Or how about just CE... Chief Employee.
106 karma · joined October 9, 2010
Rather hilariously, in typical imperial/metric, schizophrenic Canadian style, there's quite a few joint CEO/Managing Directors back home.
Managing Director itself is funny. Which is it? Are you managing a bunch of directors? Or barely managing to direct?
Puss in Boots, for example was $130 million and Kung Fu Panda 2 was around $150 million. So you're looking at 1.25m to 1.5m per minute.
It can take a week just do 3 seconds of animation and all the labour is, of course, exceptionally talented and extremely expensive.
In it, he discusses the enormous investment they are making in real-time technologies for future animation projects.
Animation is absurdly labour intensive and highly iterative and, as he says, new real-time technologies will revolutionize the industry.
Account access requires a keypad widget, an account number, the widget's serial number, a pin and the generated one-time pass.
Any transactions require a second one-time pass derived from a different algo.
Belarus, the land of no applause (http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/belarus-land-no-a...)
It has a feature called "The Asepsis feature" which will redirect .DS_Store files to /usr/local/.dscache. Quite handy.
Lower interest rates mean more leverage. Increased leverage increases risk.
If they lower the interest rate, you can buy a more expensive home.. but you increase the risk you'll lose all your equity from a small change in house prices.
Right now in the US, more than 30 percent of homeowners are underwater on their mortgage.
If they decide to raise interest rates and you have a variable rate mortgage or have to renew it, your mortgage payments can shoot skyhigh.
Either way, record low rates make the system susceptible to systemic shocks and cascade failures.
Free trade and de-regulation means capital is free to flow quickly around the world. Investors can lose faith and a country can go from solvent to bankrupt in a matter of months. Interest rates shoot up and anyone caught with debt races to pay it off with dwindling incomes while the payments get bigger every day.
However, there's a massive difference between good marketing and deceptive/illegal marketing.
Apple does great marketing. Grifters, scammers and spammers do deceptive marketing.
Second, education is not a niche. Education is a sector, one of the largest in the world. Primary school teachers are a market, and bingo cards is a niche.
Technology is a sector, Web developers are a market and version control is a niche.
Boxing yourself into a niche that's too small with a product that's not particularly attractive makes marketing much more difficult than it needs to be.
Patrick has a nice little niche business but that's all it is, a niche. Niches, by definition are really small, focused and low in demand.
In a niche, the stream of new customers eventually dries up and the temptation is to move further and further over to the marketing dark side to keep the ship afloat.
Deceptive marketing tactics work, but they shouldn't be necessary. If that's where this is headed, then just go full darkside into scamming and call it a day.
Grey and black hat techniques are a bad as crappy products, terrible service, bad systems and stolen ideas. If you wouldn't think of using any of those, then don't use scammy marketing.
If you find yourself pursuing deceptive tricks, it's a sign your niche is not big enough and your product is not high enough in demand.
This is the most common trap analytic/scientific minded business owners fall into.
Many people on HN have voiced concerns that the current crop of startups are increasingly using deceptive practices to boost their businesses.
A well planned business should not have to do this.
It's one thing to decide to be purposefully evil, but rationalizing it as necessary is amoral and possibly illegal.
Give away your non-core ideas to attract people/resources/interest and then sell your complete system.
Give away your core ideas to "prove your worth" and build trust/authority/recognition and sell your complete system.
The second version is more powerful but it takes a leap of faith. Others could poach your work and use it against you but truly viable competitors are rare and people are lazy, the odds of this happening are often slim.
Apple sells hardware and "gives away" all their media.
Content creators and developers are charged only enough (30% margin) to basically break even managing the system. This adds tremendous value to their hardware since they now have "an ecosystem" and not just some electronic widgets.
Aside: Apple have set prices for music but assumed app developers would always charge for their apps. When huge numbers of developers started giving away apps for free, Apple came out with iAds in an attempt to defray the cost of hosting free apps. They don't do anything for free.
So, the same applies to open source and hiring. Good engineers are hard to find. If you outsource your software and it becomes popular, good engineers will flock to it.
You've now got engineers pre-trained (for free) on an important component of your system and they are dead easy to identify, defraying the cost of recruiting.
Since open source is the commodity in this scenario, giving it away for free is the most prudent way of insuring widespread use and a good supply of engineers.
Edit: another idea is "give away your ideas, sell the system". Open source your non-core ideas to attract attention and sell your complete system. Although many marketers argue the reverse: give away your BEST ideas to prove your worth and build trust then sell them on the whole package.
Grooveshark is not really "piracy" since every content owner gets paid regardless of the origin of the content. Whether it cannibalizes other revenue sources is up for debate.
However, copyright is also about control and owners want complete control of their catalogs.. for a good reason.
Grooveshark crowdsources catalogs without permission from copyright owners and then only lets them manage the content via DMCA takedowns. The labels have to relinquish control to the users for this system to work and that is what they are objecting too.
Money and control is what copyright is about. Big media are ideologically against Grooveshark paying their users to seed the system without the owners consent.
