Almost every startup has gloomy periods, and often more than one. The patent is a really bad signal IMHO (I did this once). It's great that you value your relationship, and you should try to keep it that way if you can. They will need some help transitioning you out of the company, and so you should give them more than the usual 2 weeks notice IMHO. I gave 3 months notice once. Best of luck
There is another website with a Kato-centric viewpoint that talks about recent copyright issues. This article is specific to whether you 'rent' or 'own' software. He specifically talks about how renting software is actually better, and is a very interesting viewpoint.
This is a great story of Josh's career and worth watching. Especially the first 15 minutes which are stories I'd never heard before (and I live in Philadelphia).
I second his comments that Philadelphia is a fantastic place to live/work as an entrepreneur. The tech/startup community is humble, helpful, and extremely tight. This community combined with the art, history, and diversity of Philadelphia make it an awesome place to live.
You should spend time understanding all of the given capistrano recipes before you should start building any of your own since many things are already done for you.
I wasn't able to do this without staring at the capistrano code for a significant amount of time, but it was worth the effort IMHO.
Thanks for the explanation. You're correct about outsourcing, and this is the #1 reason why we have customers :)
We often get requests to build something specific for a mobile device, customized skins/toolbars, annotation tools, exporting forms, etc. It's impossible for us to do everything, so we changed things around a bit to allow others to build their own interfaces on top of our own.
We will continue to enhance our viewer for our core audience, and we will focus on areas that we believe we can deliver the most value.
I'm hopeful that with our new approach, it will empower other products and services to use 90% of what we have built and add the last 10% themselves.
I hope that clears it up, and thanks for the feedback. -Chris
I wrote the blog post, posted to HN, and then sent out a tweet to my friends which might explain some of the new users. I recognize a couple of the commenters, and FWIW they are entrepreneurs that have technology companies. Here is the tweet:
http://twitter.com/chriscera/status/1527260033
The purpose of the article is to point out that the core of the Vuzit viewer is our reliance on web services. Another topic is that anyone could write their own viewer using our web services. The last point is that we only used our published APIs to build our Viewer and our website. My understanding is that nobody else in the marketplace has designed such a technology, and is offering it as a commercial service.
I would love to hear more comments on our Technology and Company. Do you care that it's made from AJAX vs Java vs Flash? Do you care that it's based on Web Services? Would you use it for your website, product, or service?
Any help from the HN community is greatly appreciated! Best, -Chris
I think it looks great, and there aren't enough good PDF editing tools. It reminds me a little bit of PDFEscape, so you might want to check them out if you haven't already. Best of luck! -Chris
I love it when people that live in the Philly burbs bash the city. This is a lifestyle choice ... you're either a suburbanite or a city slicker. My opinion is that these likely don't mix well in any city.
There are plenty of neighborhoods in the city that are great places to live and are safe. I live in West Philly (Univ City), I walk 12 blocks to the office of my startup everyday, and I absolutely love it.
Philly is one of the largest startup hubs in the world for bio-tech and life sciences. Philly might not be known for its tech scene as much, or very early stage investing, so DreamIt has been a big step for the ecosystem here. Philosophy on investing seems different than what I see in Silicon Valley and NYC.
There is money here: Entrepreneur Magazine's VC 100 in August 2008 listed Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern PA as tied for 3rd in the country as far as #deals done. Josh Kopelman and Chris Fralic from First Round Capital are here too.
There is community here: Phillystartupleaders.org is a group of 250+ mostly tech entrepreneurs and VCs that meet monthly for a happy hour event. Indyhall.org is one of the most successful coworking spaces out there. IgnitePhilly was a huge success, with another one planned in the next couple of weeks. phillytechhq.com is a blog aggregator of all the tech companies here (big + small). The "user group" community is pretty huge too: http://phillygroups.org/community/GroupDirectory
There are alot of universities that provide access to talent: Drexel, Penn/Wharton, Temple/Fox, etc.
Philly also has an awesome combination of art and American history that make it a wonderful place to live. I hope this clears up some perceptions about Philly!