koichi

Does this mean that hats are going to be the new Greek economy?

The reviews are where the real fun is at.

Why was I just taken to meatspin.com????

Company name, app names, etc...?

Microsoft & Facebook are pretty buddy-buddy too

I don't understand what you're trying to say... if only you could tell it to me in some kind of visual, easy to understand format...

I agree, taste is super hard to figure out -

Maybe if you ran some kind of candy A/B Test.

Send two different kinds of envelopes to people, and keep track of who got what. Then, send a survey to these people to have them rate the candy's they received. After a few months, you should start to have a general idea on what types of candies are liked more and what types are liked less. Even though you'll never have a taste-consensus, you can get a general idea, and modify what kinds of candy you send and the amounts of the kinds of candies you do send.

Or, another way would be to send all the same candy to everyone and send out a survey. Then the next two weeks send another set of candy and run another survey.

Whatever you do / don't do, getting stats and info is really nice.

You can't, unfortunately, please everyone :( so might as well please a group of people _a lot_ and get a group of really evangelical fans, I think.

To get more subscribers, I think you ought to be:

- Writing about Japanese candy. - Making videos about Japanese candy. - etc.

Doing this will attract people interested in Japanese candy, and will pull in potential and real subscribers. Over the long term I think this could be good. I also think the topic of "Japanese Candy" is big enough for you to write/video about it once or twice a week.

As for the service itself - I think it lends well to word of mouth, or at least it could. People get their candy and share it with others, and those others ask where you got their candy. I was a subscriber for probably 4-5 months, and at least two of my friends signed up because of my word of mouth.

Thing is, all three of us have unsubscribed - and for all three of us, it actually came down to the quality of the candy (or perhaps, it came down to our tastes in candy). I know originally (and maybe still) your thing was about sending people Japanese candy they can't get outside of Japan too easily. That's good and all, but in the end, after a while we all realized the candy itself in terms of quality / taste was hit or miss... and with subscription, you can't have too many misses before someone unsubscribes. I'd say I personally enjoyed the candy I got half the time, so I just unsubscribed because it wasn't worth it.

I think finding candy that people will like rather than candy people find different or original is much more important. I think that's the difference between gaining more subscribers naturally through word of mouth and losing subscribers.

At least, that's my opinion on it. I do hope you start revving sales up again, though. I loved the candy when I loved the candy, and I think it's a good idea, but between myself and friends we unsubscribed because we didn't always love the candy :(

They Are: The time selector button has a snowflake, and there's a snowflake button that makes videos snow.

For a good time click on "Menu" as well... the one menu item kind of runs away from your mouse.

http://shigezo-pdx.com/index.php?option=com_oziogallery2&...

Look out behind you! It's a Creeper!

actually seems to be going up and down over and over for me now... Getting 500 Internal Server Errors, messages on Maintenance, and the actual blog post depending on when I refresh.

I'm glad books aren't priced like that - I would not be able to afford half the books I read :(

I think there's also a lot to be said in regards to how much value a reader has, too. As in, if there are more readers, will it make me, the author, more "rich" in other ways too (popularity, Twitter followers, etc.) so that when the next ebook comes along I already have thousands of people interested in buying my book that didn't exist before. A low price tag increases readers, which I think have huge individual values in themselves.

Now, if the book is extremely niche ... almost ridiculously so ... then a $3000 book probably would be okay, but in general I think this isn't going to happen too often.

$100 is way too high, I think. Two sides of the coin:

-

Sell it for $100:

1) X number of people will buy it, but it probably won't be that many.

-

Sell it for $0.99:

1) Many people will buy it

2) Many people will know your name & become interested in your work and future work

3) You'll gather a much bigger following, transfer this to Twitter, Facebook, etc.

4) When your next ebook comes out, all the people who liked this one will buy the next one in addition to new people, meaning second e-book sales will be much higher (if this one is successful)

5) Lots of sales = possibility of speaking engagements, further validating you in your field.

6) You might make less money (I'm guessing you'd make more this way), but you make so much more in other benefits.

The benefits for not selling at $99 just seem too high to me. I'd rather have 10,000 people read my book at $0.99 than 100 people read my book at $99. I'd even rather 5,000 people read it at $0.99 (making half the money), because that means you have 5,000 more people interested in what you do for your next ebook.

Good luck!

Not that Yolk is showing up high in search results or anything, but Basecamp, Campfire, Highrise, Dropbox, etc., all have (or didn't have) premium domains and are doing fine.

Besides outliers and exceptions, yes, those are probably fairly good predictors of success.

The ONLY Japanese friends I have on Facebook are entrepreneurs and biz professionals. Pretty much lines up with this article if you ask me.

On a related note, 8 percent of Internet users are somebody's grandmother.

I think you can play it free in your browser. Works surprisingly well, actually.

http://blurst.com/raptor-safari/

My favorite Blurst game, though (not in the app store yet) is Minotaur China Shop. Doesn't get better than this.

http://blurst.com/minotaur-china-shop/

Wow... Seriously? Is this the issue WakeMate emailed about (I'm guessing it is) or is this another?

I'd worry about this more if my WakeMate would actually arrive... :(

This is pretty sad, though... I've been cheering for WakeMate since the beginning, but it's getting harder and harder... Are they at least sending new charger bricks at some point, perhaps a year or so from now (har har har)?

Dang. Can IE9 handle this level of CSS?

I'm hoping that we'll see more of a shift towards individuals writing about more niche subjects. For example, those learning biology will learn from smaller books, or, more likely, ebooks that cover specific things, like "photosynthesis." These smaller books, in theory, would be written by better writers focusing on very specific things, which means each section or thing students learn about is a better experience, and written by people passionate about a smaller subject. These will be cheaper, though the big downside is organizing all these smaller texts into a "class," though I think the experience with the books would overall be better.

Big textbooks are just so... drab and generalized. The self-publishing revolution is coming, and I'm hoping a lot of passionate experts take advantage of it and write smaller textbooks that teachers can use and students can buy (for a lot less).

Well butter my biscuit

When I saw this article, I thought it said "Monty Python," not "Modern Python." Sad.

P.S. The parrot is not dead.

You could try a different keyboard layout. Dvorak is pretty good, and there are a couple others as well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard

Won't help your current symptoms get better, but could help in the future.

When I use my iPhone to play this game HTML5 side always wins!

I think "FaceTime" is really important for them to brand, and by mixing it with iChat you're taking away from that.

In the keynote, Jobs called the iSight camera "FaceTime" camera, even. I think we'll see a shift towards FaceTime in a lot of things.

I'm sad YouTube won't be a part of this :(

Definitely better for that - I can feel good playing one game and stopping, which is essentially 15 minutes or so. I'm glad I never played WoW... sounds like it could be bad in terms of being a big time suck :(