wavesplash

ActiveRecord lets you write raw sql any time you need to. AR's design goal was to just reduce the drudgery, not prevent you from using the full power of sql.

No 'serious hindrance' involved.

In the realm of UI a few 'nit-picky' css issues are the difference between joy-of-use and customer frustration.

Luckily there's an escape hatch in this case: Cog Menu -> "Use Classic Look"

The post title is sensationalist. Jixin is being quite forward and explaining how things work in the PRC. He doesn't say anything about how foreign web sites are 'harmful'. Only that the PRC feels it has an obligation to protect the people from 'harmful information'. That information can be from inside or outside the country.

Of course sites that work within the PRC system of government censorship tend to stay unblocked. ;)

Issued patent != patent pending. Patent pending has no legal standing and is non-defensible. It just means something was submitted and may or may not be approved sometime in the future (possibly years from now). Talk to a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure they'll tell you to ignore him. If the troll in question hasn't actually submitted a patent you could sue for damages.

If you were hit with an actual patent claim, the first question you ask is what is the patent # and which specific claims are they referencing. Then go back to any referenced patents and see if the claims are unique to the new patent. Of the unique claims then you can make a case if your product infringes or not.

Consider only offering enterprises a yearly pre-pay option if they want invoicing. That reduces your paperwork and lets you put the cash to work. Once you're only dealing with yearly invoices, the collections challenge is simpler.

If the product is SaaS you have the ultimate power to resolve non-payment: stop service.

Just send a polite note to their accounts payable team or whomever is your main contact say "We really love you as a customer, but our invoice is overdue and forcing an automatic stop of service on XXX, XXXX (30 days from today). We really don't wish to loose your firm as a customer. Please contact us as soon as possible so we can avoid a service interruption" Make sure the subject says something like "30 days notice: Automatic Stop of Service on XXXX for non-payment" They should jump to action. If not, remind them again in 2 weeks, then if no action stop the service.

If your service is important to them, you'll be impressed at how quickly things get paid.

Starving entrepreneurs outbidding each other to sit with two rich guys? It is just me or does this seem backwards?

For context: in contrast to other early stage investment groups and many superangels, his firm (http://www.oatv.com) invests in a very small/selective handful of deals per year.

I hear FoundersTable will be kicking off again in 2011. That covers the gap you were discussing: http://stirr.net/founders-table/

I'm testing on Chrome 9.0.570.0 dev on win7 right now. CTRL-N causes a new window to open.

Curious if this is platform specific.

Can you switch to dev and let me know what results you get? If different than a new bug is warranted.

I'd love for this to work universally but it looks like capturing CTRL-N (line-down) is a wontfix in chrome :( Should we lobby and open a new bug?

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=33056

Yes. The main crux of their business is turning ids/email-addresses into personal profiles.

Brilliant.

Any thoughts on Oauth2 and Facebook Graph support?

As the ecosystem around Twitter has discovered, the platform owners will sooner copy a good feature than buy it if it's cheap enough to build. It's not about OAuth or IMAP, it's about some GOOG PM copying the featureset and putting it in the MRD for the next release.

[edit: a famous bit of company-is-a-feature carnage for reference: STAC vs. Microsoft: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics ]

Which makes me wonder why Matt can't get this championed internally or for someone's 20% project?

Awesome. I'm an FLStudio fan since version 2.

re: soundcloud

Consider removing the reference to soundcloud. The best it can do is give give the lawyers an excuse to go after you for UI Copyright infringement.

re: value prop

The intro page does a good job motivating someone to use the product, but the homepage doesn't help sell the product at all. See if you can summarize the pain points on the homepage.

Also consider putting up a forum for musicians to collaborate/share/find each other (ala FLStudio Looptalk). The fastest way to get people to use a sharing product is to help them have people to collaborate with ;)

Good luck!

It all depends on your business. Enterprise salespeople are used to long sales cycle, high-contact, high dollar sales. If that doesn't fit your business model, then you want to find people who've done something similar to your model.

Thanks for reaching out Bret. Some suggestions going in order from user focused to app/site focused:

1) Fix graph.facebook.com to respect user permissions. graph.facebook.com/userid publicly leaks real names and UIDs even when users ask to be non-publicly searchable. This is creepy and makes users nervous that they don't have control over their privacy.

2) Give users back granular control to explicitly disallow sharing of any info they wish to keep private. This includes their friends graph, likes, wall access, etc. (empowering them to have the choice will reduce the sense of lack of control).

3) Let the application/site owners describe what they intend to use the information for. Ideally hold the app to the contract as well. example: "Need access to your wall in case you explicitly tell us to publish/share something on your behalf - we will never post to your wall without your approval".

Anecdotal story:

I showed someone Quora 2 nights ago as suggested they sign up. She said "Why do they need my Facebook? No way!". When asked "why?", she said, "I don't want that site spamming my wall - who are they?".

