Disqus - Latest Comments for jjudge

Re: Great Meetup Last Night

jjudge — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:37:01 -0000

You should do meetups in other cities - like Chicago :)

Re: Comments on Paul Graham’s “What Startups Are Really Like”

jjudge — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:39:03 -0000

Thanks Sachin. It is tough here, but I also think it forces you to build a better business. We should grab beers with a bunch of other founders...I don't do a lot of that now.

I'll be reading your blog - I just took a look and you're writing some great stuff.

Re: Fred Wilson Dot VC

jjudge — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 18:19:17 -0000

Thanks for turning me on to Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. I love "Home".

Re: We Just Undid Three Months of Dev work. Here's What We Learned.

jjudge — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:03:54 -0000

Could you be more specific on what work you pulled out/what's changed?

Re: New York City is poised for a tech revival

jjudge — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:31:48 -0000

Chicago is crushing New York, Boston, Boulder, etc.

I'd just thought I'd make a few people laugh with that. It's interesting to me to see that Chicago is always absent from startup city lists, especially when companies like Orbitz (IPO'ed 2x), Feedburner (acquired by Google), TicketsNow (acquired by TicketMaster) 37Signals, SkinnyCorp (threadless.com), CrowdSpring, Parlano (acquired by Microsoft) are/were from here.

I think you're right about New York.

Re: Don't Ignore The Least Common Denominator

jjudge — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 13:48:25 -0000

Can you expand on your: "i still haven't figure an easy way to sms from the web" Are you talking about 'text this' widget?

Google Voice just nailed SMS from the web for consumers. I setup my account and love the how easy it is to send/receive SMS.

Our TextMe product (textmeforbusiness.com) makes firing up SMS campaigns pretty easy for businesses, all controlled through the web.

Our engineering team is continually debating about the future of SMS and just how long it will live in terms of web product integration/usage. If the carriers eased up on pricing, this least common denominator would be so much more popular.

Re: Spying On Myself (continued)

jjudge — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 11:09:17 -0000

I think you're speaking to the evolution of self syndication, whether it's self hosted blog (ex: combing the Wordpress P2 template with a syndication plugin like WP-o-Matic for grabbing your feeds), or a hosted blogging service like Tumblr/Posterous, or a aggregation service like FriendFeed. I really feel like these are all driving towards the same thing, at least in terms of the ability to personal publishing and redistribution.

Re: Contract # 733 :: Sage Technology - CityPayments.org

jjudge — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 02:31:55 -0000

No kidding. I need to buy more domains. Waiting a minute, they're all gone.

Re: Wounded limb

jjudge — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:22:15 -0000

Thanks Raghu, I'm feeling a lot better this week. The painkillers are
getting old though.

Re: Wounded limb

jjudge — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:18:27 -0000

Thanks David

Re: Open Platforms and Innovation

jjudge — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:21:38 -0000

That's an interesting thought. I'm excited to see patents lose some of their value as innovation keeps moving faster. Reducing the amount of patent trolls would be a very good thing.

Re: James Siminoff

jjudge — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:56:28 -0000

Wouldn't this be a case of making great food rather than breaking all the rules? There is a barbecue joint in Chicago named Smoque where people line up outside for hours - because they love the food.

Re: Fred Wilson Dot VC

jjudge — Tue, 26 May 2009 23:23:43 -0000

Yep, they don't make 'em like they use to. Being There, Summerteeth....so good. Too bad about Jay. Not sure if you've read Learning How To Die yet, if not I can drop my copy to you.

Re: Why Isn't Paypal More Successful?

jjudge — Tue, 26 May 2009 23:16:25 -0000

I didn't read through a lot of the comments (lot of action on this post), but here are the reasons why I don't like paypal and stay away from them whenever possible:

1) They default to my bank account. I hate that, I hate paying with cash, I never want to pay directly from my bank account.
2) Their guest (non-login) checkout process with sites sucks - whenever they match up my email address and/or credit card number they don't let me proceed unless I login. When I login, they default to my bank account (and make it hard to change to use your credit card). Why would I need to login if my preference would be to not login and type out my information? I'm assuming that the merchant wants to support non-paypal accounts through this manner, but Paypal is trying to hoodwink me into logging in. In the past two months I didn't not proceed with checkout 2x due to this issue.
3) I have my credit card number memorized.

