warwick

Good call on allowing stories to be submitted without logging in. You might want to add an image uploader, but I assume it's on the list somewhere.

One thing I don't see is why someone should register on the site. Does it convey any benefits? If so, they're not listed anywhere.

Especially in the early grades, a teacher has to be a generalist. Students who take an interest in any given subject will undoubtably know more about it then their teachers do. This is absolutely worth encouraging.

It's no wonder that students aren't interested in learning if their desire to learn is suddenly discouraged once they've gotten off the lesson plan.

Suppose that the point of her daughter seeing this in school isn't so that she'll know about shipping in Baltimore, but rather so that she'll have a gestalt sense of colonial America. Now suppose that teachers are required to test in some way that students were actually exposed to this material. Since we pretend our school system can measure students objectively, we have to pretend that some facts are the important facts and test recollection of those.

Memorization might actually be a sign that 'real world' use of the facts isn't going to happen. If the facts were applicable in some way, you'd be able to test that children had actually been exposed to them by having them apply the material, not just regurgitate it.

I dearly hope that one of you guys is working on the next great startup that has a solution to this. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few ways you might be able to 'test' that a child was exposed to the material:

- tests where you write down n things you remember about the topic

- spend five minutes talking to a teacher about what your favourite part of the reading was

- prepare a short presentation, web page, essay, video, poster, whatever about your favourite part of the reading

If we can do that and make it take less teacher time, it might have a chance.

To really benefit from learning another programming language, make sure that you actually learn the language, not just hack around in it for the weekend and say you know it.

[edited addendum] Any technical safeguards, like locking down their PCs in some insane manner, is just going to create an environment where nobody likes working for you.

Between these sources, you build a list of notifications. Then there's a little iPhone app that let's you do six things with each notification:

- Read the full article or email

- Create a new todo

- Add something to your schedule

- Send a copy of the notification to someone else

- Bookmark the notification

- Ask for a reminder (Reshow the notification after a certain amount of time)

This is just something I've been playing with as my fun-hack project. It came about because a friend was complaining that she wished her inbox could be about correspondence, not notification.

Being walked through a few different development lifecycle models would have helped to put my mind at ease.

This bloke seems to want the rewards without the risks.

I spent several minutes trying to decide if French Literary profs might be able to publish physics journal articles in your scenario. I eventually decided they would be able to, since the physics journals would now be run by French Literary theorists.

I try to do 1 or 2 promotions a year. Any more and your app is 'always on sale'. Results vary for me. I find my business app outsells my 'geek toy' app most of the year, but during promotions the toy gets good sales. Business users don't tend to hang around looking for cool toys at promotions. Geeks do.

Generally I find out about these promotions by keeping my eye on the Mac developer community. In todays case I got an email out of the blue about a month ago saying they were interested. (There's some sort of mechanism where users vote that they'd like to see a piece of software on their promotion.)

I don't think I've ever spent more than an afternoon setting one of these up. These people do this constantly, and I'm more than happy to let them play to their strengths.

That's one way you promote. Instead of getting your app in front of reviewers, you get it in front of actual customers.

That being said, I also:

- Send out a lot of personal emails to various editors, bloggers, etc. when release time comes around. Give them a little advance notice.

- Make sure you're listed on major directories. For me, this is the Apple Downloads page and sites like MacUpdate or VersionTracker. Most of my traffic comes from these kinds of sites. (That being said, I really need to improve my sites Google ranking for certain keywords.)

- Get to know the salespeople at your local computer stores. I'll admit, I'm biased on this one since I used to work for one of my local computer stores. These are people who sell things all day to your potential customers. If somebody complains "I keep having to switch my SMTP servers when I bring my laptop home from work" when they're in the store, I want the sales people to know that there's something they can point the customer to. Some people also have the same reaction to 'local developer' that they do to 'locally grown lettuce'. Somehow it's better, even if it's the same.

- Show your app to everyone you know. As a bonus, they might even start to understand what it is you do all day.

Those are the strategies I use myself.

Here are a couple of videos from the C4[1] conference that I found fantastic on the subject. They're long, but they're worth it.

Wil Shipley: Monster Marketing (http://www.viddler.com/explore/rentzsch/videos/4/)

Adam Engst: Hacking the Press (http://www.viddler.com/explore/rentzsch/videos/12/)

Given the amount of reaction this comment thread got, I'm considering hacking out a prototype and seeing if it helps alleviate the problem. That being said, I've already got far too much on my plate. I don't think you'd ever come up with this idea if you were the kind of person who had time to kill checking their notifications.

Class announcements (currently emailed to me)

Reminders from my calendar (currently email or rss'd)

New posts from blogs I follow (currently RSS)

Notification of shared document changes (currently login to each service to check)

Private messages on forums (currently emailed)

* Too many notifications. I have to login to a half dozen different systems to keep up on what's happening. That's too much. There are notifications I just want to see, some I want to add to my todo list, some to my calendar, some I don't want to see again. A single-app solution for all of this would be brilliant. Email is too heavy: I want notifications, not correspondence. Bonus points if it's on my mobile.

* Some way to extract the most valuable points out of a meeting. A possible solution might be a 'real time digg' that lets people vote speakers up and down when they agree or disagree with their point. Correlate that with a copy of the transcript and emphasize sections with higher scores. Possibly two-dimensional voting for 'We need to remember this' and 'I agree with this'.

http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-awards...

That seems like an overly general phrase. Using the generic 'customer' seems like a cop-out, since it feels like you haven't really asked yourself which market you're making your product for. "Help them succeed" implies to me that you haven't really figured out the tangible benefit to the customer, which in turn means that you're in a really weak sales position.

Let's say you worked for a company making pie chart software. That phrase could apply, or something more specific like "We provide middle-managers with pie chart software to help them impress their bosses".

A good sales pitch follows directly from an understanding of who you're selling to, what they want, and how your product gives it to them.