I still haven't found a solution better than winamp with advanced crossfading output (which was last updated in 2002) to DJ a party... I usually bust out my 5-year old PC because nothing beats the crossfader of winamp (coupled with the awesome keyboard shortcuts - the ability to search for anything in the ID3 tags and enqueue the song via keyboard is so useful for a DJ)
Anyone have a better solution?
Amazing reading here how many people still use the old versions of winamp... It's pretty much the only thing I use my PC's for.
I saw an interview with Gary Vaynerchuck in the Nordic eCommerce summit and one of the things that stuck out for me was when he said that "Pinterest sells more wine for them than Twitter and Facebook combined"
The thing is if your revenues are up 2000% month-over-month and you start with $200 the next month you have $4000, then $80,000 etc. Those are pretty nice numbers very quickly.
According to the blog post, consumers are 10% more likely to buy vs. Facebook - well, that's a decent lift stat but it does, as someone else mentioned, depend on the base. Then, later in the article we learn that in Sept 11 they had 75 total orders (across 26,000 shops) via pinterest, then 320 orders in April 2012. Yes, that's more or less 4x the Sept number and does indicate an upward trend - but that's still a very, very small number, and the growth rate is unlikely to continue.
Pinterest is definitely interesting - I'll be trying it out for some eCommerce, but I'm not expecting much at this point.
... That's just from Shopify stores though. Most things people buy (and Pin) aren't sold on Shopify stores. All that data is good for is showing that it's increasing rapidly.
Actually most companies and ALL analysts use non-GAAP numbers (search for your favorite company + non-gaap https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&#...)... it reflects the true nature of the business. They are also referred to as pro-forma numbers. There isn't any funny business going on here. It is good that we have GAAP so you can compare apples to apples in different industries but for a further breakdown non-GAAP numbers are very useful to an analyst.
Yeah but the non-GAAP numbers exclude customer acquisition costs (e.g. marketing). Not sure why that's excluded as marketing is a continuous and fundamental cost of doing business.
No they don't. You misunderstood what acquisition-related costs means. Acquisition related costs are costs related to acquiring another company, not acquiring a customer. It is completely standard practice to treat one-time costs like that differently.
Ok, sorry, I misunderstood. I had lingering memories of the critiques against groupons earlier non-GAAP measures [1][2][3][4][5][6] but the non-GAAP net income mostly seems to exclude stock, acquistion costs are pretty low and very clearly separated from marketing and customer acquisitions. Again, my bad.
There needs to be some sort of standard for citing other peoples work, sort of like an updated Chicago Manual of Style (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation#Citation_styles) for online publications. These days we have all these content mills that put out very little original work... I don't know what the proper method should be, how much work you can take etc. Also remember this - The New York Times spent weeks writing an article about how Wal-mart and Target learn your secrets and then Forbes wrote a knock-off that stole a bunch of their traffic.
http://nickoneill.com/how-fortune-stole-a-new-york-times-art...
This also reminds me that as much as possible we should try to link to the original source on HackerNews, it's in the guidelines! (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
Back in July, I spent a lot of time putting together an infographic for FeeFighters on the tech boom and bubble (http://feefighters.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/tech-...). We got links back from tons of magazines, including Forbes, Mashable, Fast Company, etc. Many of them didn't link to either us or KissMetrics (our partner who did the design work), but most complied after sending an email or tweet.
One place, Bostinno - refused to link to us at all, despite multiple tweets and emails to them, for some reason deciding to credit Mashable: http://bostinno.com/2011/07/13/are-we-in-a-tech-boom-or-bubb...
Massholes.
Former journalist here. Some years ago I attempted to create a standard called "Source Blocks" (see http://www.ilamont.com/2008/11/my-new-journalism-experiment.... ). It's basically a paragraph of explanatory text that the author places at the end of the article, identifying what sources he/she used in the course of researching the article. It looked something like this.
Sources cited, referenced, or consulted: Blog.basturea.com, American Journalism Review (ajr.org), Editorsweblog.org, Glasshouse.waggeneredstrom.com, Techmeme.com, thelongtail.com, Washingtonpost.com, Wired
The problem was, even without linking these sources, it took discipline to keep a running list while work was being done, and/or time at the end of the writing process to do the source block writeup. And the system did not account for higher "weight" for certain sources, much less the details that came from each source. It attracted a little attention, but I was only able to keep it up for another year.
At the time, someone suggested creating some sort of browser extension to track all of the sources, which might have helped a little with other websites but would have been useless for phone or F2F interviews that occupy many journalists' time.
