller, non-SV/NYC, non-consumer internet startups. I can't imagine them doing trades in small middle America biopharma companies (such as we are).

What epxerience does anyone on HN have when SecondMarket trading started happening with Founders/employees/investors at their companies? Was it noticeable? What impacts on employee morale/focus/work did it have, if any? It would drive me nuts if I was CEO and all the water cooler talk was about employees selling shares/options/RSUs (if even possible to trade options/RSUs) on Secondmarket and what they got out of it, etc. Seems like a horrible, distracting idea at a small, <25 person company - not to mention the impacts on your valuation/investor perception in future raises, other externalities.

There's been a great service to do this for a few years. Awesome group out of Oklahoma City.

Basically a news aggregator that incorporates text-to-speech - the love child of Siri and Flipboard.

BuzzVoice (http://buzzvoice.com), formerly PimpMyNews. Have web and iOS apps (probably Android too).

Same founder as PigeonMe.

Thoughts: I dig it, but don't know why I should use this more than just testing it out.

Rating: Meh. I'll play around for a bit but probably won't stick around.

The good:

- Homepage Design: Great. Reminds me of a Pinterest for content (not just pretty pictures)

- UX: Great signup, almost madlibs-style

- You don't make me confirm my email before actually signing in

- you don't make me have to join before browsing/adding value

The fail:

- Value proposition? The about page is fluff

- Why the landing pages for each article? Are you trying to instapaper-style redress the content in a more readable form? Then why just a part of the article? Are you rewriting the content via NLP or seomthing? You never tell me that.

- Community: Why the social network aspects? Do I need a social network to consume my news?

- New articles. How do I add new articles? What if I want to bring in an article I found elsewhere? I'm sure you can do it, but the UX doesn't make this intuitive.

- After signup: Great. I have no friends except the founders. No content. Don't see that there is anyone else using the service. I'm supposed to be munching content. But after logging in I don't see any. Take me to content consumption or the community!

- Design Fail: The user control box in the top left is hanging over my article using Google Chrome.

All in all... What's the benefit to this versus one of a million other ways to consume content? The value isn't shown implicitly or explicitly. Not better designed than Flipboard. Not more configurable than Pulse. Not more content breadth than Reddit. Not more "grab and read at my convenience on any device" than Instapaper. So what do I use greybox for? Is it just another pretty face? All the product descriptions are fluffy and nondescript, which is a turnoff. The design is great. From the about page is seems like you guys use this specific CMS and wanted to show that you could make a news aggregator with it. Cheerio! But why would I use this every day?

Is this a serious "let's build a business" launch? Or is it a "look what I made, it shows what I can do with this CMS, but we don't intend to really drop everything and pursue this full time and think we'll actually build a business."

After watching the first season of "Game of Thrones" I wanted to read the book and see how it compared. I was amazed and enthralled. Then I read the rest of them and couldn't really do anything else until I'd finished them. Enjoyed how the HBO series was more or less true to the book: Rather than taking a 900+ pg book and trying to do it all in 2.5hrs they had about 11 hours for the whole season, and it was, in places, almost verbatim. Pumped for the next seasons (and the last two books). Highly recommend "A Song of Ice and Fire" series by George RR Martin

And there have been dozens of cases of wild polio in China and the Philippines this year, and a current outbreak of 84 cases in Pakistan, according to the WHO. http://www.who.int/csr/don/en/index.html

The quote on the cover of the notebook in the picture reminds me of possibly my favorite quote of all time:

"...and for those who dare to dream of, dare to do." - Alfred Lloyd Tennyson

Also apropos in regard to some of the other comments in this thread, re: ideas are nothing without execution.

CW, there's nothing wrong with an app that collects and tracks diet, activity, or other information (until you get into data from instrumentation devices and more complex data inputs). Diet exercise are fine. Symptoms are fine. Even reporting them are fine (analytics). The issue becomes the key word: correlating. The FDA's (currently incompletely addressed) stance is that as long as you don't DO anything with the data, you're golden. "observe and report," so to speak.

