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Very cool. I was doing a pretty straightforward website a few months ago that I would've used something like this for if I knew about it.

It would be helpful if there were a page on the site that described how it works in more detail, or maybe just a FAQs page linked to in the footer with answers to questions like "What kind of website files does Yoozon support?" and "What do you mean by dynamic? ...will Yoozon support my Ruby on Rails site?"

I liked that part where I made the character dance.

Wouldn't an electronic receipt serve that purpose just as well?

FWIW, as a non e-commerce person, I always read POS as "piece of shit," so this did make me chuckle at first read ...carry on.

netvibes.com

Np. Would love to hear about your travels. Feel free to ping me for more ideas/details. I've traveled pretty extensively in Central America and Southeast Asia, and a bit in Europe.

Huh. Never had any trouble there and I stayed out every night. Maybe I just looked like a enough of a sloppy backpacker, although I don't think I was traveling with valuables and it's hard to store a laptop in board shorts and a v-neck. I'm pretty big too, so even having lived in rough areas and wandering around in the "bad" parts of cities/the world, I've never had any trouble.

San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua is spectacular. For something a little more remote, Cahuita, Costa Rica is great too and is not far from the surfing mecca of Puerto Viejo. I bet you can find wifi in either spot, at least in San Juan del Sur and Puerto Viejo. There's some beautiful spots in the Philippines as well. Try El Nido or Dumaguete (great diving and both definitely have wifi).

The estate, just like with other private debt.

Public loans are discharged upon death, so there's that. Private loans are not though, and there can still be tax consequences for public loans.

I think the most important theme to this article, aside from the individual story of debt and irresponsibility, is that this looks an awful lot like the way the housing bubble came about. Cheap debt that the borrowers are unable to afford long term. The difference here is that student debt cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, so it seems there would be more people defaulting.

As a side note, the price tag of a degree should not be so high that a career with that degree cannot pay back the debt. This story is unique in that the debt is much older and ballooned due to interest accrual, but there have been a lot of recent graduates with high debt right out the gate with degrees that are much less employable than they used to be.

Thank you for the insightful response to a comment that frankly felt a bit baiting. I admire how you're approaching the problem at HireArt, and am thankful that the current wave of disruption in education should hopefully keep society from feeling the full fallout of the education bubble. It will be interesting to see what the world looks like in 10 years.

However, I think the bubble will persist even if all degrees were viewed as equal due to the economics around cheap financing of degrees and disincentives among universities to compete on price and incentives to compete on ancillary concerns like luxury housing, amenities, facilities, and the like. Of course, even without this warped structure of incentives, the university model is one with huge overhead, a rigid and inflexible structure, slow to adapt to change (though they are trying), and not nearly as well positioned to take advantage of economies of scale as the likes of Udacity, Coursera, or even UOP.

This entire topic fascinates me, and I don't think we've even begun to unravel all of the causes and implications of what these changes mean for society and the future of education. Exciting times!

I think it's a failed attempt to set up a poll by the OP.

I've heard that companies will sometimes pay candidates they know/like to go to one of these programs to learn to code. Seems a bit risky, but I'd like to hear whether someone has had success doing something like this.

hackdesign.org ...hands down.

Awesome. Maybe now high school computer courses will consist of more than how to make PPT presentations.

Ha! That's an awesome analogy, and I've definitely felt that way as well. I would say just the online courses I took (Udacity, Code Academy, Zed Shaw's Learn Python the Hard Way) gave me the context to understand better, and even chime in on topics. Learning how the pieces fit together helps a lot, even if you can't do much of it yourself. That CS101 course will help a lot. Have fun!

While I think learning to code is a great thing, I don't know that it will necessarily be the fastest/best path to understanding the core of your products. I'm also non-technical (coming from a legal background as well), and while the process of starting to learn to code I think has been helpful, I think what was most helpful was just asking my technical cofounders a ridiculous number of questions. Stupid questions... ones you might feel embarrassed to ask.

If you are going to learn to code, I think a high level computer science course is a great place to start. I recommend Udacity's CS101 course. It really takes the mystery out of what's happening behind the screen. If you want a good book that will also help lift the veil, I'd suggest "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware & Software" by Charles Petzold.

