samaparicio

Of companies mentioned in the article, the asymmetric contributions to OSM that bother me the most are AllTrails and Strava - 2 companies that heavily rely on trail data sourced from OSM.

AllTrails does close to zilch to help put trails into the maps, even though the majority of trails are user-generated content.

Strava has let "Slide", their one project that could help put trails on the map, die an ungracious death.

If you build a whole business model on top of free data, it may be worth considering improving that data.

Will you go back and do my classification for tax year 2018?

Liked this post. Would love more detail on GPU query offloading and on how different the engine looks compared to one that would run queries on the CPU, as that seems to be the primary innovation

Shoutout to PiHole - https://pi-hole.net/ which falls under the category of DNS blockers. One tiny Raspberry Pi can provide adblocking to all the devices in a network and radically speeds up page loading.

True, you can't block trackers on domains that aren't blacklisted, but on the other hand you can block trackers for all devices on the network.

I had Ghostery installed for years (gets one of the highest blocking marks) but I didn't like that it slowed down Chrome, hogged a lot of memory, and has the capability to send traffic back to a company.

It could. It could also force the startup to hand over control of the defense (which the startup would most likely be ill-suited to control) and therefore control the defense strategy.

All that is required is a big enough defense fund that acts as a true deterrent.

Mind you, if the startup loses it doesn't mean that it would not be responsible for the payout - but at least the startup wouldn't fold simply because the costs of defending itself are out of reach.

There are several ways of reaching a distributed consensus about that, like proof of stake.

It is also conceivable that it would be in the fund's interest to defend all lawsuits. That would provide the largest deterrent, since the lion's share of today's suits are without merit, and the cost of defense would be considered the operating cost of the fund.

What the trolls exploit is the assymetry between a defendant without resources and their own resources which are solely dedicated to this.

Without all the licensing fees that startups pay to settle the alleged infringement the business model for trolls would stop working.

A lot of startups get sued by Non Practicing Entities (trolls) that have no operating business to speak of. That provides the slimmest counterattack surface - so not sure how useful it is to have a portfolio to hit back.

I think a better defense mechanism would be a legal defense fund that would force the trolls to make their case at trial, to go through discovery, to bring expert witnesses.

Because the law firms that represent them work on contingency, this would effectively cut into the potential licensing fees, and make trolling less profitable (and less likely).

Also, a lot of trolls extract patent licensing fees out of startups for patents that should have never been granted, and that deserve to be invalidated (e.g with prior art), but the process of getting a patent thrown out is expensive, so having a fund would greatly help.

The other strategy that could work is to get all the startups that get sued by a troll for a specific infringement and make a sort of "reverse class action" - making it possible for the startups to re-use the same lines of argument, evidence, etc in their cases.

I see this type of refining activity on our payment gateway logs. I can only imagine what it looks like at a major online retailer or SAAS service. It just goes to show how fundamentally broken is payment card processing at the moment, and how ripe it is for disruption.

The charges against Ellsberg were dropped when it became public that the government had spied on Ellsberg by wiretapping Ellsberg's psychiatric visits.

So maybe all Snowden has to do is to show the government spying on him. Which would be kind of meta, as it would put the government on trial for PRISM itself, while probably acquitting Snowden

Just to point out that when you send a PDF document signed with Preview, I can open that document, extract your signature, and paste it in any other PDF that I want to. For me, this makes it too dangerous to use.

To me, the article is about 1 or 2 years too early. It provides great detail about all the pros and cons of judging the choice in advance, but no evidence that they made the right choice. Unless Spolsky is ready to start judging the performance of a sales team by some metric other than revenue.

I hate scanning. What a waste of time. I simply subscribed to http://shoeboxed.com, which syncs my scans to evernote and the other programs I use to manage the documents.

So pretty much I gather all the paper, put it in an envelope, and mail it once a month.

Better title: "Apple's insanely cool PR response"

Many ideas and business models take more than just a working product to fuel through an exit, that's where VCs can add a lot of value.

I can only speak for the first two categories... but if you look at this paragraph from the article:

> You have some people who are using the product, but who are probably not paying for it. It is a new idea. Perhaps a revolutionary idea. No one else is doing it. And it works.

That last bit of "it works" is really important. It doesn't mean that it works technically, what it means is that it works for people as a solution to the problem, that there is a good product/market fit if you want to use lean startup terminology.

