389 karma · joined March 1, 2012
Check www.screenscott.com or www.appeti.co for projects I've been working on.
Feel free to mail me at chris [at] screenscott.com
For us, one use-case for contact forms is to request a webinar at a specific date. I'm guessing here, but I think more people will request a webinar if they can simply select a date and send it off vs. if they have to write a free-form email requesting a date.
Any plans on adding a date-picker (instead / in addition to the main message)? I was going to implement that myself at the end of this week/next week...
- Our customers strongly prefer to call in via landline than to use their computer for audio. Make sure to send them the national call-in number (we've been talking to customers in Germany)
- Either only share a part of your screen or put your screen resolution way low. This will improve image quality/speed and makes sure the image will fit onto their screen, even if they use a small laptop
- Online-demo software that "just works" for the customer doesn't seem to exist.
-- Skype and Google Hangout need registration/installation, most others (including WebEx) need Java in the browser.
-- If you are lucky, the company uses one of these themselves. We've mostly not been lucky.
-- We also tried join.me but their screen updating algorithm is awful. It updates squares instead of the whole image, but in a seemingly random order. If you scroll down a page, it's just confusing chaos. Way worse than updating the whole image once.
I'm open for better suggestions...
However, I get your point about javascript/conditional comments... I had a sort of similar problem in that I had a couple of landing pages that don't have any incoming links from the main page. I just had the framework generate a sitemap for me and used that as a starting point for wget, but didn't upload the sitemap itself.
Thx for the tip regarding s3_sync!
I've been doing this for a while (deploying to S3) and the most annoying part is really to upload to S3...
> we had a business that DHH would be proud of. Bootstrapped, lean and already providing (in a small way at least) for the needs of my family and that of my co-founder. Over the next 3 months, our initial desire to not raise a seed round was dismissed and we were thoroughly convinced that we had to continue on the VC rocket-ship in order to matter to anyone. [...] This is where we made the first in a series of many mistakes
from http://mystartuphas30daystolive.tumblr.com/post/53839497912/...
But we'll see. I wish Pixate good luck anyway! More innovation is needed in this space...
That said, some parts of the ecosystem that are built around (Enterprise) Java are real behemoths and the companies may actually be looking for experience with a particular framework/library than just generic Java experience.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity_Immigrant_Visa#Winnin...
If you happen to be in Australia or New Zealand and take part for a couple of years, your chances are actually pretty good. Everywhere else, not so much.
E.g. it's not really a problem for me to find a legal advisor, but paying for his service is. I also believe many non-technical founders can easily find an agency that can advise them on mobile, but they can't pay for it.
1-to-1 communication is the best way to learn about your potential customers in the beginning. And once you need to learn about them quantitatively, it'll become easier to use adds, because you know the pain points but also the wording of your customers.
Only caveat, as other people have pointed out as well, is that not a lot of people use it so far. Hope that changes quickly!
I have been doing downhill/freeride mountainbiking and enjoy bouldering right now. Both sports don't allow your mind to wander off - you need to be 100% focused on your body. In case of mountainbiking, a lot of adrenaline was involved because of the risk. I felt that when the mind realizes there are serious consequences from not focusing completely on the task at hand (e.g. when you are racing through trees), it will focus automatically. This hasn't happened to me when going jogging or so - my mind would still be able to wander off.
YMMV, as always. Good luck!
Rent in London is a lot more expensive than in Berlin, and food etc is more expensive as well. Salaries are higher in London, though. Flat sharing is common in Berlin, but my friend had no big trouble finding flat sharing in London.
Speaking English is no problem in Berlin... many internationals live and work here.
Don't know anything about Barcelona, but I suspect the weather there is a lot better than in either London or Berlin :)
I suggest you spent a week in each city, attend some meetups etc and decide based on which culture you like better.
An unhealthy diet plays a large role in obesity and diabetes (the other one being a sedentary lifestyle). Research has unsurprisingly shown that if people know how to create food from scratch and care about a healthy diet, their risk to become obese reduces significantly.
My startup appetico tries to create cooking apps that are as engaging as Instagram, Pinterest, Angry Birds etc. because otherwise kids most likely won't start cooking for themselves.
That is a really tough story to sell to investors in itself. People won't go back 20, 30 years later and pay us because they realize that they are not obese because we got them into healthy cooking. It's easier (but still hard...) to sell that cookbook publishing is a $1bn industry that is still growing despite falling sales for books overall.
Shameless plug: We're looking for seed investors and basically everyone else who would like to tackle this problem with us. Shoot me a mail at whateverhuis at gmail dot com!
"Mr. Brin and Mr. Page, the co-founders, spent nearly a year searching for a chief executive before settling on Mr. Schmidt almost two years ago. In the words of Mr. Brin, who is now 29, ''He was the only candidate who had been to Burning Man,'' a counterculture techno-arts festival held annually in the Nevada desert." from http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/business/in-searching-the-...
My designer recently got a graphic tablet and she has got really good at using it. Instead of sketching on a paper, we now sketch on the computer. We save the sketches in Google Drive, so I can easily access them (you could also store them in git...), deleting and copying in the sketches is better than on paper. Plus, the interface you start with is really a blank, white page.
Its not really made for this specific use case, but it works surprisingly well! Except for responsiveness (but I am not sure this can be solved automatically), it seems to solve the other 4 problems you mentioned (if exporting to pdf is fine for you).
