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jesselamb's comments

jesselamb | 15 years ago | on: Dispatch.io, Hackathon Runner-Up, Tames The Cloud

Thanks for the sentiment! I'm one of the creators of dispatch.io, and I'm ecstatic with the response to our demo. I can't wait for us to clean things up and get dispatch.io out to real users. While the awards were handed out the presenters framed it as there being 4 winners and 2 other honorable mentions, with Gilt-ii also receiving a judge's award with extra distinction. I guess on those terms Gilt-ii won the most, but it doesn't take any of the joy out of it for me. :)

jesselamb | 15 years ago | on: The New York Tech Meetup: Start-ups: don't mention the money

I've been to NYTM, and the booing for the "money" question seems to be all in good fun. More like an inside joke than a jeer. As andrewjshults said, it seems less about ignoring the the viability of the presenter's business and more about keeping the technology and novel aspects of the product front and center.

jesselamb | 15 years ago | on: Facebook says it owns "book", suing startups using [generic]book.tld

When is comes to trademarks, there's really no such thing as an intrinsically generic term. A term can only be generic as it relates to a good or service. So the term "facebook" is generic as it relates to "a reference book or electronic directory made up of individuals' photographs and names," but not necessarily as it relates to other things, like the modern social network. Under the framework we use in the U.S., "facebook" is probably a suggestive mark as it relates to social networks, which means that it deserves instant and relatively strong protection.

I've described the framework here: http://notmylawyer.com/post/248307917/choosing-a-valid-trade...

jesselamb | 15 years ago | on: Ask HN: Review our webapp: AirDropper

Yeah, we need to work on implementing multiple file support really soon. I like the idea of a "send another file" link. Maybe add an "allow multiple files" option to the request form. I'll see if I can convince my co-founder, he's stingy with form elements. :)

Thanks!

jesselamb | 15 years ago | on: Ask HN: Review our webapp: AirDropper

You make a fair point. I'd say though, putting the important issue of trust aside for a second, it's not that we don't solve any problem, but that we solve a problem for which there are already other solutions. And in practice those solutions have disadvantages.

Taking file encryption as an example, you can certainly encrypt a file before sending it, but that depends on the sophistication of the sender. They may not be familiar with how to encrypt a file. And if they are, it's kind of a hassle dealing with encrypted files on both ends. You have to transmit the password in some separate medium from the file itself, and now you have to decide whether to keep both the encrypted and unencrypted versions. It's friction that our solution obviates.

Likewise, you can send an email attachment for non-sensitive files, but every email provider has differing file size caps. We're still testing the limits of our service, but we've already successfully handled files more than double Gmail's size caps, which are among the highest in the industry. Right now most of the alternatives to attachments require a fair amount of setup for the sender. Ours just requires they visit a page and upload the file.

Coming back to the issue of trust, that's definitely going to be a challenge for us as a company just starting out. If you have any ideas about how we can develop that trust I'd welcome them.

Thanks for the awesome feedback. :)

jesselamb | 15 years ago | on: Ask HN: Review our webapp: AirDropper

Thanks. Yeah, we are definitely filling a gap, the same way a Twitter client supplements the Twitter platform or an email program supplements the email protocol. Dropbox has strong potential as a platform player over the next couple of years. It's the best cloud storage system there is, and we're hoping apps like ours and the efforts Dropbox is putting into mobile will make it more useful to more people.
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