I have a serious question: why do people get upset at bubbles? Is it jealousy that others are getting investment or flipping their companies where you perceive little value? I'm not asking to be a bitch - just curious cause i feel some of those emotions myself but I rationally know that they are counterproductive.
Shouldn't we be happy for our startup brethren? Does color's funding hurt you (or the industry?). I imagine all this froth is serving to make it easier for worthy people to get investment, raising developer salaries and other generally good things.
Recalling the .com bubble, when the bottom falls out there is a lot of collateral damage, and not just to the players involved. Those of us on the sidelines and not involved in the idea-investment-flip cycle will suffer when the industry inevitably implodes upon itself. Facebook's valuation, specifically, has a lot of echoes to the past.
I was too young to experience the job market post the first dot-com bubble but I would argue that if you're in a job that is going to suffer from the collapse of this current bubble, you're most likely currently benefiting from the bubble already. If not, the collateral damage should be relatively low. Would a 37signals, patio11's BCC really be affected by a crash of this current investment bubble? Probably not.
After a bubble bursts, the pendulum tends to swing the other way, towards extreme thrift, caution, and near-paranoia - it affects spending as well as investment. The over-correction can hurt everyone.
> I was too young to experience the job market post the first dot-com bubble but I would argue that if you're in a job that is going to suffer from the collapse of this current bubble, you're most likely currently benefiting from the bubble already.
A good point, but with respect to the .com bubble, Internet commerce's crash also affected the entire economy as well as ancillary companies in the IT sector. So I'm not sure that I necessarily agree; I work for a hosting company, and all of these bubble companies need hosting. You can see where A meets B, there.
While I agree with most other replies to you, I'll provide an alternative point.
Bubbles sicken me because they truly bring out the worst of the investor types, the ones who will throw money at anything regardless of its use case.
This is $41 fucking million dollars we're talking about here, and it's spent on a god damned mobile application to connect people with others in random arbitrary situations. People do not have a difficult time doing this, an application on a phone isn't going to make a difference. We're all human at the end of the day.
Now stop and think about what that $41 million could do in this world. This is nothing more than a bunch of rich kids circle jerking one another in what's a disgusting take on business principles in general. $41 million could create several businesses that could further create more jobs for the US economy; $41 million could be fucking used to help Japan out of a bind.
Instead, it's being used to buy a domain name for $350,000. It's being used to build another mobile application that isn't even that technically impressive. It's sickening, and I would never consider working for a company like that. As an engineer, I'd very much question those who'd consider it.
I have a serious question: why do people
get upset at bubbles?
Because bubbles are unsustainable. Almost anyone who gets into a bubble, even at the beginning, will end up losing in the end.
But more importantly, a bubble doesn't keep going. It eventually pops and then the entire industry suffers. Why would you want the industry to suffer? You make money in it, I assume.
It isn't just the industry, it is the entire economy that suffers. The rush of funds to the industry drives demands for service industries and their jobs, among other things. When the bubble bursts, the industry certainly takes a hit, but so does everything that built up to support the industry.
Bubbles create large wealth when on the upside but wealth creation at a rapid extend creates a high volatility in markets until a point where people can no longer follow their current way of life. By then the bottom of the pyramid falls and the economy collapse. Your clients are to one bringing the business and is wealth is not properly give away they cannot afford them anymore and your the one suffering and the end. Read Henry Ford's theory.
> I have a serious question: why do people get upset at bubbles?
Bubbles collapse, generally with painful consequences for the entire industry. Great business ideas that would've gotten funding during a non-bubble often can't find funding after a bubble.
Because overinvestment in a specific sector of the economy necessarily results in underinvestment in other sectors of the economy.
In the case where investment capital flows to ultimately unproductive enterprises like photo sharing, and away from productive enterprises like efficient batteries, cancer drugs, etc, humanity suffers in the long term.
Now it's possible that the proliferation of photo sharing services is increasing the efficiency of photo sharing that people were doing previously, thus freeing up time to engage in other productive pursuits, so it's not necessarily a bad thing to sink investment capital into ventures that appear unproductive in and of themselves.
But I would highly suspect that this is not the case for the current bubble. It's quite likely that photo sharing apps are actually generating demand for photo sharing activity, thus being a net drain on actual economically productive activity.
