Build stuff. Talk about it. Good things will happen. Seems like this mantra works! Last week my little entrepreneur pitching app "Startup Deck" caught a tiny press wave after Colin Hayhurst & James Cunnigham's iPG made it big first on HN & then on techcrunch. I was in the middle of a hackathon so I didn't really follow up on the discussions.
Then something awesome happened: out of the blue Pranay contacted me & asked to port it to Android. "Hi Francis, I am a hobbyist android developer, was reading a post on techcrunch about YC interviews and stumbled upon your app Startup Deck, I would like to port that on Android."
Without further ado, I present: Startup Deck for Android.
I've gone one step further & set up a github repository to share the set of questions. I'm in the middle of raising some money for a new project (Talk to Me!) & I'm more convinced than ever that forcing yourself to answer these questions is one of the best things you can do at the earliest stages of a startup. Now go forth & pitch! ;-)
Hi, I'm Francis, serial entrepreneur & co-creator of DidThis & now working on something new. You can follow me on:
I also publish a low-impact newsletter.
When I first decided to participate in the Advance Hackathon I didn't really have a project idea. Then last week I did something really stupid. I proposed the ExtractoSmackto project.
Now is the time to apologize for that move. I am sorry. The proposed project is stupid, lame & fucking boring. It's the kind of stuff I'm sure plenty of you peeps are writing at work. And you have come for a weekend of creative fun, right? So it's time to bin ExtractoSmackto. ( mv extractosmackto /dev/null ) There, done!
Enter: BookHack. Pretty ambitious. Let's turn all of the raw creation going on at the hackathon into a book, printed in 48 hours! Goal: Create a physical book to document the creative process of this hackathon.
Most of the time when we digital creators build something we accumulate a mass of by-products: github commits, wireframes, datamodels, documentation (haha!), whiteboard drawings, sketches. I love that shit. But most of the time we throw that away. Let's not do that this weekend, ok?
I believe every hackathon participant is not only a digital creator but an artist. Steve Jobs said "Real artists ship". I say: "Real artists sign" ... let's turn the hackathon into a physical book & sign it, all of us!
Think this is nuts? Think we're never going to be able to create & publish a book in 48 hours? That's an excellent reason to do it anyway! Here's to the crazy ones ...
Footnote: inspiration comes from @craigmod's Flipboard book. Read his essay! I also wrote a previous blog post about this kind of thing.
Theme of the night was "Hacker News meets Gruenderabend" which might explain the higher-than-usual headcount. Stefanie seemed mighty impressed when 47 hackers invaded Solution Space for the night.
Timoor Taufig kicked off the evening by giving away some of the secrets of how to raise money on crowdfunding platform Seedmatch. Definitely the kind of thing we like to see more of at HN Meetups: a detailed in-depth tale of how they raised nearly 100K in less than 5 days.
Sebastian Deutsch from 9elements pitched in with practical tips on how to improve your SEO. Even in a world ruled by Apps & Social Media SEO remains crucial for growing your business. Case in point: even a pure 'app' like WatchLater benefited greatly from SEO.
Impromptu talks are always a bit of a surprise & that's why we love & encourage 'em at HN Meetups. The 3D guy told a spirited tale about the weird world of open source hardware where the only way to make money seems to be to give away your blueprints. Esayas Gebremedhin attempted to explain how he took his iWish project from idea to product in Cologne.
Overall I feel like the startup world is picking up speed in and around Cologne. More people are showing up at meetups. More people are sharing their stories. I hope the HN Cologne Meetup can continue to be at the crossroads between technology and business. That, and beer ...
I first became interested in the phenomenon of artificial popstars when I shared the stage with Fumi Yamazaki at LeWeb '10. I had read Gibson's Idoru before but just written it off as sci-fi. Then about a year ago I had the good fortune to discuss a weird idea with a very bright futurist: what would it take to create a completely artificial "American Idol" show? Teams of CGI artists would compete with each other to see who could create the best artificial popstar. We concluded that this was very much doable with today's technology. So I'm not that surprised by Tupac's postmortem performance.
But now I realize we didn't take the idea of an artificial music show far enough. "An artificial popstar isn't cool, a popstar generated by AI, that's cool!" If you want to "Kill Hollywood / Big Content" it's not enough to have a crack team of artists meticulously create an illusion good enough to enthrall a crowd at Coachella. Tupac's performance was an amazing display of technology & craftsmanship by a movie FX company, showcasing all the things Hollywood excels at: using storytelling, casting & FX to create suspension of disbelief. But even at a comparatively cheap $100~$500K per performance it's still not a very scalable business & that's what we techies like to create, right?
Automation of suspension of disbelief, that's the game! Can we imagine AI that is good enough to create a feature-length movie or music performance from scratch? Or failing that, can we build AI-assisted editing tools that allow a single artist to create things that until now required a whole army of Hollywood craftsmen?
We're actually a whole lot closer to reaching this goal than most people suspect. A whole bunch of the required components actually already exist. There's a decent digital robot music composer (EMI). AI-assisted game level design is not unheard of. Sites like weavrs show that artificial persona creation is feasible. So how hard can it be to create AI that generates popsongs & artificial performers? Think about it as "American Idol" meets "Battle Bots". I'd watch that show!
Want to kill Hollywood? Start building tools that help artists to automate suspension of disbelief! Make it a scalable process.
Etsy is now worth over a quarter Billion dollars. Handmade items pop up on Pinterest all the time. Seems like "handmade" is back. My guess is this stems from a frustration with our fleeting digital world.
From travel planning to healthcare, education & anything, really, our default choice has become digital. We download movies, music, books & newspapers. Seemingly overnight everything has become digital. For many, the internet has become the homepage to their lives.
But I guess a lot of people feel there's something missing. There's nothing real about what we consume. No brand to flaunt. Nothing tangible we can put on display in our homes.
Maybe for us creators this has become even more clear. Previous generations had their books in print. Their movies on celluloid. Their paintings on canvas. All we can show for our efforts is a shiny 57x57 app icon.
And even this is a pretty new thing. Software used to be tangible too. It came in cardboard boxes. On disks you could hold in your hand. Software got 'shipped'. Most of the time it came with a manual the size of a phonebook. When I buy something in an AppStore nowadays it really feels as if I bought nothing.
No wonder then that we hark back to the days when you could still produce something tangible. And it seems like creators have started to take action. Facebook now has an analog research lab. One of the flipboard creators self-published a gorgeous book about the process of creating the app. There's beauty in what we create online but sometimes that beauty is best expressed in tangible form.