I think Google has done a nice job with Checkout (very clean, very easy to use, don't mind logging in at all since I use Google for all email accounts).

It's definitely a matter of trust. I don't trust Paypal because of the reasons laid out above. I trust Amazon because they give me complete control when purchasing something.

Re: A New Approach To Facebook

jjudge — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 12:37:08 -0000

I think this plan will work out well for you. I use Twitter for a lot of the stuff that I'm interested in (ruby, mobile, apple, craft beer, etc) and Facebook for keeping up/sharing with close friends and family. A friend recently referred to Facebook as the Sunday night conversation (eg - calling your parents to give them the update every Sunday). I thought that made a lot of sense as the differences in the two are very clear to me. When I want to post a photo of my son, I do it via Flickr/Facebook, when I want to post commentary about something I'm interested in I do it via Twitter.

It seems like Facebook is thinking about the problem you're writing about by introducing groups last week. I'm really excited about the direction in which they're heading. Twitter too.

Re: Announcing 'acts_as_taggable_on' - Intridea Company Blog

jjudge — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 13:25:49 -0000

I've been using this plugin for awhile now and really like it. Is there any way to map back to the associated items for a given tag? For example:

Item.new(:description => "Eat lunch", :tag_list => "todo, now").save

It would be great to do something like:

Tag.find_by_name("todo").items

Re: looking for a good hardtail

jjudge — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:58:32 -0000

Sweet, thanks for the feedback. I'll be making this purchase in the
spring. Let's go for a ride

Re: Back to writing

jjudge — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 14:19:58 -0000

Yep, you're correct. We're actually starting to confuse him with Dylan, since he is getting some gray whiskers. He's trying to be a copy cat of the old man.

Re: Mobile In/Mobile Out

jjudge — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 14:07:28 -0000

Hmmm, this makes me think about some of the deficiencies with the iPhone (copying/pasting, transitioning between applications). I can never imagine typing up a long blog post or comment from my iPhone, it would end up being so much messier and challenging to write than it would have been if it were written with a Blackberry. You've made me miss my BB with your last couple of posts.

Re: A Slightly Different Perspective

jjudge — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 14:54:13 -0000

Great post Fred.

@Adeo re: "These companies can't get capital from banks", I've seen that first hand with my company. I was amazed when we sat down with the banks to show them our cash flows and month/month growth for 2008, and their response was - well, you lost money in 2007. Of course we lost money last year, it was our first year in business and it takes time for product revenue to catch up with expenses. Now that we're cash flow positive and product revenues are growing every month, we're at a good inflection point where we want to hire a few more people, need to upgrade our infrastructure and move to a larger office. We're trying to decide if it makes sense to take a little angel money, or continue growing organically (just a bit slower). Our gut tells us to keep bootstrapping instead of spending time talking to angels - our experience with banks alone was annoying and a total waste of time.

Re: fredwilson.fm

jjudge — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 13:28:44 -0000

kick ass - good idea

Re: My Web 2.0 Keynote

jjudge — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 14:10:00 -0000

Thanks Fred. This has me fired up to look through Chicago's past as well.

Re: Dropbox launches!

jjudge — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 13:42:37 -0000

I've been using the service for months and continue to love it. Thank you so much for creating it, and congratulations on the public launch. Now get back to those comfy chairs and code :)

Re: Community Organization Is A Conservative Notion

jjudge — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:50:18 -0000

Out of curiosity, what does McCain's resume look like and how is it that much deeper than Obama's (aside from the obvious experience due to years served)? I honestly don't know and would like to understand what major reforms/actions John McCain has been responsible for. I lightly Googled it and found his voting record (http://www.ontheissues.org/john_mccain.htm), but that doesn't tell me what he's driven into law.

Re: belly shot, week 19

jjudge — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 18:00:09 -0000

Are you kidding? You are more beautiful than ever. Stop talking like that.