interpares

Most of are customers are American. Just the old habits dying hard :-)

Ah! "Corporates" is a term that's often used within European professional service firms and is a holdover from my Dutch corporate banking days. Thanks for the advice, I'll change!

What: Emphatic (http://emphatic.co) -- social media as-a-service

Why it's cool: gives marketing resources to small businesses who lack the time or expertise

This is great. Now if only I could use an app to make sure that a piece of produce labeled as organic was truly organic.

The higher prices associated with organic produce seem like they could be a big temptation for bait-and-switchers. I know there are stringent certifications, but the incentive is there.

It's starting to feel like we're permanently addicted to low interest rates.

>how can they grow up to be well-adjusted adults if they must be supervised at all times

Sad answer is they can't. What a society we're building for ourselves.

Main takeaway: humans work best but even an organization like NPR can't use them fully. Very interesting to me as a founder of a social media-as-a-service startup that solves this problem. [1]

--- [1] http://emphatic.co

My thoughts, in random order:

-As long as humans still respond to storytelling -- something we've been doing for as long as we've been around -- branding will have a role.

-Nothing is more central to a brand than having a good product that people want. No amount of storytelling can replace this.

-$30K to spend on a consultant at this point in the startups life seems silly. It might have been better to just get all your employees together and engaged in brainstorming with some kind of framework to guide you, like this one [1].

-A/B testing and branding should work together. The most important thing you can test is your offer, the basic way you convey yourself to your clients and prospects. Focus on optimizing the copy first, not the color of the buttons.[2] A great way to do this is by listening to how your existing customers describe their problem, your product and how the two relate. Use their words.

[1] http://www.cezary.co/post/79977288955/marketing-fundamentals...

[2] http://www.groovehq.com/blog/long-form-landing-page

Where's Carl Icahn when you need him?

Not a fortuneteller but my guess is they're giving up way too early. One of the few mass-market, non-tech companies that actually had a shot in wearables.

Here is a great interview with him in The Paris Review [1]. I love when he says,

"It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination."

I know the Caribbean very well and could not agree more.

[1] http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3196/the-art-of-fic...

That's a great analogy and highlights what might be a core issue for Twitter: what it wants to be (an social network with lots of two-sided interaction) vs. what its users perceive it to be (a newswire).

Do you add relevant hashtags to your jokes/deep thoughts? That would help them to be discovered by others.

>Think about what it means to the HN culture to have a subject that normally would have been flagged out of existence as overtly political suddenly be featured front and center

We've all been learning that large technology companies cannot escape politics -- whether it's Edward Snowden's revelations or Turkey's ban on Twitter. Seeing this conversation here may have less to do with a changing Hacker News culture and more to do with a realization that technology & politics are intertwined.

Thank you! I've long thought I needed something exactly like this to keep in touch with family and friends.

Step 1: Take issue with the sensational language of the original article, which is actually a collection of links to other news stories

Step 2: Take one news story from said article and offer your own made-up explanation that's even more sensational.

Ok then.

Quite right. Historical baggage and preconceptions make some things rather difficult in certain countries if you look a certain way. In your example, shaving would do the trick. In the well-documented and numerous examples of blacks being routinely harassed, arrested or killed for unfounded suspicions...?

I'm not sure what your point is, other than trolling. I'll leave you to it.