I now make it a habit of keeping an open sketchbook next to my computer when I'm coding. Not that I'm a great draftsman or anything but having a scrap of paper nearby comes in handy when you need to write down some pseudocode or sketch an interface. I used to discard these random scraps of paper but having them bound in a notebook comes with a benefit: it becomes a sort of external memory of your work.
A few days ago I was leafing through my last year of notes, doodles & sketches when I was reminded of a sad realization. I guess all digital creators struggle with this. Much of what we produce will ultimately be lost. Lost through obsolescence. Lost in the glut of information we live in. Lost because we simply don't know how to read a particular stream of bits anymore.
There's a good chance that 5 years from now this silly little notebook will be all that's left of the four-odd iphone apps that I helped create in the last year or so. It'll be the only artifact left documenting the agony, decisions, sweat & tears that went into building these apps.
Much of what we do is ephemeral. It's all in our heads and that's what makes programming such a kick. Dreaming it up. Constructing things out of nothing. Shuffling bits until that dream becomes reality. Most digital creators will agree that it's this process that makes our craft so interesting.
Yes this very process tends to get lost again and again. Don't we all hate to write documentation? Sure, there's a git commit here. A Balsamiq mockup there. A Basecamp discussion. Some emails. Some build scripts & some code. But we rarely make a concerted effort to document & preserve the thought process that went into building an app.
We're result-oriented craftsmen. Who really takes the time to do a proper post-mortem of a project? Most of the time we get bored with the end-result even before we're finished & then we're off to build the next shiny thing!
I want to do a better job at preserving the creative process. That's why I put all assets for my last project in a folder called "The Process". It's the only one on my desktop. Every day it stares me in the face. I hope to turn that into something tangible soon. Preferably something hand-made. Maybe an infograph. Maybe a poster. Maybe a (very thin) book.
What are you doing to preserve your creative process?
When I discovered Instagram 2 years ago I was immediately hooked even though as a techie I totally grokked the concerns brought up against it: Why throw away all those precious raw pixels just to apply a filter & make it a bit easier to share over slow networks? I'm not sure that is what makes it worth 1 billion but I'll try to explain Instagram for non-believers.
Just like the iPad was not for the techie crowd, Instagram was never meant for traditional shutterbugs. You know the kind: carrying the latest model Nikon SLR, a bag full of lenses & a strobe or two. Instead, it was made for lomo-afficionados. Remember that craze from the 90's? Lomography was about taking a crappy soviet camera, sticking the cheapest analog film you could find in it & reveling in the weird off-color distorted prints that'd come back a few days later from the lab.
Sounds familiar? Yep, Instagram brought a lomo-like approach to photography to the iphone & to the masses. Focus on the process, not the result. Take your camera everywhere you go. Use it any time. Don't worry about any rules. Don't think. It's ok to use cheap tricks to make pics more interesting. Just create. Damn the quality. Damn the cheap lenses & film. Translated to the digital age: damn the heavy compression, damn the crappy filters, 600px is just fine!
If picking crappy filters is what it takes to turn on the creative bit in people's brains & make them share slightly more interesting pics, that's fine with me! For non-believers: Instagram made the process of taking pictures fun again so people ended up sharing more pics.
And now we come to the crux: Instagram made sharing pics fun again. Sure, there were plenty of photo-sharing sites before Instagram, but in many ways they were over-engineered. In it's tour Flickr describes itself as "the best online management and sharing application in the world". Who wants to add yet another thing to 'manage' to their lives? Who cares if the pic is improperly tagged or has no geolocation info, most people just want to send it to their friends.
Think about it this way: Flickr was about building the perfect album, Instagram was about taking out that oh-so-imperfect album out of the drawer & showing it to people. For non-believers: Instagram removed features to make sharing pics simple again.
I'm launching a little experiment today. It's an iPhone app called OneSec.me. It allows you to make videos like this. Thank you Cesar for being so awesome & inspiring!
With the OneSec video app you can share one (& only ONE!) moment of your life everyday. The app then stitches these moments together in one long video capturing your best experiences. I firmly believe in "less is more" & "curation is creation". This app is an extension of that line of thought.
The app is still very rough. An experiment to see if this kind of thing will catch on. Right now, I'm full-on in hypothesis-testing mode. 2 weeks ago we submitted to YC with an idea which had one hypothesis confirmed & another one for which we are still collecting data.
But after submitting to YC I had one tiny problem: I knew I'd have no reliable internet connection over the Easter period so I switched from Web to offline iOS development. That's how OneSec happened.
My guess is this will appeal to the self-tracking / lifelapsing crowd, so please spread the word! The app is almost ready for a TestFlight & I'm looking for beta-testers. Email me
I believe we're in the middle of discovering a 'pecking order' of startups based on the prevalence of the social behaviors they appeal to. So far I think we can safely say that Generic Social App (Facebook) > Photo Social App (Instagram) > Video Social App (Winner to be determined).
How do I know? A while back I did a fun little experiment on my Facebook feed. I wanted to figure out how frequently people posted about stuff they did on Facebook. After all, I was doing a startup called DidThis & it seemed like a useful thing to do. So I manually categorized the last few hundred status updates & counted occurrences in each category. Besides finding out that no one really posts about things they do (ouch!) I found a few other interesting things.
First, most people don't really post their own content, they primarily re-share. Second, there's a clear pecking order in the kinds of things they share or re-share: pictures before videos before links. Third, the traditional status update is not about what people do but about how they experience things. Fifth, sharing pics is far, far ahead of everything else combined.
No wonder then that Instagram gets handsomely rewarded. They built on top of one of the strongest pre-existing social behaviors, sharing pics. Right at the top of the pecking order. Think about it like this: sharing pics around the coffee table is something your great-grandmother already did. She probably even got them retouched or hand-colored.
Ask yourself: is your social startup appealing to a pre-existing social behavior? Is it something that your great-grandmother used to do? If not, I worry. Because you'll have a whole lot of explaining to do before your user groks your product. It's damn easy to bypass the explaining & just build on top of pre-existing behavior. If you can do this for something all the way at the top of the pecking order, you may end up winning the internet like Instagram did!
I guess it's too late now but I was one of those users who would have gladly paid for Instagram. At one point I would even have paid for Facebook. I sure as hell would pay for Gmail right now. But there's a condition attached: stop abusing my freakin' data & give me some privacy! Oh, and in the case of Instagram: don't sell out & throw your early userbase to the lions. I hate it when startups treat their earliest users to a 'grow & flip'.
