Archive for September, 2010

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My daily readings 09/30/2010

September 30, 2010

  • Xmarks Dies: Freemium’s Just Another Word for Nothin’ Left To Lose | BNET <span class="“> – Annotated

    tags: Xmarks

      • distribute product or services to customers
      • attract customers in the first place
      • support customers when something goes wrong
      • manage the process of business
      • generate enough revenue to cover costs, salaries, and profit for owners

    • Unfortunately for them, and too many other entrepreneurs, particularly in high tech, viable business models are often far more difficult to develop than the software they are to support.

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My daily readings 09/29/2010

September 29, 2010

  • How We Increased Conversion Actions 218% And Increased Sales 0% « A Separate Piece

    tags: Website optimization

  • Social Bookmarking Start-Up Xmarks Closes Down With Classy Goodbye | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD <span class="“> – Annotated

    tags: Xmarks

    • The San Francisco-based company–which had been called Foxmarks initially–had been seed-funded by Kapor, the well-known tech entrepreneur, and also got an additional investment from First Round Capital.

    • Xmarks garnered another $5 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures in 2008,

      That year, it also hired Silicon Valley entrepreneur James Joaquin as CEO, whose job it was to carve out a business with Xmarks’ assets, including using its mass of data.

      Xmarks had certainly been growing its user base and bookmarked Web addresses strongly, via a browser widget that recorded bookmarking information.

  • A product is not just about features. It’s about experience. – Sachin’s Posterous <span class="“> – Annotated

    tags: Product

    • I responded: we have the best team of engineers and designers imaginable. We will win because we are small and awesome. Microsoft throws 10x as many people at music players, phones, and computers. And they aren’t winning there. If team size always won, there wouldn’t be startups.

    • I asked this person directly: do you have an iPhone? Nope. Do you use a Mac or a PC? PC. There you go. You don’t get it. Until you use an iPhone, a Mac, drive a BMW or Audi, you don’t even realize how great the experience can be or how much it can drive the success of a product.

    • And they don’t measure products by what they do, but by how well they do them. You won’t find a matrix where Apple compares their product to a competitor by feature. They measure products by the experience.

  • Hacker News | Do What Matters to You

    tags: Startup

  • Hacker News | Going Freemium: One Year Later <span class="“> – Annotated

    tags: freemium

    • I use MailChimp for free right now but I can’t wait until my list is big enough for me to start having to pay them. It’ll mean that I have enough subscribers to actually monetize the list. At that point, I’ll be more than happy to give them my credit card.

      This is in contrast with Evernote and Dropbox, both of which I use for free but neither of which I plan of paying for in the future. They work well enough for my needs, and if I grow out of them, I’ll probably just either cut back on my use or try to find another solution. Maybe that makes me a freeloader or cheapskate, but I imagine I’m not alone.

      So, at least in my case, Freemium works best for products that either directly or indirectly contribute to making money.

    • I’d argue that freemium works best when the “premium” part has value for the user. But, making money (i.e. directly contributing to revenue/profit) is just one way to have value. Saving time is another.

      So, I pay DropBox not because it helps me make money, but because it’s worth the savings in time and frustration trying to come up with an alternative.

      Many of the most popular freemium products have a price point that is low enough that large numbers of people can easily justify the price, if they actually use the product.

  • clp.ly | Go Beyond the Link.

    tags: Competitor

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My daily readings 09/28/2010

September 28, 2010

  • Tweetmeme Founder’s Datasift Helps You Find A Needle In A Tweetstack <span class="“> – Annotated

    tags: Datashift datamining twitter

    • “Datasift is not meant to be an end product,” says Halstead. And his rebranded Tweetmeme targeting developers who need precise streams of data,with a freemium ‘pay for the volume you consume’ or have ads show up in your stream model.

      With $1.5 million in funding and the hard lessons learned from the experience of Tweetmeme, it seems like Halstead this time at least has a shot at making all sorts of realtime information a little easier to sift through.

    • CS: Twitter hasn’t even done search 1.0 yet. It’s not about search it’s about ]push. this world is increasingly driven by analytics. It might not be a huge comany on it’s own.

      JL: If you can open this up for people start innovating than I’m all for it.

      DS: Tweetmeme processes 1 billion requests. We want to help the people who can make the next Flipboard.

  • Miso Music Turns Your iPad Into A Guitar Teacher, Wins People’s Choice At TC Disrupt <span class="“> – Annotated

    tags: Music iPad

    • The real meat of the application lies in its learning mode. First, you choose a song; Miso has licensed music from Sony/ATV, which gives them rights to include music from The Beatles, Justin Bieber, Carrie Underwood, and more. After picking a song, like the Beatles’ Black Bird, you’ll see a series of colorful dots scroll across the screen representing each note you’re supposed to play (this is called tablature, or tab for short, which is a simplified form of music notation often used for guitars). Tabs aren’t anything new. But Miso will actually listen to what you’re playing.

