Disqus - Latest Comments for MartinEdic

Re: Audio Archaeology: Before there was Margaret Explosion, there was Personal Effects

MartinEdic — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 16:41:37 -0000

There were multiple bass players over the years. I was the first and last. In between there was Bernie Heveron and Robin. I left at one point to play with Brian Horton in Blue Hand. I rejoined when their last LP, Mana Fiesta came out and did the three months at the Planetarium. Crazy great times for original music in Rochester.

Re: Bringing Schiller Park Back to Life

MartinEdic — Mon, 16 Apr 2018 17:45:23 -0000

Never knew about Franklin Park, yet another casualty of the moat that is the Inner Loop. Seems to me that the City should step up on this.

Re: A Better Way To Do Bike Share

MartinEdic — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 19:43:01 -0000

Here in Rochester we have Zagster and an extra buck you can leave the bike at any city sidewalk bike rack. They track locations...

Re: 3 Great Rochester Neighborhoods and Why they Work

MartinEdic — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 23:29:36 -0000

This is a great piece but I need to correct a common factual error. Rochester was never a rust belt city. We never had steel or coal industries. In fact we were the high tech hub of the northeast for years with photography, optics, xerography and all the spinoff businesses related to those. We had a downturn when digital killed the largest employer in town but when they gradually downsized (over a twenty year period) they retrained people and gave them financial packages. The result was many new small businesses founded by engineers that now fuel the local economy. By comparison, Buffalo, a true rust belt city, lost 20,000 blue collar jobs all at once when steel went away. They still haven't recovered though they are working on it,

Re: Hardware-as-a-Service (HaaS)

MartinEdic — Thu, 22 Sep 2016 11:39:47 -0000

Distributors of commercial espresso machines have been doing this for years. They knew small coffee shops couldn't pay the ten grand upfront that a good machine and grinder would cost them and they could not have downtime...

Re: My 5-100-500 rule to close your seed round - Bringing transparency to seed investing...

MartinEdic — Fri, 09 Sep 2016 11:49:37 -0000

These numbers really only apply when there is limited viable product and no revenue, in my experience. It also is very Silicon Valley-centric. There is literally nowhere else in the world where you could possibly have 100 investor meetings. BTW, a partner and I raised a $150,000 euro seed with literally no meetings...but that was an outlier.

Re: Breaking Through

MartinEdic — Thu, 08 Sep 2016 10:23:30 -0000

Lots of emerging evidence that consumer apps are being superceded by AI from the big companies. I don't need dedicated apps for specific functions anymore. And there is interface fatigue- I don't need to constantly learn new interfaces when I can ask a bot to do it for me.

Re: Review of Modern Technical Writing, by Andrew Etter

MartinEdic — Thu, 04 Aug 2016 12:39:35 -0000

Not to mention security and regulatory issues that affect a lot of tech firms, healthcare and anything related to the government. Show me a security protocol that tells a customer you're doing this. These are real world things...

Re: Review of Modern Technical Writing, by Andrew Etter

MartinEdic — Thu, 04 Aug 2016 12:37:32 -0000

This is interesting to me because the entire premise assumes a degree of technical capability on the part of tech writers that is simply not there yet. For example, at the last STC conference there was not a single program on structured content. Assuming this audience can string together a half dozen apps and keep them up to date, manually, is not realistic. I'm sure it could work for a very small team but when you get into tens of thousands of topics (not uncommon) it would be a nightmare. And the entire publishing process enabled by a CCMS offers the advantage of eliminating constant formatting while enabling real time updates. Having multiple Jekyll sites, for example, means keeping track of what is where and somehow making them easily accessible to end users. And what about search? How do you search across all these apps with one search? Etc.,etc.

Re: Review of Modern Technical Writing, by Andrew Etter

MartinEdic — Wed, 03 Aug 2016 11:51:27 -0000

Cost effective assumes you are not measuring the cost of man hours required to keep track of all this stuff.

Re: Review of Modern Technical Writing, by Andrew Etter

MartinEdic — Wed, 03 Aug 2016 11:49:58 -0000

Not to mention publishing...BTW, I totally agree regarding PDF vs. online. But let's imagine a part number changes that is used across multiple products and appears in multiple docs published to various media. How do you change every instance of that part number other than manually looking for them? There are so many reasons why structure was developed. The average tech writer spends as much as 40% of their time formatting their documentation for multiple delivery options. Formatting is automated in XML-based systems...

Re: Review of Modern Technical Writing, by Andrew Etter

MartinEdic — Wed, 03 Aug 2016 11:45:42 -0000

Clarification: I work at Jorsek, creators of easyDITA. A couple of things. Cobbling together solutions from a half dozen apps in different places could be a disaster for companies dealing with thousands or even millions of pages that require review, edit, approval and, often, translation to multiple languages. These are the problems structured single source CCMS are designed to solve. Comparing his approach, which could work with a small team and a limited document set, to a CCMS makes no sense. It cannot scale. It should be pointed out early in this piece that the things he espouses, which, as a writer, I often agree with, are only for very small scale use cases.

