Disqus - Latest Comments for neekolas

Re: Hangouts and SMS

Nick Molnar — Thu, 06 Mar 2014 02:47:31 -0000

Agreed. Hello is less garish than Chomp, super fast, simple. I'm also a huge fan of Mighty Text, which I use to read and respond to texts from inside Chrome on my computer. Game-changer.

Re: Mobile shopping startup Slyce picks up $10.75M in its first round of funding

Nick Molnar — Tue, 04 Mar 2014 16:11:26 -0000

I wonder if their technology actually works now. When they used to have a Chrome Extension it was super-awesome right up until the point that you tried to use it. Far as I could tell they just asked you for the product category and gender, then did a colour search based on the image. Colour search is kinda tricky, but it's a long way away from what they describe on their website.

Re: Win-wins with Facebook?

Nick Molnar — Sun, 23 Feb 2014 18:35:57 -0000

Facebook actually had this feature several years ago and killed it off. There was a lot of duplicate cross-posting and it felt pretty spammy if you were friends with more than a handful of bloggers. http://techcrunch.com/2011/...

Re: Breaking Bad economy: How Walt made $80 million

Nick Molnar — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 02:20:08 -0000

What business has the same price per tonne as it does per gram? Walt's business isn't vertically integrated: there are at least two or three levels of distribution between him and a retail customer that require substantial markup. With 100% markup on retail, and 50% markup from a wholesaler and 50% markup from his distributor (Lydia and her Eastern European friends), that would leave Walt's price at $13 on a $60 retail gram. At $150 retail it would be $33/gram. I wouldn't be surprised if meth wholesalers and distributors actually had even greater markup, given the risks of the business. Plus Walt still has other costs of production, and a business partner. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy CNNMoney.

Re: Social Commerce Is Commerce With A Social Layer

Nick Molnar — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 11:33:30 -0000

As the composition of a stores customers shifts from Direct/Search traffic to Social, they're going to get more amenable to integration. Bad conversion rates cost them the most. Basic economics says they'll eventually cave; and when they do, existing referrers are in the best position to take advantage. That's our thesis at Wantering.

Re: Social Commerce Is Commerce With A Social Layer

Nick Molnar — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 15:44:10 -0000

If someone like Janrain existed for transactions, we'd be all over it. Being the first likely means a lot of wearing suits and delivering Powerpoint presentations, which I'd prefer to avoid.

Re: Social Commerce Is Commerce With A Social Layer

Nick Molnar — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 14:52:23 -0000

Building social into each eCommerce store doesn't seem optimal either.

1) It's highly fragmented
2) The skillset to build a great community and the skillset to build a great commerce business are quite different. Etsy & Modcloth are perhaps the two exceptions. Most eCommerce stores run on antiquated tech stacks that get in the way of real innovation, and are a small part of very 'top down' organizations.

What we really need is an oAuth for commerce, so that third party communities can form that are not tied to any one store. Svpply + 1-Click-Checkout would have been an order-of-magnitude better experience. The Fancy and Best Decision are both trying to build walled-garden versions of this. What we need is an open version so that 1000 flowers can bloom.

We'd use it at Wantering in a heartbeat, and I'd bet there are a lot of other companies who would too. Otherwise, we're going to have to go down the walled garden route, which only helps us and doesn't move the industry forward.

Re: Digital publishing and ecommerce startup Zmags raises $6m from North Atlantic Capital

Nick Molnar — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 15:19:22 -0000

Not sure how I feel about the Skeumorphism of recreating the feeling of a catalogue. We can do a lot better than that format (for example, Gilt or Fab's iPad apps). Still, it probably made their product much easier to sell to some of their big, conservative, customers.

Re: GrowLab Matures with Announcement of Second Cohort

Nick Molnar — Wed, 16 May 2012 17:07:10 -0000

We are too!

Re: Pebble Raises $3 Million from 21,000 People in 5 Days. Is Crowdfunding the New Venture Capitalism? - Techvibes.com

Nick Molnar — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 21:02:31 -0000

They launched their Kickstarter project after a (pretty developed) prototype was built. Built, by the way, with VC(ish) money. They're YCombinator backed.

If you look at the big product success stories on Kickstarter, they're all companies that already have a well-developed prototype. It takes investment to get there. For products, Kickstarter hasn't been working as an investment platofrm, its been working as a pre-order platform to pay for production costs. That's a totally different need.

Re: Wait, Ashton Kutcher might actually be a smart investor | VentureBeat

Nick Molnar — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 01:37:16 -0000

Might? Have you seen his portfolio. I think it speaks for itself. Admittedly, he has a leg up over a lot of other investors, in that he can get into crowded rounds based on name recognition, while others might get boxed out. Still, its about as strong a portfolio as any angel pound-for-pound.