Once you actually try to interpret (read: do anything interesting with) the data, you hit a regulatory wall. Well, regulatory hurdles, but not inconsequential (21 CFR part 11 compliance, quality systems, documentation well beyond anything the average developer is used to, etc.). Hurdles, but not complete roadblocks. So excite for some of the stuff in the works. Particularly looking forward to massiveHealth, but haven't seen anything since the funding a while back and details were nonexistent. I had some preliminary work on a great product and even a trial designed and ready to roll, and all the regulatory work (my bailiwick) lined out. But didn't get the grants funded. Sadly, I shelved it.

From someone working at a tiny venture-backed biopharma startup focused on developing treatments for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD = UC + Crohn's), amazing to see something like this. Exciting. Even cooler to see it hit HN!

I've always looked at IBD and thought something that looked almost like PatientsLikeMe but had a specific focus geared towards IBD (and features that the other lacked) would be amazing. But I knew despite being "close to the problem," I could never build a product that IBD patients would want. I may be close to the research, the treatments, the literature, our lab, and clinicians (and have family with the disease), and even some patients, it wouldn't be enough. It took YOU, Sean. Successful entrepreneurs (and pundits) always talk about "scratching your own itch," and "feeling your customers pain." But just speaking to potential customers won't cut it. You can never understand war from reading books or talking to vets - you have to have seen battle to truly understand. That's easy if you're developing some apps, many meet a need someone has had. But an app like this?

For a product like this to be realized, quite possibly even an experienced clinician would have a perspective and solution that would theoretically be feasible and valuable, but not click with users. No one, for better and worse, in this case, is closer to the problem than you are, more motivated to fill that need, or better positioned to see through the multifaceted but singular perspective as a Crohn's patient.

Best of luck in building and growing Crohnology.

I agree that there are long-term safety and efficacy studies that are fraudulently suppressed by some larger players in industry. It is an insidious problem that has horrible effects on patients. However, it is separate from my argument.

My point was that the registration of drugs is not effected by publication bias. The "suppressed evidence" typically comes in the form of post-marketing studies in significant patient populations, some of which aren't even randomized or placebo controlled (some are). NDA-directed studies are tightly controlled and reported. Then the drug is registered, and the FDA says, "we'd still like to see long-term safety data on this to see what things look like over time. We'll let you put this drug out there, but keep sending us more data."

I think the problem therein is related to the regs on post-marketing clinical studies. Companies have too much latitude to conduct post-marketing studies and then decide what to send FDA (or to publish), thus introducing the publication bias. FDA should have more control over Phase IV studies. The Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA, or pud-oof-a) was established to charge companies over $1million to register a drug, funneling money back into FDA so they could acquire more resources to review and grand NDAs. So the review times for NDAs went down, FDA got more efficient, and industry was happier. However, the act did not increase Phase IV controls as stringently as they should have, and companies have a lot of latitude on "additional clinical data" from studies conducted after the drug hits the market. That's why you see articles like the following:

GSK Suppresses Paxil Suicide Data: http://goo.gl/LCM94

AstraZeneca Suppresses Data on Seroquel: http://goo.gl/408fJ

Pfizer Suppresses Data on Edronax: http://goo.gl/fxLbW

So yes, there is publication bias and possibly fraud at work here, but it lies, in my view, early in the process (preclinical, basic science) and very late in the process (Phase IV studies). The registration process is pretty well controlled.

Note: My expertise is in preclinical pharmacology, toxicology, and NDA-directed studies (Phase I-III) not post-marketing studies (Phase IV), so if anyone has more experience here please speak up.

First, I think this is a closed view of the issue. Second, I think publication bias has more effect on basic research and translational research (read: early animal pharmacology studies) than drug development.

Conduct of a clinical trial for the purposes of establishing the safety and efficacy of a drug product intended for a specific clinical indication has the goal of registration (NDA, BLA, PMA, 510(k)) of the drug so that the drug can be marketed and sold. Publications are great, and are a component of that, but not the primary goal.

