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mscantland

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QuickBooks proper is nasty, but one very compelling reason many businesses use it is that you can hand over your "QuickBooks file" to almost any accounting firm; they can do your taxes or solve an accounting problem.

This is hugely valuable for companies like mine that don't have full time accountants but do have an office manager that does bookkeeping.

I wish this company the best of luck, but I'm not sure how much room their is between firms that are outgrowing spreadsheets but don't yet need something a big accounting firm will also use.

I think the very biggest companies (with hundreds/thousands of users) would require a long sales cycle, but I would start by ignoring that market since those companies aren't going to move to this new upstart until it has some history.

So the bulk of this business probably starts with individual accounts and small departments/companies (<50 users). This group is making purchase decisions much like consumers. That group can be sold on the web, and just needs bulk pricing options to feel good about their purchase decision.

This is a market that is ripe for innovation. The large incumbents are very expensive and offer an experience that borders on abuse.

My company has about a half-dozen heavy users and we spend more than $300 per month on this junk. A lighter-weight $20/month solution could do very well I think. Here would be my feature list:

* Cross-platform HTML5, not a java plugin or Flash

* Cope with multiple screens and very high screen resolutions for presenters (so viewers on crappy hardware don't suffer)

* Simple interface. Nothing but "share screen" and "invite participant." No chat, surveys, hand raising or other cruft.

You would also want to support corporate pricing as a lot of users are at big cos.

This is very cynical. Are we really to believe that the only part of Obama's reaction one would find lacking is his lack of theatrical anger?

I would argue that his actions are coming up short too. The simple fact of the matter is that Obama is presiding over a country that is allowing its largest businesses to gain immense profits at the cost of its taxpayers. A few examples include Goldman which is arbitraging the markets with funds borrowed at a near-zero Fed discount window and oil companies such as BP whose profits (6.2 billion EBIT in Q1) clearly indicate that the leases on which it is drilling are priced far too low and don't possibly cover the external costs of drilling.

I suspect that not charging overdraft fees will result in adverse selection-people that have no money and therefore can't be used to build a loanable savings asset.

I really hope this works, but due to switching costs, BankSimple will have a very uphill road to climb if they aren't planning to pay very high interest rates or otherwise attract people with some savings.

Could be wrong, but don't think anyone at Innova is involved with Cohpy. We contribute at OWASP (both corporate and time), and have been a big supporter of PHPMeetup in the past.

We'll give Cohpy a look.

Sorry, locals or willing to move only for these positions. We do have a remote employee, but I wouldn't want to do it unless the dev started off local

We're adding to our team at http://www.covermymeds.com. This product is about a year old and has significant revenue. Our major effort is building our API and a real-time processing system. Looking for thoughtful pros, not egos and code ninjas. Mostly Python, working with a talented team.

Parent company: http://www.innova-partners.com/main/developers. We have virtually no turnover and treat people with respect.

Contact mscantland at covermymeds dot com.

Edit: Columbus, Ohio

The main use-case I see for this is physical objects which already have a barcode. If you were going to go to the trouble of barcoding something yourself (e.g., business card), you'd be better off using a URL, where you'd be able to control what gets associated with the barcode, to say nothing of avoiding the chicken-egg issues with something like this.

This is why the Ruby (esp. Rails) community only works for startups that pay in "equity."

Down-mod if you want, but I've been running a 20 employee company for more than six years and have recently moved contract work from PHP to Python due to the unprofessionalism in the Ruby community (I would have preferred Ruby if it had a better scene).

Our internal products are also mostly PHP or Python. Same reason.

New Urbanism 16 years ago

I've been going to Seaside FL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaside,_Florida), one of the early NU towns for many years, and just had my wedding there.

The highway 30A coast, which includes Seaside has at least four examples of New Urbanist towns within a 20 mile stretch that is all bike-able. If you're into this kind of thing, it makes a great vacation spot.

If you want activities or restaurant recommendations, check out my wedding website which is still up: http://mattandmeara.com/more/

Your tax dollars at work.

I would be for this expenditure if it were likely to involve real communication. Instead, your money will be spent to pander to the proletariat and to oversimplify issues that align with Obama getting re-elected.

When a customer is going to spend more than $100k, they look for a relationship to minimize risk. Golf and similar activities are what the buyer demographic does with their friends.

Do people really think that customers that sign up for $10/mo "to-do" apps are more sophisticated buyers than enterprise customers?

In my experience, many people who complain about the enterprise sales process are failing for their lack of real domain expertise not their distaste for "schmoozing." They are also usually underestimating the intelligence of their customers and unwilling to build relationships.

