brackin

Outlook.com is starting to become an alternative. I hate using anything related to Windows Live though. I also want to use my own domain name, I remember seeing a post explaining how to do this with Outlook.com.

Yahoo could actually try to take on Google Apps. The most choice the better.

I haven't gone to College, I've gone out from High School and started building a startup. Doesn't apply so much to me because when I wasn't working in school I was up all night getting a few hours of sleep after working on projects.

I actually quite like this but what scares me is I see no mention of an export. A startup could never use this if there is no simple way to leave at some point in the future.

Why doesn't PICPC-VC have a Dropbox or Airbnb in their alumni yet?

http://www.bloom.fm are a London startup that launched last week with a killer app. iPhone only for now but their stations are really strong and the app is well designed.

This is leaps and bounds better than Apple Maps and even the original maps client on iOS that used Google Maps. I didn't even think Apple maps were 'that' bad. The huge hole was POI data, in London at least. Most POI's seemed to be approximated and the rest of them were missing, old or incorrect.

After playing with this app for 10 minutes I think this is far superior to the iOS5 Maps experience. It's an extremely refined and clean app that is extremely fast with lots of features. Start typing a street or location and it'll know what you mean within a few letters.

It's a little bit of a shame in my eyes. They could've built out a network and been bought for a lot by Amazon, Rakuten, eBay, Best Buy, etc or have built a big company. They obviously saw value in joining Google as they were still early on.

I agree with many of the points being made but I don't believe that we're actually in a bubble. Speaking to serial founders and investors it's actually a much tougher time to raise money right now than six months ago. There was no pop, just a decrease in the market. In fact overall venture capital investments didn't rise significantly over the supposed 2010 - 2011 bubble. It also costs less today so it's tough to compare with the millions being raised by most startups in 1999. Which leads one to believe that many are talking but few are executing on this talk.

If you actually want to build something valuable for the long term. Now is the perfect time to start a company. If you want to raise a seed round and sell fast then you're probably too late or will be shortly.

Exactly, I don't believe this is the case.

Why don't film makers put the first 10 minutes of a film on Bittorrent a week or month before release? This could offer many of the advantages and still allows them to earn direct revenue. I know some have tried similar models and other studies have shown leaks help the success of a film.

I think I've been receiving emails from you guys for about a year. I seem to remember the previous design being slightly more muted. It's a good market to tackle though, good luck with what you're doing.

Congratulations, I'm interested to know how easy it is to raise money from Seedrs. Glad to hear a startup kept going after rejection and hopefully will continue to do so.

I'm guessing you provided much more detail in your pitch and product than I can see on the public page. As all I see is "Discussion boards. Like tumblr, for forums." Which sounds a lot like Branch. Example: http://branch.com/b/freelancers-small-studios-what-s-in-a-na...

They're working with publishers to create branch discussion sub-communities on popular publications.

Congrats, this is really awesome. We're building a crowd-funding site in the charity space. Where one can fund a project directly and relieve updates on project progress. So that your money is going directly to help.

I know a lot of companies use Survey Monkey - http://www.surveymonkey.com

To be honest I didn't understand what you did at first, the name didn't help. You don't want to be vague as you have to find out if you're actually solving a problem.

From the comments it sounds like a polling app. In which case no, some folks I've seen doing a very simple version of this use URL's like http://poll.cm, http://polls.io and http://gopollgo.com

Who's to say that they spent the $41.m million? What ever's left will be returned. The fact that Apple bought them for $9M hints that Apple may be covering the amount they spent but even that is pretty hefty. The investors won't be able to reinvest it in their current funds though.

YC is amazing because you have the time to just build, saying that it doesn't make all of the companies but if you give up after not getting in then they made the right decision. Drew Wilson would still have done well. Keep building and as you say once you have traction talk to angels or other incubators like 500Startups.

There is little value in attending events with $3000 price tags. You get to hear Sean Parker speak, which is also posted online and they usually sneak speakers out of the back to a car or to the speakers lounge so that they don’t have to interact with attendees. There's nothing wrong with this, just that conferences can oversell the value.