My takeaway: If Facebook wants to be the login for the web, it needs to give people comfort that they have control over how an app/site behaves on their behalf.

Sure. The hidden iframe allows you to do 3 things: 1) preserve state across view changes (mail vs. preferences, etc) 2) isolate code 3) reduce over-the-wire data size because all the rendering/UI generation is happening in-browser.

If you take a look at gmail in a debugger you'll see there are 4 iframes. The controller is the 'js_frame', the 'canvas' contains the graphic UI elements.

Leaving the canvas in its own iframe allows it to be reloaded separately without affecting application state.

Javascript still modifies the canvas iframe DOM. But that modification is cross-frame from the controller iframe.

I used a similar frame-based technique back in '97 when our enterprise startup needed a snappy native-looking zero-deploy UI.

Gmail's interface is unique in that the rendering is being done by a Javascript Controller in a hidden iframe. Gmail itself only requests raw data over the wire.

If you just want the look and feel of Gmail, there are plenty of frameworks referenced in the comments (Cappucinno, YUI2, Sencha, etc) that can give you the basic layout. But if you want the mimic the speed/functionality, it'll require getting dirty with Javascript controller design in the browser.

It's all about context.

On RWW Start the startups with exits are the headline grabbers. Delicious carries much more clickthrough appeal/legitimacy than AOL. Always lead with a grabber.

You know how it goes in the press, the easy to recognize goes first in the headline. ;)

Congrats mate. If I was still investing I'd join y'all.

There are optimizations in most modern group dispatch systems to attempt optimal traffic routing and predictive placement of idle elevators. The fancy stuff OTIS has played with gets into AI, but the simple algorithms work nearly as well.

It's the unpredictability of the system (people holding doors, elevators going out of service, faulty mechanical switches, etc) that makes the algorithm design fun.

Feel free to ask me anything. I used to design elevator group dispatch systems as a side job in college.

Or perhaps you could get in touch with the http://lilgrams.com founder and join forces.

That'll solve your prototype challenge too, since it's already done.

Email me if you want an intro (contact info in my profile).

While you're technically correct, the difference here is that the growth Google sees could easily be sustained. Google can expose more users in a few hours to Chrome(for free via a well placed link on their search homepage) than Mozilla could ever hope to reach in half a year without a massive advertising budget.

Combine that with the positive 'word of mouth' I've encountered so far from non-technical types and it's possible we haven't seen the knee of the curve yet in adoption growth.

Anyone who's interested in working on #1, has some time, and can work with Rails3/Ruby, send me a note. Contact info in my profile.

Would love to see a big fat link on the front page that says "Help make the best Ruby implementation ever. Join us!" with a link to the google group. Clear call to action.

Blog wise: Bubble up some of the great activity going on behind the scenes. Design decisions, great implementation debates, calls for help on hard/easy problems, new releases, beta releases, testing calls, etc. The posts don't have to be more than a paragraph or two. Just enough so we can see where you guys are steering the ship and if there's something we can do to help.

I'm sure there are more than a handful of potential up and coming language implementers that Rubinius could help inspire and recruit. All it takes is an easy to find/read active conversation to get them engaged.

Also, I'm sure you're thinking about a 'the long road to 1.0' post. That would be great first post to talk about all the decisions and direction changes that lead up to the current design.

Congrats to Evan and the team!

Now that 1.0 is out, how about adding a blog and a mailing list?

I'd love to see Rubinius pick up a large following. IRC-only makes it a challenge to build a thriving community.

Due to a very poorly structured deal MSFT was able to use Sybase's own code to compete against them. Be careful who writes your contracts.

That's exactly how dogster.com started, a free dating site for dogs (walking dates, etc) which lead to more than the occasional real date for single owners. There are/were a few clones too.

One question is why dogster.com, who was clearly the leader, shifted direction towards being more of a portal and less of a dating site.

Unless you've started a product company recently that you're not sharing with us, all the above plus your website says you're not an entrepreneur anymore. You may have been one 30 years ago, you may like being around entrepreneurs, but catering to them is not the same as being one today.

Today it seems you're a consultant/service-provider.

Although not original, your breakfasts may be good. Just please for the sake of our patience, call out your conflict of interest when posting here. There are many charming ways to do it. Denial or dismissal isn't one of them.

If someone calls you on a conflict of interest and there's even a remote chance there might be a conflict, just say something like: "Forgive my oversight. ...". Then graciously move on.

Jonathan runs Hackers and Founders as a sideline to something else he does. He does it for love and the desire to be around others like him.

You run a consulting firm that feeds on startups.

Your breakfasts are a marketing/leadgen program. That's fine if you call it out, but you're deluding yourself if you try to claim it's a community service. It may benefit the community as a side effect, but that's not why you do them.

ProTip: When you have a conflict of interest, call it out upfront. Anything less dilutes your legitimacy.