willheim's comments

FB has but to do one thing to remain king of the heap and that is to maintain focus. The more junk they add to the site, the more ads, games, stupid apps (find out who's stalking you!) the uglier and more MySpace-like it becomes. FB succeeded in large part because it refused to be everything to everyone and become uglier. That said, the experience I get viewing my FB feed is aesthetically less pleasing as the months go on.

G+ OTOH is the new, shiny, clean kid on the block and my feeds are still pristine.

If FB continues on the path they are on the influential thought leaders who hate clutter will completely leave for G+ and that will be the beginning of the end of FB.

Would G clutter up G+ with junk? Not likely. They LOVE all that more detailed info you're voluntarily giving them that they can then serve up tailored (revenue-generating) ads on your Gmail, searches, partner sites, etc.

When you resort to callous language you demonstrate a lack of creativity.

There's an energy drink company up here in Canada with some rather terrible ads but one thing I do like is their tagline: "No Caffeine. No Caffeine Crash. No Bull"

That works on two levels. 1) Obviously they're hitting on what you're hitting (No BS) and 2) A dig at the leading energy drink Red Bull.

I think a better idea for you would be to aim for a positive message (not a negative).

- They Compete. You Win. Right On! (cute) - Better. Cheaper. Win-Win! (more accurate) - They Compete. You Decide. (play on Fox News and puts power in consumer's hand which is what they want)

Or what if your third part of the tagline rotated so that each time the screen refreshed it changed to another awesome final point? That would grab attention.

Erm... no. Apple announcing iCloud is kinda like Palm announcing WebOS a couple of years ago, streaming music from LastFM (though iCloud doesn't stream), getting your pics up and down from Flickr, and working on GDocs/Gmail/GCal/Office365.

Windows is an OS. iOS is an OS. Mac OSX is an OS. The iCloud service is designed to allow you to shuffle from one to the other seamlessly but not to replace those machines altogether. Kinda like using dropbox.

Now, is the OS becoming less important in comparison to the services available? Absolutely. Not for everyone but for the average user it certainly is. Will iCloud suceed? Surely it will, but only for those who wish to be tied into Apple products (unless I am mistaken and you will be able to share iCloud uploads with Android or WP devices).

Yay!!!!!! Missed you guys too much!

Would a company such as Facebook even want to go solo in being a credit provider? I don't see it. I do see them partnering with one of the big credit providers to create a FBCard. Then they could say that to use or purchase FBCredits you must use the FBCard which would also be a normal Visa/MC which could be used in any regular bricks and mortar place (with FBCredit rewards?) Imagine the data mining they could do on that! Now you have a FB user buying FBCredits for games/whatever AND they know what restaurants you frequent, what groceries you buy, if you smoke or not, etc., etc. And they would be able to do it all without the hassle of setting up their own credit department and collections issues. And they could probably do it so that a parent could sign up their under 18 kids for the card so the CC companies would love to get in to that market!

Square was my first thought, too. Yes, they could most certainly take on MC/Visa/Amex/etc. Maybe that is why Visa invested in Square? You have to get the POS units into retailer's hands. Then, at the same time, you have to get consumers using it. Where square differentiates themselves from the competition is that they make it very easy for anyone to become a POS node.

Now, the difference between Square and the CC companies is that square is really a gateway to those CC systems and not a credit provider themsleves... BUT once they have traction with POS merchants and acceptance by consumers could they start their own credit department? Sure. Would they want to? That is another debate. I'd wager it's much easier and still very profitable to be a gateway taking a small slice off each transaction than it is to be the credit provider.

I have to admit, when I heard of Remembary I though... huh, that sounds like Momento. Doing a quick search of Remembary vs Momento immediately brought me to this post. Then I read how Andrew Burke, Remembary's developer, handled the same news. It was great to not only see him distinguish what makes his app attractive but also recognize the strengths of the competition (and where it would suit his potential customer's needs more).

Kudos!

Hey! That's awesome! Thanks for coming back and letting us all know how you did and that I played a small part in it. (small as in that was one tiny blurb I mentioned and all the hard work was done by you alone). It made my day to read that.

Enjoy Philly!

At 5.9%+$0.95 or 8.9% flat? Good luck with that. Unless you can explain to me why anyone would be willing to pay near double what anywhere charges... Seriously, your site doesn't explain this well. Why do you charge near double (or even triple on the flat rate)?

Wow! The glowing reviews of Braintree really got my interested in them. So I went to their site. The best I've seen yet! Really top notch. Info flows clearly and plainly. Love it... except I'm in Canada. They don't service Canada.

So, anyone got a Braintree-like company in Canada they can reco?

