The interface looks wonderful (although the login link is covered by the nav menu in Firefox 2). Nicely polished.
One practical suggestion: when adding a bookmark my eye moves from left to right. I thought the green + button was a continuation of the data entry form and was surprised that clicking it didn't add the bookmark to my project. Similarly, after tabbing through the four form fields, the tab order sends me to Firefox's address bar, not Save as I expected. Both of these make adding bookmarks more difficult.
Also, the description field is hit or miss. Sometimes it's empty or the pre-filled data isn't very relevant. The thumbnail images in the Card and List tabs also have this problem.
You're really pushing the paid plans. I understand why, financially. But you need people to use and love the product first. I almost skipped signing up until I saw the link to the free plan in tiny type below the three big paid options.
As a small business founder, this is too much for my needs. Delicious isn't as fully featured, but its simpler and it's already habit to use it. But with more iteration your product could be good for bigger teams in larger organizations, which looks to be where you're headed with it. Best of luck.
Part time. But as the weeks go by it's more obvious that it needs to be full time. I took the day off yesterday and got more done than I have the previous eight or ten nights after work. It's not that I don't make progress on evenings and weekends, but there's no replacement for eight, ten, twelve hours where you really get into the hard stuff. I rarely work straight through for that long, so it's not just a result of having more time. It's more about being able to focus solely on one project (and one that I love). On July 11 I'm going full time and will get to do that every day.
It's because most of us are still focused on building something people want. Without that, none of these other things matter. Most people who contribute to this community get that.
Another important point: There are a bunch of brilliant, motivated people on HN who have shown great ability and insight in both development and business. By not paying someone to focus solely on the business side early on, they buy themselves more time to make something people want, build their user base, and improve their chances of being successful.
When you've got the chops to do both, you should. Especially early on.
"Truevert gives you special results—everything comes back through green-colored glasses. So a search for 'SUV' brings back HybridSUV.com as the top result. A search for 'building materials' brings back results for green building materials."
Until you search for something that isn't generic, then it returns poor results -- or at least it did when searching for relatively simple things in Seattle.
"It is a Yahoo BOSS search mashup. Truevert is actually just a demonstration of some powerful underlying semantic technology developed at OrcaTec, a company co-founded by Roitblat and Brian Golbère. Truevert gets its search results from Yahoo BOSS and applies its own text-analyzing software to generate the most relevant green results. OrcaTec’s software could just as easily be used to create a fashion search engine, a startup search engine, or any of a thousand other vertical search engines."
Congratulations! Can you give us a sense of how successfully you've been able to monetize all the users you've gained? What sort of challenges do you face on that front?
We launched our virtual economy this summer and are just integrating premium (the ability to pay for virtual economy coins). We're live in 11 markets with premium and gradually adding more. People use their phone and something called WAP-billing to pay for the coins. $6.99 buys you 200,000 coins for example.
Historically monetizing users on mobile have been an order of magnitude easier than on the web. Ringtones is a billion dollar business for example. SMS is a $80 billion dollar business. What web services/categories can generate that kind of revenue? And SMS is a pretty poor protocol. The key is the built-in mobile micropayment system called PSMS or WAP-billing.
One of the companies we look at for inspiration is Mobagetown, a mobile web based community in Japan. It's a $250MM company in terms of revenues at just 10MM users.
Our main challenge is to make people realize that Alexa doesn't track mobile web ;)
problem 3: phones don't connect to isp's they connect to carrier wap gateways.
One attempt to track mobile is from Opera but it's highly skewed to the type of people that have Opera on their phones and the activity that's significant for them: http://www.opera.com/mobile_report/
Old phones. iPhone, Android -- these are the phones of the future. In three years, most people will probably have WebKit or Gecko running on their phone.
The iPhone is already the best selling phone in the US.
So, for quantified sites, audience composition is extrapolated from ISP data based on what? The Quantcast provided explanation (http://www.quantcast.com/docs/display/info/Next+page4) is pretty light on concrete details of how it extrapolate demographic data from cookie info.
Would love to hear a straight forward answer for this one. My clients love the data available, but give it low validity because not clear how its derived.
Based on personal client experience, the ones most likely to need the service will have the least desire to pay anything for it. If they are willing to spend the kind of money to get things done at a high level, they will have already paid someone more qualified the first time around and avoided such problems from the start.
This can't be said enough. Most people either know they need polish, in which case they work to add it, or they have no clue, in which case they think it's pointless and won't pay.
I don't see why you'd separate it, anyway. Just be a standard web consultant. Polish is always a part of looking up web sites.
Not necessarily. Perhaps it's easy to remember and it more easily found in search, but it's harder to build a brand around a generic name like markets.com. Bloomberg, The Street, and The Motley Fool have the advantage in this space.
I'm sure the companies behind news.com, blogs.com, tickets.com, shoes.com, and most others with generic names would argue that it's not moot, that it's the exception and not the rule. You still have to make something people want, something they can't get elsewhere. markets.com doesn't seem to have that, at least not yet. It's hard to be unique in the news aggregation niche.
One practical suggestion: when adding a bookmark my eye moves from left to right. I thought the green + button was a continuation of the data entry form and was surprised that clicking it didn't add the bookmark to my project. Similarly, after tabbing through the four form fields, the tab order sends me to Firefox's address bar, not Save as I expected. Both of these make adding bookmarks more difficult.
Also, the description field is hit or miss. Sometimes it's empty or the pre-filled data isn't very relevant. The thumbnail images in the Card and List tabs also have this problem.
You're really pushing the paid plans. I understand why, financially. But you need people to use and love the product first. I almost skipped signing up until I saw the link to the free plan in tiny type below the three big paid options.
As a small business founder, this is too much for my needs. Delicious isn't as fully featured, but its simpler and it's already habit to use it. But with more iteration your product could be good for bigger teams in larger organizations, which looks to be where you're headed with it. Best of luck.