Learning to code can be a long process if you aren't able to give your undivided attention to it, so I think actually dedicating the time to a bootcamp as others have suggested is a very good idea and something I think I'd like to do myself.

Good luck!

The bit teaching kids to farm seems like a straw man regarding what is most important to learn. Learning to farm and learning to code are not mutually exclusive, and may even require overlapping skills (manipulating an environment with a given set of constraints to yield the most favorable results).

Yet, the OP's conclusion presents a stronger argument for learning to code than learning to farm: "What code.org promotes is teaching kids how to look at problems, analyse them and present them in a way that captures what they are trying to solve. It promotes teaching kids how to use a new tool that can assist them to devise solutions to whatever problems they desire. Most importantly it promotes teaching them a tool that they can use to express and communicate this."

This seems like an even stronger endorsement for learning to code than anything even in the code.org video.

I think the real underlying sentiment in this post is to not learn to code for the wrong reasons, but kids don't care about future rewards like "vats of riches, shiny things and scantily clad women." They gravitate to things that are fun and that capture their attention in the here and now. Making a sprite spin in a circle in Scratch was all it took to get my 4 year old nephew's eyes to light up. He can decide one day whether he'd rather code for altruism or profit (again, not that they are mutually exclusive).

I'd have to guess that there are significant costs associated with producing a commercial for the Super Bowl, and I'd have to think SodaStream had some sort of arrangement with CBS to air the ad, perhaps even paid for a Super Bowl spot. Even if there aren't breaches of contract, it's still pretty crappy behavior.

This could still work out in SodaStream's favor. The public outrage against CBS and big soda (?) creates the sort of David vs. Goliath dynamic that people gravitate to.

I like this a lot and might even use it myself. That said, the link generated is much too long for sharing, esp on Twitter, but probably anywhere. I'm guessing its a known issue though.

Also, add a favicon... easily overlooked, but very helpful to have.

Wow, this is really clever! At first I was thinking, "what is this? Why is there a story?" ...but if you stick with it it's very, very good. You're a very gifted illustrator and storyteller. I actually thought you borrowed the illustrations from a storybook. If things don't work out with the app you may have a future as a children's author. In fact, maybe you could publish a book version of this as a companion to the app?

I wonder if the entire experience would be better if the entire UI for the walkthrough at the beginning was the storybook without the shelf(?) and the black background, then after the story is at the end make the "last page" a fullscreen app?

The dark colors and the image mirroring was distracting and it isn't clear what its purpose is until the screen rotates, which is a very cool effect. I wonder if there's a way to achieve the same effect without rotating the screen though.

That said, an app for building habits is something I've thought about before, and I think your execution and creativity is way better than anything I would've imagined. Gamification feels like a needed component, but I wouldn't have thought of this. It almost feels like Legend of Zelda for self improvement!

>OS X Finder — damages the system, can’t copy files reliably, can’t do useful things it ought to do at all, hides key files, rife with bugs.

>Disk Utility — under some conditions, destroys arbitrary numbers of volumes, no real upgrade for years, took two minor releases to fix RAID support.

>iCloud — a organization-destroying bug-ridden unreliable disaster.

>File system — continued use of HFS Plus instead of robust ZFS.

How are any of these things possibly the work of Jony Ive? He's a designer, not a software engineer.

Happy to help.

Mixpanel, Userfox, Customer.io, Intercom.io, Help Scout, Desk.com, Olark, and UserVoice are all tools that come to mind. It comes down to preference a bit. The engagement features in Mixpanel are probably my favorite for setting up drip email campaigns and it's a really great analytics tool to start with. I'm of the opinion that great customer service begins with understanding the customer and how they're using your product.

For books, I've heard really good things about "Delivering Happiness." I'm a fan of Seth Godin as well, but he writes more about marketing. I think the ideas translate fairly well though.

Ah, Teddy. Definitely a favorite of mine as well.

"Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm." - Winston Churchill

Also, do one thing really well, but be serviceable in a lot of other things.

