jamesmcbennett

Looks great!

-Didn't immediately know that top left logo switched feeds until I clicked tour.

Supernice feed that is simple for me to use. I clicked the buttons and everything seemed easy enough to understand. I don't really get some of the comments here as I find the UI easy to understand as in I clicked everything, it worked, then I understood it.same as I do for every new site I encounter..

(Disclaimer: Friend of one of the guy's behind this.)

On official US Govt site, it says you need an award, e.g. nobel prize for O1. But that is a complete exaggeration as many people have rather average creditentials getting the O1. Having a good degree is enough for several people. Everything in addition helps.

"We’ve always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments, these moments when we dared to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known. We count these moments as our proudest achievements. But we lost all that. And perhaps we’ve just forgotten that we are still pioneers and we’ve barely begun. And that are greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, as our destiny lies above us."

This analogy started as a way to explain the scene to friends and stretches further to include company builders, patents, bootstrapping and pirates. But keeping this post under five minutes to read.

In this interview, Gentry Underwood explains why good design is based upon constant iteration. He sheds light on the importance of having a desire in solving a particular problem. We also talk about getting acquired, working at IDEO, and the role Human Centred Design played within Mailbox.

"Some men just want to watch the world burn." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efHCdKb5UWc

What is the motivation for Kicktrolling? Who would a kicktroller be? I don't get it.

i) Person who just wants to be a dick. ii) Person with personal vendetta against the project creator iii) Company looking to fend off competitors much the way of clicking lots of links to burn through a competitors ppc on adword.

David Karp agrees with you

“you’d have to be out of your mind to live in Palo Alto.”

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/11/david-karp-is-...

Good work dude!

There is a link to a .pdf two page resume on his site.

great! Thx for update. (I don't live in the US, so don't know much about the industry there.)

Desire Paths 101. See Tom Hulme talk. http://mcbennett.wordpress.com/2013/09/17/tom-hulme-john-mae...

Taking inspiration from Urban Design where a path runs along the outside of a park expecting everyone to take the architected route. However people cut through the middle when they don't like the given route, following their desire path. Over time, the grass wastes away from the thousands of footsteps and bicycles that take their preferred route. The park owners have a choice to put up a sign saying "Do not walk on the grass" or altenatively pave the new path.

In business, when consumers take a new path, there is an option to pave their path as a new product line. Watch Tom's talk above to see how Facebook didn't pave their users desire path giving space for snapchat to grow. An example where a business put up the "do not walk on the grass" sign is Kickstarter who blogged, "Kickstarter is not a store," moving away from the desire path.

In this case, the CEO of T-mobile has helped a user cross the middle of the park, the question remains whether he should pave it.

What about a simple porter analysis of Apple, still in a strong position, but not as strong as several years ago.

Power of New Entrants: Xiaomi

Power of Substitutes: Google Glass

Power of Customers: demand for low cost iphone

Power of Suppliers: Moving back to US manufacturing?

Power of Competitors: All the big tech companies.

Also a fantastic article on Disruption from The Kernal. Key insight is that companies are very aware of disruption considering it irresponsible for any board of a large technology incumbent not to have read 'Innovator's Dilemna.'

THE STORY WE ALL KNOW "Kodak built film cameras, and made money on the film, the classic “Gillette” business model, and was so obsessed with this profit stream that it completely missed the tidal wave of digital photography and the internet"

INTERESTING ADDITION "The next step for digital photography wasn’t the internet. It was point-and-shoots. Canon and Fujitsu. Kodak was so focused on disrupting itself and not falling into the trap of the innovator’s dilemma that it lost a grip on its core business. It turned out that in order to remain relevant in the internet age, it just had to make good cameras."

http://www.kernelmag.com/comment/analysis/4696/the-man-who-g...

Basic point made is that a user cares more about the design of a product that matches our desires, that is more human, more elegant over whether it simply goes faster.

"We no longer want a faster computer, but one we like more."

They do, but no surprise that they do.

Had a really interesting conversation the other night about sites that offer consumers an honest ranking of things such as a place to eat. When they monetise through businesses that care little for the honest rankings and only desire strength for their own personal ranking, there is a conflict of interest. When power is placed completely in hands of consumer, power corrupts them too as they demand a free meal otherwise leaving a bad comment despite recieving good service. I have talked to hotel managers who have been threatened with bad comments despite no problem in service and had no choice but to not charge for the room due to the dishonesty.

The big question here is how do sites generate a site that is honest providing a good service that can be monetised successfully and cannot be gamed by either business or consumer. Any good examples?

Also HackFwd have an awesome public set of videos from their events. I really hope they keep them online! http://hackfwd.com/pmm/

My favourites are by Tom Hulme, Rob Fitzpatrick, Mikko Jarvenpaa, Paulina Bozek, Mike Butcher and Florian Heinemann.

Interesting case study of a company that was a leading trophy company in the US in the 70's or 80's that had a model that worked. They had a single production location that shipped nationally across the United States.

They thought they could do the same in Europe, immediately running into problems as they quickly found they would need a distributor in each country which would take a rather large chunk out of their margin. They still proceeded and found that everyone had different tastes, the Italian's liked something flamboyant, the French preferred something classy, the English wanted something Iconic and the German's wanted something Minimalist. In the US, everyone wanted the same thing. In short, the company went bankrupt in both regions due to the errors made in Europe.