Let's do some funky math. How much revenue would you need to clone services like Facebook, Instagram & Twitter as SaaS operations? Here we go:
Facebook should have about 1 billion users when it goes for IPO at a 100B$ valuation sometime in 2012. (Aside: did you notice that billion dollars almost spells like BS?) Instagram just sold 30 million users for 1B$. This gives us 1B$ / 0.03Bu = 33$ per user for Instagram and 100B$ / 1Bu = 100$ per user for Facebook.
That's over the lifetime of the product. Let's be generous here & say that we'll use these services for only two years before we move on to something new & shiny. Seems to be about the lifespan of an average Apple product, works for me. That's 4.16$ / month for Facebook, let's make it a fiver. For Instagram that makes 1.375$ / month, let's call it an even 2$. Throw in 3$ for twitter & another fiver for the Google suite.
We're now paying 15$ / month for a slightly more privacy-aware and abuse-free social experience. Let me go check my wallet. Yep, I can afford that & I'm sure plenty of you can as well. "Free as in freedom" doesn't seem to work for social. The only thing we ever get is "Free as in beer". And in that case I'd rather just pay, thank you. So why can't we live in a world of user-funded social services?
Blame it on network effects & lock-in. The calculations above are BS because they're based on growth numbers that cannot be achieved with SaaS / paid services. Social is a winner-takes-all world where growing your userbase sustainably is akin' to suicide in slow-motion. You simply die before you reach the point where you can make a nice big 'exit' on your SaaS business. The fast way to riches is the good old grow & flip.
But still, one can dream. Maybe the time is right to clone some of these social services as SaaS businesses & scoop up the disgruntled users after each 'flip'. I heard about some bros in Germany. They're supposed to be pretty good at this kind of thing. How hard can it be?
So, you're in it for the long run & not just for the 'flip'? Fancy building a solid Instagram clone? I'll be your first paying customer. 5$ a month. It won't give you a big exit but it'll be one hell of a lifestyle business.
My previous post, Writing Counts, & the look of this blog are pretty big give-aways of the the importance I attach to writing. I'm a decent writer but you gotta keep challenging yourself & the best challenges are often the really scary ones. And what could possibly be more scary to a writer than this: "Can you explain what you do without words"?
I'm working on a new online product. Not quite ready for launch but I'm submitting to YC. Again. To stir things up a bit I decided to try to capture what it feels like to use this new product without using words & without showing it.
Here goes, I put it on Youtube. Watch it here ... I think it does a decent job of capturing what it feels like to use my app. You be the judge of it.
Can you explain what you do without words?
Just a little over a year ago it became clear to me that after years of building digital products for other people I wanted to start for myself. Time to light out, quit my job & start working full-time on a startup. That was the easy part.
What followed was the ride of a lifetime. We got into Seedcamp. We built & launched a product. Twice! We pivoted on the product but our vision of the "internet of actions" always remained strong. Maybe that's why we got an invitation to the YC interview. In the process we gathered some really passionate fans & met awesome people. I think I learned more in the last year than in the previous 10 years combined. Wow!
But at least for me, there was one thing that took me far too long to understand: the meaning of the word serial in serial entrepreneur. Because at heart, that's what I am. I just can't sit still. Gotta start something new.
Earlier this year I realized I was slowly burning out on DidThis, so at least for me, it was time to get out. DidThis continues the quest with a great team, but from now on I'll only be part of DidThis in an advising role.
There's good stuff coming up, both from myself and from DidThis. Stay tuned!
I'm sitting here in my quiet little studio licking the wounds of yet another failed online venture. I'm writing code and prepping myself for launching a new one. But for some reason I'm in a contemplative mood. I'm trying to figure out the single best work-related thing that happened to me last year. I'm lurking on my friends' twitter streams and keep coming back to SXSW '11 and how something that happened over there made my year. "What made your year?" is a question worth asking yourself from time to time. So let me explain why freakin' SXSW made my year in 2011.
You see, my best startup memories of 2011 are not tied up to the supposed 'successes'. Sure, the YC Interview was great, I learned a lot & am submitting again in the YCS12 batch. Getting into Seedcamp was enlightening. Launching and getting mentioned by Robert Scoble was cool.
Yet the single best thing I did professionally last year was joining up with a friend to build a stupid doomed little app called "FreeFreeBeer" at SXSW11. It was a location-based beer-finding app. (Don't ask ...)
The reason that stupid little app is so important to me is because it's the first thing I built for the sheer creative joy of building something. You see, at the time I felt SXSW Interactive was a place with a lot of bravado & talk but surprisingly little creativity. It got a bit frustrating. That's why we set out to build & launch something, anything in the 3 days we had left of SXSW.
There was not a whole lot of plotting and scheming involved. No meetings. No corporate bullshit or startup politics. Just "Let's build a free beer app" & going for it.
My decision to quit my job & work full-time on my own projects was grounded in that experience of raw creation at SXSW. I tasted the freedom & responsibility of building my own thing. I overcame the fear of showing it to people and saying "I made this". Once you've done that, even with only modest success, there is no going back to the corporate world.
I told you I was in a contemplative mood at the beginning of this post. Let's see if some of that rubs off on you, so let me ask: "What made your year?" & "What made you quit corporate slavery to join the startup world?"
Last night the 5th Hacker News Cologne Meetup took place at Solution Space. The informal mission of these Meetups: connect hackers, business people & angels in and around Cologne.
To my knowledge this is the second Hacker News meetup in Germany, after Munich. So why a HN meetup in Cologne & not Berlin? Maybe it's the Pirate thing? Maybe it's something in the beer? We had people coming over from all around Cologne, all the way up to Maastricht. So maybe it's really just because Cologne is central & easily accessible? That, and the awesome crowd these Meetups seem to attract. Plenty of hackers in & around Cologne. Once again Hacker News proved to be an awesome quality filter for startup people.
We started off with a simple show & tell session, where everyone in the room just explained the projects they were working on. One of those sessions about hardware hacking turned into an impromptu talk & set the tone for the evening: founders spontaneously getting up & showing off the products they are working on. We had the Dropwall team who want to change social networking for colleges. We had a guy who wants to disrupt startup conferences. There were at least two people in the room applying to YC this batch & at least one guy violently opposed to the idea of YC as a gatekeeper to SV. We even had an exclusive movie screening.