I've spoken at a few startup conferences, mostly because it's a great way to meet investors, other founders and useful contacts. The ones I found most valuable as a speaker and attendee were the events that were less well known. My favourite for meeting great people was in Luxembourg and ran at the same time as LeWeb London, where most of the tech elite were. http://www.ictspring.com

I got to speak to Randi Zuckerberg, Hiroshi Mikitani from Rakuten but far more importantly a lot of great investors and founders from Silicon Valley that were actually creating value. The people that speak at the top conferences aren't necessarily the people building the best companies

Startup school is a great balance between both, you hear from some of the best thought leaders in tech that don't speak very often and get the opportunity to meet lots of people in a similar position to you.

Decisions seem to be based on public pressure or context. The man posting the picture of poppy's burning was arrested because it was Remembrance Day. Because of common law these cases are each setting precedence. Although many may believe it wouldn't go farther than this. There's nothing stopping judges ruling that publicly disagreeing with a political party or common held belief is a form of defamation.

If people rally around a case the police and courts are forced to react with harsh sentencing. Morally these people are in the wrong but a moral justification is different to a legal one.

Paul Chambers was found guilty for sending menacing electronic communication. He tweeted that he would blow up Robin Hood Airport when it closed after heavy snow. I've seen worse sarcastic tweets than this in my stream before, after the listed cases these tweets could result in legal action.

This is a great story. GoCardless is an example of a company that found a tough problem and executed upon it excellently in a completely different way to all of their competitors, allowing them to undercut everyone else. I'm seeing more UK companies using GoCardless because if you're just catering to the UK the lower cut is completely worth it, it's very easy to integrate and easy to communicate with the team. Hopefully the rest of Europe will be able to use it soon.

If anyone's interested in hearing any further insights, Tom spoke at an event I co-organise in London recently and had a really engaging talk: http://youtu.be/pB1cCd1j48E

I used to run a marketplace business and much of my role was getting in touch with partners to get them on our service. Obviously the value we added was key but I started A/B testing email to see if it made much of a difference. I found that the shorter the email, the quicker the reply I'd receive. I worked it up to about a 50% improvement in the end. Honestly I just learned that people want you to get to the point, lay out the key facts and make it clear what you want.

If you know the person look at saving any niceties for after you've made your point. It doesn't look so false if you save any of this for after you've made your request and and you're actually interested in how their job is going.

Buffer is a brilliant team and a catalyst for how SaaS companies should be ran. I started following Joel and then eventually Leo about a month after the first landing page went live and from then people I spoke to about it could see that this was going to be valuable. Some asked if it was only a feature.

Though the product was relatively simple and wasn't compatible with all of the applications it is today. The team behind it were extremely passionate about it and were great at customer development. I'd send a tweet with a product idea or reply to a post on their blog and I'd near-immediately see a reply. As a customer this tells me they're in it for the long haul, they aren't going to pivot next week and it's worth devoting myself to this platform. They are doing all they can to make a great product and share it with the world.

The value of interacting with your customers is an art that they have to an extent mastered. When you tweet or email buffer you quickly receive a reply, in any article about them the team is thanking users. If you build a great product and really engage with users. You'll definitely build a troop of evangelists willing to pay for the product and spread the world to as many as they can and as you continue to share your vision more of the free users will join this group. This is why they are gaining traction, being built into more apps as a sharing option and I wouldn't be surprised if more are paying. The pricing is dead simple, they could easily charge much more.

I found the original Google+ post more striking. If anyone wants to access that directly: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+SergeyBrin/posts/B9VnJXd6Rir

This is a good move from Brin in my opinion, even though he can do little more than speak about the matter. There's nothing more dangerous to a stable democracy than a two party system. In Britain with more prominent parties (Even though only two really get elected) I still feel like my politics aren't being represented.

I know a few founders that have had to let people go after aggressively hiring. They've ended up fine but when they first raised their seed round they went out and hired a load of people. I do also know a few that are incredibly slow at hiring and it's lead to slow product development and an odd balance in the team (They have more designers than developers). I think sometimes if you hire too slowly it's hard to add more people when you start to need them. Because you have such a tight knit team that can't really change how they work to allow a few other people into the mix.

Somewhere in between seems best, only hire folks that really understand and fit in your vision and hire people that are going to be key for where you are slightly ahead of now over the people you needed a month ago. The team I spoke about needed designers then but now that the team has more designers than developers there's an odd balance that has lead to a beautiful but not very functional product. Their homepage changes more than their product.