Businesses do that every day. Look at the price of a book which often has two or more currency prices on it. Of course, what happened here in Canada is that stores started offering discounts or "US Pricing" models when our dollar went up. If we're to nitpick we're talking physical items which have associated local costs involved (local staff, local vendor space leases, local energy costs, etc.) whereas here we're talking electric bits and bytes. However, in sales and conversions, it's all the same... no?

I have to admit, I was looking at Grahl Software's PDF Annotator which is listed at $69.95USD but when I went to the site it said C$79.95 (using my IP to give me a price). Did I convert? No. I was turned off. That's 19% more expensive than if I used a US IP. I've a feeling, only from my own experience, that different currency prices in a flat-earth internet environment is a big turn off for consumers.

So are you suggesting different amounts depending on the currency and the location of the enquiry IP? Example: $30CAD, $30USD, 18EUR, 2600Yen?

That's something to think about. Have you done that or know a service that has?

Funny... I live with the conversion issue almost every day. Something we Canadians (and I suspect everyone doing online transactions) have just gotten used to. That said, every barrier to an acceptance is one I want to eliminate. Thanks for the input!

The author, Mark Hughes, is correct in his write-up and comes up with a few suggested scenarios where it would be "ideal". Unfortunately for Color those ideal situations where a critical mass makes the app useful are few and far between. How could Color have demonstrated themselves better? Maybe by launching a SXSW where a tech savvy and experimental crowd would give it a go, see the benefit, and continue on using it. Come to think about it, that is exactly what Twitter did. Now, imagine if twitter launched like Color did. You are posting with no followers, no one you knows sees any reason to use it so your feed is empty. Now add that you are anonymous, can't "follow" anyone, and wait until some random stranger in your vicinity post something but meanwhile your stream is empty. That's Color.

Oh, and as for the group event image sharing thing... didn't Posterous launch Events at SXSW? Yes they did (and for $41m less). http://blog.posterous.com/introducing-posterous-for-events-a...

Facebook will remain as long as people support it. In the short history of the net we have seen sites come and go with little more reason than they simply became passe. AOL had all the makings of a facebook (every ad on TV/poster had AOL Keyword:"...") but focused on their dial-up margins. MySpace had it but failed at modern design. Geocities, TheGlobe, etc, etc, had potential to do it before that. So many sites have come and gone in a social space. And now, where FB has picked up the slack they still can't replace the numerous forums out there where people really congregate to interact with "not friends".

Eventually, I believe, FB will be passe. And whatever out there is quenching people's social interaction thirst will thrive. Yes, it will be bigger because there will be even more people hooked up to the net.

I don't think we have ever in the history of the world seen a start-up so mindbogglingly confusing. Wait, let me clarify that statement with the amendment "handed $41m".

Seriously, has anyone figured out how to use color and found anything good of it? The reason we're all "piling on" is because NONE of us "get it".

Instagram and Hipstamatic are fine... for now. Let's face it, they create intriguing images today that very likely we will look stylistically dated in 5-10 years as "Hipstamatic" or "Instagram" shots. On the other hand PS or any of the numerous photo editors I have on my iPhone allow me to take a raw image and process it as I would like and then save a copy. I much prefer this route even though it takes more time. I am left in the end with the "image" and the "art" which can then be reinterpreted at a later date. And I think that is something the author gets at... these new filter programs are "fun"... but will they look like those 1980's strip mall glamour shots in the year 2020?

The title says it all. I've been working on a project for quite some time when it suddenly dawned on me (as target release date after release date kept slipping) that what I am actually building is an assembly of many functions and that I should (1) break each of those functions down into individual components (2) because they are something I already use and so do others, (3) release each of those components with the first part and then add-on as the next is complete... finally ending up with what I had in mind in the first place.

Another good quote I saw recently was how we mix up the Minimally Viable Product and the Desired Viable Product. Funny... we can read and study all we want but it takes a while to sink in and be applied, doesn't it?

When one browser (in this case, Chrome) works beautifully and the other browser (in this case FF4) refuses to operate in some capacity then that is most certainly not a problem with my computer.

Do you know how many people out there have the Mobile Intel 965 Express Chipset Family for their laptops... a staggering number, I'm sure.

Consumer Apps? There really aren't many out there. The ones that are fall into the new content/entertainment segment of news/music/video, primarily. Everything else has been made free so it can get pretty tough to get people to open their wallets. I know a few who pay for Flickr Pro, netflix, and that's it.

Me - Carbonite, some skype minutes here and there

What could your app possibly do for $108/year ($9/mo) that would be "really useful" to me as a consumer?