iseff

Only very tangentially related, my scrappy, not-too-well capitalized (from Founder's Co-op: http://www.founderscoop.com) Seattle start-up (AppStoreHQ: http://www.appstorehq.com) is also seeking developers:

http://blog.appstorehq.com/post/482789903/appstorehq-is-look...

EDIT: Err, why the downvotes?

AppStoreHQ (http://www.appstorehq.com), a mobile app search and discovery site, are hiring a developer in Seattle, WA.

We're seed funded ($150K from Founder's Co-op) and approaching cash-flow breakeven.

Happy to discuss further with anyone interested, or read more here: http://blog.appstorehq.com/post/482789903/appstorehq-is-look...

Sweet, thanks.

I've been doing some beginner tutorials as well: http://www.mobilehtml5.com

Also, my startup (http://www.appstorehq.com) provides search+discovery for mobile apps, including mobile web apps. We're trying to push the boundaries with mobile web apps (e.g. easy, App Store style payments) and are looking for alpha testers.. If anyone is interested, email me: iseff@appstorehq.com

Clever. :)

Out of curiosity, how does duckduckgo make money? I _never_ see ads (a good thing, but I'd love for the service to continue, so hoping that you're making money somehow!)

You're probably just not the right market for it.

I know folks who obsess over LinkedIn, use it often, and use it profitably. This includes insurance brokers, real estate agents, and most of all, recruiters.

And, as a business, they've done a great job monetizing with premium features.

Whoops, sorry about that. Fixed. :)

Thanks. We're hoping to come up with a nice little service around HTML5 (truth be told, I'm a big believer in web apps), and we have some fun tricks up our sleeve, too.

Feel free to contact me directly (iseff@iseff.com) if you ever have any ideas/comments/suggestions/etc. Or just to meet, too! :)

A friend of mine is doing some interesting things -- mostly for women right now -- very similar to this: http://www.theweatherstylist.com

If you believe this could be the future, there seems to be a business in creating the routing/scheduling algorithms for where/when planes should meet up to fly in formation.

FWIW, Andy Sack, the Executive Director is a great guy with tons of operational experience. I fully expect this program to be fantastic.

Full disclosure: Andy is a GP at Founder's Co-op (http://www.founderscoop.com), which invested in my startup.

It sounds less like they're being discouraged from using Python, and more like they're being encouraged to think critically about what sorts of projects Python would excel at.

Put another way, they're being encouraged to use the right tool for the job.

Yeah, we're wrestling with the best way to handle this right now.

On one hand, retweeting and repeating tweets is a perfectly acceptable -- and standard -- way of "voting" via Twitter, and we want to respect and appreciate that.

On the other hand, apps that send out links to their app liberally should probably be punished.

There's obviously a balance to be found somewhere in the middle. Our model of weighting scores based on users and their friends/followers counts helps out somewhat -- most people who are 'popular' Twitter users are less likely to spam their followers.

A couple ideas we've had -- and we'd certainly love any feedback -- are:

1) Anytime we see multiple tweets following the same pattern, discount everyone but the first by some weight (say, 50%). This will keep them relevant, but dampen their impact.

2) Keep a list of API clients which are known to be in-app clients, such as MGTwitterEngine, and either discount their weight or remove them entirely.

Surprisingly, a few years ago (2006), I received some mail from a PR firm who actually represented 37S. Whether or not they still use a firm, I'm not sure, but it's interesting to note that this success wasn't entirely built from their blog.

A shameless plug of my own site, but hopefully helpful to those not wanting to open iTunes:

http://www.appstorehq.com/wolframalpha-iphone-77717/app

This was one that I particularly thought was a little bit of him reading his own press a bit too much:

“the next hundred years will be different for advertising, and it starts today. As marketers pushing our information out is no longer enough. We are announcing anew advertising system, not about broadcasting messages, about getting into the conversations between people. 3 pieces: build pages for advertisers, a new kind of ad system to spread the messages virally, and gain insights. ... Once every hundred years media changes. the last hundred years have been defined by the mass media. The way to advertise was to get into the mass media and push out your content. That was the last hundred years. In the next hundred years information won’t be just pushed out to people, it will be shared among the millions of connections people have. Advertising will change. You will need to get into these connections."

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/06/liveblogging-facebook-a...

A serious question: What's the difference between an "unpaid internship" and a CEO of a successful company (e.g. Steve Jobs) who gets paid $1/year? Is there not a way to get around this law by simply putting the intern on a $1/summer salary?

I like this article, and I think it's a good reminder, but it's also a reminder that you need to weigh each and every business and idea individually.

For example, Google and Amazon were definitely idea companies. Neither made any money -- and, in Google's case, wasn't even sure about how they'd make money -- for quite some time. But, both have seem to have done acceptably well.

Hmm, at first I saw the title and thought it was an app that would make cheating on tests in class easy (think like the blackjack counting app - could do something like "put the phone in your pocket and shake your leg N times to ask for help with #1, and then get M buzzes back to indicate which answer from fellow students"). I don't condone it, but I bet it would sell well if implemented cleanly.

