newmediaclay

I don't think it makes sense to term this prediction in price of gas. Even as they say in the study, one of the most weighted factors in a purchasing decision is the number of charging stations available. It's the cart and the horse, even if gas is $5/gallon, consumers won't be super motivated to buy cars b/c of a lack of charging stations, and charging stations won't be built due to a lack of existing demand.

These things need to happen together to make the change, not just the gas price hike. Like others have alluded to, there needs to be more of a cultural shift or incentives from the government.

I think it makes sense to do this study with more focus on number of charging stations or public/private investment in the space rather than gas price.

Absurd. It's also awesome that they continue to mock the Street by giving their ridiculously low estimates for the succeeding quarter.

I totally agree. We have over 100 domains and 10 SSL certs with GoDaddy. Sure it gets a little annoying opting out of upsells, setting the domains to manual renewal, and changing the registration to 1 year with every purchase, but it adds a net of maybe 15 seconds to the purchase. That's well worth the savings and the flexibility they actually provide through DNS controls.

Their customer service is great and you can always get in touch with someone if you need any kind of support. Also, the iPhone app is really great. I don't know why that doesn't get more attention, but it's the most powerful Domain or DNS management app I've seen out there.

Like Callmeed, if you want to avoid them 100% b/c of Parsons, then I respect that. Otherwise, they're a budget provider that does a good job when stacked up against other budget providers in different verticals.

Great article in the NYT the other day about how these protectionist policies are going to prevent China from investing their massive cash reserves in US ventures: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/04/business/global/04yuan.htm....

This sounds a lot like the design studio at Apple. It's basically Jony Ive and ~10 designers who have full rights to prototype new products, even if they're completely random. I think a telling difference is the fact that this is a part of the core myth of Apple and the emphasis on beautiful design and small teams. It's not some hidden away secret.

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1367481/Appl... - "Jobs swiftly brought Ive in from the cold, moving the designers into a building on campus and investing in the latest rapid-prototyping equipment. He also beefed up Apple’s security, locking down the design studio to prevent leaks and installing a private kitchen so designers wouldn’t talk shop in public.

I don't think you've been a member of the community long enough, then. On YC, I certainly find a correlation between the points for a certain comment and the thoughtfulness put into that comment. This isn't true on other systems (reddit, etc) where clever noise is preferred to depth, but I generally find the most helpful comments getting voted up here.

The only other motive it suggests is garnering as much publicity for their innovation/company as they can. Facebook is notorious for being able to magnify a small announcement into a big event and reap the dividends -- remember the announcement of a redesign via 60 minutes? If you can get media and influences to come pay attention to cool stuff you're doing, why wouldn't you?

Totally agree. Some of the most influential "design" companies of the past decades weren't actually started by designers. Apple, Mint, etc. are renowned for their beauty, elegance, and design foresight, but that's just because their leaders had great taste not actual design skills.

> 5 years later? $350k minimum. There was a structural change in the economy that hasn't since reversed and doesn't look like ever reversing.

This was the fallacy that got the US into so much trouble. When real estate rises quickly and consistently, people think it's a guaranteed perpetuity. That's not the case. Any investment can go down in value and almost surely will at some point in time.

Here's a nice chart that shows the history of different investments, when and how much: http://tctechcrunch.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/facebookgrap...

Why is the premise of the title and article that DMB makes money and other bands don't? Plenty of other groups are raking it in.

While record sales might be down, I bet the amount of musicians able to make a living wage today, solely from music, is much greater than it was in 1990. This is due to the same technology and disruptiveness that has shaved 10% off the earnings of the megastars.

The story should be about how smaller bands are now able to be much more successful, not that a mega-band can still pull $70 million while others have been reduced to (gasp) $50 million.

Looking at Costolo's blog post, I was shocked to see they only have 350 employees!

Each employee represents $10 million in valuation.

Even if it doesn't live up to expectations of the cartoon, I can guarantee more people will download this app than would have without that promotion. How would that be a failure? Unless they spent a ton of time making the cartoon, which they don't mention doing.

It's not misleading, it's just not overly literal.

I think it's pretty easy to make the connection that Free Apps who also have revenue are selling things within the app.

Also, the article makes clear, it's not just people paying for the "full versions," but for virtual currencies, select features, etc.

"We have a very flexible work culture that is focused on putting good, smart people in positions where they have responsibility and trusting them to do a great job. What the ‘work’ actually looks like is much less important to us."

Wow. Can't put it much better than that.

I wish the site had a nice Features Area, so I could get an overview of what the product will do without actually signing up for it. I bet you'll lose some legitimate customers who would rather read about the product before making a "purchase" decision.

