timedoctor

All of the "problems" that he listed of to do lists are solved by using the "Getting things done" method from David Allen.

I personally hate the method of blocking off tasks in a calendar because it is: a) Not agile (can't adjust your priorities quickly). So you get sick one day then you have to adjust your entire calendar for the next month? b) Very cumbersome and totally not suited to the concept of lists of things to do.

To do lists are perfect for storing information about what you might do in the future. You can create various lists to hold information, so that you don't have to constantly try and remember it. Then each day you prioritize and figure out which tasks you are actually going to work on. The point of the to do list is not to create a list of tasks that you are absolutely going to work on necessarily. Instead it's a way to store information and then jog your memory when you decide what you are going to prioritize and actually work on.

So overall I think the idea of forcing yourself to plan ahead of time exactly what you are going to do several days in advance is a horrible idea and very ineffective. What if something more important comes up on the day? You get a call from Techcrunch that they would like to feature your app. Sorry Techcrunch you're not on my calendar.

The app doesn't work. When you scroll up and down through the images it stops showing you new faces. The faces are not all there, it's a trick, just has a few hundred facebook profiles in there, does not have all 1.2 billion.

I travelled and worked for over 3 years with 1 month at a time. After working on my time management skills I found that it did not decrease my productivity that significantly (maybe 10% reduction?). This is mostly from things that you cannot get when traveling for example: Multiple big screen monitors, regularly stocked fridge with easy to eat food, extra time taken to find locations to eat and wash your clothes etc.

This is assuming you're switching locations every 1-2 months. If you move locations every week it's a huge drain in productivity as it takes time to get set up and to travel etc.

Have now fixed in one place just because I have a baby, but otherwise would be possible to keep traveling.

I think a bigger problem of constant travel is the lack of a regular community.

This is a lot more of a problem for teams that are not used to working remotely. Our entire team of 38 people are remote in 9 different countries and we have voice meetings on Skype every day. It's not an issue.

However I do notice exactly what you are talking about every time we conduct a meeting with a new person who is not in the practice of constant remote communication.

I think the ultimate test (and application) for artificial intelligence will be to tell the computer "Make me money" and then it figures out thousands of ways to do it and starts executing on these strategies. Potentially very dangerous outcomes however without morality.

Or another initial application of artificial intelligence I think is in trading financial markets, and distilling every point of data to create models of predicting markets and making obscene amounts of money.

This move of Mayer and Yahoo to buy a bunch of startups at difficult to justify valuations reeks of desperation. I think it's the continued downfall of Yahoo.

If you compare with Google acquisitions each of them are strategic and the aquihire acquisitions are at more reasonable valuations.

Cool, so the difference with this and Jing project is that it has the video on the bottom right as well as the video of the screen?

Definitely 3 minutes is a bit short for some applications

It should be the law that they must provide the pricing online and via an API so that it can be easily collated and compared with every other hospital. Imagine the type of apps you could create with this information.

I would also add that VC funds have a s..t load of money to invest. The valuations that they give in comparison with a bricks and mortar business are night and day different in most cases. For example a successful local business might sell for 3-4 times net profits or 1 times revenues. A tech company in a series A might get 15 times revenues (with zero profits). A hot tech startup can justify a lot more based on a lot less or zero revenue. The hope is that the tech company is going to justify that MUCH higher valuation by spectacular growth. Obviously it is justified with a handful of companies, but it's a very high risk investment for VCs to put it bluntly. However they have the funds, and they have their criteria with which to invest, and they mostly have a mandate and must invest the money.

I think Paul Graham's point's are interesting, but they are based on a world that he lives in, the world of tech startups and VCs, which is not the same as the wider business world.

It makes a mockery of the concept of the US being the bastion of freedom and being an example to other countries.

I would want to get some feedback from Braintree on this. Requiring a NAB foreign currency account is a pretty big deal. I used to have a NAB foreign currency account and it was a bit hard to operated, might have improved in the last few years however.

