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The Case Against Micropayments - Clay Shirky

http://www.openp2p.com/lpt/a/515

It depends, but the answer is probably not. Most people operate shortcodes through an aggregator (OpenMarket, mBlox, Ericson IPX) that has direct binds to all the telecom carriers in a given country.

For the most part, aggregators charge a monthly fee usually tied somewhat to system throughput. For example, OpenMarket charges $1500/mo for 10 messages per second outgoing and $20,000/mo for 100 messages per second.

On top of that, they charge for messaging. Rack rate in the US is often $.035 outgoing and $.005 incoming. At Twitter's scale, they're probably paying a fraction of a penny per outgoing message and have most incoming fees waived. Some of that is carrier specific however. T-Mobile often doesn't waive the incoming message fees.

We (Mobile Commons) just open-sourced a Legislative Look-up tool as both an API, web-site, and open source code and database.

We had some issues making it work and thought we'd save other people some trouble. Namely: GIS files and location polygons work terribly in mySQL (what we use for our other apps, this is on PostGres) and that other services that offer this information (and are free) are slow.

The nature of consulting (no ongoing support) means that most apps built by consultants are trivial. That doesn't mean they aren't talented programmers, but it also means that if you're looking for something that could legitimately be a 10k line Rails App you may want to think about whether it's appropriate to even be hiring a consultant.

Also, a lot of people that are famous for "community work" are the last people you want to be working with in the trenches.

http://sailthru.com (great APIs) and we use http://campaignmonitor.com for our newsletters.

Solid of them to do that, but FogBugz is terrible. Our dev team found it to be tedious (4 developers).

We've switched to Pivotal Tracker (also in free beta) and find it much more suited to rapid development and "agile" practices. In particular, we find the predictive tools actually useful.

I attended the Tufte course a few years ago and it was fantastic. I enumerate the following reasons:

1. The 4 books alone are worth almost $200

2. He's one of the most engaging speakers you'll ever see: you're ability to present will improve.

3. Book porn. He brings antique copies of Galileo and shows them off.

4. Inspiration.

Other people did a good job explaining the basics. The issue is about book value and the complexity of the risk. The risk is similar to what the firm Citadel did with E*Trade.

The risk on the books of Bear Stearns can't be fully calculated and JP Morgan is assuming that risk, hence the low price. The Fed is possibly going to limit the downside risk of JP Morgan to keep stability in US financial markets, though they are not putting up any additional capital upfront.

Roger Ehrenberg has some great blog posts on the topic (he used to run a big hedgefund and now has an NYC startup called Monitor110):

http://www.informationarbitrage.com/2008/03/the-bear-facts.h...

http://www.informationarbitrage.com/2008/03/i-bear-ly-knew.h...

Fantastic Photoshop tutorials that focus on "polish" and a lot of design elements that are currently in vogue.

http://psdtuts.com/designing-tutorials/elements-of-great-web...

http://psdtuts.com/interface-tutorials/making-a-message-stri...

Are you talking about a screencast of your product or are you talking about video footage cut with other things?

For screencasting: keep it under 5 minutes, use a script, read the FreshView Post: http://www.freshview.com/thoughts/2007/05/how_we_create_walk...

In terms of presentations, you can imagine combining live-action with infographics and a product demo. This is an involved process and requires production and editing knowledge. Fuel for thought--imagine taking Jonathan Harris' presentation of 20 minutes and editing it down to less than 10 with a focus on facial close-ups, infographics, and product demonstrations. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/144