sskates

31 ms·

271.
by sskates 15y ago
Congrats to Matt, Sandy, and Ashu! Matt has been very generous in helping me navigate through the ups and downs of startups. He's been giving me startup advice and direction for the past year and a half (starting back when I had nothing) an
272.
by sskates 15y ago
None of Dropbox is new functionality that wasn't available before. Somehow they're a 4 billion dollar company.
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by sskates 15y ago
It's about 3%- http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/23/y-combinator-demo-day-the-u...
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by sskates 15y ago
I feel like it's worth it to remember people's names. I also don't think there's any evidence that indicates being better at remembering one thing makes you worse at remembering others. In fact it might even make you better, as you're sharp
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by sskates 15y ago
Dropbox had this problem actually, where certain versions of Windows would give them trouble. Luckily it wasn't hardware specific as well (AFAIK).
276.
by sskates 15y ago
I'll take being "Siri on Steroids".
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by sskates 15y ago
Why shouldn't Harvard take all the best students?
278.
by sskates 15y ago
You're missing the point. You are on Hacker News, you will probably care about such things. My mom doesn't care if you can't filter and sort on multiple columns. She cares if the thing is easy to use and portable, which the iPad wins hands
279.
by sskates 15y ago
People also regularly underestimate the amount of determination you need. It's not only that Pinterest itself was 2 years in the making, but the founders had created failed startups before that too. Ben Silbermann started with MightyQuiz in
280.
by sskates 15y ago
Zuckerberg was already a great programmer before Facebook, and had a number of successful projects under his belt. Facebook also took years to build, its growth was not anything like what Pinterest has been experiencing.
281.
by sskates 15y ago
It's not "just keep going and you will eventually make it". It's a question of continuing to learn and make progress towards your goal over a long period of time (in this case, how to build a successful startup). Malcolm Gladwell calls it "
282.
by sskates 15y ago
I'm curious, but why are so many people against sharing their location through the browser? You already give up your OS, browser version, and IP address (which can give a rough location) just by visiting the website. I understand if someone
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by sskates 15y ago
Yes, Dropbox is profitable. I believe their numbers are particularly high for a freemium model, more than 2%. They've said quite a bit that don't plan on getting acquired, all signs point to them going public.
284.
by sskates 15y ago
Wow that's really cool. Using your own product to solve your business' problem in true startup fashion.
285.
by sskates 15y ago
Somehow people manage to pay Dropbox hundreds of millions of dollars a year, in spite of their stingy-ness. The email version of Dropbox would almost certainly be a bigger market.
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by sskates 15y ago
Not yet.
287.
by sskates 15y ago
Thanks! Curtis definitely deserves more credit than I do. We haven't done iOS before and are aware of these kind of restrictions on SMS apps. We think we can come up with something that will get around them and offer just as good or almost
288.
by sskates 15y ago
We do use the built in speech recognition that's part of Android. We definitely want to do other languages (and luckily Google supports a lot of languages), but are focusing on English for the short term and will expand once we get that rig
289.
by sskates 15y ago
Glad you like it! We'll definitely move to email and chat once we get texting down perfectly. We still have a ways to go.
290.
by sskates 15y ago
Sorry, it's not the smoothest! We're still working on improving that part of the UI.
291.
by sskates 15y ago
Somehow it's one of these things that everyone does but nobody admits to. Any way we can make driving safer is a win.
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by sskates 15y ago
Sorry it's giving you so much trouble! We're using Google's default voice recognition engine. It does allow for different accents, but we haven't turned this ability on in the app. If it's getting names wrong, you can also try spelling the
293.
by sskates 15y ago
It's a shame that we get this reaction. Emergency workers, truck drivers, and couriers all use our app and find it really helpful because they have to spend all day driving and want a safe way to communicate. (My favorite is a group of patr
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by sskates 15y ago
Vlingo's interaction is mostly hands-free, but there are a lot of points where it really wants you to push a button or read the text on-screen. We've also found it's confusing for first time users who want to send text messages, while we've
295.
by sskates 15y ago
Somehow in spite of all the risk and PR campaigns, one third of drivers still choose to text and drive[1]. We're happy to play a small part in reducing the number of accidents by providing a safer alternative. [1] http://www.aaafoundation.
296.
by sskates 15y ago
We agree a large part of the advantage is not touching the phone at all. I disagree about voice commands though- if you put that app in the hands of someone who's never used it before, most people will give up before they successfully send
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by sskates 15y ago
It won't be able to popup behind the locked screen because of the security issues you mention, but you can still use the app through voice. The worst an attacker that got hold of your phone could do is use the app to send text messages and
298.
by sskates 15y ago
This is absolutely correct and I had forgotten about this huge advantage until you just mentioned it. We've been on a very aggressive release schedule, pushing major overhauls to the app every 2 weeks since we started in August. It definite
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by sskates 15y ago
All the credit for getting background listening working seamlessly goes to my cofounder Curtis. He's a beast. We already launch automatically on the phone docking with a car dock, and have other triggers you can specify like on Bluetooth co
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by sskates 15y ago
We did choose to start with Android because it has more powerful APIs. We don't want to cut out half of the smartphone market though, so we'll get once we're happy with Android we'll move onto iOS.

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