I know you say you're not the idea guy, but that's basically how this comes off. Kudos for putting yourself out there to get advice and feedback though. Not knowing much about your background, here's everything I would tell a non-technical person who wants to do a startup (as a non-technical person doing a startup myself):

Ideas are worthless until they're validated. Get out, talk to customers in a market that you think you can make an impact in. If it's something that you care about, are knowledgeable in, or if there's a problem that pisses you off that you think you could solve with your startup, those are good places to start. Still test in the market though, because you're only one data point. In the words of Steve Blank (go read everything by him), get out of the building! ...or at least get on the phone to start.

If you're trying to build something that appeals to the general population, just go stand at a subway or bus stop where people are just waiting and have nowhere to go and ask them questions. People are usually bored there anyway. If you're building a B2B product, call business and set up appointments to meet them. Learn customer development.

Put up an Unbounce "coming soon" page and start engaging with folks that care about the problem you're trying to solve. Start a blog on Tumblr (better sharing features, but any blogging platform would do). Link the blog to your "coming soon" page and vice versa. Get your social media pages in order (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest if it makes sense, Quora etc.) ...with a marketing background, this should be your bread and butter. Use all of these to be authentically helpful. This will drive traffic back to your site.

Eventually, you should have generated a bit of a community if you're solving a problem that people actually care enough about. Use this to keep testing ideas and iterating on what you already know. Ask if this is an idea that these prospective customers (whether they know they are or not) would pay to have solved. If so, ask how much they think the average person in their profession spends, in time or money, to deal with the problem with current methods. Ask how much they think the average person in their profession would spend to solve the problem.

Try to learn to code (CodeAcademy & Udacity are good places to start). If you learn enough to build a prototype, fantastic. If not, you will at least have a new respect for the art. Start with HTML and CSS... this isn't the hard stuff, so you should learn it anyway and, if you're handy, you might turn into a serviceable front end dev. Read dev blogs, poke around on GitHub and StackOverflow, and even read documentation. This stuff won't make any sense at first. Take it slow and after awhile you'll develop an understanding of how all the pieces fit together. You don't actually need to be able to build anything with it, but having an understanding of what language or tool is used for what sort of task will help keep you from getting completely lost in technical discussions.

Learn stats cold, and learn tools to do it well (R is all the rage, but even Excel will get you far). As a marketer, knowing how to handle data will give you solid insights into how to tailor the experience to users and will put you on solid footing with your technical cofounder. It's hard to argue with data. You can even go ahead and start calling yourself a growth hacker.

Learn design, or at least try to learn a bit. This will help you better understand what makes one UI better than the other and is an important component to UX.

Go to meetups at first to bounce ideas off people, crystalize everything you're learning, and tell folks about what you're working on. Don't let it get in the way of actually getting things done though. These things can be productive and sometimes lead to chance meetings with people who can really help you or know someone who can, but they can also be distracting.

Wireframing isn't hard. You should at least learn that much. In fact, you can do a lot of work to validate your idea just by talking to prospective customers. There are ways to build wireframes and run usability tests that don't require coding. If you're creative, you can even use things like Mechanical Turk to fake backend processes (ex. Testing an app that aggregates real estate listings. Someone submits a request on a form you put up on Wordpress. You take that and turn it into a Mechanical Turk job... this may be a bad example. I just came up with it now.)

Here are a couple of things that will help you get started:

https://www.udacity.com/course/ep245

http://nathanbarry.com/finding-ideas-project/

http://steveblank.com/2011/09/22/how-to-build-a-web-startup-...

http://businessmodelgeneration.com/

http://theleanstartup.com/

http://assets.unbounce.com/s/images/noob-guide-to-marketing-...

http://blog.kissmetrics.com/infographics/

http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pir...

If all of this seems overwhelming, don't worry. You don't learn it overnight and it's easier to learn in the context of actually doing a startup. Get around some good people who are working on startups as well, and make sure to spend time with people who aren't to defuse once in awhile.

I think a decent path would be to leverage the strengths that you have now around marketing by getting a firm understanding of statistics and how to measure growth. Start working at a startup that's big enough to be able to take on a junior employee and use that time to learn everything you can, work on side projects, and try to find mentors among the founders. They've already done it, so they'll be able to guide you in your journey.

That looks splendid! I've spent just a bit of time in Guatemala while traveling through Central America, and I absolutely loved it, but I'm infatuated with CA in general.

I studied in Costa Rica in 2006 and felt that, in many ways, the quality of life was better than that in the U.S.