Is the Apple/Braun comparison often made? I had no idea. And it's quite striking. I had certainly thought, begrudgingly, that Apple were the sole inspiration behind their work - how naive of me.
I'm either in need of a good designer for my startup, or in need of a little more inspiration like this to draw on simple first principles to get me through.
My £0.02: having worked in a few teams in the UK, France and Sweden over the course of the last decade, I'd say this is a cultural effect that can be won over locally by a certain company or social group, but would require a coordinated and concerted effort on behalf of men and women to stamp this kind of stealth-bullying out of social acceptability. I fully support the men who will help call out this kind of behaviour, and am also fully satisfied that this issue has front-paged HN for as long as it has.
From my own experience of work, cultural norms and popular issues, although only the smallest of samples, I'd say that (younger) Swedes have a much better handle on the balance of respect and gender roles than their peers in FR or the UK (England, specifically). Even the most subtle attempt at sexism is picked up on to a degree where it is unacceptable to at least publicly chance a remark of this kind in the workplace or in the media. Why this is I can only guess.
Prevalent (older) attitudes may account for the continued pay discrepancy between men and women and all that this reflects, but I'd say the Swedes have a very much less subtly-offensive 'working atmosphere' than those I've been part of elsewhere.
Also troubling is the question of 'women/babies/employment', but that's a whole other can of worms; just as a parting shot - men also leave poorly managed jobs when something better in life is offered to them, at least you get up to 9 months warning with women.
More likely than that, for the average user, is the fact that every contribution to a free, search engine indexed content site is 'unpaid work' and your content becomes the product that brings in new visitors and interest who search for the startup/web terms we all use.
Of course if you support a site, you'll be happy to help promote it. But what happens when you change your opinion on a matter that becomes important/illegal in the public eye, without the option to remove your now-offending content? Or if you plain just want to stop supporting a site? If people are guarded when making comments because of this risk, is the free service improved or worsened?
Email, picture or opinion, make no bones about it - our content is always product in some way. Content lock-in should rarely be tolerated. I'm surprised it is here, TBH. I happen to greatly appreciate this community, but I in no way agreed to give ownership of my thoughts in return for the right to interact. I'd rather pay with a content export/removal option than hand over the sum total of what little wisdom I have.
Aggregating moods would be useful on a site such as Amazon, where, depending on the technical level of the product, reviews range from sharp and intelligent to blunt and kneejerk. Having access to sentiment analysis would help consumers to quickly see whether or not the product/service being 'mood reviewed' solves their problem or not.
Written reviews are full of conjecture and anecdotes, 5-star gradings may as well not exist for 2-4 stars, so mood is another great metric to add to these tools.
Just coming back to this thread because I grabbed my Grit Scale score (4/5) and watched the TED talk, which turned out to be one of the first to hold my interest in a long while - I've seen most of the 'TED classics'.
I seem to be in the upper quartile that is statistically likely to have what it takes to stick it out, but it feels far from certain. Perhaps it provided a slight boost in self-confidence.
In any case, thanks for bringing this up. It ties in nicely with the 'Drunkard's Walk' (cf. Mlodinov) randomness/perseverance traits that seem to increase the probability of achieving one's goals.
I'm in a similar boat to toumhi and the OP: semi-technical (basic PHP + CMS + outsourcing) with slight feature-creep and sales-sweats issues.
Besides that, I'm a WooThemes customer[1] and have been amazed at how well their model has worked. I often mention this to my HTML-template/Dreamweaver 'website designer' friends, but I think WooThemes have nothing to worry about - they're too far ahead of the curve with too polished a product to need to worry about competition. The 37signals bootstrapped article is a great overview of their progress.
So I try to emulate, only my users are not as web-savvy as WooThemes' users. It seems that more traditional sales channels must be used to overcome the chicken/egg userbase issues. But, I have time on my side, so I will persevere and hopefully manage to generate initial revenues one o' these days.
[1] Highly recommended as a quick way to get family + friends set up with a very presentable web presence.
I like your approach to repetition, the design looks engaging and the fixed scope of the app makes it seem more accessible (learn 230 words for the price).
Is this your first app? How long did it take to develop? What's your coding experience? (I checked your about page first, but if you have time I'd be interested in this, too)
Heads up: a few days back I sent you a before/after doc which may have been filtered out by your inbox. I can resend elsewhere if you want - I used the address at the bottom of the Terms page.
Agreed. According to my secret source (wiki-p) UK has 8x more people per mile than the US. Germany has 7x more. Total population of these two countries combined: 143,799,308. Get translated into French and Spanish and watch users roll in. Potentially.