We didn't pay ourselves until the company was profitable. This was somewhat easier since we started the company while in college and had pretty much no standard of living to maintain.

We didn't take any funding, so it really wasn't possible to pay ourselves before becoming profitable unless we took on other debt. We decided we'd rather be individually poor with a company than individually wealthy with no company.

Once the company was profitable, the partners agreed on a goal-oriented pay structure. The base was under market value compared to other opportunities, but was still more than enough to easily live on. Then, by hitting reasonable revenue targets, salary would increase quickly.

Apple Stock vs. Netflix Stock over past 5 Years: http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...

There is not even close to enough information in this post to take it seriously. How big was the sample? Who were these taters? Are they even beer drinkers? Etc., etc.

Oh, most definitely. I think most of my requirements could be extended to just about any founder. I still spend probably 10% of my time making simple text changes in our CMS.

As a non-technical person with two technical co-founders, I found this to be a great list. Here are a few more from my experience as the non-technical founder:

1. The ability to explain things in simple, non-technical terms, even though the issues are usually neither of that. My company builds really cool things -- I need to sell those things to keep it alive. Without co-founders who can help me understand the details and speak at intelligently about our technology, I couldn't do half the pitches I do.

2. The willingness to do technical work "beneath them.". It's grand if your partner is a super talented developer, however, in a startup, they won't be able to always work on the exciting stuff due to bandwidth, and you'll need someone who is willing to deign to do some of the not so fun stuff. For example, the more technical of my partners will still pitch in with simple CSS and HTML tweaks when the rest of the team is stretched thin. His willingness to occasionally do BS that he did in his early teens allows us to keep moving forward with happy clients.

3. Patience and politeness! Your technical co-founder needs to have an attitude that makes them approachable and not intimidating. Staff and yourself need to feel comfortable asking them questions, even dumb ones.

This is a perfect example of why you need to be super wary when investing on your own -- the technology, resources, and knowledge in the hands of these big firms is simply unattainable by individuals.

Great post. This left me wondering -- what do you think would have happened if Yahoo had been successful in their $1b bid for Facebook? Would FB have turned the company around by instilling a start-up/hacker culture. Or would it have just died there, infected by Yahoo?

Amazing read. This also demonstrates another benefit of living near a college campus - acres and acres of beautiful land and architecture just begging to be walked through. It is no surprise to me that one of the few places he saw Americans walking through was a university. I live in Chapel Hill, NC just two blocks from the college and I find time almost every weekend to just stumble through campus to clear my mind, check out new buildings, and enjoy myself.

We've done both. For our corporate site, we designed it and for our product site, we went to an outside designer. We're getting ready to redesign our corporate site again, and I think this time we'll definitely look to outside help.

The reason isn't that we can't handle it (we're a web design and development firm), but because there are several immediate, key advantages gained by going with an outsider:

1. It doesn't come second to other client/product work. When doing the site for ourselves, it takes 3x as long, because we'll push it off when a new client project comes in or we need to make enhancements to our product. By hiring someone we avoid this conflict.

2. It's important to get an outside perspective. We're so ingrained in the day to day that we can lose site of how to present ourselves to our customers. Things that may seem really important to us may not matter at all to people shopping for web dev. A good designer is able to look past our subjectiveness and come up with a design that meets our consumers needs.

3. You care more when you're paying someone. When we do it ourselves, we often say "well, that's good enough for now, we can tighten it up later" -- later almost never comes. When you're paying someone $5,000 out of your pocket, you'll make sure they hit the nail on the head the first time and be more willing to critique them than your own team.

GroupOn isn't taking a small cut, they're taking 50% of each deal.

Your theory may be correct if they were only offering the discount, but in addition to the 30% a business has to offer, they then have to pay 50% of the deal to GroupOn. So, GroupOn allows them to eliminate ad costs via the discount, but then tacks their fee on top of it, which crushes any hope of margins for the business.

The polite thing usually doesn't make good business sense. Ask Bill Gates.

Google put absolutely 0 muscle behind this product. Android got front page placement on Google and it has now overtaken iPhone. They either didn't truly believe in Wave or the marketing team just made a huge gaffe by not even making a half ass attempt to push this product to the consumer world.

http://whytherearenogirls.blogspot.com/. Enough said.

Make that Ten Thousand and One. This post worked on me -- awesome ideas.

I especially like that you just don't default to the blog for all content and announcements. Diversifying your news and updates across multiple channels is a great way to make it more accessible in some cases and always reaching out to new audiences.

As someone who is working on getting a product ready for launch (http://gethifi.com), this post was extremely helpful.