Disqus - Latest Comments for fightingmonk

Re: PR and the price on a blogger’s head

Jonathan Karon — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 17:41:54 -0000

If a marketing director spends 2 hours pitching you and you cover their story, that's 2 hours of their life spent in the bargain (which equates to comp of some sort). If a founder says "I have no time and no VP of Marketing, I'll have to pay some freelancer or agency to pitch my story to the press" how is that different? As @Joel Falconer said the explicit performance-based PR is better for the customer, just as performance-based advertising is better for the advertiser.

Re: More than 66% of Users Have Upgraded to iOS 5

Jonathan Karon — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:42:01 -0000

There are also plenty of people who have upgraded an iOS device in the past only to discover that their data is gone or their device is horribly slow. Combine that with the fact that Apple tries very hard to make it impossible to downgrade, and I'm not at all surprised 20% of people haven't applied iOS 5.

(Also, I'm looking forward to seeing data broken out by device. Thanks for digging this up.)

Re: The ‘Gowalla Situation’

Jonathan Karon — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:59:35 -0000

This is one of those classic cases of external costs. Lean startup and fast fail reduce the cost of providing a service, which customers LOVE. Yet they often lead to acquisition, founder burnout, or pivoting, any of which generally causes a lot of pain for customers who have come to rely on the service as it is.

In the end it's a tension around pricing. I would ask that questioner how much more they would be willing to pay to mitigate the 'Gowalla Situation'. Nothing is really free and if their answer is 'not much' then they don't really value that stability.

Early in my career I was always amused when a vendor would trot out the "we are an $X million company who grew Y% over the last 5 years". Now I realize that what they're essentially saying is "we know you can find someone else who is cheaper, but we're not going anywhere anytime soon".

Re: Apple Never Designed the iPad - They Undesigned it

Jonathan Karon — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 16:02:29 -0000

We perceive a more or less oval field of view, books have margins to provide tolerance for alignment errors in printing and binding, rectangles happen to be the most cost-effective shape for our current display manufacturing processes, books generally have white borders because it uses less ink and white paper is convenient, Apple could have made the edges of the iPad thicker to improve the grip without changing the weight but that's harder to manufacture and they had a goal of slimness, older media are generally rectangular because straight rectangles are the most efficient share to construct using straight edges, and most modern media is rectangular because they make optimal use of our existing displays.

There are many alternative interpretations that don't align with the thesis that the iPad is the simplest and most undesigned tablet possible.

Re: How Do You Protect Against a Tsunami? | PBS NewsHour | Nov. 17, 2011 | PBS

Jonathan Karon — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 12:20:56 -0000

I ran a study in Cannon Beach, Oregon looking at the actual casualty rates of a tsunami in various situations. One of the findings was that there are many nuances to placement of vertical evacuation buildings and it is possible to negatively impact survival rates if they are placed in the wrong area. The study also produced detailed animated videos that have had a profound impact when talking to people about the dangers of tsunamis on the Oregon coast. The study report and those videos can be viewed here: http://netjunky.com/cannon-...

Re: Groupon’s Strikeouts Reveal an Unspoken Truth: Jonathan Weil - Bloomberg

Jonathan Karon — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 12:21:08 -0000

It certainly sounds questionable on the surface and I'm not sure it should be in an official disclosure, but there are good reasons to break out those costs:

Online advertising = customer acquisition. Since GAAP makes it hard to quantify customer goodwill and expected future per-customer revenue, this is a fudge for expressing the resulting increase in enterprise value and future profitability.

Stock-based compensation != cash expense. You have to treat stock grants like a cash expense on the balance sheet, but they're not. The company did not spend a penny of cash to issue that stock. It's crucially important to existing investors to see the dilution but that's not the same as spending money.

Non-cash acquisition-related costs = stock. Same issue as grants. There's dilution of investor equity but there's no money out the door.

Re: The Numbers of Disqus

Jonathan Karon — Thu, 05 May 2011 16:21:03 -0000

I'm honestly not sure. I had the Disqus plugin installed before installing Thesis, and I think I remember it just working. Sorry I can;t be more helpful. Maybe the Thesis developer (who seems to provide great support) could provide some hints?

Re: The Numbers of Disqus

Jonathan Karon — Wed, 04 May 2011 17:41:47 -0000

@Rishi Shah I use Disqus just fine with Thesis on WordPress. Was that what you meant?