In or around Cologne? Like beer? Like Hacker News? Let's meet up again next month! Join the Meetup group & keep reading HN to find out when the next one will happen.
I'm talking about YC submission season. One week to go, peeps! You already submitted, right? No? You should have! I mean it says right at the top of the form: "Groups that submit early have a significant advantage because we have more time to read their applications."
Besides that silly tactical reason to submit early here's a real one: the YC form is a pretty good reality check for your idea. It simply asks all the right questions. (Shameless plug: if you want more questions download my iPhone app Startup Deck)
If you can give simple, concise, plain, down-to-earth answers to those questions you're well on your way to getting invited & what's more important: you're forcing yourself to write down your idea.
Because one nice side-effect of putting your idea in writing is that it's a lot harder to bullshit on paper than in-real-life. In a real-life conversation it's very tempting to cover up your weaknesses with an excess of enthusiasm. This is especially true at startup events: frantic talk about 'killing it' seems to be the norm ... until everyone gets shitfaced at 3am & the truth emerges.
Enthusiasm is great, but you're not doing yourself a favor if you don't force yourself to do regular reality checks. For me, the YC form has become such a bi-annual brainstorming and reality-checking tool. Simple as that. Got me invited to the YC interview once & even if I blow this submission I'll at least learn from it.
So. Let's all submit early this season & give the alumni sifting through it all a break.
If you catch me in a bad mood, chances are that I'm just having a shitty creative day. The single thing that gets me pissed off the most is finishing a day & not being able to say I created something.
I've been a developer for most of my life, so creating something has traditionally meant checking in some code into a repo. There's something satisfying about wrapping up the day, writing a commit message & knowing that you created this thing out of thin air. It's magic!
And as you take on less code-to-the-metal, more visionary 'product' roles there's a kick to be had out of creating a great user experience. I have no trouble at all finding my creative spark in product development. And when all goes well, it's magic, once again!
But not all days are like that, some are filled with tedium & nonsense & no creativity at all. Too many of those in a row & I know I have to change something. Ya know, the whole Steve Jobs look-into-a-mirror thing.
This is where the danger lurks. This is why so many developers seem to be so prone to ADD. This is the moment when 'side-projects' are born & promising ideas are abandoned. Unsatisfied creative urge is the unspoken destroyer of startups.
Sure, we'll say things like "They died because of lack of focus" or "They just stopped iterating" but in reality it often simply means that the people inside the startup just stopped getting their daily creative high & as a result of that moved on to something else.
I have a simple cure: writing. Putting pen to paper satisfies my creative urges & it's something I can do from anywhere. Hell, I'm doing it right now because the internet is down & the bit of code I'm working can't be tested without the intertubes.
One of the things I regret about the past year or so is that I stopped writing prose in favor of writing code. When you're the only techie in a startup this is an easy trap to fall into. The reasoning goes like this: "I'm the one most apt to writing code, so I'll focus exclusively on that & forget about blogging for now."
Even as a developer, writing counts! Crafting prose is very much like crafting code: an analytical & creative process with a clear yet elusive end product. Good coders are good writers. Good product people are good writers.
Writing skill has become a bit of a limus test for judging startup people for me. If you can't explain your product in writing in a concise & straightforward way you need to go back to the drawing board. It means something is wrong with your idea or you yourself don't understand it well enough.
Writing is important in online business because you'll be doing so much of it: writing copy for your landing pages, help pages, email messages, etc ... Your first contact with your customers will probably be in writing. Even if it's just a tweet. So you better make sure you know how to write well.
And writing well starts with writing ... a lot ... regularly ... in public. Writing solves two problems for me: creative frustration & improving my writing. So excuse me while I hit my head against the wall for not seeing the correlation between my creative frustration and lack of writing. Writing counts, you dummy!
Right now, the holy grail of startup entrepreneurship seems to be user engagement at all cost. Unlike a few years ago it's no longer enough to sell plain-old eyeballs to advertisers, you need to sell engaged eyeballs. And you better be sure that the eyeballs you're hawking are part of the happy clickin' likin' tweetin' commentin' crowd.
A quick refresher. The social startup deal is the following: get people to create content, then get them to interact with each other around it. Chop up your userbase in segments according to behavior. Harvest the now nicely targeted eyeballs & sell them to the highest bidder. Profit!
That's why software built by startups is more about social engineering than software engineering. That's why we end up with borderline psychopathic behavior from the likes of Zynga. And that's why we'll just do about anything short of selling our mother into mturk-style slavery in order to keep user engagement up. There's money to be made in the engaged eyeballs business & that's why you're working on cat pictures.
But here's the problem: people are inherently lazy. Creating good content is hard. And only a tiny fraction of any userbase are creators in the first place. So we've done everything to reduce friction in the content creation process. We went from journalism to blogging to microblogging. We went for minimalistic design to make content creation as simple as possible. Hell, we even redefined 'content' to include things like checkins & automatic sensor output.
And the scheme worked! People are creating 'content' like never before. Everyone I talk to seems to be drowning in a sea of Tweets, Facebook updates & other user-generated content. Yet I feel something is missing. Something simple. Something elusive. A thing called quality.
I'm not too snobbish to admit there is a lot of great content out there. But damn it's hard to filter out the good stuff in my social feeds. (Your definition of 'good stuff' may vary of course & that's part of the issue here.)
I feel like the social web now is a lot like the oldskool web before Google. You know there's good stuff out there but there's no practical way to find it. The closest we've come is the Facebook 'like' button so 'friends' can recommend things to each other. But that doesn't work since most people are upvoting crap like batshit crazy squirrels on speed collecting acorns. You just can't trust your 'friends' anymore, you know ...
What I want is a place where I can go to meet my friends & where I know they will only recommend me the very best things they know about. I want a place without meta, without 'filler' content, without the garbage social startups have engineered us to produce in their perennial quest for user engagement. I want a place where everyone follows a simple gentleman's agreement:
This one's been doing the rounds on the interwebs & I think it's worth pointing to the original discussion. It's sad to think that even though the better people & the better startups can still be found in Silicon Valley, all of that talent is wasted because of greedy dinosaurs & stupid politicians. Here's a copy of the To-Do list for US-based sysadmins:
Get corporate membership with EFF. Identify all applications with user-generated content. Move all associated domains to a non-US based registrar. Migrate DNS, web serving and other critical services to non-US based servers. Migrate yourself to a non-US controlled country.