It's not hard. Firefox under Unix has an interesting property. When you select text, you end up with the following targets for an X Window select operation:
With this, I was able to add an extension to my editor to obtain the URL, pull the page, pull the title and generate an HTML BLOCKQUOTE with proper CITE attribute with the highlighted text included.
Google and other search engines then take this into account in rankings, as do social media sites, etc. creates a machine readable hierarchy of attribution
this gets discussed endlessly and i've switched off from the conversation, I am more interested in getting google, twitter et al to support the microdata, the publishers and CMS providers will fall into line thereafter
In a world of short attention spans, I don't want to listen to a podcast, and I doubt the podcast would have skyrocketed up the HN page.
Increasingly, smaller articles about other articles get much more traffic than the original source. One such example is the well-researched NYT article about how companies learn your secrets, and then the Forbes article that cut the crap and got to the real shocker of the story and got more pageviews (possibly $$$) http://nickoneill.com/how-fortune-stole-a-new-york-times-art...
In a world of short attention spans I particularly want to listen to a podcast of the "Woz" because this is not the normal corporate gibberish that strongly contributed to the "short attention span".
The occasions they let the Woz out are rare enough.
Or as they say - listen and learn ;-)
(and thanks for all the links)
In a world of short attention spans, listening to Woz talk while I dick around on the Internet is actually pretty appealing to my ritalin-deprived self.
In a world of short attentions spans oh look an eagle!
This whole talk about low attention spans, is it backed by any real research? I'd have thought folks on Hacker News would have longer attention spans. After all, most are developers who need to get into the zone when coding, and often read copious amounts of documentation. This sort of thing requires concentration!
So what you're saying (as heard from someone looking to get into the software developer field sometime soon), is that as a developer you still do a lot of documentation reading and you dont just have it all stored upstairs?
Increasingly, smaller articles about other articles get much more traffic than the original source.
This may be a good lesson for writers to learn (imagine how a pageview-whore would summarize your article, then summarize it yourself), but in the meantime we shouldn't encourage it IMO.
This is a fantastic idea. I could see myself using this thing as a consumer too (ie not just for hacker stuff). May have much broader appeal than something just for hackers. Monetization should be fairly straightforward... You know what apps people have, sell very targeted ads for new stuff, sort of like a mint. Seems like a potential gold mine once you get to scale.
You should build something that searches through my gmail for common bills though, I don't want to go through the process of sending you all my bills
Is there a startup opportunity for an identity verification service whereby you do the ID verification once and then each service that wants to use it gets charged a smaller amount?
Example: consumer goes to idverificationsite.com, registers there for free- they ask out of wallet questions to verify identity, potentially do a minimal background check too.
You then use this login with Yelp, AirBnB, Getaround, etc.
Yelp, Getaround, Airbnb pay idverificationsite.com some small amount per verified person. Removes some of the friction of ID verification/spreads cost around.
There was an interesting article in Inc. magazine a while back about a company that tried that. They found out that no sites wanted to use the service, even though they saw how it might solve their problems, because it would immediately make their non-verified users less valuable.
Google actually used to do verification on people with Knol; you'd type in a credit card number and it would look up your name on the CC and match it against the name in your profile. I think that functionality got retired.
It would be nice if this service was available more globally.
There are at least two startup opportunities for something like this. One is the creation of the credential/verified identity certification and the second is the transmission/exchange of the credential. These are two very disparate set of competencies.
Several years ago, I was working with Honesty Online, doing exactly this identity verification startup prop and where it became very evident that this is really two businesses. Now we, in another startup, sigkat.com, are very early stage in the second business - creation/exchange/transmission of any sort of credentials so that vertical apps like identity verification can focus on their domain.
Dave is attentive and useful as an investor, even with 250 investments to date. He's created a brand for himself and 500 that is awesome to be a part of. It's great to be a part of the 500 family/mafia and I encourage anyone who has the opportunity to do so to go for it.
As for 500s strategy, they have money for follow-on investments. They were in our convertible note but then doubled-down in our seed round. They invest 50k in each of their accelerator companies but also do follow-on in the ones that show the most promise. The strategy makes sense to me... too early to tell because none of the exits have been smashing home runs, but I certainly expect some of them to have huge returns.
One downside to their strategy is that the follow on investments can be seen as a vote of confidence. It may be very hard for a company to raise funds if passed over by the people who know them best.
Anyone have a better solution?
Amazing reading here how many people still use the old versions of winamp... It's pretty much the only thing I use my PC's for.