I personally use Braintree but with a US account for a US company (even though I live in Australia). This is more of an exceptional case however I think.

For Australian businesses charging in US dollars is not exceptional, probably very common.

This is just the beginning. I can see a future where top ranked universities offer online degrees at a small fraction of the current prices.

In fact I think the pricing will be separated out so that the lectures are 100% free and you pay for examinations or for tutoring or for small group mentoring with professors.

The logical conclusion is mega-universities that teach to millions of people in multiple countries around the world and out-compete existing universities leading to a large percentage of current universities being shut down or used only for courses where in-person training is necessary (for example medicine, some engineering courses etc).

Microsoft has the luxury of failure also, but when they tried to compete with Google they failed. Microsoft are in the same markets that Google makes a huge amount of money from and yet they failed on most fronts.

I think the safest way for Google to make money would be to not innovate or create any off the wall projects, and then just return the money the money to shareholders through dividends or share buybacks.

Just looking at the current stock price of Google $909 and Earnings per share of $33, this means that IF Google returned the entire earnings to shareholders it would take 27 years for the shareholders to get their money back and THEN after this 27 years they would start to get a return on their investment. This assumes no growth, and Google has grown significantly but there is no guarantee they will grow in the future. Even if they do grow significantly it will still take a very long time to get your investment back.

There are unknowns that could completely disrupt Google's business models for example what if all search became voice based (siri-like) with better AI. Or what if a competitor develops much better AI capabilities into their search.

I thought duplicated were automatically removed? Bug with hacker news?

I think it's probably better for Google to stage it with a higher price at first (for early adopters), get a lot of feedback and spend a couple of years to improve the voice commands and then release it to the mass market.

I know for me when using Siri, I am disappointed 80% of the time. Siri fails actually at least 80% of the time when I use it, so I really cannot use it, because it's too annoying to keep trying until Siri gets it right. Much easier to type than to try and talk to Siri.

Google glass is going to have significant challenges with the voice commands and early adopters will be willing to go through the pain of asking it several times, but the mass market will quickly get frustrated if the voice commands do not work 90+% of the time.

The idea of borrowing to buy a car is a ridiculously bad financial decision that most car buyers make. There are some exceptions (such as if you absolutely need the car for your business), however in most cases people would be way better off in buying a cheaper second hand car.

There are countless other examples. It annoys me greatly when people in the US state how the "cannot live on less than $100k per year". And these same people have no money saved in the bank. So they earn a very high salary and are still living month to month. Incredible.

What's the difference between squatting and building your app? So you're doing to take my domain whilst I'm in startup phase?

When I read the title I thought they were talking about abolishing patents altogether, which I think is not such a bad idea. At least for software patents I definitely think they should be eliminated.

Eliminating this one patent is pretty useless. Admirable in a certain sense, but there are thousands of other ridiculous patents. You can't fix the entire system one patent at a time.

Alexa rank is not accurate when it's higher than 20,000. If higher than 100,000 it is not accurate at all and can be gamed easily. Just get a few friends with the alexa toolbar to visit your site and your alexa rank will magically get a whole lot lower.

I think .io is a much better choice than .co, because .co is easily confused with .com. .io is so completely different that it is less easily confused with .com.

Note that overstock totally rebranded their domain to o.co and found that a very large percentage of visitors were typing in o.com instead of o.co and they were losing a very significant amount of traffic.

Do marketing teams need a different task management app than another task management app? Why not just use Asana for example or Basecamp?

The longer quote from Warren Buffett is very interesting

Today the world’s gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce – gold’s price as I write this – its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A.

Let’s now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world’s most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?

Beyond the staggering valuation given the existing stock of gold, current prices make today’s annual production of gold command about $160 billion. Buyers – whether jewelry and industrial users, frightened individuals, or speculators – must continually absorb this additional supply to merely maintain an equilibrium at present prices.