    • Miso Music isn’t available just yet — you’ll have to wait two weeks or so until you’ll be able to buy it in the App Store — but once it goes live it will be free for a basic version. A pro application will be available for $2.99, which includes more virtual instruments. And songs will be sold as in-app purchases ranging from 99 cents to $2.99, with packs of songs available at a discount.

  • Opzi: A Quora For The Enterprise <span class="“> – Annotated

    tags: knowledge Sharing

    • KR: WHat’s the value proposition for the first user at the company?

      EP: It can work for only two users as a communication platform or a reference point. We want to build something that feels like a consumer software but is for the enterprise.

    • EP: We’re not trying to compete with Quora; were just trying to add a centralized knowledge base within businesses. We are looking at organic growth but open to whatever makes sense.

      SV: Our approach is to build a layer on top of a company. This a light and easy way to add that layer. And it can integrate with other silos of information.

    • EP: Yammer seems to be trying to build a social network for the enterprise. This is more of a knowledge base.

      SV: This would compete for time spent on email, Yammer and other communication platforms.

      LZ: How do you get the word out?

      EP: Here, today.

      CC: I think the biggest issue is that some companies want to have their classified information on servers.

  • Hacker News | End of the Road for Xmarks <span class="“> – Annotated

    tags: Xmarks Case

    • with the emergence of competent sync features built in to Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, it’s hard to see users paying for a service that they can now get for free

      After taking so many knocks, it’s easy to be disheartened. But why not at least give this a go? It doesn’t involve a large engineering investment – just charge for what you already offer! When the alternative is shutting down, where existing users need to move on anyway, you might as well. Those users might appreciate the value of what they have now that it is about to disappear…

    • Maybe it’s because it creates an obligation for them to continue the service for a reasonable amount of time.

    • Man, I’m gutted. I use Xmarks every day to sync from my work & windows machines (Firefox) to my MacBook (Safari) and thus to my iPhone / iPad. I’d have happily paid $5 a month or so to use Xmarks and I imagine I’m not alone.

      It’s really unfortunate that they won’t even try the freemium, or (shock!) even the outright pay to play approach. I’m sure with two million users there would have been enough paying customers to create a profitable business.

    • Chrome killed my use of Xmarks. With a consistent, cross-platform browser that has syncing out-of-the-box I no longer need Xmarks. I mainly use other browsers for testing now.

    • They are failing because they can’t even ask people to pay for their service. They skipped that and went directly to we are shutting down our servers in 90 days.

      DHH needs to give them some scream therapy about business models. The one he does about asking your customers to pay for your service.

    • From “build something people want” to “built something people want” to “can’t monetize 2 million users.”

      Any other examples of this?

    • sucks to have this ending after all your efforts. Xmarks was a great product. Hats off to you and your team and good luck in your next adventure.

  • Xmarks Blog » End of the Road for Xmarks <span class="“> – Annotated

    • As I write this, it’s a typical Sunday here at Xmarks. The synchronization service continues operating quietly, the servers chugging along syncing browser data for our 2 million users across their 5 million desktops. The day isn’t over yet, but we’re on track to add just under 3000 new accounts today.

    • In early 2006, I built a prototype bookmark synchronizer for Mitch Kapor. We were starting to work together again for the first time in many years, and he wanted me to help him: he was chairman of the Mozilla Foundation but stuck using Safari because there was no way on Firefox for him to keep his bookmarks synchronized across the 5 computers that he regularly used.

    • Curious to see whether it would prove as useful to others as it had to him, Mitch asked a colleague with a widely read blog to write about it, which he did. Hundreds of users showed up to kick the tires and many of them stayed. Some of them mentioned it to their friends. Others blogged about it. Pretty soon there were 5000 users. Of a prototype.

    • a crowdsourced Wikipedia of Websites, or maybe even a spam-free search engine based entirely on what users had bookmarked. We put together a privacy policy that acknowledged the kinds of things we were hoping to do, and set off to firm up operations and infrastructure with the anticipation of growing to hundreds of thousands of users. In October of 2006, we incorporated as Foxmarks, Inc. We had made the transition from pet project to startup.

    • We learned a lot about the art and science of synchronization, and poured all of that knowledge into a new client and server which we launched simultaneously and disastrously around Christmas, effectively killing the service for most of our users as we scrambled to understand why the system that we had tested in the lab behaved so much worse in production. Angry users, deprived of the service that they had grown to depend on, demanded that we revert to the previous incarnation, which seemed perfectly adequate to them. We pressed on, and two weeks later the alarms finally stopped ringing.

    • We recruited a group of non-technical subjects to do a usability test, and it flopped. Sit people in front of a search box and ask them to test it, and their first query is their own name. #FAIL. It turns out that with the exception of people doing market research, consumers using search are not typically looking for an authoritative list of sites within a category; they’re looking for an answer to a specific question. Undaunted, we tested some variants of the basic search idea, including a version where we inserted our results into the Google search results page. The verdict from users: too complicated.

