crashdev

Hmm. This the same biometric login routine used by USAA for their mobile apps. Curious to know who actually built it, is it being used under license or is it delivered as a service. Anyone have info?

In my experience the startup community (both founders + funders) is heavily skewed toward people who believe that creating value takes time and teamwork, and that any premature + asymmetric effort to capture value is just counterproductive. Very few really big companies in tech have been built by bootstrapping -- it offers the illusion of control, but typically at the expense of impact.

I work with a ton of investors -- both angel + VC -- and this kind of opportunistic self-dealing is not condoned or tolerated by any of the professional / career investors I work with. It takes a long time -- and the help of many people -- to build a real business and folks who want to stay in the early-stage game don't pull shit like this because it undermines trust among both founders and fellow investors when you need it the most.

Good point. AppStoreHQ's 'Hottest' list is built on streaming blog post discovery, and the stream is what's on the home page (kind of like Hype Machine does for music) - so any app that gets a mention from any of 70+ "canonical" blogs, or any blog that drops an AppStoreHQ review widget into its review - will show up in the stream.

So yeah, you have to at least have gotten some traction somewhere to get into the stream, but the bar is pretty low. (That said, about half the apps in the App Store have never even received a user rating - they're still in AppStoreHQ's search results, but they'll need a little love to get out of the basement).