willheim

FB has but to do one thing to remain king of the heap and that is to maintain focus. The more junk they add to the site, the more ads, games, stupid apps (find out who's stalking you!) the uglier and more MySpace-like it becomes. FB succeeded in large part because it refused to be everything to everyone and become uglier. That said, the experience I get viewing my FB feed is aesthetically less pleasing as the months go on.

G+ OTOH is the new, shiny, clean kid on the block and my feeds are still pristine.

If FB continues on the path they are on the influential thought leaders who hate clutter will completely leave for G+ and that will be the beginning of the end of FB.

Would G clutter up G+ with junk? Not likely. They LOVE all that more detailed info you're voluntarily giving them that they can then serve up tailored (revenue-generating) ads on your Gmail, searches, partner sites, etc.

When you resort to callous language you demonstrate a lack of creativity.

There's an energy drink company up here in Canada with some rather terrible ads but one thing I do like is their tagline: "No Caffeine. No Caffeine Crash. No Bull"

That works on two levels. 1) Obviously they're hitting on what you're hitting (No BS) and 2) A dig at the leading energy drink Red Bull.

I think a better idea for you would be to aim for a positive message (not a negative).

- They Compete. You Win. Right On! (cute) - Better. Cheaper. Win-Win! (more accurate) - They Compete. You Decide. (play on Fox News and puts power in consumer's hand which is what they want)

Or what if your third part of the tagline rotated so that each time the screen refreshed it changed to another awesome final point? That would grab attention.

Erm... no. Apple announcing iCloud is kinda like Palm announcing WebOS a couple of years ago, streaming music from LastFM (though iCloud doesn't stream), getting your pics up and down from Flickr, and working on GDocs/Gmail/GCal/Office365.

Windows is an OS. iOS is an OS. Mac OSX is an OS. The iCloud service is designed to allow you to shuffle from one to the other seamlessly but not to replace those machines altogether. Kinda like using dropbox.

Now, is the OS becoming less important in comparison to the services available? Absolutely. Not for everyone but for the average user it certainly is. Will iCloud suceed? Surely it will, but only for those who wish to be tied into Apple products (unless I am mistaken and you will be able to share iCloud uploads with Android or WP devices).

Yay!!!!!! Missed you guys too much!

Would a company such as Facebook even want to go solo in being a credit provider? I don't see it. I do see them partnering with one of the big credit providers to create a FBCard. Then they could say that to use or purchase FBCredits you must use the FBCard which would also be a normal Visa/MC which could be used in any regular bricks and mortar place (with FBCredit rewards?) Imagine the data mining they could do on that! Now you have a FB user buying FBCredits for games/whatever AND they know what restaurants you frequent, what groceries you buy, if you smoke or not, etc., etc. And they would be able to do it all without the hassle of setting up their own credit department and collections issues. And they could probably do it so that a parent could sign up their under 18 kids for the card so the CC companies would love to get in to that market!

Square was my first thought, too. Yes, they could most certainly take on MC/Visa/Amex/etc. Maybe that is why Visa invested in Square? You have to get the POS units into retailer's hands. Then, at the same time, you have to get consumers using it. Where square differentiates themselves from the competition is that they make it very easy for anyone to become a POS node.

Now, the difference between Square and the CC companies is that square is really a gateway to those CC systems and not a credit provider themsleves... BUT once they have traction with POS merchants and acceptance by consumers could they start their own credit department? Sure. Would they want to? That is another debate. I'd wager it's much easier and still very profitable to be a gateway taking a small slice off each transaction than it is to be the credit provider.

I have to admit, when I heard of Remembary I though... huh, that sounds like Momento. Doing a quick search of Remembary vs Momento immediately brought me to this post. Then I read how Andrew Burke, Remembary's developer, handled the same news. It was great to not only see him distinguish what makes his app attractive but also recognize the strengths of the competition (and where it would suit his potential customer's needs more).

Kudos!

Hey! That's awesome! Thanks for coming back and letting us all know how you did and that I played a small part in it. (small as in that was one tiny blurb I mentioned and all the hard work was done by you alone). It made my day to read that.

Enjoy Philly!

At 5.9%+$0.95 or 8.9% flat? Good luck with that. Unless you can explain to me why anyone would be willing to pay near double what anywhere charges... Seriously, your site doesn't explain this well. Why do you charge near double (or even triple on the flat rate)?

Wow! The glowing reviews of Braintree really got my interested in them. So I went to their site. The best I've seen yet! Really top notch. Info flows clearly and plainly. Love it... except I'm in Canada. They don't service Canada.

So, anyone got a Braintree-like company in Canada they can reco?

Businesses do that every day. Look at the price of a book which often has two or more currency prices on it. Of course, what happened here in Canada is that stores started offering discounts or "US Pricing" models when our dollar went up. If we're to nitpick we're talking physical items which have associated local costs involved (local staff, local vendor space leases, local energy costs, etc.) whereas here we're talking electric bits and bytes. However, in sales and conversions, it's all the same... no?