To conduct a clinical study, the company must present all preclinical (FDA calls it nonclinical) pharmacology and toxicology on the drug product to determine whether the product is safe for testing in human trials. This is done via an investigational new drug application (IND, big damn documents that take months to prepare). But I digress...

To conduct a clinical study, the protocol has to be submitted and FDA given time to comment (and they will, often and without much room to argue). That means the patient population, randomization scheme, endpoints, power analysis, etc. are vetted by FDA pretty thoroughly. Next, the same process occurs for the study at local or national (central) institutional review boards (IRBs). They get really nitpicky (especially local university IRBs for numerous reasons). Their primary goal is to ensure the safety of patients, but they won't hesitate to comment on the design of the study in most cases. And (not sure exactly when it became a requirement) sponsors have to register their clinical trial with a national registry (which you can search on clinicaltrials.gov). The results of those studies MUST be submitted to the FDA under the IND, to the IRB, and updated in the registry, or development stops and the IND cancelled.

So unless I misunderstand your comment, the publication practices of journals affects the validity and thoroughness of clinical trial data. This is not the case. Publication bias may alter the available literature, but drugs are NOT registered on publications and effected by "pre-registration." Drugs are developed and brought to market through a seriously controlled and monitored process, not at the whim of medical journals. Now, preclinical data, basic science, "academic studies" not moving a drug toward registration, etc. are affected by publication bias. It is a problem, and pre-registration is a complex issue but beneficial.

One final note: Writing this comment made me think that an alternative form of pre-registration would be really interesting. But not to medical journals, but an open registry for "coming soon research science." Think of a registry of "here's what we want to do" for researchers in basic science, all putting up ideas (ones they are willing to do so openly) for preclinical or clinical studies on the site, indexed by keyword. This would allow researchers to look online and not see what things HAVE been done, but see what things are GOING to be done. This could help researchers identify colleagues (communicate via social features), collaborate on the research, and pool their funding efforts to get multi-institutional grants (usually higher dollar and currently a little less competitive and thus easier to get). Put your research field and interest, and studies you would do "if you had the money" and then the registry would send you recommendations of people to connect with to try and move those research areas forward. If this does not currently exist (which it does not, to my knowledge), it would be amazing to have. It may also be an easier task to implement as a new feature of an existing research social network or community. "Enhancing serendipity in research..." Interesting. Thoughts?

This is interesting, and might be possible. The worry is that even if you have bullet-proof skin, your bones would break and internal organs be turned to mush. but would it?

The name of the project is 2.6g 329m/s, after the mass and velocity of the bullet.

Using 1/2MV^2 to calculate the force, in Newtons (1): =(1.2)(0.0026kg)(329m/s)^2 = 140.7 kgm/s^2 = 140.7 N

Convert to footpounds (lbf): (2) 1 N = 0.22481 lbf 140.7N (0.22481) = 31.6 lbf

So you body would have to dissipate 31.6 foot-pounds of force. Yes, it would loose some from friction mid-air, and your skin would dissipate some, but for the sake of argument, let's assume this is in a vacuum or some magical container, ceteris paribus. There's always the "it only takes 8 pounds of force to break a bone" but that's why you have soft tissue surrounding your bones. If it hit you in the head, you'd probably be screwed no matter what. I think this is more to be a replacement for body kevlar, not to wear as a batman cowl.

I once heard that a pro boxer can his with over 900 PSI, which would be about 30 lbf, but that's dissipated across a whole fist. Here's an article discussing that, it ranges widely (3). We need a better correlary.

So I continued to look and found a paper on bite force (4). It shows that a human can have a bite force of an average of 162 lbf. And specifically the incisors had a range of 22.5-33.7 lbf. That is roughly equivalent to the 31.6 lbf of a bullet. But what does this mean? A strong bite can ravage tissue, and a hollowpoint bullet would be a pretty sharp point and would likely slice right through the underlying tissue if it broke the skin (as it was designed to do).

I think it's important to look at other properties of the "pseudoskin" layer. They used a small little patch on ballistics gel, and at the end of the video the patch was pushed into the gel and folded in on itself. So if you'd been wearing the patch and got shot it would be embedded 2 inches into your epidermis and underlying tissue (but at least it would be easy to pull the slug out!).