Disclaimer: My companies do enterprise software. Edit: I've also played golf exactly once in seven years since we started.

It is insulting to this company's employees that Schwartz still doesn't get it. This tweet is characteristic of his failure to view the world as it really is, and to sell something that customers will pay for.

Oracle, IBM, HP, Apple, etc are not going out of business in this economy.

Investing billions to give software away (Java, MySQL, NetBeans, etc) in some far-fetched hope that it would cause customers to buy extremely expensive systems hardware didn't work, and everyone seems to know this but Schwartz.

We've been in this space for a long time, doing both consulting work and two healthcare web services.

It is usually a mistake to think of HIPAA as some sort of over-arching checklist of requirements such as encryption schemes.

Instead, your goal is to put together a privacy and compliance plan that meets the HIPAA Rule as well as state and local regulations, which sometimes are more specific or strict. I find that the best way to start is to think about how your service uses data, who are your users, and what are they doing with the data (sharing it with others, keeping track of it, submitting claims through your system, etc.). Once you've figured that out, use the flowchart on the HHS website to determine if you are a covered entity under the HIPAA rules: http://www.cms.hhs.gov/HIPAAGenInfo/Downloads/CoveredEntityc...

Once you've determined if you are a covered entity, you can narrow the parts of the Rule in which you need to become expert. Depending upon your business, you may determine that you are a healthcare clearinghouse, a provider, a payor, or not a covered entity at all. Each of these entities have specific requirements, and you'll need to work with these requirements as well as fill in details in your privacy plan so that you can act within the law and also be a good data steward for your users. If you are not a covered entity, you still may need to comply with some parts of the Rule because you are acting as a Business Associate (BA) of a covered entity. Or you may not be a business associate-Google Health for example does not consider itself to be a BA.

The HHS website (http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/understanding/index.htm...) is a good place to start. After that, the HIPAA Rule is formally implemented in 45 CFR Part 160, and Subparts A and E of Part 164:

* http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/waisidx_07/45cfr160_07.ht...

* http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/waisidx_07/45cfr164_07.ht...

Privacy rules are just one of the complex parts of healthcare. This is a huge part of the economy, and a large amount of the inefficiency isn't because someone hasn't created a web service to streamline it. Healthcare data aren't like banking transactions-there is a complex vocabulary and making it machine readable has been a huge challenge and isn't anywhere near being solved. There are also many embedded interests (employees with jobs they don't want to lose as well as big companies with profit motives). The upside is that if you do something successful, you will improve the lives of many.

Best of luck with your venture, and get in touch with any questions (mscantland at innova-partners dot com).

Censorship flamewar 16 years ago

Disney made money from proprietary content last quarter (they paid $0.35/share dividend), and censorship helped the Chinese Communist government remain in power. So the system "works" in the sense that it performs as designed. I don't think I asserted anything that isn't obvious, and that wasn't Bucheit's point.

The question Bucheit raises is whether copyright protection is bad because censorship is bad? Which isn't fair because the ends are always more important than the means when human rights are at stake.

For example, if Bucheit wanted to show copyright protection in a different light, perhaps he could have shown its virtue by comparing it to keeping secrets about underground railroad stations?

But showing counter-examples is merely proving Godwin's law. Which I think is what Bucheit's analogy showed to begin with.

Censorship flamewar 16 years ago

Elegant, and one seems to follow from the other. The only problem is that the analogy is wrong.

Copyright seeks to improve customer choices by creating profit incentives. Those who are willing to invest can create, and those who are willing to buy, vote with their wallets. One hand washes the other, and copyright law simply maintains the proper incentives for the system to work.

Censorship in China seeks to maintain a central focus of power by suppressing alternative ideas or organizations, which when shown the light of day might be more popular. There is an inherent conflict of interest which leads to depriving citizens of the ability to control how they are governed.

So whereas copyright preserves profit incentives but leaves the market to decide the winner, censorship in China puts one product on the table (CPC/PLA), and prevents others from being considered.

This is really nice. We are going to try it for hard-to-reproduce browser issues in one of our apps.

Feature request: Could you add some meta-data to the notification email with user-agent info? Would be nice to get browser, OS, screen res, js and flash support, and anything you can get about network properties (DSL, dial-up, hostname and location, etc).

But our clients use XML-RPC

Touché.

Client: But your design is in Latin, which I don't speak...

Engineer: Yes, but Twitter is written in Latin...

Client: You're fired.

Client needs as an afterthought are why engineers are considered by most to be professionals, while programmers are considered fodder for outsourcing to low-wage countries.