Disqus - Latest Comments for mridley

Re: Michael's Thoughts - Tech - Poking my Head Up

Michael Ridley — Fri, 21 Feb 2014 07:53:28 -0000

Baophac! How are you? Never been to Montreal...maybe some day?

Re: Michael's Thoughts - Blog - Where Are All the iBooks Textbooks?

Michael Ridley — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 01:27:25 -0000

The point is - why doesn't YOUR company publish some iBooks textbooks with enhanced content for either training or marketing purposes (or both)? It seems like there is a big opportunity here for non-legacy publishers.Although at some point Apple will have to come to the table if they really want grad school textbooks from recognized names.

Re: Michael's Thoughts - Blog - Where Are All the iBooks Textbooks?

Michael Ridley — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 00:32:44 -0000

Oh yes, I COMPLETELY agree. I do not expect to see Elsevier or Oxford University Press. I also do not expect to see O'Reilly and Associates. But I do expect to see the "next O'Reilly". I do expect to see people publishing textbooks from their bedrooms on things like Photoshop, the Eclipse IDE, or how to pwn an Xbox 360 game. Where are those books?

Re: Nokia to dump world’s most ridiculous luxury-phone brand, Vertu, for $265M | VentureBeat

Michael Ridley — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:53:59 -0000

Aside from it being a lot of money to spend on a phone that's immediately technologically obsolete, the thing that struck me when I used a Virtu years ago was that they are HEAVY. As gold and platinum will be. I'll keep my iPhone.

Re: Is your new iPad heating up?

Michael Ridley — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 00:19:19 -0000

Haven't had a problem with mine so far.

Re: Twitter and Facebook Are Tomorrow’s News Service. For Now, Though …

Michael Ridley — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 00:17:24 -0000

I get most of my news from Twitter; not so much from Facebook. Since getting an iPad I'm getting a lot from Flipboard's curation as well. I do still hit Google News from time to time and subscribe to The Economist as well. Some also comes from the BBC World Service and NPR when I'm in my car. Basically none from television; on rare occasion I may tune in Al Jazeera English but...that's pretty uncommon.

Re: Flickr co-founder announces newest startup & newest funding | VentureBeat

Michael Ridley — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 21:48:33 -0000

Interesting. Will have to follow this. I've long thought that as mobile takes off there's an opportunity for location-specific persistent user generated content. Virtual graffiti even. I'll be curious to see if this takes off.

Re: Groupon's First Earnings Call Missed the Mark, But It May Not Matter

Michael Ridley — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 08:44:39 -0000

That is definitely a way to parse the sentence, but has GroupOn had a secondary offering? They just IPOed a few months ago and the share price performance has not been all that robust. A quick Google didn't turn up any evidence of anything more than a desire for a follow-on offering.
*shrug* who knows.

Re: Groupon's First Earnings Call Missed the Mark, But It May Not Matter

Michael Ridley — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:46:47 -0000

I don't mean to be nitpicky, but I really have no idea what the following paragraph meant:

"When Groupon went public last November, it raised $700 million in its IPO. That number is now up to $1.1 billion. One year ago, that number was a mere $119 million."

Obviously Groupon did not raise $119 million a year prior to its IPO...or at least not through public equity markets. But maybe that is meant to reflect valuation? But the $700 million raised in IPO is not the same as the valuation of the company..so...I'm confused.

Re: Wiki as Document Management System

Michael Ridley — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 19:38:49 -0000

Adam,

It's working well. I don't use it as religiously as I could but for certain things like keeping track of confirmation numbers for phone payments and things like that I'm pretty good about. I also used it to get out of debt by keeping a budget and track of all my payments and that kind of thing.

I haven't been in the job market for a while but it's been very helpful in managing job searches.

And I try to keep track of technical stuff that I come across on the web in there, as well as documentation and notes on personal tech projects.

Overall it works really well. I did decide a while back that it was getting too sensitive to keep on a third party hosting site so I moved it inside the firewall at my house but that's a decision that people can make according to their needs.

Hope that's helpful!

-m

Re: The Magic Midnight Mind Meld

Michael Ridley — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 01:16:18 -0000

Hi Mark-

Thanks for the writeup. I didn't really notice any obnoxious name dropping. I read it simply as giving the reader, me, a sense for the atmosphere. Perhaps I'll finally make it out to Austin next year. We'll see.

Re: Did Someone Ruin Foursquare For Me Yesterday?

Michael Ridley — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 22:14:14 -0000

Oh yeah that part would be creepy. It wasn't clear to me if the bad audio quality was on purpose or not. I was assuming just a bad connection. If it was intentional then that's not good manners at all.

