I've found it's more about number of messages per minute, than number of chats at a time.
Where number of messages per minute is my real limit. (unless I am trying to trouble shoot a bunch of issues at the same time)
2,403 karma · joined October 6, 2008
Where number of messages per minute is my real limit. (unless I am trying to trouble shoot a bunch of issues at the same time)
The number of YC Applicants has increased as the risk of doing YC has gone down.
When someone going into YC had an expected outcome of basically $25000, less people were willing to leave jobs to go start companies. Think about pre 2009 YCombinator.
Now consider post 2009 Ycombinator.
As the process became less risky: more guaranteed capital (the Ron Conway, Yuri Milner portfolio strategy), and more Acquahires. The value of the average company went up, the downsides went down, and the risk to starting a company went down. Thus, more people were willing to apply to YC, and Paul and the YC partners were able to accept more companies.
You could probably argue that this was a function of the popularity of YC. I believe that founders are rational, and the popularity of YC again decreased their risk. How many founders do not quit their jobs until they get into YC? (many)
This is a separate argument from whether or not we need government healthcare, but I think it's pretty clear that risk evaluation is absolutely part of being an entrepreneur.
(As an aside, dealing with healthcare is just one of many things that we as founders have to do that provides very little net benefit to our business. The less of this BS we have to do, the better we will deploy capital and the more focused we will be on important problems)
We found it was quite a bit of work, especially multi-state. Talking to entrepreneurs in other countries, not having to deal with healthcare for employees really let them focus on their product and their company, and not how to insure a small growing team across state lines.
Yes, anyone can integrate with the easy to use API, but it's bizdev that turns an integration into a channel to acquire more customers. (This may apply more to B2B software than consumer)
Interesting but not surprising that roughly 25% of the kickstarter money went back to kickstarter and their funders. Of course if they really wanted to make the money stretch they could have cut out salaries, maybe I can find our year 1 financial statements :-)
Once you have more than a few servers you will go crazy if you don't have a good configuration management setup. The real advantage of using a tool like puppet over something home grown is that you can hire someone to come in and manage puppet who will be able to understand how your automation works without having to have your system admin sit down and explain the 1000 little arcane perl scripts that make everything work.
We use client-server puppet, but require all the updates to be manually run, which makes rollouts a little bit more deterministic and avoids the "Hey we just changed puppet and everything broke" effect.
(Ben from Olark)
To do the json version of http://www.olark.com/transcripts we'd need to expose an Oauth endpoint and do a few other things that would probably take a while :-)
(Also have you looked at http://www.olark.com/help/webhooks )
I am still a little concerned about a slow request blocking your page though. What's your URL? Do you know if you are using JSONP?
If the cost of offering chat is < value you get from chat it works out.
The trick is to understand that equation for your business.
We launched targeted chat to help you focus your chats on just particular visitors. One could argue that the value talking to customers who land on your pricing page, while ignoring everyone else always works out.
You'll see that many of the top paid state employees are doctors, or policemen/firefighters who get paid a ton of overtime.
But you'll also notice things like the director of IT for Alameda County was paid 430,312 with a 266,760 base salary. Where as the direct of IT for San Mateo country had a base salary of 175,775 and had pay around to 330K. Which is probably market for someone like that in the Bay area, but sure seems a lot for a government position.
I think it is reasonable that if salaries go up in a good year, that salaries should go down in a bad year. I'd be interested in seeing the change in government employee pay over time relative to tax revenue.
If I start my day producing, (which I often do). I get too distracted doing work to eat until well after lunch time.
One of my new years resolutions was to eat breakfast more often. So if I want to do things that aren't work, I basically have to force myself to not open my laptop until I've completed them. I.e. if I start the day doing work, the odds of be going running diminish quite a bit, as does the chances that I'll eat breakfast.
As a caveat, I am not doing that much writing for external audiences, I could imagine some benefits to starting writing first thing in the day before their are as many distractions.
Dr. Perez in Computer Science, he actually has done a ton of research in how individuals use information (PIM) including email.
It might be useful to do some competitive analysis as well: http://www.boomeranggmail.com/ (attempts solves the 'do this later problem')
As your probably aware MailTrust created by Hokie Pat Mathews and bought by Rackspace still has a pretty big office. I'd track him down and get some feedback from him.
My two cents, feel free to reach out ben at olark.
Matt's loader is less focused on making javascript safe to embed from the security standpoint, and is more focused on ensuring that a 3rd part javascript file does not slow down your page.