    • Based on our momentum and despite the failure of our early efforts to find gold in the corpus, we secured venture capital funding and recruited James Joaquin as our CEO: “There’s a scalable business in here somewhere,” we told ourselves, and we were determined to find it. James pushed us to find a way to use use our bookmark corpus to enhance web search, an area with a proven Internet business model. We developed several prototpes, and after user testing, we settled on a simple-is-better scheme: we would add information to Google search results showing “bookmark rank” for sites, essentially tallying users’ bookmarks as votes of confidence.

    • So at the DEMO conference in March 2009, we rebranded ourselves as Xmarks and introduced the “Smarter Search” feature, as well as a new Xmarks.com website where users could find the top sites across a huge range of topics.

    • Some of these ideas, like SearchTabs, saw the light of day; others never made it out of the lab. Our “SearchBoost“, service was an upsell to advertisers: pay us a fee and we’ll add a mark to your ad when it’s displayed to our users, showing the bookmark rank of your site. Our tests showed that we could boost ad click-through rates by 10%. We built it and it put it front of potential advertisers. Many were interested, but ultimately the feedback was negative: our user base was too small to be worth their time and attention.

    • We also considered refocusing Xmarks as a freemium sync business, but the prospects there are grim too: with the emergence of competent sync features built in to Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, it’s hard to see users paying for a service that they can now get for free. For four years we have offered the synchronization service for no charge, predicated on the hypothesis that a business model would emerge to support the free service. With that investment thesis thwarted, there is no way to pay expenses, primarily salary and hosting costs. Without the resources to keep the service going, we must shut it down. Our plan is to keep the service running for another 90+ days, after which the plug will be pulled.

    • I love Xmarks and have been using it for years, when it was once Foxmarks. Now I use Google Chrome as my primary browser, but I still use Xmarks to sync my bookmarks. Here’s why:

      1) I can control when Xmarks syncs (manual sync, auto sync, etc)

      2) I can revert back to previous sync versions

      3) I have A LOT of bookmarks and this seems to overwhelm Chrome’s current sync capability. It always hangs or crashes when i try to sync my bookmarks. Syncing everything else works fine though.

    • It is very sad that no one wanted to step up and purchase the technology. I bought the iPad version on the app store. I would pay also pay a $3 to $4 per month for an annual subscription. Perhaps people arent willing to pay until they are about to loose it.

    • Hi guys,

      I see that there is no way back, from what I read in your statement.

      If all of that is true, then your very last step, your very last task would need to be, to make your Server-Software available as open source.

      Changin the settings in the client add-ons would help people to run their own server to be able to still sync there data browser indipendantly.

      I highly recommand you to make it available as open source. At least the basic sync functions…

      my regards

  • iPad Gems: Evernote, Papers, Instapaper Pro, OmniGraphSketcher, Penultimate + Art Authority | iLounge Article

    tags: ipad evernote design

  • 新浪独家对话黄光裕代言人邹晓春实录_家电_科技时代_新浪网 <span class="“> – Annotated

    • 我们是希望这些管理层做好本质工作，公司目前造成这种发展缓慢的局面，也跟管理层的责任不大，因为这帮管理层同样创造了08年国美的辉煌。目前这种现状我们认为是企业的领导人没有给出一个清晰一个正确的长期战略指导，是战略出问题，而不是在集体管理和资信上出问题。

    • 　邹晓春：对，首先是没有反对。第二也可以看出，陈晓先生在操作这件事情的时候，没有把好事做好，这个是问题的关键。

      　　所以也同时可以看出，他在这个方面不具备一个企业领导人应该具备的素质，这个企业领导人职业经理人最应该具备的素质就是积极的去沟通、去协调所有的事情，使所有的问题都能够得到妥善的解决。

    • 我们始终现在反对陈晓先生这种包办的态度，他包办股东，他包办董事局，最后他就是说这个事情是好的，这就跟父母包办婚姻是一样的，一样的是这种情况，他就认为我这种包办就是给你们两个人是找来幸福的，但是幸福不幸福呢？大家都知道包办婚姻的事就是不好的。尽管他可能心里有良好的愿望，但这种做法还是不对的。

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My daily readings 09/27/2010

September 27, 2010

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My daily readings 09/26/2010

September 26, 2010

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My daily readings 09/25/2010

September 25, 2010

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My daily readings 09/24/2010

September 24, 2010

  • Hacker News | High Resolution Fundraising <span class="“> – Annotated

    tags: AngelGate Angel investor VC

    • How much does our first $20 angel investor get? Well, he gets to participate like he was investing $20 today, plus he gets a discount to the valuation. So instead of getting $20 / $750 = 2.67% of the company, maybe he got a 20% discount to the valuation, so he gets $20 / (.8 * $750) = 3.33% of the company. (We’re ignoring the effect of interest here for simplicity, but he probably effectively has $21 and change invested by now in real life.)

