ranvir

Having been through this, merely contacting the potential acquirers, confidentially or not, gives the perception that the startup is or will be out of cash, anyway. Every remotely acquisitive company is getting several of these inbound missives every day and they always assume the startup is dying. I don't see much downside to a different tack at this point and, if anything, it may serve to jump-start the auction process.

Yes, I believe that's exactly what's happening. Investors as a whole are able to shape their own reality: If enough of them talk about valuations taking a southward turn or a "bubble popping," then it can quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The opposite case is also true, of course.

$8k annually for 650 users is about $1 per month per user vs a $15 list price. Is that right?

Chute (YC W12) - http://www.getchute.com/jobs - San Francisco, CA

Senior Frontend Developer, Full Time

Chute helps brands, retailers, and publishers ingest, manage, and display real-time visual content on their sites, social channels, in-venue, and even in their advertising. We provide a fully customizable cloud platform and a suite of brand and publisher friendly applications. We currently work with some of the world’s biggest brands, agencies, publishers, and developers, including NBC, Turner, Condé Nast, NY Times, Huffington Post, Hearst, the NBA, Nike, Starbucks, Live Nation, AEG, Universal Music Group, and nearly 4,000 others. http://www.getchute.com/

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We're hunting for someone with a passion for well tested, clean front end code. We're building out lots of new pieces with a combination of Backbone and Marionette.js and looking for someone to help guide the future of these various apps. You should be comfortable with Jasmine and ideally you've worked on a production site using Backbone.

Would love to read that article if you have a link.

It's a topical story for the day, so we thought it was worth posting. The story is being told with photos.

Thanks for the question. Avatars.io is one service we offer as part of our broader API and family of media services - see getchute.com. While we will maintain a generous free tier, we will eventually charge for access to the underlying API. Avatars.io itself is not a standalone business but is, however, a great way for developers to get started with Chute.

This sounds like a huge coup for Square. And a little surprising that they could actually (or already) provide card processing at a better rate than Starbucks could negotiate on its own.

Our goal at Chute is to provide the complete infrastructure around handling media files. See our other products at picture.io, avatars.io, and even slidechute.com. We think photo and video assets require unique workflow and processing and we're focused on providing that.

Good point. Changed it to "select photos." Thanks.

Absolutely. That's already built into the Chute SDK, actually. We're still polishing the docs (we haven't formally launched the API yet), but the functionality is there. Feel free to email me directly if you'd like any help.

We understand your concern. We're actually already working on the ability for each app to put its own credentials in for each service. We plan on releasing a lot of helpful components built on top of our API, and we understand that means earning people's trust over time. Hopefully you'll consider us again at some point in the future.

To your second point, I should probably clarify. If anyone begins by using Photo Picker+ we will grandfather them in and never charge for that use of the API. In the future there may be other paid components or features of the API that a developer may choose to add, but that will have no bearing on your use of PP+. Thanks a lot.

Hi there. I'm one of the co-founders of Chute. We're not planning on making money off of this service, per se. We are planning on making money at some point from use of the broader Chute API as well as several other products we're launching, which we hope people will begin to discover with Photo Picker+. Photo Picker+ is something we built as part of the overall (forthcoming) product offering, but we thought it would be useful on its own so we released it first as a separate library.

The Chute API will always have a free tier as well.

You can't yet select multiple images or video, but they're both on the roadmap. Thanks a lot.

For some reason we have a real problem hanging on to previous design iterations and we often want to go back and try incorporating things from previous iterations. This is going to be really cool, especially for distributed teams.