EDIT: The copy on the site needs work.
. The expressions used (meet to your mood, break barriers, you in the driving seat) are either non-standard and odd, slowing down the reader, or cliche, losing meaning and impact.
. The punctuation is mixed - periods slow down readers, make them stop reading at times.
. You obviously get that you need to keep it short, but IMO you've picked the wrong words in a bunch of places.
And to couple these critical thoughts with the helpful - I'll offer to sit down with another copywriting colleague and go over the main points we see at no charge. This could increase conversion, but no guarantees.
. I learned by living in the other countries. Semi-immersion in your home country is possible (movies, books, tutor, conversation exchange) but harder.
. What's your goal? Business, pleasure? Focus on finding the vocab you need to know and figuring out what level you'll need to reach.
. Fluency in itself isn't a true state - ability to communicate clearly is the best gauge, most of the time this means spoken communication. This can range from simple formalities to industry-specific negotiations.
. Traditional reading and writing exercises are only useful to learn the language framework, i.e. its basic grammar. Try to get these out of the way quickly, and use them more as a reference.
. Modern novel reading is good for vocab and cementing grammar knowledge, as well as being amusing.
. IMO the key to the most important communication channel is learning to speak in a way that is received loud and clear by a native. This means learning the sounds of the language, phonetics, and seeing where they differ to your own sound-bank. A recent blog experiment I read about [http://www.xamuel.com/french-in-30-days-day-30/] made some interesting discoveries - his intensive daily learning only resulted in an understanding of many single words. His actual communication skills weren't functional. I'd say that they could have been, had he focused on the right things. I left my further thoughts on the linked page.
. You can do all you need to for effective learning every day, just by living in the foreign country, with no need for reminders - but this is of course rarely practical.
. A further key point: learn to hear the fixed expressions that are used in common speech. With enough of these you can sail through most situations and even learn to ask for help when stuck on something.
. Do not try to word-for-word translate what you want to say in the target language, find the fixed expression for what you want to say. This takes time, and a fair bit of practice, but what doesn't?
. Flashcards give the false impression of learning to communicate. I would avoid these unless they contained fixed, common expressions. Even if they offer spaced repetition, which seems to work well, they encourage the wrong kind of learning. Yes, adults can take shortcuts to learn faster than children/babies, but they still must learn the 'codes' of communication in the culture and language.
I'm working on a system that incorporates these points in an audio format, but it's yet to be tested and I've no idea if even that could work as intended. So far, no silver bullet.
Agreed. While there is some good, open tech out there (OmegaT, MemoQ - for open formats, at least), there seems to be lots of room for improvement. Email should be in your mailbox now.
Definitely not avoiding them in my freelance work - they help to keep me on schedule.
The 'no deadlines' line at the end refers to the translation community/tools startup I launched recently - that's a new kind of remote work for me and will need adjustment from the world of deadlines.
Once I start working on a site, I can be absorbed for hours and deadlines become superfluous as I could do in a day what would take a secure-salaried staffer a week. But managing freelance projects and startup promo is a challenge.
Freelance translator here. 4 years working at home in a few countries for companies around Europe.
. Perhaps it is largely personality based, but I've always enjoyed it. Deadlines keep me on track and side-projects fill the spare working capacity. So work does get done and, as others have said, more besides.
. Productivity is not a problem, especially when you learn to down-tools when you feel you need to, rather than waiting for your set break times. You'll probably find yourself working more efficiently.
. Socially you do need to adjust, and make the most of opportunities to meet other freelancers/people where possible. I initially missed the office banter, but less so with time. As with most things, if you accept it will be different and don't resist that, it should be easier.
. As mentioned elsewhere, those around you at home will indeed sometimes forget that your body and mind are often separated (i.e. body at home, mind at work). Prepare to have many thought-bubbles burst, unless you have a good home-office solution. A semi-hack for this problem is to simply take more notes.
. Energy wise, if you care, I've seen studies for and against the savings made by remote working. Heating 25 whole houses in winter compared to a single office, for instance, doesn't guarantee an energy reduction. But then there would be 25 times less CO2 emissions. Swings and roundabouts. Never really been a key issue for me, but perhaps worth consideration.
I'm now moving into a more involved 'startup-style' phase this year, with no deadlines to keep me on track and no team around me I'm going to have to adapt to a new style of remote working. Tips welcome!
Is the Apple/Braun comparison often made? I had no idea. And it's quite striking. I had certainly thought, begrudgingly, that Apple were the sole inspiration behind their work - how naive of me.
I'm either in need of a good designer for my startup, or in need of a little more inspiration like this to draw on simple first principles to get me through.