plusbryan

This article misses the point entirely. LivingSocial just acquired a shit-ton of users for $10 each. Period. That's an extremely low acquisition cost for a lifetime user value of $50 or more. They now have more than a million credit cards and email addresses that they didn't have before.

http://www.lifeinbeta.org/2011/01/why-living-social-can-sell...

Agreed. This honestly seems like my experience with the early beta, which did seem pretty buggy. The production version has fixed a lot of these issues, so I'm a little surprised that this version would exhibit some of these same issues. That's too bad.

I would imagine the microsoft ad linked in the article will resonate with a lot of people. Very well done.

FWIW, burglars do sometimes test doors randomly. This is speaking from experience of being almost-burgled while my door was unlocked.

That's a misleading article. Apple disallows a lot of things from its in-app payment system. Collecting donations, especially if they then take their 30% cut, probably has some weird tax implications for them. Why not just incorporate PayPal or another payment system into their app? Sure, it's not as easy for users, but it's flat-out untrue to say that Apple is preventing non-profits from soliciting donations via apps.

If I were in negotiations with Yahoo to buy one of their properties (and I were more nefarious), I'd have leaked a story like this to reduce the sales price.

This app makes me want to travel, right now, so I can just try out the app. Amazing.

Kids these days have so many awesome tools at their disposal. Thanks for sharing!

I want it just for the sexy improved keyboard. Geesh!

Would love to see some reliability and speed metrics in the coming weeks as adoption increases!

Even more important, you won't need to solve that pesky captcha each time you wish to log in!

It it just me, or does the mob mentality of this scare anyone else just a little? With no real evidence and certainly no trial, a one-sided tale told on reddit led to the destruction of a small business.

I'm shocked and ashamed that California's own Feinstein appears on this list.

I once got a call from Apple's review team from a man named Steve. This news for me is like hearing that the lotto's lucky numbers changed and I just threw away the ticket.

Agreed. I've just taken the last half hour to write to my senators in hopes it will gain some attention. This will be a hard issue to battle though - no senator wants to sponsor a bill that might be blamed for a terrorist attack.

For sure. I still remember scooping out huge gobs of that yummy spagetti sauce from that stove. This feels a bit like my parents selling my childhood home. So many good memories.

> the level of thinking users did before they paid for something versus when they bought it for free was different

This is the very reason we never dropped the price of Swipe to free, even though Square and other competitors did so. Because of the relatively complicated nature of the signup process, their ratings quickly dropped to 1-2, and ours remained 4-5. Additionally, our customers were more qualified and converted at a much higher rate.

Bills sent to collections for as little as $15 can severely affect your credit score (personal experience). Since most car dealerships these days use the score as indicative of credit worthiness, even a small dispute can lead to annoying situations.

"public shaming" is an amusing feature

I wonder how the governor will feel now when NYC foreclosures skyrocket.

@sprout: I disagree that airbnb and ilk would increase inefficiency. In fact, it seems to me that it's hotels that bring the inefficiency into the market. They are proxies for short-term housing needs created at a time when it was difficult to arrange short-term housing in unused space in residential zones.

Imagine a world where sublets were completely unrestricted on both a governmental and leasing level. If I go on vacation, I would rent out my place. Theoretically, because my place is used 100%, the demand for these massive, overpriced hotels taking up prime real estate in our nation's cities would dwindle - and the efficiency of the city would actually improve.

Instead of locking up this prime real estate in hotels, which are seasonal and affected by economic hardship, we'd enable more people to live downtown full-time, close to their jobs - which would lower transportation costs, monthly housing costs, overnight rental costs, and in general bring efficiency to the market.

They definitely did a bit of grassroots lobbying with petitions (http://savenysublets.tumblr.com/) and I heard the founders spent some time in NYC. But nothing compared to what I bet the Hilton's of the world put into it.

I'm pretty sure it would take me about as long to master...

After spending 8 months wading through the MFI program myself, I concur that it's messy and poorly managed - I'm not surprised that this is part of the reason for the delay. Keep at it, I look forward to mine!

the red paper clip guy actually hired a pr firm to help him gain publicity and achieve his goal (I knew a guy at the pr firm he hired)

Jobs must not get invited to many weddings.

My joke finder only kicked in when you mentioned the battery. We live in a scifi world, except for those darn batteries.

Congrats Trevor!

Lots of potential in this space. But you're right, for some reason, a 502 Bad Gateway error seems less forgivable when coming from a bank.

Does anyone know the approximate percentage spent on actual operations vs. management and build-out of the system?

I lived in Boston for a summer in 2006, and I got to witness the transition from decades-old transit tokens to paper cards.

It was a giant cluster: Horrid machine usability, non-reusable transit cards, and untrained station personnel. It made me wonder what sort of premium the MBTA paid for that "upgrade" and how much rider confidence was lost.