I have to admit, I was looking at Grahl Software's PDF Annotator which is listed at $69.95USD but when I went to the site it said C$79.95 (using my IP to give me a price). Did I convert? No. I was turned off. That's 19% more expensive than if I used a US IP. I've a feeling, only from my own experience, that different currency prices in a flat-earth internet environment is a big turn off for consumers.

So are you suggesting different amounts depending on the currency and the location of the enquiry IP? Example: $30CAD, $30USD, 18EUR, 2600Yen?

That's something to think about. Have you done that or know a service that has?

Funny... I live with the conversion issue almost every day. Something we Canadians (and I suspect everyone doing online transactions) have just gotten used to. That said, every barrier to an acceptance is one I want to eliminate. Thanks for the input!

The author, Mark Hughes, is correct in his write-up and comes up with a few suggested scenarios where it would be "ideal". Unfortunately for Color those ideal situations where a critical mass makes the app useful are few and far between. How could Color have demonstrated themselves better? Maybe by launching a SXSW where a tech savvy and experimental crowd would give it a go, see the benefit, and continue on using it. Come to think about it, that is exactly what Twitter did. Now, imagine if twitter launched like Color did. You are posting with no followers, no one you knows sees any reason to use it so your feed is empty. Now add that you are anonymous, can't "follow" anyone, and wait until some random stranger in your vicinity post something but meanwhile your stream is empty. That's Color.

Oh, and as for the group event image sharing thing... didn't Posterous launch Events at SXSW? Yes they did (and for $41m less). http://blog.posterous.com/introducing-posterous-for-events-a...

Facebook will remain as long as people support it. In the short history of the net we have seen sites come and go with little more reason than they simply became passe. AOL had all the makings of a facebook (every ad on TV/poster had AOL Keyword:"...") but focused on their dial-up margins. MySpace had it but failed at modern design. Geocities, TheGlobe, etc, etc, had potential to do it before that. So many sites have come and gone in a social space. And now, where FB has picked up the slack they still can't replace the numerous forums out there where people really congregate to interact with "not friends".

Eventually, I believe, FB will be passe. And whatever out there is quenching people's social interaction thirst will thrive. Yes, it will be bigger because there will be even more people hooked up to the net.

I don't think we have ever in the history of the world seen a start-up so mindbogglingly confusing. Wait, let me clarify that statement with the amendment "handed $41m".

Seriously, has anyone figured out how to use color and found anything good of it? The reason we're all "piling on" is because NONE of us "get it".

Instagram and Hipstamatic are fine... for now. Let's face it, they create intriguing images today that very likely we will look stylistically dated in 5-10 years as "Hipstamatic" or "Instagram" shots. On the other hand PS or any of the numerous photo editors I have on my iPhone allow me to take a raw image and process it as I would like and then save a copy. I much prefer this route even though it takes more time. I am left in the end with the "image" and the "art" which can then be reinterpreted at a later date. And I think that is something the author gets at... these new filter programs are "fun"... but will they look like those 1980's strip mall glamour shots in the year 2020?

The title says it all. I've been working on a project for quite some time when it suddenly dawned on me (as target release date after release date kept slipping) that what I am actually building is an assembly of many functions and that I should (1) break each of those functions down into individual components (2) because they are something I already use and so do others, (3) release each of those components with the first part and then add-on as the next is complete... finally ending up with what I had in mind in the first place.

Another good quote I saw recently was how we mix up the Minimally Viable Product and the Desired Viable Product. Funny... we can read and study all we want but it takes a while to sink in and be applied, doesn't it?

When one browser (in this case, Chrome) works beautifully and the other browser (in this case FF4) refuses to operate in some capacity then that is most certainly not a problem with my computer.

Do you know how many people out there have the Mobile Intel 965 Express Chipset Family for their laptops... a staggering number, I'm sure.

Consumer Apps? There really aren't many out there. The ones that are fall into the new content/entertainment segment of news/music/video, primarily. Everything else has been made free so it can get pretty tough to get people to open their wallets. I know a few who pay for Flickr Pro, netflix, and that's it.

Me - Carbonite, some skype minutes here and there

What could your app possibly do for $108/year ($9/mo) that would be "really useful" to me as a consumer?

I was REALLY hopeful for FF to make a comeback with 4. I had been a convert in the 2.X days and watched as it got bloated and slower throughout 3. Switched to Chrome in version 9 and never looked back. Then IE9 came out and was so much faster than before so I had hope for FF.

Well, that hope has been quickly dashed. How? By mozilla's own demo page, the web'o'wonder. On my three year old machine it says my video drivers don't support WebGL and won't play nice with many things. What it does play nice with was not very wonderful. The "Letterheads" were choppy with a framerate probably approaching 8 or 9 fps. The 360 video refused to load. Same with Remixing Reality. IE9 wouldn't work with those and neither would Safari.