A century from now the 400 million acres of farmland will have produced staggering amounts of corn, wheat, cotton, and other crops – and will continue to produce that valuable bounty, whatever the currency may be. Exxon Mobil will probably have delivered trillions of dollars in dividends to its owners and will also hold assets worth many more trillions (and, remember, you get 16 Exxons). The 170,000 tons of gold will be unchanged in size and still incapable of producing anything.

You can fondle the cube, but it will not respond.

I think a major problem with retention is that the course is not a recognised qualification.

The next step for online education is get a real qualification that improves your job prospects through places like Coursera.

Also I think there are a bunch of other hacks such as collaborative motivation (getting a group of members to commit to each other to complete the course and automatically reporting to each other when they have completed each section where everyone in the group has collective responsibility to help each person in the group to complete the course.

Why do you say that these are strong brand names? I think all of the names are difficult to remember and spell. I know that finding a name is difficult, but the names of these startups are probably the least impressive aspect.

Wevorce - I doubt that people would remember this name

Startups can use a systematic method of determining if a name is memorable. I think the ability to remember the name and write it down and spell it correctly is the best indicator of a strong name.

I've done this previously by getting a short list of 15 names, then stating them several times in a video (in different orders), then using a crowdsourcing site such as amazon turk, get the person to watch the video and then write down which names they remember. This tests both their ability to remember the name amongst a crowd of other names AND their ability to spell the name. Certain names come way out on top.

Startups need to think very carefully about their name, because I believe the memorability of the name will have a huge impact on their success.

I'm not sure that this is the sort of board member you want? You do not want board members who are trying to sell to you?

I'm a non technical co-founder and am building a combination of a serviced based business and technology business.

I think this article is spot on for most people. A lot of very successful businesses can be started with a wordpress blog and very little technical capability.

A business based around the technology itself is a highly risky venture. I would argue it's a lot lower risk to first develop a business without much technology, build up your customer base and then gradually build technology to automate more aspects of the business as you go.

PayCycle purchased by Intuit for $170million is an example of this. They started doing the payroll for businesses completely manually. Literally writing out checks etc. Then they gradually automated each step of the business.

For most businesses it's a better strategy to build the business first get customers and then build the technology second. Technology startups where you build the technology first are the exception not the rule.

I have to disagree with this. I've watched every episode of Shark Tank, and many of the businesses are in highly competitive markets and do not have any fundamental competitive advantage. 10 times profit is actually a really good valuation.

Investing at a 10 times profit in a small company is a highly risky investment. You are gambling that the company will be: a) ethical b) continue to operate for enough years to pay you back c) If they stay the same then after tax it will take 15 years to pay back the investor assuming that all the profit goes to paying back the investor which is highly unlikely.

Potential growth is the upside that you are looking for but it's certainly not at all guaranteed, and the opposite is also possible (negative 100% growth, or company being worth nothing).

Rooms can be created on Skype, that's the way we use skype in our business, we create a group chat between all the relevant people and then favorite it and it's the same as a room.

The contact list issue is good I think for larger companies especially in the beginning.

I'm wondering about how the integrations could be used in our business, and I'm also wondering if we can integrate our software with HipChat

Hi there powdahound, what is the main benefit of hipchat versus using Skype? I see on the home page "persistant chat rooms" but I use that feature in skype (I create a chat with several people and then favourite it). I'm not understanding the potential benefit. We have a team of more than 40 people all working virtually.

Re "Create at least one lead generation channel as an affiliate for another product"

Selling another software app as an affiliate is completely different to selling your own application and I would argue much harder to actually make any decent money from. Any effort you expend is building the brand of the other company. You can't split test their landing page. You lose a lot of traffic to people that directly type in the url.

If you can rebrand some awesome software where you own the domain, brand etc and you sell and get 100%, this is not a terrible business model, but the problem is that any half decent software wouldn't want to do this as they would prefer to sell it themselves.

I guess they are saying to be an affiliate as practice. I don't really agree however. I think you can practice on your real business.