Because they has been busy updating gmail design.
To me it looks like Google has stopped caring about what their customers want and is focusing instead on things that they think we want...
2,176 karma · joined December 5, 2010
To me it looks like Google has stopped caring about what their customers want and is focusing instead on things that they think we want...
The graphics/visualization is breathtaking but what they learned from all of that analysis seems very limited: Apparently, when caregivers discover that a child is learning a word they simplify their use of that word till the child grasps it and then revert back to normal usage once the child can use the word.
It could very well be that their regular usage of the word that the child is learning is unaffected, but in addition they use the word more often in simple sentences around the child, and once the child understand the word revert back to regular usage patterns/frequency. That would explain the results and does not seem that interesting.
It allows you to probe the black-box and see what comes out the other end. For example, I would be saying a lot of money if I were a married 60 year old woman called Mary. But I guess we all knew that!
I read in a book ("Blown to Bits") that one of the reasons why Brittanica flopped was because the sales people did not understand what they were selling. They thought that what they were selling was knowledge.
But most of the customers bought the books to assuage parental guilt, that they were doing enough by their children. Once the computer came around people stopped buying encyclopedia's so that "Johnny would do well in school," and bought computers instead.
Encyclopedia Brittanica did end up becoming a victim of changing technology, but in the short term at least, not in the direct way as is assumed.
I feel that you should test the other side's priorities before you disclose yours. You would not want to trade an elephant for a pawn.
I feel that for a non-consumer product like ours, where design is not the make or break difference, a video like the one that we have is more than sufficient to let people know more about the product.
I found Mark's blogs to be very informative. They contained actionable insights that I used often as I launched my start-up.
So I like 7, building a database of biology but to tackle that head on would be impractical (financially). That is the end goal that we have at my startup, but we are starting out by helping labs manage their reagent and chemical inventories first. Sounds mundane but the eventual goal is to get to a crowd-sourced global database for biology. Remains to be seen how it pans out.
My point is that such lists of top X ideas can be useful but often the biggest challenge is plotting the trajectory. And often the path is not a straight line.
He would constantly make quick small suggestions like this, possibly even obvious things, but his enthusiasm and excitement when he made the suggestions, encouraged us to carry them out and it definitely helped us out.
Congrats Geoff and YC!
As long as people can be sure to arrange to be here when the batch is in session it does not matter.