tapp

Potentially. I've been thinking recently about what keeps my company on Google Apps (roughly a dozen people) despite the appallingly bad customer support and several major nagging and unresolved bugs.

The single biggest factors are gmail filters and priority inbox. I get an extraordinary amount of ham, and rely on both of these to give me a fighting chance of keeping up. I'm confident I could probably find a replacement for filters, but am much less confident re priority inbox. If a standalone solution offered robust equivalents for both, I would seriously consider migrating, and would probably be willing to pay a 50% premium over what we currently pay Google.

One shop's opinion, FWIW.

Really? The polio vaccine made my body better without adverse effects, and there are literally hundreds of other examples.

Evolution is a process, not an endpoint - - it seems highly unlikely that no further improvements to the human body are possible.

I have to disagree - Google Apps has the absolute worst support of any business application/suite I've ever used.

If Google provides meaningful support for Wallet going forward, I hope they consider extending it to Apps - it's desperately needed.

Kickstarter is kosher, precisely because as the parent post said ""Kickstarter is not a store, it's just a website where you give money and get stuff in the mail later."

It's the fact that it's a donation, not the pre-purchase of a physical good, that makes it so.

If you're selling a physical good, you're supposed to deliver or ship it at the time of the transaction.

> where'd you hear that whopper?

Originally from our banker at Chase that handled our merchant account set up, but it's easy enough to confirm if you look:

http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/card-acceptance-guide...

http://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0221-billed-merchandise...

> You really think Amazon Payments would have let Kickstarter go this long if they weren't kosher?

It's worth noting that even though Kickstarter is kosher, the area is gray enough that Amazon is not taking on any more Kickstarter-type sites until further notice precisely because of their legal concerns.

A lot of people don't seem to realize that it's also prohibited by the Visa and Mastercard TOS. You can't bill people's credit cards for a product that doesn't exist yet.

Is that for both B2C and B2B companies? PG's article doesn't say, and I have a difficult time envisioning how most seed-stage enterprise software companies could generate a 5-10% w-o-w revenue growth rate. It tends to be much lumpier than that.

No - this is not universally true.

e.g. Google Apps for Business is a PAID product that is not advertising supported.

The sales literature says "Count on our 24/7 customer support" - http://www.google.com/intl/en/enterprise/apps/business/benef...

Unfortunately, per my post above, customer support is basically every bit as lousy for customers of paid products as it is for users of free ones.

Depends on what you mean by "access to support."

My company, and several of my customers with whom I've discussed this issue, spend a significant chunk of money on Google Apps and related Google services. We do get a customer support #, but all that means is someone answers the phone.

I'm not sure we've ever received actual support from them. We have trouble tickets for significant, documented issues that have been open for YEARS. The official answer is that someone from engineering will look into it and get back to us.

We're looking into ways to reduce our dependency on Google services, but of course it's a challenging and time-consuming endeavor to migrate away.

Slightly OT:

I am surprised to hear this sentiment on HN as often as I do. It seems to imply a somewhat Luddite-like fear of technological advancement, versus the generally positive interest I would expect from hackers. Am I off base?

I'm not talking about modafinil specifically (no opinion there) but more generally.

This is cool as far as it goes. However what I'd really like to see (though it would obviously be a lot more work) is an analysis that tracks the deals through to consummation. I've read that a very high percentage fall through before funding (HyConn was one of the high profile examples.)

Writing this quickly because I'm about to run out the door, so please excuse the incomplete answer.

In brief, aside from simply recognizing it intellectually (which alone helped me a lot,) I'd start by literally following the advice I wrote above and remove the phrase from your vocabulary. i.e. Don't say things like "I really have to get caught up this weekend." It's a hopelessly imprecise statement that, if you're like me, primarily just engenders stress and shame. Instead use active language re: precise tasks. e.g. "I'm going to fix my bike and go to the store this afternoon."

Fiore does talk a lot about similar language issues in the Now Habit. For example, he stresses the importance of saying things like "I choose to work on this report now" versus "I have to work on this report now."

His argument is that the latter promotes a victimhood mentality leading to resentment and then procrastination.

He also points out that it's simply untrue. If you're going to be precise, there's very little you have to do - there are simply things you choose to do because either you enjoy them, or because you prefer the consequences of having done them versus not having done them.

Hope that helps!

From the blog post: "Almost every Sunday night I mourn another blown opportunity to catch up"

The author may also want to consider removing the notion of "caught up" from his vocabulary. Although it's not covered in the Now Habit, it's discussed in other respected books on procrastination and time management.

I used to beat myself up a lot with the idea that there was a (poorly defined) state of having gotten "caught up" on life tasks like those the author describes at which point all would be well.

The problem is that it doesn't really exist - there's always more to do than you can actually do - and denying that fact keeps you from living in the present. There are simply activities you choose to do and activities you choose not to do - that's it.

While it may sound absurdly simplistic, this one change in thinking had a huge impact on both my personal productivity and happiness.

