garbowza

I've been using Dashblock in a production environment and it's super easy to create and use the APIs on sites. We'd previously written our own scripts to do this at scale, but it was difficult to keep them all up to date. You're right that fixing a single page's dom changes is trivial, but it's a real pain to scale that. Regarding the ML aspect, I've tested changing the dom for a page in Dashblock and it seems to work... it didn't break the scraping I had set up. The price might not make sense for everybody, but for me it's definitely worth it.

Because they can side-step background checks and be resold to anyone.

Great point about the value of the social validation from high-profile media coverage! That's usually more important than the minimal traffic it drives.

This was definitely our biggest surprise: we expected an early spike and quick tapering, just like we were accustomed to from web traffic.

It's hard for us to know how much residual traffic we still get from Better Homes & Gardens, since there's no referrer to track people coming from magazines.

We're actually working on an export feature now. We keep full resolution copies of all photos because so many people want to use Moment Garden to backup their baby photos.

Where did you get the $70MM figure? Published reports show half that.

Incorrect. Only what is specifically claimed (in the claims themselves) holds up in court.

The key is to read the claims (particularly the independent ones) - that is the only part of a patent that holds water.

In this case, the first independent claim is seriously narrow. The OP's title is extremely misleading.

This was the reason I co-founded Moment Garden http://momentgarden.com, to help parents securely save the memories of their child.

I know it's a leap to trust a small startup with such important data, but with stories of Google arbitrarily shutting down accounts, it helps make our case.

Sure, we've had some growing pains, but when a parent emails us with problems, they get in touch with a founder who will make the situation right. Good luck getting that with Google.

Is there a paid plan? I'd love to use something like this, but before I build on it, I'd like some assurance it will stay around for awhile.

This seems so obvious in hindsight. Despite "The Social Network"-generated interest, startups are simply too boring to make for great ratings without some manufactured drama.

I feel for those who applied to TechStars NY, not knowing about the circus they were getting into. Startups are hard enough without additional, external distractions.

He laid out his reasoning quite clearly - do you disagree with his points? If so, which ones and why?

I saw Gmail being used in this manner quite a bit among our friends with new kids (or expecting kids). I was concerned about the long term security of the memories they shared this way, which ended up being the reason I co-founded my startup, Moment Garden http://momentgarden.com .

There are surprisingly few good, secure ways to save and share memories of your kids. Particularly if you don't trust Mark Zuckerberg with your child's private data.

Not true.

You'd be surprised at how much innovation is in the industry, particularly with respect to social media. I know: my company provides web based software to funeral homes and mortuaries. We let them design headstones online. We even put QR codes on the headstones to make it easy to find the deceased individual's online obituary within the cemetery.

Not so good in IE8. All the message gradients are royal blue and functionality like the drop down doesn't work at all.

You must examine a patent based on the specific claims, not the title. Many people make this mistake and assume the patent is much broader than it actually is.

With a product, you design the solution based on your vision and find customers who match that vision. With web design work, you are essentially taking direct orders and requirements from the client.

She said "real world" not "3rd world", which certainly adds different context.

Yep, that's essentially the moral of the post. While cheap clicks do exist, and you can find them, you need to ask yourself whether it's really worth it for your business.

Definitely that's the reason the ads are cheaper in less developed and less wealthy countries. It's simple supply & demand: obviously there are more people targeting ads towards users in the U.S. and other wealthy countries.

We touched on a lot of this in the article, and in fact the title clause "(and why you might not want to)" was referring specifically to that point!

That being said, there is a tremendous amount of useful techniques you can learn from this approach, and you can choose apply those towards whatever demographics you are marketing to.

It's up to each person to decide the specific goals of their ad campaigns, but I'm hoping this article outlines some techniques that will help you achieve those goals.

I definitely agree. It all comes down to user intent: Either you can try to sell Facebook users on your product in the small ad space that they probably end up ignoring, or you can get them to your site first and convert them into customers once they are on your website.

Personally, I think the latter approach works better. Get lots of cheap clicks to your site, and work on conversion when they are there. It's too hard to create a convincing pitch for your product in the tiny real estate provided by Facebook's ads, when the users' attention is already distracted by a lot of other stuff going on.

The interesting thing is that the least recognizable celebrity (Isla Fisher) ad performed the best. But examining the photos themselves, when combined with what we learned about the things people click on, it became more obvious why that was the case.

With more time and a bigger budget, we'd like to do further experiments to determine what other aspects mother (or even father) photos draw clicks.

It's true that ultimately for our product, conversion into customers is what matters in the end. But I don't think that makes this article useless.

Almost all businesses want to get people "through the door" to your website or product, and our experiment shows how you can do that for a relatively low price.

A logical follow on would focus on the landing page and conversion, but that is beyond the scope of this original experiment, which was to show you the mechanics of lowering your CPC.

While that's definitely a stumbling block we discovered from our experiments, I think there are several other key takeaways: 1) an "appealing" image is very important 2) start with broad demographics and narrow interests 3) increase your CTR before decreasing CPC too much 4) wait for the demographic reports and then narrow your demographics using your most success ads

Results seem to vary considerably depending on the market and keywords, although it does seem that with some patience and experimentation you can find that high value/low cost sweet spot.

They key is patience. I had tried Facebook Ads several times to no avail, but after reading one of your blog posts as well as several others, I went back to the drawing board until I started finding the variables that made it work. I'm hoping this post expresses some of the lessons learned.

Wow, this is incredible. Can't thank you enough!

We're working on a few of these now, based on your feedback. Do you mind sending me an email? zack@momentgarden.com

Yeah, we have seen that. Definitely similar concept, but different market. Really impressive implementation!

Excellent - we really appreciate it! If you have any suggestions for making it better, we are all ears.

Yes yes yes! We're actually working on that as we speak.

Thanks for sharing Memolane. I hadn't seen that before, but it definitely looks cool.

And I really like your idea of putting a real Moment Garden on the home page to allow interaction. You're right, that would help visitors grok the concept.