mikesaraf's comments

Its funny that the game in the opening of "Sight", released 10 months ago, is similar to one they had at Google IO this year. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqOluB4e-q4

If your looking for a Point of Sale system that runs on mobile devices (phones, tablets) checkout AnyTill (http://anytill.com) We're launching in May on Android. If you want to try a beta, let me know.

Two words: Artisanal Servers

I think this is really clever, I love it!

2 Suggestions: 1. A way to control which emails this gets attached to. If I'm emailing a client, I don't want them to ever feel I'm too busy to be contacted. 2. Allow for other measurements. In the same way most phones have a DND button, I would be great to have a manual override for days I'm busy. Also for me it would make more sense to measure how busy my calendar is vs my inbox.

Additional variation: It might be interesting to post an average response time to expect vs ples/tol/unb.

I don't know about the first one, but at Google IO they announced they were getting all of their partners (major carriers & hardware manufacturers) to agree to support any new device with software updates for 18 months. They hinted it would be required to be a Google certified device.

Nice logo and clearly most people like it, there are always some haters.

I grow raspberries every year and there are wide variety outside of the sterile and often flavorless red that we see in grocery stores. http://tinyurl.com/5wyewjg

Also, thanks for that bit of trivia (Bibendum).

It seems odd to me, for years developers have been one of the few groups of people that could publish something and not have to pay the "gatekeepers" and actually have a shot at success. Finally after years of having to deal with the publishing, music and movie cartels; writers, bands and indie movie producers can reach the world without having permission to do so. However somehow we (software devs) have gotten into a position where we are beholden to 3 companies (Apple, Google & Microsoft) if we want widespread access to a mainstream audience. For that privilege we have to pay 30% for these companies to host a few megabytes of program files and they tell us that its breaking even. For 99 cent apps I can believe that, but I write applications for small businesses and those apps are worth way more than 99 cents. There is a big difference in 30% of 99$ vs 99 cents.

I don't know what the answer is, but I do know that its going to have the following effects (some good, some bad): 1. Software prices are going to go up for any app that is more serious than a fart app. 2. Web apps are going to become more mainstream for small businesses. Which means... 3. SaaS is going to become more mainstream, because I don't want to run a web service and not get a monthly payment for it.

Apple has done a number of good things for consumers in this industry, too bad they felt they had to screw developers over in the process.

Cool and very useful site, Thank You!

If you feel comfortable doing so, can you share what additional percentage of equity you traded for the additional investment. (A range is fine)

Can anybody that is in or has been through YC answer these questions:

How difficult and costly is it to find a place in SF for 3 months? It seems like a large part of the YC money would get used up for the founders basic living expenses.

Do most YC company founders go in debt / use savings / use most of the YC money, to cover personal expenses while they do this?

Apple went from being a company with niche product and small market share (that I loved) to a worldwide juggernaut that many thought would save us from the anti-consumer duopoly we have with AT&T and Verizon. While we did end up with better phones and software, developers just answer to a new master. While I find the closed model of iOS disagreeable and anti-consumer, what is worse is that Apple is taking the closed model of iOS and spreading it like a virus into the Mac. And since Apple, the company beloved by “all” can do it, it clears the way for everyone else.

So no, as bad as the current duopoly is, I don’t think Apple becoming a carrier will make it any better.

Square bypasses that, they deposit into the bank account every business day. There are some exceptions for larger transactions.

The argument about 16 available apps is shoddy at best. The release SDK for Honeycomb has only been out for about a week; It's being compared to a platform that has been around for over a year now. The only iPad apps that were available when it launched were by the few lucky companies that got pre-release access to its SDK. In 3 months the number of available honeycomb apps will be a different story and in 6 months it will be a non-issue.

We wrote a utility that will run on a customer's windows server that syncs data from our webapp to their local server. Some of that data is calendar events and it saves those directly to the customers exchange server. Granted not all of our customers will use this functionality, but enough will to make it worth writing.

Our software is for attorneys and many attorneys love outlook + exchange + blackberry server, even small offices.

It is basically an open invitation to use their tools where you see fit. Our web app is built on an open source stack. We are writing software to integrate with the Mac (few attorneys use Macs but its growing). There wasn't any weird limitation or requirements to write MS only applications, we couldn't find any catch.

There are a couple of ways to get support. First, you're basically getting premium MSDN account access, so you get a limited number of support requests, it gives you one-on-one access to their engineers to get technical help if you need it. Second, there is a general BizSpark contact. We haven't contacted them yet, I suspect its primarily for getting help with the parter & investor networking aspect of it.

As far as signing up, go for it! I'd encourage anyone that falls in their guidelines and wants to integrate with any piece of MS software to sign up. (Main guidelines: Your company or startup is less than 3 years old, privately owned, Less then $1M in revenue)

I'm a co-founder of a little startup project that got accepted in the BizSpark program and I can say it has definitely been a benefit to us and will be to our users when we launch in late January. We're building a web app for a vertical in the attorney space, it's a rails app built completely on an open source stack.

Why do we need BizSpark? While we would like for our customers to use our web app exclusively, the reality is the majority of practices run Windows and Office. So we built Exchange and Outlook integration using the tools provided by BizSpark. If we hadn't had access to those tools we still would have built the product, but we wouldn't have Exchange and Outlook support at launch. The benifit for us; We built a product better suited for our customers. The benefit for MS: They have another product on the list of thousands that has custom support and integration with their office suite, their bread and butter.

Clearly the biggest benefit for us has been access to thousands in software we otherwise couldn't afford. But we will be looking at the opportunities to network with partners and investors through BizSpark when we're ready.

I see it as a win for us and an ever so tiny win (because of our small user base) for Microsoft.

A very well done site! The ability to jump in and make a card and get a shortened link without signing up and harvesting email is one of the real attractions, the other is the flickr integration, its really slick.

A possible problem is you may be violating the license to some of these images. The first few I checked out where all creative commons, but this one does not allow derivative works, but it shows up in the results: http://www.flickr.com/photos/24879866@N05/3488893875/

(I may be misinterpreting the license)

One minor thing, where it displays the images from flickr, I would make the "use" button more apparent, it doesn't look like a button so it is not clear that you can click on it.

Otherwise its a very nice site, how long did it take you to build? Technical details?

This is the calculation I use and it seems to work out more often then not:

Observe the lanes, every person is assigned 1 point, elderly (60+) +1, buggies over 70% full get +1, smokers get +1, welfare recipients +2. Add up the totals and the line with the smallest sum is usually the fastest. Obviously you can't always tell who is on welfare or who the smokers are, but the obvious ones are usually the ones that take the most time anyway.