Re: Condé Nast Goes Shopping, Spends $14 Million on ZipList

Nick Molnar — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 17:44:33 -0000

You sure there's a return for investors on this? When they raised $4.5m, they likely didn't give up more than 1/3 of the company. That puts their valuation at ~$13.5m. Basically, a wash.

Re: Mixtent Lauches to Crack Reputation with Controlled Anonymous Commentary

Nick Molnar — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 15:46:03 -0000

Mixtent is the company behind the reference.me SPAM site. Stay away. Stay far away.

http://news.ycombinator.com...

Re: http://blog.pinterest.com/post/19799177970

Nick Molnar — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 20:23:10 -0000

One part of the TOS that hasn't changed is #8, the indemnity clause. It still makes individual users responsible for covering Pinterest's legal fees if their use of the site gets Pinterest sued. That one was a particularly scary term, and I'm concerned that it's in there.

Re: How to Hustle SXSW for Fun & Profit

Nick Molnar — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 20:03:22 -0000

Can't wait to see you, Danielle. Been too long

Re: http://thecultureofme.com/post/14460550970

Nick Molnar — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 11:53:02 -0000

Thanks for the support.

We just launched a new $12/month pricing plan this morning to make Shirtify even more affordable.

Re: A Super Lazy — And Genius — Way To Buy Band Ts

Nick Molnar — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:09:32 -0000

Still do. I'm the tech director and sit on the board. Its always been a nights and weekends thing for me, but definitely a fun project to be a part of.

Re: A Super Lazy — And Genius — Way To Buy Band Ts

Nick Molnar — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 17:16:52 -0000

Thanks for the great write-up. [Full disclosure: I'm the cofounder of Shirtify].

Just to clarify, we'll ship you shirts from any artist that sells merch online, and links to it from their official website/facebook/myspace.

Also, I've gotta get in touch with that Rock-T-A-Day guy. Maybe I can just sell him 30 Shirtify subscriptions.

Re: Jig

Nick Molnar — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 22:57:57 -0000

There's power to a highly focused and structured interaction like Jig, though. They can tweak and shape the site like crazy to optimize for answer quality; Twitter has to optimize for thousands of possible use-cases at once.

Re: UX Critique of Path 2

Nick Molnar — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 18:04:56 -0000

Doable on Android, though.

Re: A Better Way to Rate Films - Bad films are bad

Nick Molnar — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 16:26:42 -0000

Nice idea, but where's the execution? You don't explain this magical rating system anywhere in your app. So, it just feels like I have to rate the film twice on two undefined scales. Fail.

Re: Which Telecoms Store Your Data the Longest? Secret Memo Tells All

Nick Molnar — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 17:42:11 -0000

Has anyone leaked the data for Canadian Telcos?

Re: 30/10/10

Nick Molnar — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 13:22:50 -0000

I would imagine this is the ratio for a startup at a certain scale, where they have attracted mainstream users and gotten mainstream press. Presumably in its earlier days a startup like Foursquare or Zynga would have had higher engagement rates, as the community was smaller and more self-selected.

Is there a corollary for the engagement rate a small/brand new startup needs to hit the inflection point needed to keep growing into a Zynga or Twitter? I would imagine it's a higher number than 30/10/10. For example, it wouldn't surprise me if Turntable.fm was running at a 50/25/15 for their first couple weeks, and is now gradually reverting to the mean.

Re: SEO Shop Puts 50 Google +1s on Sale for Just $9.99 - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic

Nick Molnar — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 23:38:16 -0000

For the record: Digg, Stumbledupon, Youtube, Reddit, etc have been dealing with pros for some time. They've also had some luck at stamping it out. Check out subvertandprofit.com...they've been around for 3 or 4 years. Their Digg voting used to almost guarantee a front-page spot, now I hear many of the accounts get ignored.

Even with manually submitted +1s, there will still be odd patterns from the aggregate traffic across all the campaigns the company offers. 250 different people voting on the same random page might be hard to find, but 50 different people +1ing 20 of the same, totally unrelated, is really unlikely, statistically. So, after enough of these campaigns, Google will start discrediting most of these accounts.

Unless they can find a way to generate thousands of new accounts, so they can burn old ones, Google will eventually catch on.

Re: If History is any Guide, You’ve Got Two Years

Nick Molnar — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 19:57:05 -0000

I was barely a teenager in the '90s, but SXSW is a lot like I imagined it being. You say you haven't seen outrageous launch parties, but there were a bunch at SXSW. The one that comes to mind was the week-long open bar at a swank lounge that Blue Calypso used to hype their launch.