Re: Did Someone Ruin Foursquare For Me Yesterday?

Michael Ridley — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 18:52:23 -0000

It's interesting to me in scanning through the comments here that the consensus is that this was "creepy". Cold calling someone I don't know at a restaurant where they are eating is not something I'd do, and probably not something Emily Post would approve of, but what's the point of location check-in services if not to share our location?

I tend to be an early adopter of new technologies but I actually haven't started using the location check-in services because I haven't decided whether I'm comfortable with it or not. But if I did check in somewhere publicly I'd expect that people would..you know...know where I am. If I were going to use such a service I'd probably use one where I was only sharing the information with my friends.

Aside from speaking at a conference or something of that nature I can't think of when I'd really want to announce my location to the world. But I think I'm an edge case there. Interestingly I'm not overly privacy paranoid in general, but the location thing seems to be a line for me.

Re: How To Score 30 Minutes With Me

Michael Ridley — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 21:45:49 -0000

Seems like a great way to encourage engagement in your online presence. This is actually a super good idea the more I think about it. Although your blog and Twitter presence are well established, anyone looking to build an online presence could trade their professional services for online social interaction. I like this concept. Is anyone else doing this? It doesn't ring a bell.

Re: Convore

Michael Ridley — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 20:44:11 -0000

Thanks for the comment!

Definitely it works to link to a topic on Convore. I think it's a strategy question for you guys - do you want to be a destination or do you want to be an infrastructure? If I were on your board of advisers I'd say go the infrastructure route. What you have now is great but the way to grow is to get your brand embedded across the web. There's nobody out there facilitating real-time social interactions on arbitrary sites and I think it's a big opportunity.

There are some execution questions but in general it would be great to see where my social graph currently is on the web and be able to have a real-time public conversation with them. If you build a reputation engine then you've got the best parts of Stack Overflow, Disqus, and Digg all in one. That would make for a very successful company.

Re: Fred Wilson Dot VC

Michael Ridley — Sat, 16 May 2009 16:58:08 -0000

I wonder why they haven't started to support Google and/or OpenID in general yet...

Re: Posting and Pulling Comments From FriendFeed

Michael Ridley — Sat, 16 May 2009 16:51:41 -0000

Obviously I'm a bit late to the party, but as I have just recently started using FriendFeed I just came across this post. Unfortunately FriendFeed is missing from my Account Services list of available services. Has this functionality been removed? :(

-m

Re: Posting and Pulling Comments From FriendFeed

Michael Ridley — Sat, 16 May 2009 16:51:41 -0000

Re: Am I Trying Too Hard?

Michael Ridley — Fri, 01 May 2009 17:04:52 -0000

You want what? A CRM system?

-m

Re: Why Second Life Has the Wrong Architecture

Michael Ridley — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 09:55:12 -0000

Yup! Of course I meant homogeneous. Thanks for catching the typo! Fixed.

-m

Re: Wireless Over the Air Sync Between iPhone and Google Contacts

Michael Ridley — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 18:06:41 -0000

Trent-

Thanks for the comment. I'm not sure exactly what the problem you're having is but I'll drop you an email privately and we'll see if we can figure it out. Sync in a Blink is awesome once you get it working!

-m

Re: iPhone 3G Sync with Google Contacts

Michael Ridley — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 17:45:06 -0000

You can definitely do it that way. But I would suggest using Sync in a Blink instead. It rocks! And then you don't have to bother with that at all. For more information see here.

-m

Re: iPhone 3G Sync with Google Contacts

Michael Ridley — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 05:57:36 -0000

Owen-

Thanks for the comment. I installed the application and it rocks. I've written up my thoughts here.

-m

Re: iPhone 3G Sync with Google Contacts

Michael Ridley — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 14:51:48 -0000

Yeah, that would be nice! I looked into that, but there doesn't seem to be a reasonable way to do it. It could be possible to access the groups using the Google Contacts API, however there's no way to sync that into the iPhone contact list.

It would be nice if the iPhone SDK would allow access to the phone contacts, as then you could create a web service that would sync Google Contact Groups and even do it over the air. But, with the current iPhone SDK/API that's not possible.

-m

Re: Feature Request: Coverflow for Contacts on the iPhone

Michael Ridley — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:13:09 -0000

Ashim-

Thanks for the reply. Alas I suppose I'm committed to the iPhone at this point, and the lack of that feature is not a deal breaker by any means. But I do hope it's something that a future OS release supports.

-m