I'm sorry for US sites and users. Your government is hell-bent on turning the internet into a read-only device like TV, easily regulated and controlled. The population will be required to sit quietly and keep their eyes glued on the screen so they don't miss the ads, with any infringers deemed terrorists and pedophiles and thus deserving of summary punishment by DHS squads.
Hopefully the internet will route around the damaged segment, and the rest of us can continue to enjoy the amazing interactivity it has brought our society.
So yesterday I gave a short little talk at the HN meetup in Cologne. One of the things I mentioned was the list of questions I like to use to think about startup opportunities. And of course I mentioned my little iPhone version of that list. Which I made free for the evening as a little gesture of goodwill.
Seems people liked it so much that I got more downloads than there were members in the audience. So I'm keeping it free. You can download it from the iTunes Store
Pirate Gone To Heaven*: if man is 5 | then the devil is 6 | then god is 7 | and freedom is 8 | so set your DNS to 8.8.8.8 | if you want to bypass censorship
Plenty of people know about www.depiraatbaai.be to bypass internet censorship. But there's another way: set your DNS server to the 4 holy numbers: 8.8.8.8. Works in Belgium to access The Pirate Bay & I guess it should work for you Dutchies too, now that your government has joined the dark side.
(*) my excuses to the Pixies
I'm writing this for a very specific person in a very specific place. Let's say he's in 'neutral country' in the SOPA war. So R, if you're reading this: I think the robots.txt freedom.txt idea is a very powerful one & I need your help to promote it. You're in the right place at the right time. Spread this idea!
This week's ACTA shenanigans show that the war is never over. That's why I urge every techie in control of a domain to create their own robots.txt freedom.txt file to protest internet censorship. It's personal, low-profile & will act as a reminder to keep fighting.
This is how you do it:
Let me start this top-list with a gratuitous quote, that kind of shit seems to be in vogue with the socialites these days. "Who questions much, shall learn much, and retain much" ~ Francis BACON. Ha! Did you see that interwebs? I sneaked in a bacon reference!
While prepping ourselves for YC & Seedcamp interviews we were constantly asking ourselves a bunch of questions about DidThis. That list turned into an app. You should download it now & contribute to the keep-francis-off-the-streets fund.
Or you can just continue reading below. Yadda yadda yadda. Enough intro BS, here are the questions, bookmark, share & discuss 'em:
What are you going to do?
What are the obstacles in your path?
What are people forced to do now that your product does not exist yet?
What are the barriers of entry you'll have to break down to enter this market?
Who needs what you are making?
What exactly is it that you are building?
How do you know your users need what you are building?
How will your users find you?
Who needs what you're making?
How do you know your users need it? What are your users doing now that you don't exist yet?
What, exactly, makes you different from existing options?
Why isn't someone already doing this?
What obstacles will you face and how will you overcome them?
How will customers and/or users find out about you?
What resistance will users have to trying you?
How will you overcome your users' resistance?
What are the key things about your field that outsiders don't understand?
What part of your project are you going to build first?
Who is going to be your first paying customer?
If your startup succeeds, what additional areas might you be able to expand into?
Why did you choose this idea?
What have you learned so far from working on your idea?
Six months from now, what's going to be your biggest problem?
Where do new users come from?
What is your traffic trend like?
What's the conversion rate?
What makes new users try you?
Why do the reluctant users hold back?
What are the top things users want?
What has surprised you about user behavior?
What is it that you do? What exactly are you building? What are you going to do?
How do you know the user want it?
Who are your users?
Who are your target users?
How are you going to scale?
What’s unique about you?
What are the insights you got from your users?
What usage from your users surprised you?
What's the magic?
What's the barrier to entry?
How do you make money?
What's the benefit for the user?
Which subset of your users is most desperately waiting for the solution you are building?
What has surprised you about user behavior?
Who is going to start using you the soonest? 3 months from now? 6 months from now?
How do you know your users need what you are building?
Why did you pick this specific idea? What are your motivations?
Why are you the right team to do this?
Why is the world better because what you built exists!
What’s your background in this problem space?
Where’s the rocket science in this?
What are people forced to do now that your product does not exist yet?
How do you know that you are building the right product?
What are the top things users want?
Why doesn’t it already exist?
What part of your project are you going to build first? What are you going to build next?
What’s the biggest missing feature? The one thing customers keep asking for?
How do you know users have the problem you're solving?
How will you know when your product goes viral?
Which features are you launching with? Which ones will you build later?
Are you going to internationalize?
What keeps you awake at night
How are you going to explain the app to first-time users?
If you had to delete one feature, which one would be it?
Why doesn’t it already exist?
Why will people want this?
Which subset of your users is most desperately waiting for the solution you are building?
How do we know users have the problem we're solving?
What do your users say about your product
What are the top things users want?
Why do the reluctant users hold back?
How much time to visitors spend on your site / app / product?
What are the top things users want?
How many people downloaded / installed / used your product?
What's the biggest driver of traffic?
What actually does a typical user do with your product?
What is your traffic trend like? What’s your growth rate like?
What's the conversion rate?
How committed are you?
What are your problems? What is screwed up? What is going wrong?
What can you do in person to make sure the product will be successful?
Is this something you want to spend your next 5 years working on? Why?
Are you open to changing your idea?
Is this the biggest problem you could find?
Why aren't your engineers working on something bigger instead of this?
What are your technical costs?
Why is what you are building technically demanding?
What are the keywords people are going to type into Google to find you?
How are you going to solve the chicken & egg problem?
Where does your traffic come from? How will people find you?
What are you going to do to increase the virality of your product?
What resistance will users have to trying you?
How big do you think you can get?
What are the criteria you will base your decision to launch on?
How are you going to scale this to become a massive company?
What are the obstacles in your path?
Why are people quitting your app? Why are people giving up?
Six months from now, what's going to be your biggest problem?
What do you do to encourage your people to keep using it?
What is going to make this thing stay in the top of people’s heads?
How are you going to scale this?
What will make your product stand out in the marketplace?
Is this something that people are going to want to do over and over again?
How hard is it to convince people to use your product?
Where are your customers? How will they find you?
How are you going to sell it to your customers?
What’s the customer lifetime value?
What’s the customer acquisition cost?
Have you asked people to pay real money?
How you will sell it to customers?
Who is going to be your first paying customer?
If your startup succeeds, what additional areas might you be able to expand into?
What’s the customer lifetime value?
What’s the customer acquisition cost?
How are youg going to scale this?
How much are you going to charge your users?
