heliodorj

The main motivator and source of satisfaction for software developers is the human aspect, not the technology itself. Is your product making a difference in someone's life? Who are your customers? The difference between these two approaches explains why college grad developers go into finance thinking they'll work on 'neat' problems and a few years later hate they jobs because at the end, their contribution to society is simply a number that indicates profit and not a single person's life has been significantly affected. In the end, we all just want to be appreciated. Like edw519 pointed out, go solve people's problems. Everything else will fall into place.

NYC (SoHo)

Xtify, Inc.

Website: http://www.xtify.com

Cross-OS regular push and location-triggered push notifications and campaign management platform. We're looking for Java software developers or interns.

More details: http://www.startuply.com/Jobs/Software_Developer_System_Engi...

jobs AT xtify DOT com

NYC (SoHo)

Xtify, Inc.

Website: http://www.xtify.com

Cross-OS regular push and location-triggered push notifications and campaign management platform.

We're looking for Java software developers and/or interns.

More details: http://www.startuply.com/Jobs/System_Software_Engineer_1165_...

jobs AT xtify DOT com

The most important factor to success is hard work. It applies to starting companies as much as it applies to getting into college. You can apply to Stanford and MIT with perfect grades and a perfect SAT score, and they'll still reject you! There are more people with perfect SAT scores than there are admission spots. To trim down the pool, the college has to look outside of schoolwork. That's where the extracurriculars come into play. In most cases, whether you have something to write on that list is determined by how hard-working you are, not by how smart you are. And once they see that you spent your time doing something great outside of school, the admissions people will forgive your less-than-stellar grades. An added benefit to the school that comes from choosing hard-working people over bookworms is that once the students graduate, the hard working people will go on to build great businesses and ... wait for it ... donate to the school!

Spend a few minutes putting yourself in the admission officer's spot and think about how you'd choose the next round of students.

Personally, I recommend focusing on your perseverance first, social smarts second, and book smarts third.

PS: I guarantee you that girl on the news getting fished out of the Indian Ocean right now will be attending Stanford when she turns 18.

done

I got my first job after college through a posting on efinancialcareers.com that turned out to be a recruiter. I got my current (and second job) at a startup through a posting on LinkedIn.

I recommend going to meetups through meetup.com and checking the message boards and email lists for those meetups. Plenty of quality leads through Meetup.

mint.com urbanairship.com

They have clean, efficient design.

i didn't have the patience to wait; downloaded it manually. I wonder if your chances of getting the OTA are improved if you turn on wifi.

froyo looks great!

they made good use of the extra space at the bottom of the screens by adding the phone and browser icons next to the drawer button. it frees up two spots on your main screen!

chrome-to-phone is unbelievably slow even with a nexus one and a great internet connection. it takes literally one minute for the map to show on the phone!

I'm not a fan of learning from technical books, but that's just my style. I like figuring out exactly what I need to do and Googling it one piece at a time, side-by-side with having the docs as reference.

You could start by reading the dev guide from the top: http://developer.android.com/guide/basics/what-is-android.ht....

You should read the Activity lifecycle some ten times at least: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity..... To avoid countless headaches at the beginning, clamp your app to only portrait or only landscape mode if it makes sense.

Also read over the Intents doc a number of times as they are another crucial part of the system: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/intents/intents-fi....

The Android SDK contains various samples that will get your going quickly.

Having a G1 to test with is a good idea. They are painfully slow, so if you get the G1 right, everybody else will be happy. Quick stat: devices by platform: http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-ve....

Designing the interface layout is pretty painless. The framework is well thought out.

how many installs do you have to be able to pull $2000 a month in ad revenue?

which ad network are you using?

A few more observations: I kept detailed stats on the download patterns for my paid spy camera app. The rate of downloads is constant between 8am and 2am. I did not see any 'rush hour' effect. It's also constant but slower at night, between 2am and 8am. Given that sales come from all over the world, that would tend to flatten any bumps in the graph. I'm not sure what time zone Google is using for these stats.

More interestingly, weekends see up to two times the traffic, so I release my updates Saturday morning so they can have the most possible traffic through the 'just in' list.

I have a few apps for Android. First few days you always get a lot of downloads (depending on what your app does). That was one year ago. I released another app a few weeks ago and the market has changed. Now, it's much more like the iPhone market where you fall into oblivion if you don't have some marketing strategy. Take a look at the 'just in' for all apps. It's filled with batches of 'hot babes' apps and skins apps so you fall down the list very quickly before anyone even has a chance to notice you.

I released a 'Sca', a spy camera app, a year ago and it's doing pretty well. Made $6,000 in 14 months. With the release of all the new phones this year, revenue has picked up to where I consistently get $30 per day after Google takes its cut. I tried $2.95, $9.95, and I settled on the current $5.95. Revenue is constant across all price points. There's no way to scoop up all price points, though, which is annoying. Anyone have any ideas for that?

Last I checked, you get bumped back to the top of the 'just in' list if you submit an update and it's been a few weeks since your last update, so it's a good way to spike up traffic.

I released a niche app for astronomy, Iridium Flares, that sells for $1.45 and makes one sale every few days.

I made sure my two paid apps have a free version. I have a few free apps that advertise my paid apps.

If you compare the top paid apps with the top paid games, it looks like there are more successful games than successful apps. People will pay for entertainment, but games usually require many more hours of work.

We're looking for a software developer at Xtify, Inc. The position is in New York City. Website: htttp://www.xtify.com More details: http://www.startuply.com/Jobs/System_Software_Engineer_1165_...

this is NOT worthy of the front page. this has happened before and it will happen again. nothing interesting to see here. moving on...

Good point. The interviewees had an understanding that this content will be freely available and now that's changed. Then again, maybe he told them the content will be free but there is a possibility that one day it will not be free anymore. Either way, the better approach would have been to leave existing interviews freely available and start applying the pricing structure from the present onward.

On another note, I'm glad to see Andrew turning Mixergy into a real business that can be self-sustaining. As entrepreneurs, we should all be able to agree with that.