As it were, this is also a cool app. :)

From the looks of it, he uses FeedBurner.

It took me quite a bit of time before I got over the whole "give everything to FeedBurner thing," but once I did I never looked back. It's a pretty good service and works well almost all the time.

Yes, buttt..... after around 10,000-20,000 (or somewhere around there), they decided that sequential user id's were a bad idea, so most users won't know what user number they actually were.

(As an aside, my ego likes the fact that I am user 5500: http://twitter.com/users/show.xml?screen_name=iseff)

I'll likely get downvoted for this, but oh well...

I actually found this hilarious and worth being on the top of HN. Sure, it's not as intellectually stimulating as most of the articles here (and that's a very good thing), but every once in a while I think it's a good thing for a community to get together and have a laugh.

As long as we keep the quality up most of the time, I think it's alright to have some fun a bit of the time.

> so this is just another way of thumbing their nose at open standards.

It's likely much less "thumbing their nose at open standards" as it is just a matter of making sure their software works for the vast majority of their users.

I know that's how I develop software, anyways -- if there's a quirk in a browser used by a very small percentage of users that's not entirely simple to fix, I don't. It's just a matter of priorities: create new features and upgrade existing ones for 99% of your users or fix features for 1% of users. Depending on the feature, you make a rational decision.

Thanks! We definitely have personalization features that we want to build, right now there's just so much to do. :) Promise we'll get to it soon, though!

Hey all,

Hoping to get some feedback on our new site. We've been launched for a bit now, and are finally ready to start showing off to the world. Hopefully you'll have some comments, especially if you're an app developer.

We're working on mobile app search and discovery, since we believe the app store is far too hit driven. We want to make finding the perfect app easy. And, as a developer, we want you to be able to market and distribute your app more effectively.

We've done some things that I think are pretty interesting. Here's a quick run-down:

1) "Hottest Apps" -- We index many different blogs that review apps and any review they write gets linked to from our site. Then we use that as an input to create a list of what apps are currently the hottest. We also publish the most talked about apps to our Twitter account (http://twitter.com/appstorehq).

2) Sponsored Results -- App developers can purchase sponsored results for any category. Right now they're $10/week or $35/month.

3) Saving Apps to your Amazon Universal Wish List -- If you want to remember an app, but don't want to buy it yet, you can save it to your Amazon Wish List and come back to buy it later.

4) App badges for your site -- You can embed a badge on any site and write a review of an app. We'll find that review (because you embedded the badge) and we'll link to it from the app's detail page. It gives your visitors up-to-date information about the app, and gives you more traffic. A win-win, we think.

5) Search filters -- we think we have the best all around mobile app search on the web now. You can drill down by any combination of Search Query, Category, Price Range, and Rating. Soon we'll be adding Release Date to that as well.

Overall, we're really trying to help app developers with app distribution (and other problems) and help app consumers find the right apps. So, if you have any suggestions, please let us know!

We're also testing the waters with white-label search. For example, if you run a blog which talks about mobile apps, we'd provide a white-label version of our index and share any revenue you provide... If you'd be interested in something like this, let us know.

Most surprising quote of the article (IMO): "Zynga, the largest applications developer on Facebook, with 42m users of its games, is reported to be nearing annual sales of $100m. Together, developers working on Facebook’s platform are expected to make more than $500m this year – perhaps more than Facebook itself."

Here's a link to see more info without hitting iTunes: http://www.appstorehq.com/touchplan-iphone-30416/app

(Disclaimer: that is my newest project.)

I guess I should've been more clear: "older" did not mean age, "older" meant "at Amazon longer than others."

This doesn't matter much, but Saginaw is North/Northwest of Detroit.

As someone who grew up in (outside of, but that's the style of Detroit -- no one lives _in_ Detroit) Detroit and takes enormous pride in that fact, it's been funny to see the massive amount of press recently about the fall of the city. I think the rest of the country is just sitting nervously, thinking "what if that happens to our city?!"

The funny thing is, when I was growing up we NEVER went to downtown Detroit. There were basically only two reasons to go there: (1) to watch the Red Wings or Tigers (the Lions didn't even play there until recently, and the Pistons still don't), and (2) to go to the Auto Show. We would just spend all our time in the beautiful suburbs. However, now, when I go back home to visit, it's amazing, we spend ALL our time downtown and talk about how much better it is and how much we love it. Quite the opposite of how the press talks.

If you want some perspective on how Detroiters feel about all this, I highly suggest reading Mitch Albom's article, The Courage of Detroit (http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/the_bonus/01/0...). It's long, but try to get through it all.

It's an interesting thought, though I'm not sure it's the most efficient way to get at the data for which he is looking.

For instance, you could just look at price history of TVs and you'd find that prices are generally increased in the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl and then discounted heavily in the following weeks. Therefore, if you want a good deal on a TV, buy it a week or so after the Super Bowl.

Awesome, an Inc. article inspired by a Hacker News thread. That, to me, is a perfect example of the quality of comments on HN.