What are you charging money for?
How much are your users spending on similar solutions to yours?
Have you asked people to pay real money?
Which specific things are you doing better than your competition?
What things does your app have that competitors don’t?
What are you offering that no one else can replicate?
What is you app, service or website NOT like?
What is the size of your market?
How are you going to break down the barriers of entry?
What are the key things about your field that outsiders don't understand?
What's the revenue of your closest competitor? What is his traffic?
Why isn't someone already doing this?
What are people using now instead of your solution?
How are you going to make your users switch from competing products to yours?
Why are you going to succeed?
I feel very strongly about internet censorship. I think the SOPA protests don't go nearly far enough and should last long after January 18th. But we can't keep blacking out the internet forever, can we? Kinda defeats the purpose.
So I have a deliciously nerdy solution to let he enemy know that we'll keep watching them & to remind ourselves to keep up our guards. Here's how you can make a statement: copy the paragraph below & save it as freedom.txt in the root of your servers.
Hi, my name is INSERT-NAME, I am the creator of this website and I oppose internet censorship. I created this freedom.txt file to protest recent attempts at censoring the internet. Censorship is never a legitimate solution because the cure is always worse than the illness. We, the internet, will not tolerate censorship. Do not mess with us. A closed internet is a tool of oppression. An open internet is a weapon of mass creation. Pick your sides. Adapt this text and create your very own freedom.txt on your websites.
I really truly badly suck at promoting things on Reddit, HN & co so I'll need your help spreading this. Create your own freedom.txt and do that social thang!
Every coder creative type will get stuck. In a slump. And as Dr. Seuss said: "When your in a slump you're not in for much fun, un-slumping yourself is not easily done".
I've seen coders deal with this in some pretty damn funny ways. One of the weirder ones was the guy who'd get up from his workstation & go stand in a corner of the room. He'd just blankly stare at the wall. Punishing himself like a little boy for writing bad code.
Conventional wisdom tells you to make a switch when you're stuck. Go do something else & your brain will snap right back into it & subconsciously come up with a solution.
Unfortunately making a switch to clear the head often translates into a tab-switch. After all, infinite entertainment is only a tab away on teh intertubes. And, admit it, most of the time a promise of "I'll get right back to it, pinky swear" ends in your browser's tab bar looking like the aftermath of a cluster-bombing campaign directed by a hyperactive baboon on speed.
Conventional wisdom said 'go do something else'. Not go do a million other things all at the same time. You see, just like cluster ammo, open tabs remain dangerous long after the battle is over & the crazed baboon has gone home. Close your unused tabs right now or you'll end up tripping over them sometime in the future anyway. It's ok, I'll wait. You can do it now.
Still here? OK. So next time we're stuck, let's do something different, shall we? We will close the browser. We will shut down the computer. For good measure we'll also shuck away the cell phone. Our next part of 'Mission Unslump' will be to find a real book. It roughly looks like two thin iPads fused together by a stack of paper. You'll recognize it when you see it.
Seriously, next time you're stuck: resist the temptation to switch tabs. Don't let your mind dance to the beat of teh interwebs. Shut down your machine. Pick up a book. Start reading. Slowly. Deliberately. Now get the fuck out of here!
The other day I was playing around with recommender systems. Nothing fancy, just some googling around. Trying to figure out if there's anything happening in this space. Just doing research, minding my own business.
Then something creepy happened. I noticed this cute asian girl following me around wherever I went. She was in my Gmail sidebar, popped up on the Google SERPS & on YouTube. Then she hit the Q&A sites: "find your asian bride" ... on StackOverflow of all places ...
Thing is, I don't need an asian bride, I already have one. Thank you very much. You see, my significant other is from Shanghai so our household computers end up Googling quite a bit of asianess. Somehow this got lodged in Google's brain. Combine this with a clueless AdSense advertiser and the power of retargeting & you end up with this whole bag of silly.
The creepy thing is not that Google makes mistakes, but that these recommender systems are starting to drive everything. The news you read. The webpages Google selects for you. The things you buy. The food you eat. Everything cherry-picked for you through robotic or social recommendations. Your life, personalized, for your maximum comfort!
We've never had more access to information than now. But the paradox is that the very tools we created to help us sort through this mess end up decreasing the diversity of information we consume. It's perfectly possible to live your life without having to confront a dissenting opinion. This makes us weak.
What I took away from this for the product I'm developing is that I'm going to add a healthy dose of /dev/random to my recommendations. I'm also going to stop calling that specific feed 'recommended'. Ultimately, if you're trying to build a good feed, the goal is to make 'interesting' things float to the top. And often 'interesting' and 'personalized' do not overlap.
So thank god for false positives! And asian brides! Next time you build a recommender, don't overdo it. Make sure you introduce a kind act of randomness. Your users will thank you.
So Samsung used the same actress as Apple to create a tablet commercial? I guess I'll have to watch both commercials in sequence now. Yeah, yeah ... same girl ... giggly goes my OSS-loving brain. Neat. +1 for you, Samsung.
Wait a minute ... do you see what I see? For the product peeps in the audience: I think this is a prime example of good vs. bad demo style. At first sight, both ads seem pretty similar. Go ahead. Watch 'em. Don't forget to turn off the sound for maximum effect.
Exhibit One: Samsung
Exhibit Two: Apple
Yep, same face. Yep, both trying to sell a fun-encrusted slab of silicon & glass. Yep, both playing to our base instincts. Tonight's pitch seems to be: buy our slab of silicon and your daughter will love you again. Both do a decent job in the storytelling department. Cute.
Now, let's take a look at execution. After all, that's what us startup geeks keep telling matters, right? Right? Which one is the better ad? Which one tells me most about the actual product? The key thing to remember here is: Show, don't tell
Apple shows me I can use the camera from the unlock screen. I can do that funky pinch-to-zoom thingy with my fingers. I can use the hardware button to take a picture. Swipety-swipe. Funky red-eye reduction. Tweetaleet is built right in. Contrast this with Samsung's ad: it does games, it does newspapers, it does video. Dammit, don't you just hate it when the forces of evil hire the better ad guy?
This reminds me of how many startups seem to approach their product demo. They will tell a great story of how this product is going to change the world instead of simply showing how it can improve my life right now.
Memo to self: next time I do a product demo, repeat this mantra: "Show, don't tell"
Hi, my name is Francis Dierick and I own this website. I no longer wish to stay Anonymous in the fight against internet censorship and those who want to close down our internet.
