edowling

As other commenters have pointed out, 500 is way more international than YC. Over half of the companies in the current batch (of which I am one) are international. Dave McClure, Paul Singh, etc spend HUGE amounts of time travelling the world looking for the best trends and startups. In that sense, they select from a much wider field of applicants.

500 itself has no problem giving money to international companies - however, most companies flip-up or establish in the US to make it easier for other investors. It does depend on the company though. Some companies come to the US to enhance their network, not necessarily to crack into the US market, so setting up shop here legally doesn't make sense.

For visas - they provide references, etc that are needed and are very quick and responsive about it. That said, they will not "sponsor" you to come in on an H1-B or anything like that.

The Facebook API is hugely varied and wide, so I'm guessing they want to try it with simpler APIs first before going after something huge like FB or Twitter (which is complicated by OAuth).

There seems to be a lot of data centres cropping up in Sydney, with Amazon being the biggest. Has anything changed in the AU landscape which has made data centres more viable now?

It depends hugely on what you are doing. At Kickfolio, we needed to think about dev ops and infrastructure right from the start. Kickfolio launched with 13 servers in place (10 Mac Mini's, EC2 load balancers, Heroku front end).

Having been featured on a few large sites, it was enough. We spun up 3 dynos on Heroku for the front end, and in the first week of launch we had gone through a few hundred GBs on bandwidth (not including static assets hosted on Cloudfront).

Apple recently got into a lot of trouble in Australia after routing earnings through its Ireland operation.

http://m.smh.com.au/business/tax-office-takes-285m-bite-out-...

I use Parse for several high-usage apps, both iOS and web apps, and have never had a problem. I log every single connection error to analytics, and see very few problems.

Not yet possible to change app url. Definitely coming soon, along with Android.

We don't check for updates to screenshots and reviews yet - you can remove the app and add it again. We don't like the idea of updating someone else's website if they don't want us to, but being able to opt-in to auto-update is probably the way forward.

Thanks. We'd love to have the demos not require Flash but it is how Pieceable works. With the team moving to Facebook, we have a few options to explore about the future of the tech.

Thanks for pointing out ooomf. I hadn't seen them before. I like to think every new service in this space is great validation for us. I think there is enough room in this niche for several players to exist to cater to different needs.

At the moment it sorted by most recent. Would love to have them jiggle like the home screen so you could move them around! Would be a fun bit of jQuery.

Thanks for that. Will look at ways we can improve the experience.

Great to hear! Definitely coming soon - if you have signed up for a free account, you'll be the first to know when we add it.

That gave me an idea - to resolve disputes, we could simply send a link to the iTunes-listed support email and have people verify through that.

Don't want to make it mandatory, but in cases where it becomes an issue, it could work well.

Thanks!

I touched on this with this reply: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4196850

In short, we're focusing on a folio element and also the interactive app demos, allowing visitors to actually try and app before the download it.

Just wanted to touch on differences with other services. We've really focused on the folio element, allowing people and businesses to create a complete presence online. Instead of single pages, we feel developers want to create a complete online portfolio of their work outside of Apple's walled garden, with a minimal amount of effort required to maintain it.

Fair comment. Custom CSS is available for pro and unlimited plans, so you can customise how it looks. Ultimately, we'd love to have several themes and templates available.

Thanks! I'll fix it now and push it later today.

The demo's are an optional extra. You can check out a demo here: http://www.edwarddowling.com/victorian-opera

or here: http://kickfolio.com/examples/modest

Just click play twice and away you go!

(Tech is from the great guys at Pieceable).

The bar is only there if you are logged in, so users won't see it.

Thanks for the feedback! I've just spotted your error in the logs so will work to fix it today.

Preview view is a good idea - will see about how we can implement it.

We're planning on adding a dispute resolution process for apps. One of the use cases we've identified is that a business might want to feature an app as a marketing tool, while the freelancer who made it might want it as a portfolio tool. Automatic verification doesn't seem possible, so we're currently building a manual dispute resolution process.

Yep - thats the best one.