Yesterday, Michael Pope posted an article titled Technical Cofounders Are a Myth. In it he tried to make the case that software engineers don’t finish what they start, and that you’re better off paying a technical person than partnering with one. His frustrations are valid and not uncommon, but his conclusions are way off base for a lot of reasons.
The GPL effectively rendered ArtPal a pro bono project. I was unable to make it a businessworthy endeavor while abiding by the full terms of the license. However while selling ArtPal was not a sustainable business in and of itself, it generated sufficient leads to be well worth my time.
If you’re going to talk about the virtues of failure or any other counterintuitive concept, please follow the Brad Feld strategy of reason, and avoid the Umair Haque strategy of shocking contrarianism.
Writing for people is about cleanliness and brevity. Writing for Google requires clutter and redundancy. Startups should write for their users because companies need to prove their value before they market it. Any startup that’s writing for Google is getting ahead of itself.
I recently replaced my work and home keyboards with the Kinesis Advantage. These are my collected thoughts on it after two full months of daily use.
The trust that Google accrued when it was a smaller company opened doors for many unforeseen consumer products. Every time Facebook uses data in a way that makes its users uncomfortable, it closes those doors a little further.
What I want to see is a mutual recognition of self-interest and codependence between Twitter and its third party developers, and a better understanding of what both sides need to do to make the most of that relationship.
It’s not that Apple doesn’t want “some other company” to establish a higher level language standard; it’s that Apple doesn’t want any company to do that — including Apple. The reasoning is the same: if Apple were to allow developers to write iPhone apps using MacRuby (i.e. Ruby 1.9), there would be nothing to stop those apps from being moved to other mobile platforms that also support Ruby.
Whether you believe Twitter brought 30.5%, 32% or 45% of didtheypasshealthcarereform.com’s traffic, the conclusion remains the same: not only did Twitter win the battle of relative numbers; Twitter drove more total traffic to the site than Facebook did.
There is a widely held belief that you can tell how interesting a Twitter user is by the number of followers that he or she has. This is a flawed line of thinking.