    • We haven’t discussed valuation caps yet. Valuation caps are intended to prevent the startup dragging its feet on raising money, thus building up lots of worth in the company, and then the angel investor getting cheesed. For example, if they had just grown through revenues for a year or two, they might be raising money at a valuation of $1,250. In that case, $20 only buys you 2% of the company (remember, he gets a 20% discount : $20 / (.8 * $1250) = 2%), which the angel investor might think doesn’t adequately compensate him for the risk he took on betting on a small, unproven thing several years before. So we make him a deal: he gets to invest his $20 at the same terms as the VCs do if, and only if, the valuation is less than $750. If it is more than $750, for him and only him, we pretend it was $750 instead. This means that under no circumstances will he walk away with less than $20 / (.8 * $750) = 3.33% of the company, as long as the company goes on to raise further investment. (Obviously, if they fold, he walks away with nothing. Well, technically speaking, with debt owed to him by a company which is bankrupt and likely has no assets to speak of, so essentially nothing.)

      I think that just about covers it. Make sense? Anybody feel free to correct me if I botched something here, this is not quite my bag.

  • Hacker News | Can we trust Michael Arrington? (AngelGate) <span class="“> – Annotated

    tags: AngelGate Angel investor VC

    • I think “black and white” is a problem here… I see no reason why Arrington can’t be right while McClure can honestly believe that there was nothing wrong with the meeting.

      Conspiracy theories grow on the basis of black and white, good vs. evil, etc. Outside of programming, aren’t we all used to varying shades of gray?

    • wolfrom said Arrington right and McClure honestly believe.

      Believe is very different to wrong. If Arrington is right, McClure is wrong in his belief. He can still honestly believe it though.

      One, or all, of Christians, Muslims and Atheists are wrong in their belief, but they can all honestly believe.

      I’m not being pedantic here, if you read wolfrom’s statement with the correct meanings you’ll see how wrong your comment is, even if you honestly believed it.

    • “If you’re an entrepeneur you believe Arrington.”

      I disagree, I personally think Arrington made a bit too far of a stretch.

      Did a bunch of super angels get together and talk shop? Definitely. Are they talking about how high valuations are right now? Probably. Once you get into the “concrete plans for how to control the world” it gets a lot sketchier.

      There’s a strong difference between someone saying “company X is raising at a really high valuation, you shouldn’t stand for that” and “company X is raising at a really high valuation, don’t take it or there will be consequences”. Startups talk about investors all of the time, why should the investors be any different?

    • Whether Arrington was right or wrong, there’s probably some truth that angels hate YC. It’s based on the whole premise that VC’s and angels aren’t all their cracked up to be. It would make sense that these “superangel” gatherings would discuss their slipping hold on power and how to get it back.

  • Hacker News | Finger-Pointing, Emails, Deleted Tweets, Rage. AngelGate Is Far From Over <span class="“> – Annotated

    tags: AngelGate Angel investor VC

    • What kind of self-respecting conspiracy that aims to subvert the startup world with collusion among major players discuss their doings over twitter? Someone please buy these guys a copy of Cryptonomicon.

    • A Silicon Valley angel conspiracy without Ron Conway isn’t really much of a conspiracy.

  • Hacker News | Ron Conway Drops A Nuclear Bomb On The Super Angels [Email] <span class="“> – Annotated

    • My paraphrased short version:

      Ron Conway to the super-angels: I’m in this game because I love seeing entrepreneurs build cool stuff. You guys aren’t. Stop worrying about term sheets and valuations and worry about adding value beyond cash. I’ve wanted to say this for a long time, but have bit my lip in your presence. I no longer want to be involved with any of you. And Dave McClure, quit being a classless embarrassment to Silicon Valley.

    • That is a good summary. However, I’m surprised that so many other comments talk about Conway rocking, being a great individual etc.

      When I read his email, my thought was that the email was a great image-building propaganda tool and that he wrote it with the knowledge that the email would be made public.

      His email talks how great he is, how he loves entrepreneurs and how other investors are in it for self-serving factors like ego and money. Of course, I have no way of knowing whether that is true or not. However, I’m willing to bet that many unscrupulous investors could easily write a similar email.

    • I would have similar doubts about Conway’s authenticity here except that doesn’t fit with what I’ve heard pretty much everywhere else about the kind of person he is to do deals with and work with.

      Maybe he wouldn’t have written that email if this story hadn’t been aired. Maybe he would have. But the email fits with his past actions, so to me it doesn’t matter.

      My guess is that he knew the email would be aired, and he wrote it to entrepreneurs as much as to the super-angels. His brand is all about trust-with-entrepreneurs, and if he loses that his deal-flow gets severely cut down.

