dforeman

As someone with consumer electronics experience and a 94-year-old grandmother, I actually think #4 is brilliant. She will never understand how to maneuver to email on her iPad, and the abstract 'reply' and 'send' symbols we all take for granted are hieroglyphics to her. There's definitely a market for an always on, single screen email device a toddler could use. Perhaps the stylus isn't dead yet!

I don't know the first thing about marketing to senior citizens and their caretakers, but I know I spent hours searching for "senior citizen email app.."

I think it's interesting how the Yelp model might work for business services, but breaks down for service providers. We're not doing lawyers, but I think lawyers are a good example of why the Yelp UX model is wrong for the "relationship" business services market.

- First, reviews are the wrong content. You won't get them, first of all, because customers of businesses who see 10-20 engagements per year will never leave lukewarm or negative reviews. Secondly, even if you only allow recommendations (like LinkedIn) and not open reviews, it's still the wrong content to describe a complex business service. The managing partner of WSGR has tons of recommendations on LI. Does one of them come close to capturing how he thinks about business or his potential value? No.

- Second, stars or any other standard comparison ranking system is the wrong discovery method. Stars help people discover who is good, but not who is good at what.

- Third, participation. LawPivot, who was able to raise several million dollars, lets lawyers generate business through a private Q&A site. Well, the most successful lawyers have no reason to use this service- they are already oversubscribed. Any service discovery/review tool dependent on active participation by the service providers leaves out the best players. This is less of a concern for the B2Brevs of the world, but describes why Guru.com and Elance became talent slums.

I probably shouldn't say anything, but we're launching (and applied YCW12) with something designed to fill a number 2 role for an often overlooked class of business services.

I think that question was included ironically- I.e., he's only been asked a handful of times. His sample size reflects the dearth of "learning how to program to build a viable webapp" stories and comments here. I don't even know if noob questions are accepted here- I've never seen one. I don't post them because I feel I should be finding answers on google rather than degrading the quality of this board.

The decision to learn enough programming to build what I want stemmed from the realization that understanding how my webapp will work at the technical level significantly refines my vision for the product- bringing it much closer to reality. Whereas before I was talking to recommendation engine people because I wanted "recommendation features like Hunch," now I'm working in PHP/SQL and getting exactly what I want. My current strategy is to talk to the CTO's and creators of similar webapps to understand their technology and language choices (e.g. GAE or MAMP, SQL or Solr), go as far as I can on my own, and then work with a tutor for an hour or two to get momentum and correct my architecture mistakes.

The treasury's argument is fatally flawed.

"The baseline in which discretionary spending grows with nominal GDP is substantially higher because CBO assumes that nominal GDP grows by just under 5 percent a year on average, while inflation is around 2.5 percent a year on average."

GDP is not growing by nearly 5 percent a year and should not be projected to grow at that pace. Real GDP growth is significantly smaller. Additionally, with our monetary policy (QE 1,2,..,x), inflation is higher than 2.5%. The treasury's math is fictitious.

I'm not proud to say I know someone who has made tens of millions of dollars providing loans to contractors so they can drive a rig. The drivers rarely know what truly terrible terms they're getting, yet they're stuck since they lose their livelihood if they lose their truck. The guy jokingly calls his company 'Tombstone Financial.'

My guess how a fail like this happens- Executive team has an investor relations (PR) firm on retainer. IR firm sees "Open Letter" as a PR crisis, pulls page from crisis management playbook and opts to respond immediately. Responds in investor-speak. Flops with audience who elevated the letter to a PR crisis in the first place- the internet/consumer. Social media fail.

I just don't think Skype is a 8.5 billion dollar feature, especially any MS implementation. It's not like Skype was a closed platform- they have an API and their policy is to let the market decide which UX will win. I'm sure MS could have built all the features they want without buying the company. Apple already used the video conference marketing gimmick anyway and it's not exciting anymore. Who uses Facetime? Video conferencing solutions are good enough.