I'm super excited to start playing around with this. Although there is still friction in moving from one app to another, this API is a first step in weaving together what is now a disjoint mobile experience. Also, a great way to growth hack: I see app developers viewing URX as a toolkit to piggyback off other apps' audiences/views. Congrats to the whole URX team!
We need more female entrepreneurs with attitudes like this. Although awareness for equality issues is undoubtedly important, Collin hits the nail on the head by re-focusing on the undeniable truth: running a company is just plain hard. Sure, being female, minority, short, nontechnical, etc can all be drawbacks, but I'd argue that they all pale in comparison to the difficulty that is successfully running a sustainable company. Full disclosure: I am relatively young (20) male hacker of minority descent, and I used to use some of these factors as excuses but now I treat them as irrelevant. Those things simply don't matter to me (in context of running a company or building a product) because it's not really in my power (and not really my overarching mission) to change the culture of the valley and the rest of the tech world. Just my $0.02.
Super glad that this is on the frontpage. Dashboard design is probably the single biggest thing that analytics companies overlook when building product. It took us nearly 5 iterations to get our dashboard to a decent point.
What's worst is when offering free trials of an analytics product and then realizing that all freemium customers engage with a dashboard once, and then dropoff forever. Event tracking and various stages of a/b testing can be dangerous because they steer engineers to local minimums in designing a product.
Having a logical understanding of every element of the dashboard is the best way to approach the design.
Great post, we need more resources like this out there.
I think the article is great, but I'm not sure about a few particular industry segments. For example, in SaaS, it often may make sense to actually charge for software up-front before even having product-market fit to see if there's even any viability in making it a business in addition to experimenting with pricing. Often times, the drop-off experienced in going from a completely freemium product to a priced one is fatal and gives you inaccurate data about the market's reception to your product.
In consumer web, the product -> strategy -> business model approach makes complete sense, but I'm unsure if it carries over to most things in B2B.
Looked at the screenshot, is this using some sort of integration with Screenhero? After playing/using Screenhero, I've been excited about the possibility of incorporating it into web apps.
Love the tech, but the design is spectacular. I'm one to get turned off pretty quickly if things aren't obvious/well-designed, but this is the exact opposite. Kudos.
I love the idea. An immediate thought is whether this technology can be abstracted for use in different departmental infrastructures (training a new frontend dev on the platforms/tools the rest of the dev teams use, training a salesman on the CRM tools/communication protocols, etc.) and for the lessons to be customized to the needs of a specific company. Obviously that would require a lot more API work, but I think it'd be super valuable for different types of teams. I think I'd pay for it.
First of all, I think this technology and application is awesome. Glass really is pushing the boundaries of what can be done in the physical world with contact to software and the internet. I just worry that it's approaching communication platforms a bit too swiftly, especially in light of recent controversy regarding usage while driving (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/technology/personaltech/go...).
Really hope that some sort of legal precedent is set so that us geeks and developers don't have to worry about distribution if we want to invest time/energy into building apps for Glass.
I can attest to this. Initially, I was extremely skeptical that the Tesla was anything great (electric cars haven't been the highlight of the automotive industry despite repeated attempts by established manufacturers). A few weeks ago, however, I had the chance to drive a family friend's Tesla and I was stunned.
The Model S seems like a car from the future. Forget the fact that it's completely electric and charges via an alien-like, glowing plug. The interior with the large, beautiful touch screen, a voice-activated system (that, contrary to Siri, actually works) coupled with access to the internet, and the gorgeous trim and accents really make the Tesla a standout.
Moreover, it's every geek's dream. You can remotely control the car with a smartphone app, monitor the car's efficiency and performance via beautiful graphs, and even have presets for charging cycles.
Best of all, the pickup is like none other (as one would imagine). Flooring it in a Tesla has a completely different meaning. Pure acceleration and no roaring engine noise.
I think it goes without saying that I'm very excited about this company.
Cool idea. Seems pretty similar to http://www.tweetspiration.com/. After putting a decent spam-filter on this, maybe there's a way to introduce crowd-supported mechanics (ala upvotes, comments, relevant mentions/hashtags)?
I sort of understand the reasoning behind App.net, but I'm worried that its developer focus will prevent many average users from joining the service and prevent it from really providing the social layer that's necessary to actually build something network-driven out of it.
The reason Facebook and Twitter are popular platforms are not necessarily because of their particular features or user data but because of the massive networks they represent. By tying our products to their ecosystem, you're able to leverage their technologies and data while still having a large enough addressable market. This is definitely not the case with App.net (at least so far).
I think what App.net might have that's unique is an active developer community (as opposed to a mass of average users), so perhaps it can standalone as a developer-friendly social platform, but I'm questionable as to whether anything of mass market value can come out of it, especially on the B2C side.
They basically just ran a (very extreme) Groupon. Most companies that do daily deals lose money on them in hopes of turning some of those initial customers into recurring or lifetime customers or to increase awareness for their products.
This 'mishap' may have similar yet increased effects because of the impressive way they handled the situation. For example, I doubt Razer would have ever imagined their story landing on the frontpage of a high-traffic site like HN, but now that it has, I (and probably hundreds or thousands of others) have gone to their site to get more info.
Really shows that with smart and agile situation-response, you can turn an unpleasant circumstance into an opportunity.
I think turnaround CEOs have the some of the toughest and most public jobs in the industry. The particularly difficult roles are for those individuals that already have a successful past (Mayer with Google) that are then implicitly 'expected' to bring new energy and vitality to companies simply because of those past successes.
Look at Ron Johnson, for example. His genius did wonders for Apple but the same concepts failed with a different industry in his tenure with JCPenney. There's no silver bullet, and what Mayer's doing with Yahoo may have some similarities with what was done early on with Google, but in order to cement Yahoo's independent identity, she's going to have to pursue some goals that aren't identical to things she's done before.
Ending WFH is perhaps a start. The externalities (noisy lashback from media, etc.) don't help, but she's going to have to face a lot more of that in order to institute long-lasting change.