An open internet is more important than the interests of nation states. Governments have failed us because of ignorance & corruption. They must be fought.
An open internet is more important than corporations. They have failed us because of their natural greed. They must be changed.
An open internet is more important than security, copyright infringement, terrorism or child pornography. We will not be fooled by the strategies of fear employed by those who wish to censor us.
A closed internet is a tool of oppression. An open internet is a weapon of mass creation. Pick your sides. Create your own freedom.txt on your websites.
Last saturday I went to Startup Camp Switzerland in Basel and decided on the spur of the moment that I wanted to lead a panel. There I was, right in the middle of a room with the assembled Swiss internet intelligentsia. Brains everywhere.
And the zombie in me was thinking: “Oh, how I’d love to pick all those tasty smart brains.” All I needed now was an excuse. And “Dirty Startup Tricks” it was: “What can you do to run your business faster, simpler, cheaper?”.
You see, startups move at a different speed. If you’re moonlighting a startup you can’t do things the same way you’d do them at your BigCo day job. There are some fancy memes describing this approach. Agile. Customer Development. Lean Startups. Business models vs. Business plans. Whatever.
Here are 8 random dirty startup tricks I learned at SCS11:
It’s ok to hire cheap at first. One of the fundamental startup skills is being able to focus on your core competencies and delegating everything else. But that can be hard when you are cash-strapped. One solution is to hire a VPA. We’re doing it at Quantter for research tasks, data input, simple image processing and “human functional testing”. One step up is hiring students / interns. You can get lucky with the last approach: it seemed to work out well for at least one startup in the room. But always make sure that you never oursource core tasks.
Buy Facebook Fans. This is stricly against the FB guidelines and can get you banned, but I’m mentioning it anyway. You read the “dirty” startup tricks at the entrance, right? One person in the room pulled this off & the going rate seems to be 100$ for 100K Swiss fans.
Buy and Adword on someone’s name. Want to meet someone? Maybe an investor? Or a CEO? Buy a Google Ad on his name so that when he Googles himself he’ll notice you!
Being a little spammy is ok. The topic of SPAM, opt-in vs. opt-out came up several times in the room. What surprised me most about the discussion was a new attitude towards spam. The vibe I got was that being a little spammy is ok (about 50/50 split when asked to raise hands). Doing opt-out seemed to be an accepted practice.
Check Darkpatterns.org Dirty tricks can backfire. There’s a community of people out there checking websites for dirty sales / usability tricks. So if you think about doing something that is slightly ‘edgy’, check out darkpatterns to avoid having the internet community go all 4chan on you.
Build FREE throw-away services. We had one audience member suggesting building simple little tools (e.g. a website uptime checker) that preferably send out notifications so that you can then later insert a marketing message for your paid product.
Double-sided signup incentives. Referral/Affiliate programs are quite common. One trick to take the “trafficking your friends” edge out of this approach is to give something to both the new signup and the referrer. Dropbox does this. Don’t do this with cash. Offer a digital product for signup / referral.
Being a little sneaky is ok. There’s a reason why plenty of entrepreneurs have a naughty/sneaky secret: the mindset of pranksters is a great mindset to have. Wozniak & Jobs started out building blue boxes. Y Combinator explicitly asks for something “naughty” you’ve done on the signup form. The pranks at MIT are the stuff of legend.
I came to this session with only 1 “Dirty Trick” to offer but I learned a lot more. So I guess that makes me a little sneaky, which I am totally ok with. I revealed my dirty trick “Joker” card all the way at the end of the session. Those who were there know what it was, the others will have to wait for the blog post. Remember: Stay Hungry, Stay Naughty!
P.S.: I'm copying some old posts from my previous blogs here when I feel they are either insightful or personally significant. This one is to remind myself to stay a little naughty ;-)
A few days ago I tweeted that Quantter was blocked in China and I was ‘flying over’ to investigate the issue. I’m writing this from Shanghai inbetween New Year festivities and I can confirm: not only www.quantter.com but also blog.quantter.com & tumblr.com are blocked, in addition to the usual suspects like Facebook & Twitter.
So what went wrong? My guess is that quantter is too closely affiliated witch that well-known chinese arch-enemy twitter. We use twitter for login & rely pretty heavily on the twitter API. The quantter domain probably just scores too high for the ‘twitter’ keyword and hence we have become an enemy of the state.
Whatever. Here’s how to bypass the Firewall in China. Every expat is doing it, so don’t worry. No one is coming for you. For the purists there’s always Tor, but I prefer the far simpler approach of using a VPN provider. Go to http://www.freedur.net (the domain is not blocked from within China) and signup for an account. It’s 14.95$ / month and they only accept Paypal. I used them when I was in China last time and their service is pretty good. I’m using the L2VPN option to surf the “real” web from my iPhone and iPad.
Being blocked in China is something that the mischievous little boy in me may appreciate, but it’s just plain bad for business. There’s a massive market for apps out here (seems like everyone I know in China has bought an iPhone in the last 6 months) and missing out on that is just a big mistake. Bringing Quantter to China may be pretty low on our list of priorities, but I’m going to make damn sure that the (warning! spoiler alert) soon-to-be-launched iPhone app will be in the Chinese AppStore.
China has by far the largest internet population (estimated at 500mio), about half of which are mobile users. Let’s say that this puts the iPhone app market at a conservative 200mio. Just too big of an opportunity to pass up on.
P.S.: I'm copying some old posts from my previous blogs here when I feel they are either insightful or personally significant. I kept this post because being censored sucks & seeing Western governments emulate China scares me shitless.
A few weeks ago I did a last-minute submission to the Ignite! competition at LeWeb. The prize is a chance to talk for 5 minutes in front of a 2000-strong assembly of digerati at the LeWeb conference. There’s a catch though: you’re not allowed to pitch your startup, so talking about Quantter was out of the question.
I submitted a pretty weird idea: let’s turn this 5 minutes in a fundraiser for charity:water & see how much money we can raise by talking about my cold water swimming efforts.
1 billion people don’t have access to clean water. Without clean water no health. And without health you can’t afford luxuries like education & innovation we technologists so often take for granted. I strongly believe that education & innovation can change the world for good. 20$ will give clean water to 1 person for 20 years. Each time you donate $20 to charity:water you directly change a life & plant a little seed that has the potential to grow into an education & a chance at prosperity.
