Published in The Message · 12 min read · Jul 30, 2014 -- Behind the nation’s closed doors, with YouTube. The first time I noticed the room was in the Numa Numa video of 2004, circulated pre-YouTube, i
This post expands on a question I recently encountered at a midtown bar. It revolves around what types of data I had worked with in the past and which ones turned out to be most challenging in study. Admittedly, the conversation wasn't ideal…
Kim Kardashian: Hollywood , the celebrity role-playing game from the Seinfeld of reality stars, is currently the fifth most popular free iPhone app on Apple's charts. It's also the fifth-highest gross
As one half of an iOS development company , I’ve been thinking about how to make money on apps for a while. The recent kerfuffle aroused by Brent Simmons and Jared Sinclair’s posts on the topic brought some of those thoughts to the surface. To preface this discussion: I haven’t personally been…
2014-03-15 Many of today's most exciting startups were tried before in a different form. Suppose you develop a new technology that is valuable to some industry. The old approach was to sell or license
Improve your CSS? Hire me as your coach. JavaScript archives Compatibility CSS coaching QuirksBlog Donations Politics Mobile About COH sitemap contact The HTML5 drag and drop disaster After spending a
One of the things you're supposed to work out some time in your adolescence is that though you're the star of your own life, you're not the star of anyone else's. Some companies never work this out. A
Five and even ten years ago, Mac developers would tell you that you can’t release a Mac app that uses standard controls with their standard appearance. Mac users would look at iTunes and the iLife app
My iOS Indie-Game Numbers Tuesday, July 29, 2014 – 33307 views — by jazzychad Yesterday, Jared Sinclair published a very candid writeup of the download and sales numbers for his app Unread. It was ver
Jared Sinclair Discusses Unread's Earnings 28 July 2014 bzamayo.com/unread-s-earnings Jared Sinclair: Unread for iPhone has earned a total of $32K in App Store sales. Unread for iPad has earned $10K.
Look around your iPad for a minute. How are its third-party apps doing? Are they all being actively updated? Are they all built for iOS 7 yet? You never see any non-Retina graphics, iOS 6 keyboards, o
The patron saint of the 'irony' debate. Illustration: Lindsay Mound Irony. The term people love to use… incorrectly. On TV, in literature, between friends — people misapply and misuse the word a milli
This morning a story was published in Re/code speculating on the funding of my new venture. I’m happy to confirm that we’ve raised a $55M Series A round of funding led by NEA with participation from Accel Partners , Bain Capital Ventures and MentorTech Ventures . While it is too early to delve into…
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A Candid Look at Unread’s First Year To my knowledge, indie developers don’t publish the kind of numbers that you’ll find in this post. My sales records are none of your business , as the saying quite literally goes. The question in your mind will no doubt be why am I writing this at all? It’s a…
The structure of the VC industry is changing. This matters not only to entrepreneurs raising capital — but it also impacts the finance industry overall, because companies are staying private longer (f
When I started my first company, Moped, I didn’t think the day would come that I’d have to close it down. I was as naive as I was ambitious. Our vision was to revolutionize communication, making messa
And its challenge to the rest of us Published in The Message · 7 min read · Jul 21, 2014 -- It’s almost inevitable: I encounter Minecraft somewhere online—it’s easy to do, because there’s a lot of Min
One advantage of being a professor is that you can ramble about your eccentric theories to a captive audience. For example, I often grumble to my graduate students that every time a new iPhone comes out, my existing iPhone seems to slow down. How…
During Superbowl weekend I was wasting time on Facebook when I saw a newsfeed ad about becoming an uberX driver in Los Angeles.
Right then, after watching so many shitty brand ads on TV, I had an idea! This is the story of how that idea became the financial model below which outlines how a person…
I started seed investing in 2010 (and much more actively in2012) before becoming a full-time YC partner. In this period, I invested in about 40 companies. So far, five of them are in the “really good”
Reading selection: “Learning to Read”excerpt from The Autobiography of MalcolmX MALCOLM X Born MalcolmLittle on May 19,1925, Malcolm X was one of the most articulate and powerful leadersof black America during the 1960s. A street hustler convicted of robbery in 1946, he spent seven years in prison,…
Sunrise. Evernote. Feedly. Wunderlist. Mailbox.* Those apps are all an integral part of my personal productivity suite, the tools that I use on a day-to-day basis. Without a desktop version, those mobile clients are useful but not transformative.
I walked downstairs to make some Craft Coffee at 7am and there they were. My mom must have hired the only unfamiliar face in the room after a Google search for How to hold an Intervention.
I knew what it was. I had had a big blow up with my family after I quit my good job, shaved my head, and…
Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an entrepreneur in 1985 when almost any dot com name you wanted was available? All words; short ones, cool ones. All you had to do was ask. It didn't even cost anything to claim. This grand…
The Greeks had a word for this, I thought, as I worked my way through Marc Andreessen's most recent epic tweet storm . The venture capitalist -- who has suddenly begun treating Twitter as his own pers
Fred Wilson recently coined the term ' App Constellations ' to describe what he was seeing in the mobile app ecosystem with respect to distribution. Over the past few months, mobile companies have continued with this strategy, the idea being that standalone apps are better for mobile, versus the all…
The subject of this blog, the LIFX light bulb, bills itselfas the light bulb reinvented; a “WiFi enabled multi-color [sic], energyefficient LED light bulb” that can be controlled from a smartphone [1]. Wechose to investigate this device due to its use of emerging wireless networkprotocols, the way…
WHERE does creativity come from? For centuries, we've had a clear answer: the lone genius. The idea of the solitary creator is such a common feature of our cultural landscape (as with Newton and the falling apple) that we easily forget it's an idea…
In 2008, I added tilt scrolling to Instapaper . Today, that’s an “innovation” in Amazon’s Fire Phone, but Farhad Manjoo says they blew it : Take Auto Scroll, which moves the text on your screen as you
Jonathan Zdziarski Forensic scientist and author Jonathan Zdziarski has posted the slides (PDF) from his talk at the Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE/X) conference in New York called Identifying Backdoor
Ken Norton is a product partner at Google Ventures where he advises startups on product management and also helps organize workshops. Congratulations, a product has found its product manager. Perhaps
Why Golfers Buy Hole In One Insurance Priceonomics Photo credit: New Brunswick Tourism The goal of insurance is usually to protect us from life’s least happy circumstances: the loss of a family’s prim
July 23, 2014 Mistakes You Should Never Make I was walking to a team meeting where I was going to announce that we would likely have to lay off nearly all of our employees because we unexpectedly had
Take a look at the two water bottles below. The one on the left is pretty much your standard water bottle design: tall, clear, probably crinkly. The one on the right feels a bit less conventional, wit
It’s so simple, right? Published in The Message · 10 min read · Jul 24, 2014 -- Someone could make off with all your garbage that’s put out on the street, and carefully record how many used condoms or
The Thin Blue Line in the Big Apple (Andrew Burton/Getty Images) There is nothing conservative about government violating the rights of citizens. I magine if I were to tell you there is a large group
The most interesting things I learned at HOPE X. I attended 2600’s Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference this past weekend at the Hotel Pennsylvania. This is my third time going – and their tenth
The Media Equation Riding the Juggernaut That Left Print Behind Media companies and readers with numerous other options are increasingly passing by print products like magazines, regardless of quality
Colorado is the self-described “vanguard” of innovation. But that’s not really how it felt to me on Friday after the Denver police stopped the UberX I was riding in. Here’s the full story, with all of
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