Re: Tanner Burson : Thoughts on Appcelerator Titanium

Jonathan Karon — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 14:16:02 -0000

Tanner,

I had the same experience with Titanium and gave up after about a day. In my case, I was building a simple mapping app. I wanted iOS and Android, and the mapping support in PhoneGap was too primitive. Getting a map view up and populated only took an hour or two, but then the mysteries of Titanium kicked in -- putting a JS function definition above (or below) the creation of a UI component would cause mystery crashes; no documentation on certain fairly standard manipulations; etc.

They may have fixed this recently, but there was no way to add a deployment target to an existing project when I tried it out. I built my prototype app for iOS before I installed an Android SDK only to discover that I couldn't add Android to the project and had to start a new project.

I'm not one who likes to dis other people's work, and I know some people who are happily toiling away with Titanium, but having cut my teeth on the power of the Microsoft development toolchain and the transparency of GCC and Make, it seems to me that the product managers at Appcelerator don't have a clue what it means to build good tools for developers.

Re: Mobile Notifications

Jonathan Karon — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 12:56:19 -0000

It strikes me that this is, in essence, the News Feed for apps.

I'd love to see 20 or so different algorithms for sorting, ranking, and filtering notifications, sold as apps by various clever developers, so I can try different approaches and tailor the feed to my wants.

Re: http://daverecycles.com/post/2858880862

Jonathan Karon — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 15:29:49 -0000

This is why some of us startup CTOs still say things like "we DO need to spend 10x as much for a few boxes in a colo rather than using a cloud." Outsourcing means loss of control. And unfortunately, even when a cloud provider acknowledges the existence of security concerns their general answer is "trust us", and the detailed answer is "we have super secret expertise and you can trust us". Ever tried to get a provider to give you security incident coverage or indemnification? It's not pretty. And the most thorough interview won't review mistakes like this one, you'd have to do a complete code and operations audit to even hope to expose this one.

And yet people sit around complaining that they can't store credit card data in Heroku and still be PCI-DSS compliant. It amazes me.

I would LOVE to hear about cloud providers who DO have serious, on the record security profiles. It would revolutionise the space. But I fear the costs would be more than we'd pay to roll our own.

Re: Twitter Gets Sued For Letting Famous People Interact Online

Jonathan Karon — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 13:34:37 -0000

The problem here is that then only people who can afford to pay a FTE for several years can get patents. A patent filing already costs somewhere north of $15k in legal and filing fees by the time it issues. Making it cost several hundred thousand is definitely NOT a good way to level the playing field. (And yes, I've filed patents and know companies that are still alive today because they filed a patent and it was critical to their defense from a giant company trying to take them out.)

Re: Data Protection

Jonathan Karon — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 13:41:46 -0000

I've had good luck on the Mac using user folder encryption. It makes Time Machine backups less flexible and you spend a lot of time waiting for the backup to finish after logging out or shutting down, but it takes care of making sure your local DropBox data is secured.

You're right that there just isn't a good method of storing encrypted data in DropBox, hence my caveat on what you should feel safe putting in there.

User authentication is a very hard problem. I hear rumors that Google is adding one-time-PIN via text message support to Apps. That, in my opinion, mashed up with OpenID and SSL-everywhere would make life a lot better. But it would also make life a lot more annoying. ;)

Re: D8 Video: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Privacy

Jonathan Karon — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 19:35:14 -0000

Almost every new web app / social service has to overcome the critical mass problem -- if not enough people use / opt-in / activate a feature the feature is more or less useless.

Amazing product designers find solutions to this problem.

Facebook's answer is to switch everyone on by default and maybe let them opt out. What a cop out.

Re: Designing For Your Audience

Jonathan Karon — Sun, 30 May 2010 12:03:18 -0000

Many thanks for the feedback!

Controlled access to YouTube is definitely a big issue. Our whole premise in building WeetWoo was to get closer to a safe, guided environment suitable for all kids. The limitations of the iPhone OS have made it harder to get to a perfect solution, but we keep trying to improve.

The challenges in a school -- web filters, bandwidth constraints, liability, teacher-specific content -- pose a different set of limitations that we think we have an answer for. If you email feedback@weetwoo.com we can get you on the beta tester list -- I'd love your feedback.

Re: Designing For Your Audience

Jonathan Karon — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 18:57:08 -0000

For the same reason that it sometimes takes a ridiculous amount of prose to say something simple until an editor steps in and tears your heart out. We grow very firmly attached to our beliefs.