I personally think this analysis is spot on.

My company, Ringio http://ringio.com , is at stage 2 "Working Product Stage" and it would have been impossible to raise any money in the last 6 months as we went from "napkin stage" to where we are today.

Anybody want to comment on their own fundraising experiences?

I guess you're saying that the article suffers from selection bias? Maybe.

But then you go on to state that "nobodody that I know" ... which is just the same kind of selection filter.

There are well over 50 million Garmin style GPS units in the market offering turn-by-turn navigation. While you may not have a need for them, they are providing widely adopted functionality, and since Android is the first mobile platform doing this, it is potentially disruptive.

Is the higher resolution display of the iPhone 4 disruptive, or an enhancement?

When we rounded up a few small business people, the things they pointed out that they liked best about Android and iPhone were even more basic than Chad Fowler's report

http://www.ringio.com/2010/06/29/iphone-vs-android-getting-o...

Pohl... I didn't blog about the hype. I wrote about real differences that make a user's life better.

For example: I said that Android's turn-by-turn navigation will lower the chances of you getting lost on the way to the airport.

Or that the pictures and videos you take on an iPhone will look better.

What I'm trying to get at is that a lot of these reviews (like Gruber's) focus on irrelevant or marginally relevant issues for real users.

It's great that the iPhone 4 has a hi-res display, but what is the impact?

I for one am getting tired of all this undeserved attention to things that don't make a difference in anybody's lives. This iphone doesn't make anybody more productive, more empowered, more effective, less frustrated. It doesn't free up time for anybody and doesn't do anything new.

In fact, I just wrote the complete opposite of Gruber article: a comparison of the GREAT things that are unique to iPhone and to Android for startups trying to get something done.

http://www.ringio.com/2010/06/29/iphone-vs-android-getting-o...

I'm actually quite excited about this and have been waiting for it for 5 years.

I think Skype Kit can bring a lot of innovation to software and create a much bigger ecosystem around their network

How about this? Build a general purpose "backend" interface that allows anybody trying to commercialize a web product to manage their users.

Your system should allow:

* the creation of superadmin accounts

* Map your user model to my user model

* CRUD users of my application

* Impersonate users of my application so I can see their data

* Expire / suspend / upgrade / downgrade users

* Search for users

* Notify a user via email of something

* Report top users by metric (in the mapping operation above we tell you where to look up these metrics)

* Report new signups per day

I work for Ringio (http://www.ringio.com) so my advice is potentially subjective. Biggest differentiators:

* You get a screen pop on your computer (or your Android) when a call comes in, with the whole interaction history between the caller and anybody in your business, so your chances of sounding like you know what you're talking about are higher.

* It syncs in real-time, 2 way, with your Google Contacts and makes it a snap to share contacts between colleagues.

* It gives you fine-grained control over your Caller ID when making phone calls, so people who call you back are reaching you where they should (e.g. a support call shows your main company number, but a personal call shows your personal business number)

* Unlike most of the other services, Making an outgoing call is not an afterthought, it's well built into the system as a full feature. And most startups trying to get customers do a lot of outbound calls, and rarely get called. (10:1 ratio)

Why is every measure of storage always "demystified" with a paper stack analogy? I find it funny that when the paper stack would not provide the right scale, the used a stack of storage devices...

This is precisely what the "inversion of the telco model" talks about. And ATT ignored. Users want to pay for features, not access.

http://www.telco2.net/blog/2008/09/the_inversion_of_the_tele...

Instead of all this complexity, why not simply NOT COUNT the characters of any URL? There is no reason anymore for 140 characters.

One way to suck less is to raise angel money after you've made some progress, such as demonstrating some technology viability, some market traction, or at least commitments from other people to join you if you get funded.

It's actually also here -- http://www.ringio.com/about/pricing/ in our main website. For us the emphasis since we launched a month ago was to get good feedback from customers, and since it has been free for all to try, it felt unnecessary to be more upfront with the trial.

The cost of prioritizing the wrong things and ignoring what's important to your customers far outweighs the higher cost of engineers.

Also, consider that engineers can fix problems faster.

Hi Transatlantic... our pricing is very straightforward: $99/mo for up to 4 users and then $25/mo per user if you need more. A detailed pricing explanation is here -- http://support.ringio.com/entries/171337-ringio-pricing-expl...