We call it a "consumer exploration tool" - a quick way to tap into the wealth of information in social networks to get a better picture of what people are like. The target market is marketing professionals - brand managers in consumer products companies and such.
We tried to build a tool that's easy to understand and use - our hope is that you go to the website, and after just a few clicks you get it. We'd appreciate any feedback from the HN community on that point.
Oh, and it's absolutely free for now, so if you can use it to get some insights into the market for your own startups, that'd be awesome! - Let us know if you found anything interesting.
Personally, I never ever give my email credentials out. I totally agree with Jeff Atwood on that.
However, while you're at it, why not ask people for their facebooks/myspace credentials? You'll find many more "friends" there than in my email contacts, plus facebook is far less sensitive privacy-wise. If someone got hold of my credentials, the maximum they could do is deface my profile and send some stupid messages to friends. If they got hold of my gmail account, they could access almost every other account that I have through "forgot your password" links...
Not that I'd actually give you my facebook credentials though :)
What people seem to be forgetting is that the US ad market is the biggest by far, and thus the opportunity to make money isn't in the global market.
Ask Peanut Labs (formerly xuqa.com) how much money they made as the biggest social network in Turkey, and why they changed their business model completely...
Maybe part of the explanation is that it's very light-weight - the car in the photo looks tiny, it says it's made of fiberglass, and my guess is that the engine must also weigh much less than a comparable internal combustion engine (you don't need as much metal to contain the combustion...).
Of course, that probably comes with a heavy price to passenger safety. Fiberglass won't give you any protection in a crush. That may be the reason why Tata is involved and not some European manufacturer. The Euro market has some serious safety regulations.
Fiberglass won't give you any protection in a crush
Damn, just put the tank of air in front. Any wreck will cause a mighty explosion balancing out the various vectors involved. I haven't done (and couldn't do, really) the math, but this seems perfectly reasonable.
Which makes the phenomenon even stranger - nobody here seems to be able to come up with a good explanation of scribd's success, yet somehow they do succeed.
1) You want people to eventually download and re-edit, but in the mean time (or for some people) you just want to allow them to see it in their browser.
2) The adobe pdf plug-in is less than spectacular, even if you do go to all the trouble to export your office docs to pdf.
3) I'm not sure, but the pdf conversion from the 3 Office document formats must be fairly lossy. Then again, I don't know that the office document conversion to ipaper is any better.
4) The user might not have Office or a suitable clone handy.
Also, this is only slightly related to what you're saying, but you could imagine Scribd supporting more obscure document formats which are not readily converted to pdf's.
So let's see, students submitting papers and receiving scores. Sounds familiar?
It should strike everybody as an idiotic way to evaluate potential business success. If anything good's gonna come out of it it's that we may come to questions that same process that's used to evaluate academic prowess.
Very nice and useful idea. I may actually come back and use it (which happens very rarely with new apps nowadays).
Problems:
Way too slow. Spend more on hosting :(
The "meat" is in the flickr, youtube etc. search results below. The tag cloud should appear blow it IMO. Also, limit its size, and let users enlarge, sort it etc.
How about letting me filter results to just some of the sites you're crawling?
Judging by the fact that until they came under open and public criticism they had 3 mysql servers running and a very small development team the only thing twitter was doing wrong was not spending their money.
Who develops desktop applications anymore anyway (except maybe game developers).
If in the past you used to build apps for windows because that's where the installed base was, nowadays you build web apps.
I learned Delphi and VB back then when I wanted to hack together simple utilities with lots of UI. In the last couple of years I learned Django and Rails for the same purpose.
That and more: Apple's platform probably won't be adopted by anyone else, so even though the user base is attractive right now, down the road it would look diminutive compared with the user base for an open platform that could gain support of multiple vendors.
7-8 years ago I used to develop mobile apps in both Palm OS (closed platform, just one vendor) and J2ME (open, widely adopted). Palm had the more attractive installed base back then, but as their fortunes changed, that investment is now worthless. Compare with J2ME, which kept growing thanks to support by most vendors.
The most significant difference IMO is the distribution model. An iPhone user will have one place to look for new apps: the Apps Store. Whatever app s/he is looking for, it will be there or not be at all. That's a huge advantage for a software developer. An advantage the Palm didn't have.
Also: sure, in 8 years the iPhone may be dead and Apple bankrupt, but (1) do you really think so? and (2) do you really need to plan that far in advance?
Palm actually did have the distribution in place - through palmgear (interestingly, it still exist) which was THE go-to place for Palm apps.
Regarding advantages to the software developer, having just one place where you distribute, and that place being controlled by Apple, isn't a good thing at all. It may mean that it's easier to start selling, but also that you have no negotiating power if and when your app becomes a success.
The stupid music companies managed to hand over the keys to their distribution to Steve Jobs, but they're not exactly happy about the fact that he now has so much control over their fate. Apple's great at creating consumer electronics that actually appeals to people, but they don't seem to be a very nice company to deal with as a business.
We tried to build a tool that's easy to understand and use - our hope is that you go to the website, and after just a few clicks you get it. We'd appreciate any feedback from the HN community on that point.
Oh, and it's absolutely free for now, so if you can use it to get some insights into the market for your own startups, that'd be awesome! - Let us know if you found anything interesting.