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In startups, we often tell each other that "the idea is useless", that is, startups are not about the technical details of the idea, they're about the human-to-
by DanielBMarkham 14y ago
In startups, we often tell each other that "the idea is useless", that is, startups are not about the technical details of the idea, they're about the human-to-human interaction of people and your business.
This is also true about data. Startups are not about the data. A dozen companies did what Dropbox did, but there was only one Dropbox. Everybody did search, but there is only one Google, and so forth. Yes, people consume the data, and yes, if you ask them they'll say that's why they're using your app, but that's confirmation bias. They already use your app and enjoy it. When you ask them, they just look at what the app does and repeat it in a way that makes them sound the smartest.
So, presto chango, adding those two things together along with Jacques' essay and we end up in a really weird spot: your startup may be about providing some kind of massaged data to end users. So you find an API to do that. But the guys providing the data, the heart of your app, have the least amount of reward in the entire equation! Hell, in many cases they're providing data willy-nilly out to just about everybody for free. To them, the data is worthless, yet you're building your business off them! Crazy world.
I have a personal news aggregator I wrote a couple of years ago, http://newspaper23.com http://newspaper23.com Nothing fancy, just rips some headlines, then rips the plain text, then puts the plain text in json and makes a client-based detached reader.
To provide the plaintext, I was using ViewText. Great folks. Put in an URL and it'll give you a readable version of what's there.
But guess what? The ViewText guys didn't like my app ripping 50-60 articles a day. So I lost this huge amount of functionality when they decided to start rate-limiting. Now when you click an article, I bring up a frame and load it. I wanted plain text, this was the entire reason for the app, and now the critical thing I wanted is the exact thing that isn't working.
No big deal for my newspaper23 app, but it would be a freaking red alert if this was something I was selling. API use, like walled gardens, are high-risk.
EDIT: Fixed possessive version of "Jacques"
- jacques_chester 14y ago> ... along with Jacques essay ... Tiny, irrelevant nitpick. Assuming that Jacques Mattheij is using the French pronounciation of his first name, the possessive version of Jacques is Jacques's. This is because in French the final letter of most words is silent, and in English the possessive form of spoken nouns not ending in an audible "s" is rendered in text as <singular>'s. Phoenetically: zhahk -> zhahks Not: zhahks -> zhahks. Regards, another Jacques.
- DanielBMarkham 14y agoDang, I'm surrounded by Jacqueses! (Jacuqi?) Thank you. I changed it to the Americanized form of possessive for words ending in s (pronounced or not) I think this could go either way, but I screwed it up no matter which choice an author might take.
- jacques_chester 14y agoWell in all fairness, outside of La Francophonie, "Jacques" is not a common name. And for English speakers it's just chock full of exciting traps. My favourite is putting 'c' and 'q' next to each other. In French that's a single sound; in English it says "new syllable, please! edit: > Jacqueses! (Jacuqi?) Jacqueses would be closest (-ii is a Latin pluralisation, Jacques comes from Jacob which is Hebrew). There's an impedance mismatch here: English stores plurality in the word, French stores it in the sentence.
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoWould a good translation of La Francophonie be "the French-speaking world"?
- jacques_chester 14y agoIt'd be clearer, but much less fun to put it that way :D
- Gmo 14y agoI do think he is from Dutch origin though (Because he talked in the past about one of his experience with QNX in the Netherlands)
- jacques_chester 14y agoI was under the impression he was Belgian.
- AznHisoka 14y ago"Startups are not about the data. A dozen companies did what Dropbox did, but there was only one Dropbox. Everybody did search, but there is only one Google, and so forth." Maybe I'm missing something, but DropBox was just a very well-implemented GUI for backing up files - there was no "special sauce data". As for Google, one could argue that their data (or their index) was one of their competitive advantages. They started crawling pages back in 1998. They basically have a 15 year head start over any new competitors that want to enter the field today. And their index is vastly superior to Bing's/Yahoo's. So I would disagree that startups are not about the data. For a lot of them, without the data, they'd just be a fancy, useless CRUD GUI.