Exactly, to all of the people worrying about the fact that he's 16. I don't think it's really him doing much of it. I've seen these deals happen before, where an investor gives someone some money, brings in their executive team and outsources development. If you look at the list on the about section about five agencies and freelancer teams are working on the app. I've met a few people that are over the last few days.

They are basing it on his age (Nothing wrong with that) because they seem to have a huge agency or press team working to get two BBC headline's and coverage in all of the big publications.

The worry with this is if all fails and the app doesn't take off (As it didn't the first time and with most companies) will they all stick around and will the investors put more in? This is why I don't particularly like this model.

All the best to him and the team though. I'll be interested to see how it goes.

The key reason people use Instagram is not about filters. Which is why Hipstermatic which was far more popular at first let most of their employees go.

There is a level of context around Instagram pictures. The cropped square image that is easy to consume as you scroll, the filter, the way the geolocation data is shown and the way you like and interact with the picture.

The way you interact on Twitter is different to Instagram. When I see someone Instagram a picture I will rarely comment but when I see a post on Instagram I'll interact with most posts. Instagram isn't necessarily especially brilliant but all of this is about context. You don't post the same content on Twitter and Facebook.

Their original app allowed you to paste the link of an article or any text and they'd summarise it. It didn't really work and this is trying to find a use for it. I'l be interested to see where they take it.

From a company angle they seem to be outsourcing a lot of development based on their about page. I'm not sure how scalable this is for a startup. If this second iteration doesn't work will they be able to pivot?

No because they also received value from me explaining what we're building and he was very interested by it. They are a much bigger market-leading competitor so it's not a case that people will deal with every day.

I can understand why someone wouldn't want to talk to a competitor but not when dealing with normal founders, users, etc. As you pointed out it can be risky but overall being open usually leads to a net positive.

I deal with this every day when I meet founders. They tell me that they're keeping their idea under-wraps because they don't want anyone to steal it or pass it on to someone who could.

Not once has any of these people succeeded with this approach. On the other hand, Joel at Bufferapp who I've been watching since the early days was very public. Got out there to find out if people wanted the product pre-MVP and when there was an MVP he let people use it. Today they're based in SF, have strong revenue, a team, venture funding and hundreds of thousands of users.

The people with "stealth companies" that succeed are serial founders with money behind them. Most of the time they don't keep it under-wraps, they just don't share it online. If you ask them what they're doing they'll tell you and they're constantly getting out there talking to partners, investors, etc. Many of these companies fail such as Color.

Unless you're starting a new national airline that could be stopped if a competitor found out what you are doing and went to congress or partners to block you from entering the market.

I recommend talking to competitors if you're put in a situation with one. This is something I've done and they've been very helpful, on one occasion one helped me out without intending to by talking about why one feature probably wouldn't work without a tweak because they found out it doesn't work without X.

In the end it's about execution. Get as much as you can out of the door as you can and learn as much about the market as you can.

I actually wrote an article about this a new months ago: http://brack.in/post/32461803751/stealth-is-bullshit

Most probably because of all of the press and Apple store feature. The feedback I've read has been mixed. It's definitely got more use than their first app but I'm not sure it fits into my usage pattern.

I think the app looks great and has some nice imagery. It's rather unintuitive though. To read something you have to download the stories like it's Instapaper, when the categories were preinstalled in the app.

It's also confusing how to navigate, you have to swipe up to load the webpage or you can also double tap that just loads more of the story, swipe down to get back, swipe right to go to the next story and if you tap on any part of the story (Say to copy) it opens spiralling social sharing icon.

The problem for me is that Flipboard and Twitter are the only ways I really choose to consume mainstream news, barring HackerNews or Reddit. This app isn't social and has set about 10 categories, you're supposed to be able to generate others but when I typed in 'Startups' nothing happened. I think the reason they pivoted from summarising any text into articles is because you can cut an article down much easier. They're broken down with an introductory line, summary and summary paragraph.

For example: If you wanted to summarise this comment you could take the first line and the first two lines from the paragraph before this and that would be just. If Flipboard bought them and used it in their iPhone app so that before you click to read more of an article it's summarised it instead of just leaving a quote I'd be quite happy.