FWIW, YMMV, etc.

Wow, that seems like some pretty serious brand dilution.

I'm curious - does anyone know if TED charges any sort of fee to the local TEDx licensees?

He's promoted it on his verified Twitter account and his blog as well; I'd say it's the real deal.

Completely agree on both counts. As designers and developers it will be difficult to resist the urge to replicate this all over the place purely for the visual impact, but I hope we don't.

The use was so fantastic here precisely because this sort of story cried out for exactly these tools to provide a deeper understanding.

Seems to be going around. Stanford did something similar just recently as well:

http://www.change.org/petitions/stanford-university-bring-ba...

Many of the "e-discovery" software suites out there now include digital forensics capabilities that will scan for signs of tampering.

Slightly OT, but could someone tell me what, exactly, "acq-hire" means? I thought it referred to one company acquiring another purely in order to get access to talent.

Facebook did not acquire any Carsabi assets according to the linked TC story, it simply offered the founders jobs.

Back in the day, we called that getting "hired."

Is there a distinction here (e.g. perhaps some sort of payback to investors or something) that I'm missing?

I think it's more a matter of simple customer segmentation (same principle behind outlet malls: charge price-insensitive customers a premium, without losing the price-sensitive but hassle-insensitive customers who are willing to schlep to the outlet mall for a discount.)

AdBlock allows Google customers to self-segment the same way. Win-win.

Would those of you who object to this tactic also object to collecting website analytics (which in my experience many normal users, including members of my own family, do not understand either.) If not, why not?

This isn't a rhetorical question; I'm sincerely curious. Thanks.

> If you know someone in the space, we would love an introduction.

I do - my email address is in my profile. Let me know your preferred method for getting in touch?

I'm not sure it is. To the best of my knowledge, Amit hasn't found a donor yet - they've just found several possible matches.

If so, then the next challenge will be getting one of those matches to donate. Per article on HN yesterday, "more than 50 percent of South Asians in the registry refuse to go through with the donation process if selected" (Source: http://www.good.is/post/amit-gupta-and-the-south-asian-bone-... )

If payment improves that ratio, then I would think this could still potentially help Amit.

No API yet, but they do send you an email notification.

My experience is primarily back-end development, so I'm a complete UI design dummy. I have a stupid question that I always mean to look into "when I have time" - - given topic, perhaps someone on this thread can answer.

Why does the font in the input box on the bootstrappingdesign lander look so screwy and hard to read, relative to the rest of the page? (I'm running Chrome on a vanilla Windows 7 box.)

http://i.imgur.com/TgQjV.gif

> It seems like he is ready to finally leave TechCrunch, but doesn't want to frame it as a simple matter of leaving TechCrunch to become a full-time investor

I wonder about this. Even if you accept the premise that his priority is now his fund, it seems like Mike's formally leaving TechCrunch could have a nontrivial impact on "CrunchFund's" deal flow?

> It's a shame they don't scan things besides books

It sounds like they do. Homepage says books/photos/business cards/documents/greeting cards.

> Our deficit is $14.6 trillion.

Just in the interest of precision: it's actually our national debt which is approximately 14.6 trillion. Our deficit this year will be closer to 1.5T.

http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=12039

Not that they aren't both mind-boggling numbers

> I just wish biomed paid better wages -- I much more than doubled my income by leaving a wetlab and doing advertising instead. It's a lesson in what our society really values.

This bothers me greatly.

I don't want to threadjack, but are any HN'ers aware of discussion elsewhere about what concerned members of society who do value biomed progress more strongly than most, but who don't have Milken-level money might be able to do to promote faster progress?

I'd be very interested in exploring how YC-like entrepreneurial energy could be unleashed on improving human health, and would be willing to chip in.

Your comment re: multiple identities is exactly right. I don't understand why people seem so surprised to hear this sentiment coming from her, though - Mark is already on record on that topic:

“Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

Facebook's policy from the top down seems to be that you are only ever entitled to one identity - period. If you were foolish enough to be born into an environment where expressing yourself solely through that one identity can get you in to trouble and/or killed, that's your own fault.

> The story here is that people are doing things that in most jurisdictions are illegal.

Agreed; I believe the problems posed to AirBnB's model are more severe that most commenters seem to recognize. Further, the countermeasures many are suggesting are problematic in their own right. e.g. Troy in Techcrunch post said:

"Also, go with your gut. My gut said something wasn’t right about the people that rented my place, but I didn’t know how to handle that gut feeling..."

IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that depending on specifics, both the Fair Housing Act and the ADA can apply to hotel rentals. If you create a situation where people are empowered to decline a rental because they "got a bad gut feeling" about the renter, you open up yet another legal can of worms.

I have nothing against the AirBnB guys - I'm actually rooting for them. However I think it's time for them to step up their game and start tackling these issues head on instead of hiding from them, which seems to have been their strategy to date.