I would think we'd need to see more info on the shear-thickening properties of the gel, see what more than just a "patch" would do; say, ballistics gel with a complete outer layer of the pseudo-skin, and other properties. The little patch has no way to grab onto the surrounding skin and provide tension to dissipate the force across the surface of the tissue (think like springs on a trampoline). And significant shear thickening would cause the pseudoskin to instantaneously harden with the force of the bullet, protecting the underlying real skin and tissue.

Need more info, but this could actually be promising.

(Note: Can someone check my calculations? I did them REALLY quickly. I can't confirm their reliability.)

Sources: 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_of_firearms#Force 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(unit) 3: http://www.connectsavannah.com/news/article/102548/ 4: http://www.glapbta.com/BFBP.pdf

That depends on the cancer and depends on the approach (structural, genetic, or immunological).

The difficulty in cancer treatment is that you're dealing with a natural biological process gone awry. It's not like viral or bacterial infections, where you're fighting something off. You're dealing with aggregations of unwanted mutations and cellular proliferation (over simplification warning).

Chemotherapy is less trying to alter a process than it is dropping a bomb in the body and hoping that you kill the cancer before killing the patient. There are some incredibly effective chemotherapy agents that will never make it to market because they are just too toxic.

Gene therapy approaches are making promising moves, but it is very early.

There are some pretty cool structural approaches, such as protein conjugated nanotubes that lyse cancer cells under infrared light (Stanford and Oklahoma researchers), but these too are early, and for only specific tumor types.

Cancer is a huge problem that takes a multifaceted, case-by-case approach. Lots of tools in the tool shed, and it's growing every year. I feel in my heart that one day in the future, cancer will be called "the biggest problem of the last generation." But there is much work to be done.

Exactly my point. The previous commenter worried about the rash of "amazingly promising research" articles followed by "FAIL." With this type of promising animal data, the prospects are good.

Actually overall, in vivo animal testing on vaccines, antivirals, and antibiotics are typically quite predictive from animals to humans. These types of tests are not historically very predictive when moving from in vitro to in vivo animal studies, however. This is typically because the treatments and vaccines are structural and/or expression-based (exploit a bacterial surface protein and poke holes in the cell, use a virus to get into T-cells and inject genetic material to let them identify and kill polio, etc). (yes, oversimplified). But moving from cell culture to a living organism This doesnt always work out. If it does, then it's relatively easy to confirm the effect if it works in animals to humans (virus is gone/never infects, etc). So more antibiotics and vaccines fail from in vitro to in vivo than from animal to human data.

In treating diseases of inflammation, rheumatic disease, pain, etc., it is generally quite predictive when moving from in vitro to in vivo animal studies (e.g. is it down-regulating inflammatory transcription factor NF-kB, or not?). But it becomes much less predictive translating endpoints from animals to humans. That's, very generally, because it is difficult to assess disease measures of improvement in inflammation in animals and translate that to humans (pain, discomfort, edema, these processes may present much differently in rats versus humans, for example). Great animal data may not mean you'll get such a strong effect in human subjects, and thus the failure rate for these drugs in clinical studies is quite high compared to vaccine and antibiotic human trials, because those vaccines were shown to be ineffective earlier in development. This was a very general explanation, to be sure, and I'll dig through my archives for some papers on this and try to add links later.

Depends on how you look at it: Actually we did evolve this mechanism, we just hadn't evolved a way to exploit it yet. We evolved, physiologically, faster mentally than physically and discovered a synthetic way to leverage this exploit before our bodies found a way to naturally.

Frankly, you shouldn't wait for the equity portion because of the cliff. You won't vest any shares in the first year, so if it is for a "contract" CTO position initially, why the trepidation from them for the stock right away?

They will pay more for you without stock, and they won't lose any stock if they don't keep you longer than 1 year, so they shouldn't be reluctant to issue options to you. If they are, they sound as if they are gun-shy in issuing their option pool, which is suspect. Not only for you, but for other future employees as well.