Imagine my surprise last week when Geraldine Lemeur mailed me back to tell me my proposal was accepted. I freaked out & posted on HN because I am not a good public speaker. The response has been overwhelmingly positive & I thank you all for the great advice. I’m still scared shitless, but I’ve learned to enjoy the preparations & am actually looking forward to next week.
The fundraising pitch is pretty simple: “Donate to charity:water & get a chance to see your name in a swimming video like this one.”
If you like my effort, donate, retweet & reblog this: let’s try to raise as much money for charity:water as we can at #LeWeb! See you there!
P.S.: I'm copying some old posts from my previous blogs here when I feel they are either insightful or personally significant. Speaking at LeWeb was just awesome ;-)
I'm working on an exciting new project that isn't directly related to iPhone/iPad so I'll be toning down my posting on Fakepad a bit.
The AppStore has been good to me, especially after the NYT mention of Biblethumper. While I'll be maintaining my existing apps, I expect the new project to take up most of my nighttime coding sessions.
A new app is on the horizon, but right now that looks to be 2-3 months in the future. In the meantime I'll be writing a lot of Python infrastructure code. So expect me to get started writing about iPhone development again in a few weeks, but right now ... radio silence ...
P.S.: I'm copying some old posts from my previous blogs here when I feel they are either insightful or personally significant. I keep this one as a personal reminder of when exactly I started working on Quantter/DidThis
Mobile development is having a major “Dr. Strangelove” moment right now: we are learning to accept the fact that we can and will learn to live within the confines of Apple’s mad AppStore world. What makes “Dr. Stangelove” so compelling is that it describes a world which remains eerily coherent despite the madness of its foundations. Apple’s AppStore ecosystem is similar to the world depicted in “Dr. Strangelove” in both its madness and coherence. Let’s start with the madness.
To most developers, the AppStore world does not make a whole lot of sense. We know open systems are better, yet we jump at the first opportunity to play in Apple’s walled garden. We’re encouraging the users of our software to give up massive amounts of freedom for a mirage of convenience. We know as developers that handing over so much control to a single company is probably not a good idea. We know that by developing for the platform we’re fostering the creation of yet another monopolist.
Sounds familiar? Yep. In a previous post I described this behavior in terms of addiction but I was never quite satisfied with that writeup: it described the symptoms, not the causes of our illness. If we’re going to plead insanity to defend our actions, we should at least try to understand the roots our madness.
I firmly believe that the root of many of our tech society’s illnesses can be traced back to the network effects that seem to be ingrained in almost anything we do online. Network effects play a tremendous role in the growth of monopolies like Google (selling ads to the greatest network of eyeballs), Facebook (mining privacy for profit) and now Apple (marketing software as consumer instead of high-tech goods).
As developers and early adopters we hold great responsibility in influencing which services will become popular and which ones will wither away: by joining an early network we cause it to grow exponentially. So we’d better choose our networks wisely, but most of the time we don’t. We happily joined the Facebook gold-rush and now we are riding out this AppStore wave. Despite the fact that Facebook is probably a looming privacy nightmare and the AppStore’s approach of software distribution is probably encouraging users to give away more freedoms than is strictly needed.
In markets dominated by network effects there is often a point of no return & I believe we have reached this point with the iPhone AppStore. Even if as developers we’d like to live in a different, beautiful & more open world; network effects dictate that AppStore-like software distribution is here to stay.
Within the confines of the AppStore developer network, the unwritten internal rules make sense. Don’t do stuff that Apple won’t like (they pay your bills). Follow the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines (they exist to help your user). Follow the API rules (ditto). Obey the downward price pressure (it’s an artifact of the consumerist distribution model). Once you’re in, once the money starts flowing your way, it’s not that hard to justify the tradeoffs of developing for a closed network like the AppStore. Just look at those numbers:
120K: the number of iPads sold in the first day of pre-orders. 150K the number of applications available in the AppStore. 1 million: the number of pre-order sales Apple is likely to announce on April 3. 4.8 million: the number of iPads Apple is likely to sell in the first year. 50 million: the market for tablet-like devices Apple is expected to create by 2015. 1 billion: number of apps Apple already has sold for the iPhone.
Network effects & Apple’s understanding of consumer nature created this AppStore monster. The sheer size of it made us developers surrender. After all, we get to share a little in the benefits, so it’s not all that hard to justify & defend it’s existence. Once you’re in, it is a very coherent world indeed.
These days a lot of technological monopolies get created unwittingly by us developers: every few years we seem to be more than willing to join yet another gold-rush on closed platforms. Each time we do that we reinforce the network effects at play in favor of the fashionable platform of the day. Once that platform size gets big enough it reaches a point of no return due to network effects. Once a technology has reached this stage it doesn’t matter whether you refuse to join: if you will not, another dev will happily take your spot.
The growth & adoption of new technology is a gradual process: it literally creeps up on us & most of the time we adopt new tech before we fully understand the consequences. And that’s when I think of Dr. Strangelove: technology has a way of creeping up on us and creating a world of madness when we least expect it.
I like the iPad, but I don’t like the consequences for software development if the closed AppStore model gains more traction. There has to be a better way!
P.S.: I'm copying some old posts from my previous blogs here when I feel they are either insightful or personally significant. I'm keeping this one to remind myself to choose my technologies wisely.
When Steve jobs presented the iPad to the world now almost a month ago, it was a divisive event: there were those who ‘got it’ ( MuleDesign, Paul Buchheit, OhSnapSon ) and those who didn’t (Satoru Iwata, Gizmodo). The initial reception was mixed at best. In a few hours the “No Flash, No MultiTasking, Lame.” meme was going around the internet, reflecting the infamous “No wireless, Less space than a nomad, Lame.” moment of the 2001 iPod launch.
The traditional technology press was having a hard time. There were no impressive tech specs to quote. The device was hard to pigeonhole: was it a tablet, an oversized iTouch, a Kindle-killer? And why all the restrictions (no Flash, multitasking)? Lots of open questions.
While everyone was speculating on Twitter & trying to grasp the impact of this device, one clear trend emerged: those who actually held the device & used it in-real-life were raving about it. That is because the iPad is fundamentally a sensual device: you have to hold it & touch it to understand it. And that was exactly why so many tech reviewers didn’t get it: Apple’s infamous secrecy prevented 99.99% of pundits from getting a real feeling for the device. Even now, one month later, most developers haven’t been able to touch a real device.
P.S.: I'm copying some old posts from my previous blogs here when I feel they are either insightful or personally significant. I'm keeping this one to remind myself to keep the 'touch' in mind when building things.