To use an analogy: Grooveshark is a grocery store where the customers personally stock the shelves with Coca-cola products but the company doesn't get to decide which products are available. Maybe the customers don't like Coke Zero and refuse to stock it. Coca-cola can't do anything except remove stock they don't want there.
Except the analogy falls down since Grooveshark is digital and the shelf space is infinite. The labels can add their entire catalog themselves, but they don't want to.
If a band is touring the world to promote an album, their presence in a given country has a huge impact on sales in that country.
If music is leaked across the internet way in advance of the tour/pr/marketing drive, then sales of the album drop precipitously. It's not possible to be everywhere on Earth at once, so it's then impossible to effectively market the album.
If anyone else streams or buys those songs, then the content owner will get paid.
Meanwhile the ads or the $6 a month fee goes only towards the songs that YOU actually STREAM from the service at streaming rates. Plus you can buy other songs for 99 cents.
If you never listen to your uploaded songs again, someone else will and they will be the ones paying the content owners.
Content owners get paid whenever anyone strams or buys anything on the system regardless of where it came from.
Media is a two way market. Both content owners and buyers must be completely satisfied for the market to work effectively.
The two problems with labels: 1. they want to get paid alot and 2. they want to control their catalogs so that they can control their marketing.
The two problems with customers: 1. they want to pay less and 2. they want to listen to whatever they like.
Grooveshark solves these problems completely. They pay copyright holders to stream songs on the system and charge customers through ads or fees for the service.
At the same time, missing songs in the library can be uploaded by users and they get fairly paid for the "work" from Grooveshark's profits. Content owners don't have to do any work to seed the system with their content but they get paid for every stream or download.
So labels save money by not having to manage their content, since, in theory, it's already been uploaded by users and the crowdsourcers make money "working" for Grooveshark.
The catalog ends up more complete than labels typically allow and the users are happier. Everybody wins.
The only problem is that the system only works if the labels give up some control and they HATE that.
Hopefully Grooveshark survives, I think it has the best shot at finding a workable path for everyone.
Now the situation is big labels pushing, mostly pre-internet era, artists with enough clout to penetrate global markets and extremely small niche labels with no market penetration.
In typical anarchaic fashion, digital evangelists diss the old way completely in a damn them all mentality, without really addressing the other half of the equation.
Recording music is labour intensive and great music is difficult. It takes entire teams of producers, coaches, engineers and songwriters to help a band polish an album to sufficiently high quality. Yet more people are needed for marketing, sales, pr, distribution, design, business development and so on. None of these people can be marked to zero. Great content is expensive.
Art is also high risk. For every 100 ideas, 99 of them are bad and 1 will strike a chord with the public and go big. That's just the way art works. It's not a bug, it's a feature. Art is taking a risk, despite the odds. But someone has to pay for that risk. The bigger the project, the bigger the risk.
To say that a label offers "nothing" is completely disingenuous and totally ignorant. Labels are not the enemy. Go out and talk to the owners.. most of them are very humble and genuine people who really do want to help artists succeed. I've talked them, that's how I know.
You want to know what happens when you put 500 musicians in a room with platinum award winning artists and label reps and lawyers? I can tell you since I've been there.. the musicians don't ask the artists much, but they ask the reps and lawyers a thousand questions about how they can make a living doing what they love in a world hell bent on devaluing their work.
Many djs, for example, rely heavily on labels to curate their offerings and once they find a label they like, they pay more attention to whatever they release than random discoveries.
Another option is more of a co-op model where multiple bands get together and share resources between them. Many bands in Canada operate this way. They tour together, give each other recording time in their own studios, work as studio musicians on each others albums and work with the same suppliers etc.
Users still have to learn the UI controls of each library or whatever else the designers come up with.
The "support twitter updates" looks like a tagline and the categories are confusing. A standard menu would be at the top right of the page with Updates/About/Contact/Support as options.
The "screenshot" of the product on the top right is confusing.. it looks like clickable UI elements at first.
The buy button does not have enough contrast and the desired action is not clear enough. Plus why is the sale price on the button? Was that tested?
The fact that this is on sale is not immediately obvious.
The screenshot of the product's menu should be next to the mouse, perhaps overlapping.
The manual portion is superfluous and should be on the support page or on a separate "How it works" link.
The background is nice but really distracting.
Finally the phalanx of share buttons at the top is highly distracting and might be better placed somewhere else. I would probably put a grey band at the top with the share links on the left and the support/about menu items on the top right.
I would also move the screenshot next to the mouse, put the sale price info above the buy button and move the buy button down onto the grey section to provide more contrast (plus I'd try the button in the orange/yellow). The text between sale price and the app store logo should go below the buy button to the right of the other grey text.
The copy could also be tightened up.. for example "Instantly achieve unrivaled precision with any mouse." is a much tigther value proposition.
The grey bullet points should be shortened and more clearly delineated.
Finally the FinalTouch logo has too much glow and makes my eyes bug out.
Note: I'm not trying to denigrate the owner's website. This is an unsolicited random opinion.
Stopping random UI experiments would require a replacement system designed specifically for web apps that access a standard library of controls.