Google is a great example where Larry Page and Sergey Brin interviewed Eric Schmidt and hired him as their CEO. Worked great for 10 years, and their relationship seems to keep working today.
Are there more examples (also unsuccessful ones)? I'm actually not aware of any. It seems much more common that one of the co-founders becomes a full-time manager (or that they are kicked out of their own company).
On one hand I was really impressed by its capabilities, on the other hand the documentation is unfortunately lacking...
I think Slick has great potential and hope that typesafe brings the documentation onto a quality level similar to Play. If you want to try it out today and get stuck, after some time I found it quicker to look at their test cases first before googling, much more info there than in the docu and example projects.
In addition to what others have said: I find the overall design good, but I don't like the stripes/greyness over the food image (http://www.farmly.net/images/home-banner.jpg) at all. Getting the color of food images right is always tough, but this definitely fails. For some images, e.g. the strawberrys, it may be fine because the red is very saturated, but others, like the cheese or the cupcakes... they look grey / too dark, which is not what food should look like.
Also, I'm not sure if the transition helps. Makes it harder to look at the images and takes the attention away from the text.
Good luck!
I.e. if I have to fill out a form somewhere, I would not only submit it once, but several times (ideally automated), ideally with realistic data, i.e. other businesses in my area (so geo-location won't raise a red flag then).
If I visit the next website which employs the same network, they can't really identify me - they have a big set of businesses I could possibly be (or they just take the last one, which would be fake).
At least currently, they do not seem to verify whether the filled out form can be properly validated, i.e. if the user clicked on a confirmation mail or similar.
Anonymity by obscurity :)
First of all, computers can be mechanical - the first computers have been [0].
Furthermore, computers are predictable. If a CPU would not be predictable, how would you program it? If you write a program, you assume that your computer is predictable and that your instructions will be carried out. (If that assumption is not met, a fault occurred - but this happens in mechanical systems as well) In fact, you can perform computation in lockstep to detect errors.
Of course, it can be practically impossible to exactly predict a network of computers with several layers of software deployed... but that is not the issue here.
If you want to use the Android SDK (this includes additionally Google APIs), you have to agree to this license: http://developer.android.com/sdk/terms.html This is also needed to release your App in the Play store.
Someone has argued source.android.com should be given a different name, similar to chromium and chrome. I think that would clear things up, too.
If my app or SDK uses undocumented APIs, then it may not work in newer versions - but I'm not supposed to do that anyway. Maybe this is just a fancy way of saying "use only the documented API, because we guarantee it is stable".
Maybe carriers / handheld makers really just copied the source of the Google SDK, used or changed whatever they felt fit as if everything was an official API and with the next update all their changes were broken... so deriving of the SDK had to be addressed in a special way.
IANAL, but "participating in the creation of" ... "a software development kit derived from the SDK" sound like it contains creating a patch for the SDK. Very unfortunate wording, I wish they would have sticked to "don't use undocumented APIs".
For the first category, as others have said, you should try to mentor them.
For the second category, this was tough in my experience. I did my best trying to work on my communication, being friendly, but the other programmer just ignored it. After I gave it some time, I wrote the business guys (some have a technical background though) what problems I had with the other programmer. If you keep it high-level and that it is mainly the communication that doesn't work, they should get it.
From then on, it's really their job to fix the problem. In my case, it was handled pretty good. I didn't become best friends with the other programmer, but it was workable. If your management can't fix the problem (final escalation: firing the other guy), you should quit. This will not be the last time such problems will pop up in the company (be it engineering or another part) and good management is able to handle that.
That said, the German government tried to create many incentives for creating "greener" cars. However, the manufacturers IMO seemed to pour money into lobbying against it, rather then putting their engineers to work.
Depending on how much Tesla eats into their market share, it could be a tough road ahead for the German car industry (and, to some extent, for the whole German economy). Especially considering how long it takes them to come up with an answer to the Prius...
I was more interested if younger successful founders in the US faster take-over older founders. And they don't. A large part of the wealth of the older founders has been acquired past-IPO.
The conclusion (for me) is that to make it into the top 10 (whether US or Europe) and stay there, you gotta grow a company successfully for many years, like Microsoft, Oracle or Apple did in the US and SAP did in Europe.
1. Bill Gates
2. Larry Ellison
3. Jeff Bezos
4. Sergey Brin
5. Larry Page
6. Steve Ballmer
7. Paul Allen
8. Michael Dell
9. Laurenne Powell Jobs (widow of Steve Jobs)
10. Mark Zuckerberg
If the definition of old is "younger than 20 years", this represents 3 startups (Amazon, Google, Facebook). If the definition is "younger than Skype", then only Facebook is left.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400
[edit: formatting]
The whole article contradicts itself. Just start with the title: "The GPL self-destruct mechanism" vs. "This is why Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has been declared the licence "viral"." A spreading virus that does harm by... killing itself?
Last time I checked (for MySQL) it was possible, but not really recommended/wide-spread. Does anyone have practical experience with Postgres (and Heroku)?
It's more difficult if you want to replace scrambled eggs or similar. I have tried the vegg [1], but have not been very impressed.
And I just googled and found out that apparently in China there is a food scandal where they produce fake eggs [2]. Obviously they design them for profit and not as a replacement for vegans or even a healthy, cheaper alternative. But it seems that it could be done.
[1] http://www.thevegg.com/ [2] http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/11/06/how-to-make-a-rotten-egg...