I really think we should build the community first using one of the many tools out there before we start investing time into building something custom. Perhaps we can even use something like basecamp/campfire or talkerapp (I'm willing to pay for the initial costs personally).
The community is the important part but I think something as simple as a Google Group would be enough to prove that it's a community that will be worth being part of. Just my 2c.
Also agree with grace. A simpler way to create and engage community (Google Groups, Posterous Groups, ...) may be enough for the early alpha stage.
About the software, I'd usually go with the "use existing software" approach. However, with the specs outlined (game mechanics and so on) there's also a big risk on ending creating a big patch "hacking" the existing software.
A third option in between would be to use some kind of framework as Django (or Ruby) with as much already done apps for the functionality as possible. For example, a comparison page for forum appz solutions on Django: http://djangopackages.com/grids/g/forums/
I think the alpha stage option is a good point. Get things moving asap with Google/Posterous Groups, and then turn some attention to a custom site including the desired features.
This person's lack of cryptography knowledge is pretty pathetic - but if even committed terrorists still think security by obscurity is the way to go, what chance do we have with the general public?
The articles mentioned that they knew about AES, PGP, etc but did not trust it because "non-believers" used/developed these protocols.
Instead, they developed their own encoding mechanism in the hopes that it would evade detection or decryption by possible backdoors in existing algorithms.
In many cases, security by obscurity is a viable tactic, especially in combination with other tactics.
For whatever it's worth to you, most of the pre-DES-era encryption techniques betray themselves to basic statistical analysis. It's hard to hide that you're using puzzle book crypto, even if it produces what appears at first glance to be binary gibberish.
Like I said, there is a security-by-obscurity game to be played with this stuff: tamper with a known algorithm (even if you don't trust it, it's not like you can tell the difference between AES and TEA just by looking at ciphertexts).
I wrote this comment only to make it clear that the stats required to figure out if something is "really" encrypted are trivial. They take significantly less than a second for a Ruby program to perform. You'd just always run them.
Sorry I wasn't more explicit (or if you already realized that).
It was more than just security-by-obscurity; these guys refused to use an existing package that would solve their issues... the "mujahaddin secrets" package (ostensibly jihadist in origin) that did implement AES cyphers.
Guess what, if you're so purist you can't trust experts in your own field because they use "contaminated knowledge", then you better be a true genius, or you're not going to be very effective.
It sure is convenient that the people who have such bad judgement that they want to plant bombs on airliners also have such bad judgement that they roll their own crypto.
And I don't think it's a coincidence. It really boils down to them not being able to figure out which people (especially, which "authorities") to trust.
Also seems childish of al3x to forget that out of amy hoy and thomas fuchs' work came scriptaculous which has probably inspired startup founders wowed by Ajax only less than Ruby on Rails itself. al3x probably leveraged that work early on at Twitter itself.
If lifestyle businesses like 37signals and freckle are producing the kind of tools like RoR and scriptaculous, more power to them!
I agree. Instead of (or in addition to) creating a website like this on tumblr, you could showcase your design skills by creating a better designed and more visually appealing website. Works better to get you a new job than a simple footnote saying "I'm available for hire..."
I find it hard to believe that someone could go from not knowing anything about coding to creating stuff quickly that works well enough to be used. Isn't that what we're all trying to do? Maybe this Alicia was just lean programming her way to the top?
Launchrock is a little too meta for me... it probably will never make any money but hey, it probably didn't really cost any money to make.
I guess that's one problem with people not working for big companies when they graduate college and instead just going to their startup, they don't know the kinds of problems real people are having. Now let me go back to working on my iPhone game.
Would love to hear more about your experience in this industry and where you think you fit with the bigger players out there (televox, smilereminder etc.)
The short version is that, if everything goes according to plan, they are Big Consultingware Project Management and I am Basecamp. (Or, to put it another way, I'm not competing with them, I'm competing with non-consumption of services.)
Shouldn't we be happy for our startup brethren? Does color's funding hurt you (or the industry?). I imagine all this froth is serving to make it easier for worthy people to get investment, raising developer salaries and other generally good things.
Would appreciate serious feedback.