This article is very interesting. However, while reading, it sounded like a late night infomercial. There may be real value in this style of teaching Math, but as my first introduction, this Times article feels like the sponsored hooks used for products such as those baby reading flash cards and acne medication.
I hope that the Jump system is real and that it solves the problems outlined in the article.
Camera phones with video recording capabilities are almost ubiquitous. More then that, they're cheaper and solve the primary usage case better then the portable Flip cameras do. Flip cameras provided better quality portable video and now that embedded mobile technology has caught up to that quality, justifying the price to carry around another device is difficult.
Hmm... yeah, after about a half hour clicking the buttons, I don't think that I'll use your app more then once.
It really is a nice way to cull my followers. I'm trying really hard to keep my Twitter account topical and interesting. However, spending the time to go through each and every user more then once doesn't sound like a lot of fun.
Please give me the option to see a long list containing all of the people that I follow.
Showing me the users follow to followers ratio as a percentage would be useful data. If I could sort the long list based on this number, it would be even better.
I'm not sure about the current Twitter TOS, but having the option to bulk unfollow with a checkbox would make things fast and friendly.
The rate of people who would visit your new product and then immediately leave would be high. Generally, this is called bounce rate.
A few people might see your product and stick around, but I think that the brand confusion (and potential law suit) might be strong enough con's to negate these few users.
Google Trends monitors search terms, not traffic. The Google Trends graph is relative to the total search volume for the keyword Quora.
Web traffic is a very different thing. It's how many people actually visit a site. Here's an estimate of Quora's traffic:
http://www.quantcast.com/Quora.com
You can see that while they've experienced a significant peak in traffic that has resulted in a recent decrease, they're doing very well.
The argument presented in the article blames MySpace's decline on "staff, architecture, and business plan".
While I agree that these things are contributing to the decline in MySpace's influence and traffic, the underlying problem is the engagement of the community. MySpace is a Social Networking site that rely on a community of users.
People want to be at "the coolest party". They want to talk to the coolest people and engage in the coolest party games. In a separate, but similar example, musicians need to reinvent themselves in order to maintain their mass-market appeal.
MySpace's failure is that it hasn't re-invented itself to stay cool. Their recent design change was too little, too late and relied far too much on the past. The redesign was like "the old guy at the party" trying to make conversation - everyone feels a bit odd that he's there.
Facebook will suffer the same fate unless they eventually reinvent themselves or truly transition into becoming a Social Network Platform. Something new will come along that has slightly cooler tech but more importantly, draws the coolest collection of people.
Groupon and their clones only need to pull these types of shenanigans to scale.
If they refine the model to compete largely with themselves, in the end, the company will win.
In order to do this, Groupon (or likely a smart clone) needs to break itself apart into niches and dominate the smaller markets that they are engaged in.
I like the idea. The execution was well done. Clean, simple, easy. Your initial landing / signup page needs some work. You did a good job of instilling trust, but I didn't know what your service did. This will have a negative impact on signups.
1)
Make a video introduction. Do some grass roots stuff like sponsoring a rose exchange at a few local schools (might be a bit late for Valentines day now). Write a press release today - this is newsworthy with the proximity to Valentines day and newsies are struggling for feelgood stories. Get some testimonials. Find out when someone gets married after using your service and do something huge. Take out some Facebook ads. Do some in-game sponsorships with facebook games.
2)
Users. Your product is built around users. Your product balances on trust and if you monetize too early, you won't stand a chance of being trusted. Switch when marketing is no longer a problem and something you do to continue to push the product.
3)
In order: Trust, scaling technology, competing services from people with money, the "one off" usage case.
4)
The design is well done. You start building trust on the first page. Inside of the app, your product is easy to understand. It's fun. I didn't like the error message above. The number of modal popups got annoying fast. There was nothing to do "after" I sent my note.
"If you remove the video revenue sharing scheme from Mahalo 4, you’re left with a ballooning group of in-house staff members that are creating content. Mahalo version 1 started exactly the same way. Large groups of people were hired in-house to generate written articles and cull popular hyperlinks. Shortly thereafter, Mahalo 2 relied on offshore outsourcing and then inexpensive remote American labor to mill content.
When thought of in this light with a view of Mahalo’s history, it starts to become clear that Mahalo 4 is an iteration that has already occurred. Mahalo is iterating over itself. Partly due to the fact that they have enough money to do so, partly because the revolving door of staff members hasn’t experienced previous iterations and partly because online video is simply making money for content companies at the moment."
I haven't had this problem and I've owned Blackberry's since they were blue.
Charged thousands of times - MicroUSB is an easy connection.
That being said, I really like the magnetization of the macbook power connector and would happily trade microUSB for something with a magnet rather than a push.
There is a good amount of demand for software jobs in T.O. Between the GTA, Waterloo and Ottawa, we're seeing a good surge of tech in Ontario centered around Toronto. It's got to the point in the past few months where finding available, good folks is touch-and-go.
However, I wouldn't limit your scope to development jobs. This sort of "chat roulette" for pre-screening is a very powerful idea.
Personally, I'd be focusing on the restaurant industry if this was my baby. They spend countless dollars on HR and if there was a way for an assistant manager to sit in an office to pre-screen for real interviews... it would be on fire. Restaurant chain owners are also very willing to spend money on technology like this. I don't think that you'd have a hard time finding low rate, non-intrusive funding from a small group of them to get the entire whitelabel thing off the ground in a hurry.