      To solidify that trust, he publicly threw down the line in the sand and said, “I’m on the entrepreneur’s side. Always. I’m even willing to give up friendships / partnerships with these other investors to prove that loyalty.”

    • He knows more about how these guys act behind closed doors than absolutely anyone. I think it’s official now: these guys were being bad and they got an appropriate bitch slap.

      Hopefully that’s the end of it. I’m sure none of them are genuinely bad guys. There’s probably just a side of some of them that’s a bit greedy and stupid. Hopefully this will be the lesson they all need to keep that side suppressed permanently.

    • My respect for Arrington keeps going up, and I can’t help but admire what Ron Conway has to say about this. The no-bs approach works for him. I’m glad he called out the writing, I guess McClure’s money is still green, but I don’t think I could take anyone that writes like that seriously.

      Edited for clarity.

    • Arrington has has obviously lit a match to a powderkeg with “So a blogger walks into a bar…”. McClure’s response came across (to me) as defensive, which at least confirms that there is a concern about the appearance of impropriety.

      I would love to know who was at this meeting and who got this email from Conway.

      There are some useful short-term consequences of this:

      1. These super angels probably don’t trust each other anymore (“who tipped off Arrington?”). This is a good thing;

      2. Meetings like this are less likely to happen in the short term. If they do, they’ll probably be somewhere private (the back of a restaurant is not private); and

      3. It highlights the importance and value of reputation and integrity (of which Conway’s cup overfloweth).

    • This guy is an upstanding individual and really cares about startups. I’m glad people like him exist. Maybe some day I’ll be lucky enough to have him invest in one of my projects.

      I really like how he called McClure out. I know McClure is a smart guy and allegedly a great investor, but he is quite classless and the f* this f* that attitude is embarrassing to what are supposed to be a group of intelligent, successful, and perhaps caring individuals.

    • Ron Conway rocks but the email almost feels like it was intended to be leaked.

  • Ron Conway Drops A Nuclear Bomb On The Super Angels [Email] <span class="“> – Annotated

    • So that I would not be influenced by any outside inputs I am writing this without sharing my thoughts with anyone including David Lee and the other SV Angel Partners.

      I want to clarify once and for all my total disagreement with your values and motives for being investors.

      I have stated consistently for year that I invest because I love helping entrepenuers and watching them learn and succeed.

    • I think you have a different value set and lets agree to disagree and not have to even engage in any idle chit chat or discussion of any sort….ever.

      Furhermore, I regret David Lee was involved in the gatherings. I am sure he does too.

      We talked about the first dinner and I encouraged him to write the email above and withdraw….I know he was uncomfortable with both gatherings….where no one was there to speak up for the interests of the entrepenuers.

    • Please keep this confidential even though I know that will be hard since two of you let your egos take over and show Arrington how important you are by telling him you were headed to a “secret” angel gathering.

      Dave McCLure…pls try not to blog about this and cause silicon valley more embarrassment with your unprofessional classless writings

    • “The world of startups would be a better place if you spent less time complaining about deal structures, terms, vc’s, and valuations etc and the cars you drive, and just helped entrepenuers build their companies.”

      which is why he’s the most successful angel investor in the history of angel investing.

    • Absolutely. Wow. Good reminder to all of us to focus on what’s important.

  • Finger-Pointing, Emails, Deleted Tweets, Rage. AngelGate Is Far From Over <span class="“> – Annotated

    tags: AngelGate Angel investor VC

    • It doesn’t take someone deeply engulfed in the situation to figure out what McClure is talking about. Clearly, Ron Conway, founder of SV Angel and the most prominent angel investor in Silicon Valley, sent an email to other angels involved in the situation. Clearly, that email was in opposition to McClure’s stance that those at the meeting were doing nothing wrong. David Lee, who McClure mentions, is a partner at SV Angel and was at the meeting.

  • So A Blogger Walks Into A Bar… <span class="“> – Annotated

    tags: Angel investor VC AngelGate

    • So I did what any self respecting blogger would do – I drove over to Bin 38, parked my car and walked in.

      • Complaints about Y Combinator’s growing power, and how to counteract competitiveness in Y Combinator deals
      • Complaints about rising deal valuations and they can act as a group to reduce those valuations
      • How the group can act together to keep traditional venture capitalists out of deals entirely
      • How the group can act together to keep out new angel investors invading the market and driving up valuations.
      • More mundane things, like agreeing as a group not to accept convertible notes in deals (an entrepreneur-friendly type of deal).
      • One source has also said that there is a wiki of some sort that the group has that explicitly talks about how the group should act as one to keep deal valuations down.

    • Collusion and price fixing, that’s what. It is absolutely unlawful for competitors to act together to keep other competitors out of the market, or to discuss ways to keep prices under control. And that appears to be exactly what this group is doing.