My thoughts exactly. It depends on the room; yellow in living/dining, and white in bathroom/office.

I have a white CFL desklamp in my home office, and by a chair in the corner I have a yellow corner lamp (admittedly incandescent not LED).

I prefer to do casual reading/relaxing under yellow light ("mood lighting"), and work/bathroom under white light.

This may seem like a binary issue, but really it comes down to setting and personal preference for the light used therein.

"Find out what you want, and then learn to ask the right questions." - Tony Shalhoub, psychiatrist in 'How Do You Know' (random but memorable quote from the Paul Rudd romcom I relented to watch with my wife recently)

My point exactly. How do you get juice? You pulverize and squeeze it out! So going the extra mile to extract oils for slight flavoring is bad, how?

Juice is not as good for you as whole fruit. Fine. 20 ounces of any fruit has too much sugar (and would make you shit sideways) anyway. Everything in moderation.

If you're going to drink a glass of Oj, which would you rather have, one they deoxygenate or dehydrate? Wholly or partially? I'll personally take deoxygenation over dehydrations. And the fruit juice industry's method for deoxygenation is not, to my knowledge, done via a full nitrogen sparge (bubbling nitrogen or other inert gas through the liquid to lower dissolved oxygen) or via a membrane contactor deaeration system (used in my field, drug dev, and semiconductor applications - check out http://liqui-cel.com, I've built these systems in a cGMP facility, they're awesome). It's simply vacuuming down the head space in a vat, and maybe replacing it with an inert gas (or just leaving it at negative pressure to reduce soluble oxygen as stated above. I'll take that over an OJ that has more in common with Tang than the fruit that bears it's name, anyway. So what if they tweak the flavor with a bit of ground orange to keep flavor consistent?

I would think it certainly could. Whether it SHOULD, depends on the reason for testing blood alcohol levels:

Blood alcohol vis-a-vis alcohol intoxication: With widespread use of breathalyzers, I don't know if this technology would be an improvement. Having to get a tattoo to test for blood alcohol levels seems overkill (at least the tattoo would be necessary in the current stage of the technology's development). While not perfect, available technology (IMO) seems to be doing a sufficient job.

Liver disorders, cirrhosis, hepatitis, other liver disease: There are other diagnostics more appropriate than testing for blood alcohol content (BAC)for these. Ethanol is metabolized by the liver relatively quickly.

There may be applications for testing blood alcohol, but I don't think this technology is enough of an improvement to make it viable. A doctor may disagree. That is just my opinion.

This is pretty fantastic. So very many applications for such a technology. Obviously the primary indication for the technology in its current stage of development, quantifying blood sugar levels, is in and of itself, a large enough market to make this attractive. But this is early stage.

Consider the possibilities for the next stages of development:

- Advancing the formulation to obviate the need for a "tattoo." The next generation could be a solution simply applied to the skin that would penetrate deeply enough over a short period of time to test blood glucose without the need for a tattoo. The real time, point-of-care diagnostic frontiers, cost reduction, and other factors implied here are phenomenal.

- The article mentions glucose, sodium, and oxygen levels in the blood. The "sensor molecules" simply bind to the target molecule or ion and change the fluorescence, providing a reading. Think about the applications for other ions, lipids, amino acids, and even proteins and cytokines using antibodies. Molecular binding assays are prevalent across many, if not most, diagnostic assays. This could have application in such a wide range of indications it boggles the mind.

- Combining the testing to assess for multiple diagnoses in the same test. Think of a kind-of multiplex assay (such as an ELISA) in a single unit. iPhone aside (which is an awesome way to do it), think of a single unit that applies 50-100 small droplets of solution on the skin and sends a focused LED for testing each droplet individually (think of a bunch of small capillary straws, instead of the hundreds of needle pricks such as in an allergy test).

Glucose for diabetes: check.

Sodium for evaluation of electrolyte levels, kidney and adrenal function, cystic fibrosis disease state: check.

Bacterial infection (nosocomial infections especially, like MRSA), viral infections, toxin screening, hepatitis, rheumatic disorders, cancer, the list goes on and on...