Re: 10 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Giving Up on Your Dream

Jonathan Karon — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 19:27:49 -0000

Lori, Excellent points and a very good set of questions to bring some logic to a process that rarely has much logic. I think it's important, though, to realize that sometimes abandoning a dream is far better for yourself, your family, and your future. I have stuck with dream projects for too long on a few occasions and put myself and people around me through far more discomfort than a rational analysis of the situation would accept. Sometimes recognizing when a dream IS out of reach and letting go is the hardest decision of all.

Re: Top 5 things missing from most entrepreneur pitches

Jonathan Karon — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:44:24 -0000

All great points, Charlie. As a sort of bridge between your points about milestones and product strategy, the startup community has been talking more and more about customer-driven product evolutions. This is a really good thing -- it saves a ton of time, effort, and money and pushes for agility.

What I'd love to see from businesses are some well expressed milestones around product evolution. Something like "30% of customers in target market say the current product evolution meets 100% of their needs".

Re: The Power Of Passed Links

Jonathan Karon — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 18:29:30 -0000

And thus the vigorous discussion between Magpie and it's detractors.

Re: The Power Of Passed Links

Jonathan Karon — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:58:23 -0000

Mark's comment touches on this and I think you need a lateral differentiation.

I'm going to propose another class of traffic: Intent-Driven Passed Links. Simply put, I ask people on Twitter rather than asking Google.

Consider googling "Django hosting provider" vs. tweeting "Anyone have a favorite Django hosting provider?" My personal pattern would be to do the former, review the options, then seek critique via Twitter.

More and more I'm skipping the Google part. So it's passed link, but it's a solicited passed link and thus is intent-driven.

The popular discussion of Twitter still frames it as a micro-blogging service but there are a lot of people using it like a chat room.

Re: Age

Jonathan Karon — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:55:09 -0000

Unless, of course, you are Karl Lagerfeld. Then you hire a curator for your iPod collection to ensure each one of your dozens of iPods are fully loaded with the bleeding edge of hip.

Re: The Great Syndication Debacle

Jonathan Karon — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:07:11 -0000

Don't ever stop syndicating, baby!

Just because some of us resent change and experimentation doesn't mean you should give up your living experiment. I mean that. Giving up would be changing, and as you know I hate change.

Re: Finding Ways to Help Bloggers Help Bloggers

Jonathan Karon — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:11:29 -0000

My Positorious RSS feed used to give me one or three pithy nuggets in a week. That was nice. Suddenly I've accumulated 15 in the last 8 hours, and none of them are what I expected. This leads to the omnipresent discussion of over-syndication and dilution of voice.

I LIKED that I could count on Mitchner-esque essays written in a reliable and familiar voice on a range of topics that fit a (mostly) human persona. To lose that dehumanizes, and I fell the loss more than I expected. I think I must be too much the artiste for this new sublimated info-world, or perhaps I am tired and need a warm bed and a nap.

Re: Time For The Sprint To The Finish

Jonathan Karon — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:16:45 -0000

Excellent post Fred, and I'm really excited to see where the Bloggers' Challenge goes in the future.

Your comments to said reporter reminded me of a theme you wrote about a few months ago, and it brings up the issue of social capital. AVC (and you) has a LOT of social capital. When you make a comment about one of your portfolio companies or highlight a particular classroom that could really use a donation, the impact comes from the social capital you have built.

There's no doubt that the internet has certainly changed the dynamics of communication, fund raising, and charity. It's gotten a lot cheaper and faster to spread a message, cultivate interest, and collect returns. But we are still creatures with finite attention, and information consumes attention. All of that social capital is a reflection of the trust people place in you (or anyone) to curate information. I can envision a future in which I am exposed to dozens of charity solicitations a day because everyone has figured out how to use the current tools. Then we're back to email whitelists and hating all the junk.

So there has to be a fundamental opportunity here to combine the soliciting and fundraising activities with trust networks and social capital. There's a down side to the whole system -- people who influence opinion have the power to decide which causes get attention. You have the social capital to get recommendations on pay as you go 3G in Europe without searching the web, and Peter Shankman has the social capital to demonstrate the power of Twitter spontaneously in meetings, but most of the world doesn't.

I have no doubt that we'll solve this, just as we've "solved" the cost of communications, but "most popular" is still the de-facto sorting principle on much of the Internet. Maybe what I'm looking for is Long Tail Social Capital.

Re: Understanding Google's mobile ambitions - mediabistro.com: MobileDevicesToday

Jonathan Karon — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 12:25:44 -0000

Your link is broken... Seems to have moved to http://www.fastcompany.tv/v...