zsupalla

yes it's the IoT platform. but I got a lot of cold emails from sales guys confusing me with the founder of the face cream company. sigh

Hi, Zach here (the author and Particle founder). I couldn't find much written on the post-M&A experience of a founder; we're all constrained by NDAs so generally not much we can say. I figured it was worth writing something that might resonate with others who have gone through the experience, and I'm happy to answer questions here so long as they're not about deal specifics or other stuff that would be covered by NDAs.

This is a perfect example of confusing correlation with causation.

Exactly! I'm always disappointed by reporting on scientific research; reading the research helps, but how many people are going to do that? A lot of people will probably change their diets based on this research, assuming that eating meat is as bad as smoking.

siavosh, this looks great - I think this would be super useful for a team (especially with slack integration), are you or will you be looking for beta testers for a corporate solution?

Awesome, this is a great resource; thanks for publishing it. How did you find the Crazyflie's autopilot? I've got to order one to test it out.

The cloud back-end is open source so you can do that:

http://www.github.com/spark/spark-server

Yep that's right! It's an Arduino-like microcontroller development board, but with built-in Wi-Fi and an open source cloud back-end

Less marketing jargon, more actual content. What I find particularly fascinating is that bitcoin is mentioned a bunch of times passively without anyone ever saying "this is a bitcoin bank". It's like your supposed to just intuit the function of the site from a bunch of vague adjectives and adverbs like "everywhere" and "instant".

Actually it's not down, just needs a www (the link on the site points to https://spark.io, which doesn't resolve, but https://www.spark.io works fine)

Don't forget Autodesk's open source 3D printer platform Spark! So you can print the enclosure for your Spark devices with Spark too.

Zach here, also from Spark. We're definitely working on next-gen hardware now, haven't selected a final chipset yet.

Our hosted cloud is somewhat different from the open source version, and the differences will grow over time. As an open source company, the question always comes to "how do we make money?" Our open source thesis is to give away basic technology and sell advanced technology. Right now the biggest differences between our hosted cloud and the open source version is scalability; our system is designed to scale horizontally whereas the open source one is a single instance (although it could, of course, be modified). We are still deciding which features that are still in development will be open sourced, and which won't. We've learned from other for-profit open source companies (like MongoDB, for instance), that even after being on the market for years they're still trying to figure out which features to give away and which to sell.

Performance issues are resolved, now the site only plays the videos that are on-screen.

The differences between a forum system designed to be implemented on someone's webpage and a big platform for "social interaction" are significant. Discourse could be used for a narrow purpose (i.e. creating a developer forum or a customer service portal), Branch can't. Just because their external appearance shows similarities doesn't mean they are the same product, or even in the same market.