HN user
Also, is it recommendable for startups to apply to places like YC if this scenario is true for them? This has to happen all the time. What's to stop a VC from protecting his investment by giving a heads-up?
"If you plan on signing up for an incubator try to get an idea of how much time there is allocated by the various partners in the incubator for this mentoring and maybe talk to some alumni to see how well that worked out in practice."
This is actually something I have been wondering about. Can anyone give feedback in regard to this? pre-emptive thanks
First, "professional" and "amateur" should be defined to better make his point. Also, the examples are anecdotal.
Thank you.
I have been feeling a bit uneasy about the scope of our idea for some time now. Today I feel much better because we have managed to whittle it down to one core product that is easy to understand and sell. Everything is clearer now. However, now I'm unsure what to do with all the other stuff that we still plan on doing but just further down the road. Do I just leave it all out?
To make my point clearer... Originally we were saying we wanted to do X. To do X you need Y and Z but especially Y. After re-scoping we are now saying we will put all our focus on Y (which is a product in itself), see how things play out, then see about everything else.
I have a small doubt about one of the questions.
"Please tell us about the time you, ONE FOUNDER NAME, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage."
We are three founders. Do you want just one founder to answer or is this a mistake(probably mine)?
The article seems to generalize quite a bit. The effectiveness of a letter like this I imagine would depend quite a bit on who the target is.
I will agree with you on the points of nomenclature. But most of everything else you said sounds anecdotal stemming from a possible bad personal experience you might have had.
Just because HCI has been studied for several decades now, it doesn't mean it has been WIDELY studied, understood and applied as a concept from the beginning. Just because you have a friend who studied it back in the late 90's it doesn't mean that it was a subject matter covered nation-wide by all universities by any stretch of the imagination and even less so as a concept widely considered by developers of the time when making their interfaces for their digital products. The examples of good interface design from this era are few. The only point I was trying to make was that it is expected to have a lot of designers from non-computer science backgrounds working in these fields at the moment because they are new fields. 20, 30, years is nothing when thinking about the lifetime of a profession. I'm older than the first Xerox GUI. It is arrogant to say that all or most of these designers only think in terms of "art". It only shows your possible(I dont really know you) lack of understanding of both design and art.
Lastly, you mentioned how the effectiveness of design is not quantifiable which leads me to believe you diminish the importance design for this reason. As you probably know but may have have forgotten, in HCI it is impossible to divorce the human aspect from the computer aspect of the theory. Humans are unpredictable, often preferring to go about doing things counter-intuitively or in surprising ways. These decisions are mostly influenced by social or genetic predispositions often which are unpredictable. There will never be 1 right answer or formula to anything regarding human interaction with anything. Yet, somehow through proper design, developer's and designers have increasingly been able manage this and adapt as things evolve quickly.
This it a lot less true today than it would have been several years ago. I'm a designer and most of the younger designer's I know are comfortable programming in several languages.
Anyway, your statement is an oversimplification. You could also say that the website the designer made would have better usability and be more engaging for the users (but perhaps buggy), while the developer would have a well coded site that no one (except maybe other developers) would want to use.
Keep in mind /UI/UX/Interaction design is a new thing. I'm a UX designer but when I was in school nothing of the sort was offered. Designing for the internet was just then becoming a concept. Most of my studies were focused on print! I would say that this is true for a lot of interaction designers with more than 5 years under their belt.
FTA:
"It is widely accepted that the spark for the recent dramatic events in Egypt came from last month's uprising in Tunisia. If people power could bring down one regime perhaps it could do the same elsewhere.
Many of the necessary conditions were already in place: public fury at years of political repression, an economy that rewarded a corrupt elite and kept a majority in poverty, and widespread loathing for a leader clinging to office.
Could Egyptians be persuaded to overcome 30 years of fear and apathy and take to the streets?
It is no accident that this question has been answered, emphatically. Over the course of a remarkable fortnight, People & Power has been filming exclusively behind the scenes with a core group of young activists from the April 6th opposition movement.
As Elizabeth Jones reveals, they have spent a long time planning and organising for these momentous days, taking lessons from other revolutions about how to mobilise popular support."
My setup: Device = TV with Computer, Software = Plex and sometimes VLC, Source = Torrents
I bet that this will be the case (unofficial streaming or downloaded content viewed on a computer) for most people outside the US.
While I'm not saying 600-700 is fair price, I'm sure a lot of money went into R&D. I wouldn't doubt that R&D accounts for a significant portion of the difference in price. It would be interesting to know how much profit they are making on each device.
Which, if true, will bring even deeper market penetration. Never thought iPhone discussions could sound so sleazy.
I would have to agree with you. It is not last.fm because there is no scrobbler. What would really be interesting is a scrobbler that worked across all platforms including browsers. As far as I know Boxee's solution forces you to use their software to watch videos if you want to have them scrobbled.
I wonder why Google broke from Android UI branding with Honeycomb. It doesn't even seem to be consistently applied throughout. Definitely not an improvement.
Techstars is listed as a committed member. I wonder if YC is interested at all?
This is the question that will be the game changer: Will the current ad-break-supported television model even be around in 20 years?
I can't imagine that this model will hold up. Will the broadcasters eventually be cut out of the equation except for maybe live events?
Well thats just it. I don't think people will be using the TV to surf the web in the same way you do on your laptop. You dont really "surf" the web on your phone do you? Yet, you dont second guess the merging of the phone with the web. Generally with the phone, the web is used to do specific tasks. Whether its read a favorite blog or looking up something on wikipedia you aren't really "surfing" but more task oriented. It makes sense to use the internet to deliver content(video for example) to your television, however the experience will be completely different from a PC. In my eyes, this is the inevitability; especially if interaction is supported by a tablet or some other touch device. The question that remains is what form that interaction will take.