Then I tried them in Chrome. Huh. Go figure. They all worked marvelously. Yup... this new web era could be a Web o' Wonders... but it looks like it won't be featuring FF4 or IE9.

Now, can anyone tell me why FF4 has issues with WebGL but Chrome 11.0696 doesn't? And it's not just a webkit thing because Safari 5.04 isn't liking them either.

This is not an issue. We currently face the same inefficiency of having to encode videos in multiple codecs today. Want your vid on iOS? H.264. Want your vid on other platforms? Pretty open. What's the issue? Just some inefficiency. It means that all videos have to be encoded in a few formats in the backend and a browser detector to tell our server which video to play. As long as the end user isn't harmed I don't see the big deal with Google supporting Google's own format (that they have opened up with a protected royalty-free format).

As it is right now there are probably several elements toyour site that require different rendering depending on the browser (IE6 I'm glaring at you).

I like it and I'm scared for you. Here's why:

Like because: Design, interface, potential for information gathered there, potential use. You know all this.

Scared because: You're creating an information portal when Google does a better job. You need a massive amount of users to give you all this information when there is really no incentive for them to do so. Say I am in Amsterdam and want to go to a club. I go to google and type in "Amsterdam club". I will then get lots of information, reviews, photos, etc from a wide variety of sites. The very first entry is a map of a bunch of clubs linked to reviews. Fantastic! It's open, accessing every site in the world, and filled with info that is relevant to me. Your other problem that I foresee is accuracy of data. Clubs/restaurants/hostels close/renovate/change owners all the time. You need your listings to be curated and current. As soon as you fail once you lose that user.

I haven't backpacked in over a decade (1998) and when I did I relied on Lonely Planet books to get me places and then locals to steer me towards the good stuff. You get nothing more current, fresh, and accurate than locals, local zines, and lamp post billings. As for hostels there are many, many, many sites now that have traction and offer me more value (again, I just googled it). Trip journal sites abound (and offer many revenue possibilites like book journal printing). Restarant review sites abound, as well. User generated travel content sites have to be one of the toughest markets to crack. And with all the niches you're trying to combine into a walled garden I just don't see a clear path to success.

To add... as someone said, people just don't travel all the time. I used to be a member of a travel blogging site about 6-10 years ago. Haven't been back to it since and completely forget what its name is/was. It was a big one and very popular. Google replaced it for me.

7 courses? Wow! That's a lot of cooking. Guess someone domain squatted 3-6courses.com. So, if I want to rip off this idea do I have to be 8courses.com? Or could I beat you to the punch with 6courses.com?

Sorry, didn't get past the first page with a forced google/FB login. Change that and I'll try it out.

I also use Pencil. Before that I was just using Fireworks or whatever graphic software I felt like. Pencil (as a true wireframing tool) forced me to focus on just wireframing which enabled me to get some alternative graphic ideas from my coders and designers.

I have a bunch of ideas but really don't feel like spending the effort typing them up. Maybe that's how they feel? Abandoned, unloved, salvageable but... who cares?

That's a tough one. Persistence and lucky timing could help if you can't get a direct and personal introduction. Till you get the introduction it will all be about persistence.

First, HDR is not available on the iPhone 3G or 3GS so those who didn't have a 4 would buy the app (and they do). Second, Posterous email-in a blog post is a feature that is available to any blog platform I'm aware of but what they did differently is to focus on it making blogging as simple as can be. It was sort of a reverse engineering of the whole work-flow. That turned into a community and it is that community that is the product. They found a niche within making a company based on a neglected feature. Cute.

"Possibly relevant professional events" are the 5-10% of what you need to do. Most of those events are just drinking and schmoozing with little benefit and even less follow-up.

Have you identified potential places of employment? Have you posted on relevant local boards? Have you called up/met with any recruiting centres that focus on Philly? Have you contacted the HR departments of companies that may fit? Have you spoken with the Philly board of trade/commerce? And stretching out, how about the local chapters of the Knights of Columbus/Shriners/other social groups? How about your university/college alumni? Facebook? Have you extended your possible career choices to include teaching at a community college (I know one guy who did that)? Have you checked with the city and what jobs they have (municipal governments are all hiring IT guys these days)?

There are lots of ways to find a job. Sitting in front of your computer, browsing Monster/Craigslist/etc. is not the best way. The holidays definitely put a crimp on opportunities available right now so you should, IMO, be taking the initiative to introduce yourself to those who may have openings in the next couple of months. First the introduction, then the reintroduction after the holidays. That shows drive, determination, and desire.

I know far too many families that have broken up because of "Daddy who is boring". When your kid says that you know that your wife has been thinking that for even longer. This isn't just those in the start-up space. Microsoft, in their WP7 "Really" ad/social commentary already summed this up perfectly.