      This isn’t minor league stuff. We’re talking about federal crimes and civil prosecutions if in fact that’s what they’re doing. I had a quick call with an attorney this morning, and he confirmed that these types of meetings are exactly what these laws were designed to prevent.

  • SpringPad Finds Its Feet With Mobile App <span class="“> – Annotated

    • Like I said, it’s the mobile component that’s most compelling. You could be at a bookstore, scan a book you may want to read, then come home to all sorts of info: Amazon reviews, price comparisons, and so on.

      Again, the main idea here is to help you remember stuff. You’re out, doing your thing, see a bunch of stuff, send ‘em off to SpringPad so when you get home you can parse through it all at your leisure. I’m not one to “hoard” too much information while sitting in front of my computer—I have zero bookmarks set on my current Firefox installation, as crazy as that sounds—but the idea of having a sort of depository for my mobile could prove entertaining.

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My daily readings 09/22/2010

September 22, 2010

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My daily readings 09/21/2010

September 21, 2010

  • FolderBoy – Personal tasks

    tags: Note

  • To Get Paid What You’re Worth, Know Your Disruptive Skills – Whitney Johnson – Harvard Business Review

  • Hacker News | Ask HN: what would be in your ultimate information manager? <span class="“> – Annotated

    tags: Note

      • Get info in quicky, get info out quick.

    • I had the same issue and found Evernote. It now fills the roles you mention (well, I would’t put music or photos in it as I use iTunes/Spotify and iPhoto/Flickr for those, but you could). So, perhaps I’ll just say what about Evernote makes it awesome for me, and what, in a new thing, could make me switch..

      I use and need a reasonably flat-form environment with tagging. I don’t care for folders, hierarchies, or whatever, because I’m too impatient and have a bad memory for structure. I just want to throw stuff in and have it use tags or similar to figure out my intent. When it’s time to get stuff out, I’d rather type in a query than go digging through folders, for instance (the Google vs Dmoz/ODP approach).

    • Lastly, and Evernote gets this very wrong.. I don’t want an information manager changing my info! Evernote’s rich text editor keeps screwing up my formatting and fonts.. even on “plain text” stuff. I wish they could just let me have a totally plain text view without any of the rich stuff.

      Oh, and make it sync somewhere – preferably through the file system so I can use Dropbox to sync it across computers myself. In fact, if you did that (and recommended users use Dropbox), then you solve the backup issue too and could use Dropbox’s affiliates thing ;-)

    • Agreed re “get info in quick, get info out quick”. That’s been a driving principle behind my app, (http://www.folderboy.com/index.htm).

  • Hacker News | Ask HN: Taking notes in a meeting with an iPad <span class="“> – Annotated

    tags: Note

    • I’ve been switching between Simplenote, Notes Plus, and Penultimate. I like the sketching features of Notes Plus and Penultimate.

  • Memonic – The Collaborative Online Notebook <span class="“> – Annotated

    tags: Note

      • Similar to our position.

  • Methods of Work: It Didn’t Happen If You Didn’t Write It Down « Design By Gravity <span class="“> – Annotated

    tags: Note

    • For a while I used Evernote as my main note taking app, but sadly it isn’t great at this. It is cross-platform, by virtue of being a web app, and it has never lost a jot of content. But sometimes I don’t have a network connection. At which point, fail. Evernote also has some weird design decisions. For example, when you click on a note, it doesn’t immediately open for editing; I can’t think of a single time where that was useful. You have to click an extra button to edit it. Bizarre. Plus it doesn’t do simple asterisk to outline translation on the fly, which, dang it, it should. It ought to have an outline mode, period.

    • Evernote has enough quirks that I don’t use it for everyday notes, though I do use it for longer term stuff.

    • It never fails to amaze me how much I learn by doodling notes about a problem, walking away for a couple days, emphatically not thinking about it, then coming back to it. The back of my brain apparently is really adept at making progress on a problem when I seed it and leave it alone. Having the original notes written down when I come back is key to making sure you don’t forget a bunch of details.

    • I disagree about Evernote. There are mobile clients for it that will upload the notes later when there is an available connection. The desktop clients work in the same way.

      Although personally I can’t use Evernote for all my note-taking needs because at Uni a lot of the notes are weird squiggly lines and formulas, evernote isn’t too friendly for writing down those.

    • Evernote will always sync the meta-info for your notes, but it will only cache the contents locally if you pay the monthly fee. That is, if you create a note on machine A, it will only get cached for offline viewing on machine B if you explicitly look at the note on machine B while you are online. Paying customers don’t have to worry about that; everything gets automatically cached on every machine where you run the app.

      Agree on the note taking, though. I tend to draw a lot of diagrams, and Evernote’s not a good solution for that. In fact, there is no good solution for that, as far as I know, besides pen and paper.

      • We can do it in iPad app for this kind of note taking

    • I’m surprised nobody has mentioned KeepNote. It’s an awesome tool and is cross-platform (at least for linux and windows).