Re: The Wee Little Grill and Charcoal That'll Change the Way You Cook Outside

MartinEdic — Sat, 25 Jun 2016 13:03:43 -0000

You need to make sure you tell people you cannot use these indoors. You mention it fitting a small kitchen. Someone could die.

Re: Bitcoin: Democracy and Debate

MartinEdic — Mon, 04 Jan 2016 14:01:41 -0000

I would like to suggest, for 2016, that all proponents of Bitcoin agree to stop talking in this arcane insider lingo and simply explain your thoughts in plain English. If you want broad acceptance, this is essential. I'm pretty savvy and I have no idea what you are talking about. This is marketing 101. And yes, I know, geeks don't like marketing. But tech marketing is what I do and clear communication is critical to the success of any endeavor.

Re: Access Code

MartinEdic — Tue, 07 Jul 2015 09:48:35 -0000

I am curious about actual numbers. How many complete course? How many get jobs? Actual range of salaries, not averages. It is very easy to throw numbers out there optimistically. I certainly hope these are real numbers affecting significant numbers of people. But 5% of how many? Are we talking about single digits or real impact?
I ask these questions because I contract to teach startups in a not for profit and I see how they massage their success numbers. It's done to keep money flowing in.

Re: The Buffalo Bet

MartinEdic — Wed, 03 Jun 2015 12:43:40 -0000

The 'education' we provide is not operational stuff. We put them through an extensive customer discovery process where they are required to talk to at least 100 people related to their business concept to see if it is viable before they actually build it. This process inevitably makes a wide range of valuable connections with potential users, investors, mentors and more. We do discourage doing any business planning until they have a viable,scalable business model. If they don't, it is far better to learn this at the earliest stage. We've been through this process with 36 software startups and the results are enlightening for everyone involved. It is basically a stripped down version of Steve Blank's Lean methodology.

Re: The Buffalo Bet

MartinEdic — Wed, 03 Jun 2015 08:58:58 -0000

43North is a great program but I have heard from people in it that they get no real help in the form of teaching, etc. that is useful once they are there. Accelerators should only be measured by where their companies are a year out from leaving the program. I know because I teach in one here in Rochester. This metric seems to be ignored when we talk about this movement. Success rate. And, btw, I define success as learning. If you decide an idea is not good or you're not cut out for it, that is a form of success.

Re: Blockstore

MartinEdic — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 16:22:05 -0000

Troll

Re: Blockstore

MartinEdic — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 16:10:10 -0000

Thanks guest, that actually makes sense to me. Maybe you should edit the wikipedia entry for blockchain, which is totally useless!

Re: Blockstore

MartinEdic — Tue, 17 Feb 2015 09:36:02 -0000

I am reasonably competent around software technology and I have no idea what any of this means, nor can I find a cogent definition, for laypersons, of blockchain. Yet it is a constant subject here. I bring this up because I believe that the whole bitcoin community is mired in this kind of arcane language and until it stops writing like this there will never be widespread acceptance. It is pure gobbledygook.

Re: A Lens Into The Future Of Enterprise Software

MartinEdic — Wed, 21 Jan 2015 15:58:51 -0000

I went into Search work by category section and only one category has any work in it. After looking at their pricing I think they have a problem. Companies like Blur Group, which matches freelancers, mostly marketing-related, with projects, took years to build a steady flow of projects. This was very sales-intensive and even now, with 50,000 registered 'Experts' the flow of projects is very slow (I know, I am registered with them as an Expert).
However, for my Kavyar project I would be interested in potentially partnering with them to use their infrastructure. The Kavyar guys think they have a better way of reaching buyers of creative services.

Re: Backing Up Your Files

MartinEdic — Mon, 12 Jan 2015 14:19:17 -0000

Chop shops want Honda Accords, not obscure expensive cars. They go where the market is. An Accord chopped up is worth twice as much as an assembled new one (yes, some legit places buy new ones and parts them out).

Re: Backing Up Your Files

MartinEdic — Mon, 12 Jan 2015 14:16:44 -0000

All my files start in Google Docs. They may get downloaded for other people's purposes but the original version is always there. I do cloud-based backups but the things I really want are on Google.

Re: Broken Cap Tables

MartinEdic — Sun, 04 Jan 2015 13:22:56 -0000

Sizing the wrong market might be a good blog post- I'm quite certain you have multiple examples. Not only of companies but even more commonly with investors...

Re: Broken Cap Tables

MartinEdic — Sun, 04 Jan 2015 13:20:34 -0000

Ha! When I thought about sizing the market I wondered why you'd invest. But then that thought crossed my mind and I realized I was sizing the wrong market. Ironically, I train startups in an accelerator and this is a very common mistake!