Again, fantastic.

I actually see a lot of positives here, but certainly some negatives. And also I have some thoughts on how it makes (or doesn't make) sense for Apple to snap up the alien-wrought 'cable killer.'

Pros:

- Apple doesn't "need" the Hulu revenue (as does an independent Hulu or Netflix or Pandora...), giving it leverage in content deal negotiations. Or, Apple could allow it to be a loss leader to get even deeper into the media in our lives (they certainly have the deep pockets to ink deals favorable to the cable giants if need be, with negligible impact on their ~$80B Warchest). What was the precedent in the deals with the music labels to get them to put their content on iTunes?

- People look at wireless carriers and cable megaliths with similar passionate disdain. And rightfully so. Apple has shown an unparalleled ability to bend carriers to their will. I would love to see the cable giants squirming on Apple's hook. They are, in my opinion, the ONLY acquirer with the muscle to keep the cable co's in their place. I can only imagine the calamity of Carol Bartz negotiating with the cable giants as those guarantees expire.

- It is quite possible that Apple as a company is the toughest negotiator out there right now. This stems from their mindshare and market power, or maybe it's just Steve's giant adamantium balls. (see points 1 and 2)

- The litany of commercials (even if you pay) and user experience issues with Hulu drive me nuts. Possibly no one better to right that ship than Apple.

- They could relaunch Hulu alongside a subscription music service. Hey, it could happen.

- In an unrelated note, I just want to watch Steve Jobs kick Rupert Murdoch in the teeth.

- Exclusivity on a streaming TV service like this would be a big leg up over Google in the Android/iOS battle. It may not be a bellwether in device selection for the HN crowd, but it may well be for the rest of the world (sorry, I just can't call them "normals" anymore, it's sounds borderline derogatory).

Cons:

- Will spark antitrust review/inquiries, but not enough to prevent it from going through. APPL/MSFT/GOOG can't piss without Christine Varney there to record its volume, color, and aroma. She'll be gone next month, but there will be an equally odious character to fill her seat at the Justice Department.

- This could be bad for consumers. While I would love it initially, if the cable co's ever do get the upper hand, it would really piss me off to cut my cable and have the content suddenly get shut off because negotiations went South. Minor annoyance, sure, but still.

- This could be really bad for consumers. How deep into our media consumption is Apple going to get its fingers, nay, tentacles? Are ticketmaster and AMC theaters next? Apple is filling more holes than, well, let's just say than some of the actors in the one content category Apple has shown an unwillingness to jump into bed with.

All in all, like most things Apple does, it could be awesome. But it will no doubt leave a bitter aftertaste whose origin you just can't explain.

Oh, wait. That's the taste of the forbidden fruit in Steve's great walled garden. You always wondered why he named it "Apple." It tastes great, but there's always a price to pay.

I usually shy away from these "Do what you love" stories, but when I saw the domain it came from I had to read it. I thought the universe (or PG) was sending me a direct message via HN! (And no, I'm not that stupid or that much of a megalomaniac, I hope.)

So, from one Justin Briggs to another, thanks for an inspiring story, a newfound respect for SEO, and for bringing back some similar memories from my path.

Good Luck!

I'm taking a different read of this article, I guess. I view this not as a "who cares what phone I use, since I rarely use the 3rd party apps." I take this, and some other commenters do as well who have significant usage of some 3rd party apps (Netflix, Kindle, Instapaper, et al), as a challenge to build better apps that provide more functionality. Every time I look down at that 4" screen and think about all the things I can do with it, I still look at it and think, "Good lord, there is SO MUCH MORE we haven't even seen yet!" And it makes me want a whiteboard so I can start mapping out ideas.

There is still a huge amount of opportunity to create incredible apps. Social Media apps have been done every which way from Sunday, content apps as well, To-Do lists are certainly overdone, and basic note apps as well (though there are some unique innovations that could be done on note apps IMO). But look at those categories, compared to all the incredible things these devices can do? There are still big wins to be made in mobile app development, both native and browser-based.