      Combine it with dropbox FTW.

      http://rasm.ods.org/keepnote/

      • It seems a log of note taking app support dropbox.

    • Hey Chris,

      I love your rundown on these note taking apps. I’d also call your attention to Springpad (where I work) at http://springpadit.com. Like Evernote, it is hosted in the cloud (and our iPhone app will be out soon) and helps you remember anything. But as opposed to being “dead data” that sits in your account, Springpad works especially well at capturing just the info you want to remember and automatically organizing and enhancing it. For example, when you see, hear or read about a new restaurant you want to try, you can easily save it in Springpad and it’ll automatically be stored in your restaurant folder, and enhanced with the restaurant’s business info, and links to Yelp and Open Table. You can also easily set alarms to email or text yourself reminders when you want to remember something. Would be great if you give it a whirl and let me know if you have any questions!

      • It seems springpadit tries to help users use the note they take.

    • I like Evernote as a place to put things that I would ordinarily have the urge to write on a sticky note. And since it can do word recognition in pictures, it’s a great place to scan and stash receipts, business cards, etc. Not the greatest for note-taking, as I said above.

    • I think that mind mapping in general is overhyped. It’s outlining, with a tree-shaped presentation. But it can be a good solution for real-time notes.

    • I discovered GSNotes years ago (actually called Golden Section Notes) and have never looked back. Oh, I’ve tried OneNote, Evernote, Keynote and a few others – I always ended up with GSNotes. The design is just stupid simple – export as plain text, html or PDF. I just usually use the main app – it’s portable on a USB key. It just works.

    • Another note-taking alternative is Springpad (http://springpadit.com). Not only does it enable easy rich text note-taking and bookmarking, it also makes it quick and easy to save things you typically find interesting…like restaurants, products, recipes, wines etc.

      Springpad is database driven. So, not only do we detect and structure the core data of what you’re capturing (recipe ingredients, restaurant address, product specs, business contact info, movie particulars, etc.), we also automatically organize it for you.

      And, we enhance what you’ve captured by integrating with popular web services to help you out when you’re ready to take action (links to Open Table for reservations, price comparison for products, local listings and showtimes for movies, etc.)

      (Disclosure – I’m a Springpad co-founder)

      • Auto organizer 

    • Coincidentally, I started doing this not long ago after seeing this: http://www.adamthody.com/2010/01/indexing-ui-sketches/

      My 3G is more than sufficient to capture a notebook page. I usually import the pictures directly from my phone with Preview, annotate, then copy and paste to Evernote. I find if I print neatly enough, Evernote can recognize some of the text, but adding a few tags works fine.

      The more I use Evernote the more I like it. For one project I’m working on, I have handwritten notebook pages, snippets from PDF and Word docs, pictures, URLs, even a campus map, all in one place and searchable–sweet.

    • I’m a big Onenote user, I’ve tried thebrain, Evernote and even knowledgebase software, one of this things that helped me was putting the default save on my dropbox folder so that it’s the same friom whichever pc I open up. I use tablet pc’s a lot and the ability to continue where I left off whilst roaming is fantastic!

  • Notational Velocity

    tags: Note mac notetaking productivity

  • Hacker News | Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist <span class="“> – Annotated

    tags: Monetization

    • I think there are a few takeaways here:

      * You have to charge from the very beginning. If you start a free service, and then try to establish a pay system afterward, your users will feel tricked and trapped and they will rebel loudly. Scribd seems to have been in a hurry to get adoption, so they made it free to host documents; as this guy said though, he much preferred hosting with Scribd over doing it manually on his university’s web server. That could have been Scribd’s value proposition, and a small yearly fee for that probably would have worked OK.

      * SaaS could get itself in trouble if there are too many incidents like this. I already hear from clients that are concerned about using online services; the most common questions are, “What if they change their terms?”, “What if they go away?”, and those are legitimate concerns. Many of my clients aren’t the most computer-interested people, so if they have concerns like that, then that means that stories like this have penetrated very deep into the consumer market.

    • > If you start a free service, and then try to establish a pay system afterward, your users will feel tricked and trapped and they will rebel loudly.

      If you lock behind a paywall things previously available for free, sure. And they’ll be right too.

      An other option is to add features which are only behind a new paywall. Issue then is providing additional services of value and a way for users to discover them.

      reply

    • The initial response was to flip out, but once people realized reddit wasn’t going to switch to a pay-only site the outrage died down. It might have only worked because reddit users/admins try so hard to foster a sense of community, but it seemed to me like reddit showed how to set up a pay service correctly, and people were just too jaded because of sites like Scribd to realize it.

    • It seems like Scribd would solve more problems if they let uploaders pay to give their readers free access. I’m not the Scribd user; the guy publishing with them is.