There are language differences, cultural differences, tax and regulation differences, additional costs of multiple companies to be setup during expansion and the list keeps going on. Startups stuggle to scale in Europe for very clear reasons, it's much harder to do so. With a small team and little resources, a company can address the entire United States, in Europe they simply can't (of course there are a few lucky exceptions).

So as a European, what has Europe needed for the last two decades to be competitive? Quite obviously, it is to level the playing field and remove those barriers to zero. Until that happens, European Startups will never be able to scale to the size or with the speed of their US competitors. While I think European founders are as smart as American founders, by the points above, does that even matter?

Easier translation such as http://www.reverbeo.com (Friends of mine) will take care of the language barriers on web businesses. Higher levels of customisation on both software and hardware will take care of the stylisic differences. But the regulation challenges require EU intervention and we've been waiting a long time for them to do anything.

In this interview, is there a relationship between a TV pilot and a lean startup MVP where Spacey is against such a pursuit preferring more visionary endeavours that take longer to get feedback?

I'm not too worried about titles either, just what does the person who identifies in that role do? Pre-investment, they are a builder in many cases who makes code or makes a community or makes something. In each of the stages, it seems that the role changes radically.

Possibly, but that is just isolating the topic of motivation. A company with an indirect strategy with a world-changing mission and great corporate culture is likely to attract better talent in the first place which will perform better when on fire.

Theory of Obliquity by Prof John Kay at Oxford is really interesting. In lay terms it suggests that if you choose to lose weight for example (the direct route), you are unlikely to succeed. Alternatively, if you choose to become a great cyclist, you are likely to lose weight, (the oblique route.)

Prof. Kay uses ICI which was a leading pharma company in the UK to explain obliquity in business. In 1987 ICI's mission statement read 'we make awesome products and innovate new drugs where possible to do good.' (wasn't in those words, but that was the message.) In 1994, they changed their mission statement to 'we exist to increase shareholder value,' and dropped the rest. The company went bankrupt not long after. The oblique route resulted in one of the largest companies in their field with the highest shareholder value, the direct route resulted in bankruptcy, i.e. the absolute lowest shareholder value.

Increasing shareholder value is only a motivation of the shareholders not surprisingly. Employees and customers have little interest in increasing shareholder value directly (unless they are significant shareholders) yet it is through motivating customers and employees that a company will grow and increase shareholder value the most. When longtime ICI employee Sir James Black (Nobel Prize Winner) was asked to change from making awesome drugs to pushing existing drugs on a roadshow to increase shareholder value, he left the company. He later created more blockbuster drugs in his new role, but not at ICI. Thus in VC funded and non-VC funded companies, I believe the goal should include to produce a great lifestyle for the team.

@thruflo

I have a mild knowledge of open source, but never felt Opendesk nor Wikhouse ever truly embraced open source despite using the name for kudos, nor do I feel the team operate with a true open source mentality. The Creative commons site is explicit that the CC BY SA license is their license that is closest to open source and do not say that all CC licenses are open source. For me, the precense of the NC tag has always torn me in different directions wondering do I understand this stuff well enough as my understanding is that Opendesk is not actually open, (nor is wikihouse).

With my own separate endevour, I have thought alot about this and wonder what parts of our furniture and the furniture of our community should we open source and what parts should we be opposed to. Opensourcing the design project is fundamentally destructive to the current model of design of which they are pro's and con's to that project, the main pro being that you potentially enlarge the size of the design field which would have be proven, the con being that you discount the value of the design where designers are potentially unable to pay their cost of living which is not a glorious project.

Opensouring CNC joints in a beautiful collection is much closer to what I intend to mean by open source, i.e that the components are open sourced so that community and other communities can create great designs. I believe that primitives should also be opensourced that are not attributed to any designer such as square table with no design thought, much of what may be perceived as classical woodworking designs that have been around for decades if not centuries. But as for opensourcing the final design of the desk you guys have designed, I am fundamentlly against, nevertheless you haven't open-sourced it yet, merely used open source in name for now.

They are awesome, I spent a couple months living with the Tom, renting a room in his flat before he setup Shutl.

Just setting up a shopify site. Had to do my first delivery (from a kickstarter) and courier messed quite a few things up, hence why I ask. Thanks for feedback.

did I do it right, don't think it worked.

(also how do you put a question in Ask HN?)

Love their video. Also must be taken into account that many campaigns have strong existing communities such as this one.

Launchrock recently migrated their platform fabsie.com works launchrock.fabsie.com works www.fabsie.com seems to be broken. will figure it out as soon as I can.

Having a great idea is indeed a small part of the pie that won't take off unless you learn to hustle. Part of that is knowing the right people of which I felt I knew some relatively important people pre-kickstarter, but they didn't help at all during the campaign. I used Topsy as mentioned in the post and twitter to seek out people / influencers / bloggers / journalists that I did not previously know.

A platform that allows ideas to rise to the top of the pile without any hustle is indeed interesting. In the past you could hand an idea over to someone to do it for you, but they would take the majority of equity and it wasn't a great deal for creators. The opportunity now is that you can use Kickstarter (and other platforms for other things) that take a much smaller cut, but they leave that hustle to you. I hope my blogpost can aid other creators in learning how to run their campaigns, but there is always the old option in handing your idea over to someone to do the execution/hustle, thereby leaving very little ownership for you, (around 5%).