far33d

Which apps? Would like to teach some basic math to my 4 yr old.

does anyone else find the URL for this article strange?

"Here’s how Apple products are created: a team of designers decide exactly what a product should do and how it should look and feel, their work is ruthlessly edited by Steve until he approves, and then the entire rest of the company is given the task of moving mountains to make that dream real."

Unsurprisingly, this is exactly how Pixar works. But Pixar was essentially run by Ed Catmull, who is much more like Tim Cook than Steve Jobs. Yes, Steve was CEO, but he wasn't the tastemaker at Pixar. As long as the CEO trusts someone else to drive the taste and works hard to preserve that culture, Apple will continue to be successful.

I'm sure hundreds of second and third tier VCs piled on with ridiculous valuations in the hopes that they could add a "hot" company to their website. If this article is correct, Dropbox did the right thing and decided to go with smarter money.

Another possible scenario is that their new customers account for a significant portion of revenue. Once they hit the edge of the addressable market, their CPA rises significantly and their revenue goes off a cliff as it becomes harder to acquire new, profitable customers.

There are two ways to read these tea leaves.

Ed Catmull is the only plausible external possibility. He would be excellent at making sure what works at Apple stays that way.

Add Zynga to the list as well. We're building the next generation of social games from Central Square in Cambridge. If you are into games, this is the best place in Boston to work right now.

Great team, great opportunity.

My email is in my profile.

The explosion in angels has not skipped Boston. A few recent acquisitions will certainly increase activity as well.

Boston, MA

Zynga Boston has a small team working on the next big social game. We're looking for a number of positions in engineering, art, product management, and data analysis.

My email is in my profile.

Facebook already has circles. They're called friend lists. Adding UI sugar to make circles (if people actually wanted them) would be nearly trivial. For instance:

http://www.circlehack.com/

If they don't have a button that says "share" that you click before it posts that's a TOS violation and will likely be changed quickly if the FB compliance team is paying attention.

Fact of the matter is that install rates often don't change much when you ask for additional permissions. Most users don't care. There's often no compelling reason to build out complicated permissions flows when the standard "ask for it all up front" works just fine.

Mostly, turntable is growing because they are subsidizing free music. The social is gravy, but people love free stuff. At some point they will need to actually cover their costs (note the shutdown of non-us traffic) and it's going to be a lot more difficult.

Growth has never been the hard part for music startups. Making money has.

This is an incredible amount of leverage for the non-founder employees of YC-backed startups.

With some quick analysis on some aggregate of 4sq feeds, you could determine the average # of checkins per user per day, which would let you estimate daily actives reasonably well (3m checkins / day)

Facebook should be heralded for using a real user engagement metric in the advertising reach numbers. They could claim every registered user as a "user" but then they'd be lying (like most other services do).

Given the near total saturation in the US, it's not surprising that their monthly actives are starting to show some decay from the quality of installs going down as they grow as well as some seasonal affect.

Basically, the replacement rate of new installs in the US is lower than the number of people who have not been active in the past 30 days. If we had more granular data, I'd be willing to bet the loss is primarily in users who installed recently, not longer-tenure users losing interest or switching services. Like my mom.

At first glance, this looks about 100x better than jobvite.

Wow. Eric and Elizabeth Lefkosky turned a $1m angel investment (according to crunchbase) into $380m cash in 4 years.

If your company is ever used as the subject of the "X for Y" analogy, that's success. AirBnB used to be the eBay for vacation rental.. Now other companies are the airbnb of things.

It's unfortunate that "local" has come to mean "groupon clone". There's so much more to local commerce.

I would normally chime in but this thread feels like a witch hunt with a lot of people who don't know what they are talking about pretending to be experts.

This is hilarious. They can't say they're safe anymore, they can't say they aren't addictive, so now they are "harmful and addictive" but easy to quit?

I too thought this would be a kindle or ipad-like device that browsed the web for cheap. I was excited. Then I saw it was a crappy netbook and was disappointed. The form-factor makes a big difference for me, since I already need a full-featured laptop for my work.

You should have gone to Brown :)

My wife printed half-size boarding passes to try and save some paper and we go SO much crap at every juncture.

The one-liner blog post is much better than the alternative: dontjustcollectmyemail.com

I'm sure there's someone who said that about newspaper classifieds once too.

Engagement should be a relative metric: so in this case, maybe, the % of users who sign up that make a transaction in a time period. Otherwise it's not really meaningful without other data (ad spend, total users, etc). This is "total engaged users" not "engagement".

Can we please decide on what the definition of engagement is? For social apps on facebook it is daily users / monthly users. Here it means "more users using the service". Let's not confuse vanity metrics with relative metrics.

I'm likely to be on the wrong side of this argument, but part of my gets upset every time I hear about a founder leaving their fast-growing company. Great companies are built by the kinds of founders who don't just want to start something, they want to build and scale it into something world-changing.

Imagine Mark Zuckerberg leaving FB to "start something new". Imagine Bill Gates leaving MSFT early on to "experiment with some new ideas". Larry Ellison, Page and Brin, Jobs, etc all evolved with their companies. Why does it seem like this class of entrepreneurs is uninterested in seeing their companies out?

Steve worked on-site at Pixar one day a week (Friday) until the Disney acquisition. Day-to-day management went through the executive team, primarily Ed Catmull for technical and operations, and John Lasseter for creative direction.