    • Scribd would rather increase the amount of content on it’s servers by making uploading easy and free. While the guy that publishes the article is really the Scribd user, he can publish elsewhere if the price makes it too much of a hassle. The viewer has less of a choice, if it’s only published on Scribd it’s either pay up or go without.

      I don’t agree with their choice (or methods) but it makes sense for them to do this.

    • Early Scribd broke the web by taking open format documents, putting them in a proprietary wrapper, and calling it a “service”.

      Middle Scribd fixed their own brokenness by moving to HTML 5 (which is sometimes more convenient than a PDF, and is certainly “open” and accessible).

      Late Scribd is again breaking the web by moving documents behind a paywall. Some qualities are just baked into a company’s DNA.

    • From the FAQ (this is crazy):

      Your documents will automatically be entered into the Archive after an initial period of time. You can recall a document from the Archive by opening the document’s properties, clicking the Archive Status tab, then clicking the Recall from Archive command. If a document’s properties page doesn’t have an Archive Status tab, then that document has not yet been placed into the Scribd Archive. To learn how to edit your documents’ properties, please see our Writer’s Guide.

      After a couple months your document will return to the Archive, and you can repeat this process to recall it again.

    • I can’t actually believe that they would go the paywall route. It honestly seemed a few months ago when they added HTML5 support that they were going in a really great direction and now I will avoid them like the plague.

    • I don’t care if they want to establish a paywall, that’s there perogative, what I don’t like is taking my content, which I uploaded under the belief I’d be able to host it there at no cost to end users (persumably subsidised by ads) and then charging my readers for it. I post my content (mostly slides from talks and such) for readers, I’d probably even pay to put my content there, it’s rather convenient.

    • I would flip that around on you: I think it is time that companies reach a point in their understanding of users’ reaction to the bait & switch.

      The value of your service to a user isn’t going to increase simply due to the passage of time or growth of your site. If they wouldn’t pay for it on day 1, the odds are they won’t pay for it after 2 years of using the service. If, in the process of trying to monetize your service, you “hold hostage” a portion of the value that the user has contributed to your site, they are going to be pissed.

      This has all happened many times now. I think companies trying this route in the first place will be easier to change than peoples’ reaction to it.

    • I would flip that around on you: I think it is time that companies reach a point in their understanding of users’ reaction to the bait & switch.

      i agree.

      The value of your service to a user isn’t going to increase simply due to the passage of time or growth of your site.

      i disagree. many users may not pay on the first day because they don’t see the value in it, or don’t understand how the site works. but being able to use it for free and coming to depend on it may put a higher value on it over time.

      how many users would pay $1 per month to access facebook now that all of their friends are on it and they use it every day? probably a lot. those users probably wouldn’t have signed up for an account in the first place if they had to enter a credit card number.

    • While I generally agree with your points, I don’t think they are particularly apt to this article. The guy isn’t saying Scribd owes him anything, he even states that he understands they never promised him a free service in perpetuity.

      But when you make a service available for free and take pride in that fact, harvest your users content, and then suddenly flip over to a paid service without even giving your users adequate notice or tools to opt out I can completely understand how users might feel cheated.

      Isn’t the company partly responsible for creating the sense of entitlement you’re talking about?

  • Goldman’s Observations: Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist <span class="“> – Annotated

    Once I realized they were doing this, I self-discovered that I could opt-out on the settings page (buried under “sharing”), but I don’t feel I got adequate notice of the change. Haven’t they learned 

    tags: Monetization

    • With the deep goodwill I’ve developed towards Scribd over the past year, I might be able to excuse that mistake (barely) as overzealous cluelessness. However, the other mistake simply isn’t excusable. With inadequate notice to account-holders, Scribd set up a new program where old files on Scribd (it’s unclear how old; their FAQ simply says the conversion happens after “an initial period of time on Scribd”) are automatically put behind a paywall where readers have to pay Scribd to access them. [Update: Evil Wylie reports that the files are archived after 2 months.]

    • Scribd’s paywall stunt instantly put Scribd on my shitlist because it vitiates the reason I chose to use Scribd in the first place. I don’t know that they ever promised me perpetual free access to the documents I post, but their value proposition always has been open access to the documents–freely shared with everyone and indexed in the search engines. The paywall destroys that value proposition. They’ve taken the documents that I wanted to freely share with the public (many of them public documents like court rulings and filings) and made them inaccessible. If my readers can’t freely get the documents I wanted to share with them, then what’s the point of using Scribd in the first place???

      I also feel like Scribd used me. With their implicit promise of open access, they got me to share a lot of high-interest documents and generate lots of link love, then they flipped the default (from free to paywall) as part of a cash grab. I could check out of Scribd, but then I would break a lot of links and it would take a lot of time. So now I feel trapped. It’s a terrible feeling.

      [Note: I always knew that Scribd could shut down and break the links, but I was willing to tak

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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My daily readings 09/19/2010

September 19, 2010

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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