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Justin and Jason discuss their experiences at MicroConf and the Rock Rock Hotel, Justin’s new focus on being focused, the Atlantic’s article about Justin’s Yelp nightmare, how Light Table raised $200k and Brydge raised 500k via Kickstarter, why Justin believes Kickstarter is the future of seed funding and should be called “kickstrapping“, why Jason and Guyon are probably going to kill their HackerEvents project, how some kid built a motion tracking gun-turret system, how Edwardo Saverin and Derek Sivers are renouncing their U.S. citizenships, the development of Colby’s Star Stream project, why Justin thinks Appignite should be open-sourced using a WordPress-like business model, Kevin’s Rose’s likely net worth, how the UK is going to station missiles on a residential roof for the Olympics, how the CIA’s MKUltra project likely created the Unabomber, the Pentagon’s claim that they have no photo evidence of Bin Laden’s death and the treasure hunter who says he’s located Bin Laden’s body, Richard Stallan’s Facebook notes and Jason’s memory system project, how Fringe has been renewed for a fifth and final season, playing with CircuitLab, Jason’s idea for a Facebook game that uses the game design of Scrabble but applied to electronics and why future interviews will most likely be conducted by either Justin or Jason alone instead of both of them at the same time.
I love you guys but Jason’s idea of MemoryHole should not be done as it would be a waste of your valuable time IMO.
This is just one of the similar services already out there:
http://pinboard.in/
Quick bookmarking with notes (desc)
Email bookmarking
API
Page download and archiving (for an extra cost)
Tags
3rd party iOS apps
Option to make bookmarks private.
10 bucks. (one time fee)
Run by a cool solo developer as well.
Back to Any-Fu!
(I should add, I do get the whole “do as an academic” thing and I did hear Justin (rightfully) state that you should not give up if there are competitors… but…… 10 bucks. do you really want to spend months on this (it will be months) for 10 bucks a lifetime sale?)
There are other fish in the sea.
Thanks for the MicroConf recap. Pool party sounded great.
Justin’s comments on focus and actionable tasks resonated with us. We set weekly achievable tasks. We find not setting any tasks or setting unachievable/big tasks usually means you achieve nothing.
We wanted to know your views on strategic portfolio analysis. You guys manage multiple projects. Have you ever looked at growth share matrix or similar approach to determining your focus? Eg if you sold or closed down pluggio, and gave 100% to any fu would you be in a better or worse position?
On lean methodology Jason should get Appignite out. Using the hacker news app as an example would mean your time is not wasted. Also think the hacker news events has more legs than you think, just consider the niche and USP.
Liked Any Hoy advice on starting a business on pain point, not idea.
Congrats to Colby. Future astronaut in the making?
Kick starter is a serious option. Now you don’t even need a tangible offer. You don’t give up equity. Kick strapping already being used. Was doubtful in the beginning but gaining popularity. Kick starter takes time and effort, but so does any funding.
The baseball reference is called Steve Blass Disease and was recently featured on a this American life podcast.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Blass
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/462/transcript
Good episode!
+1 for memory hole.
Found ever note too complicated.
Current workaround is buffer (sorry Justin) and twitter. Because buffer integrates into phone and browser, you can just buffer a website with the necessary tweet. Then you just review your tweets to recap on past entries. Essentially your tweet stream is your memory hole.
Regards the Lanyrd/HackerEvents – you should have Simon Willison & Natalie Downes on the show to tell the Lanyrd & their story. They’ve both got speaking experience and are entertaining, and it’d be great to hear some more British accents on the show. They’re active on Twitter as @simonw and @natbat.
My personal take is HackerEvents could be useful as a curated aggregator as much as a service you have to sign up for direct. This would make it a useful discovery tool, and could use Lanyrd as one of it’s sources so easily building on the effort of people adding events there.
“How much is Automattic worth”? – $300-500 million approx, http://www.quora.com/Whats-a-ballpark-valuation-for-Automattic-or-Wordpress-currently?redirected_qid=396381
I will also voice my opinion that generate code client-side that will eventually run server-side in a protected environment is not a good idea.
Technically cool, fun thought project, etc. etc… but a lot like leaning over with a sign saying “Kick me in the butthole eventually” on your rear. I forgot the last show I posted my entire argument against it, but it was around the issue of validating the uploaded code when you cannot trust the client generating it.
Disclaimer: Just my 2 cents, carry on. Opinions are like ___ and all that good stuff.
+1 for Memory Hole
Jason, I was thinking about that tree guy right before you brought it up. Haha. I believe he was taking a core sample when the drill bit got lodged in the trunk. So he cut the tree down to get the expensive bit back. I feel sorry for that guy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_%28tree%29
@David Walz – Yep, that’s right. Good memory! 😉
For all your bookmarking needs check out Diigo, their tagline? Collect and Highlight, Then Remember:
http://www.diigo.com/
One thing that I thought it was interesting was the mention of the “oldest” living organism, the tree that was 4,000 years old before it was cut down, if the tree was only 4,000 years old where do we get the 65m years calculated for fossils? I’m sure I could do some googling but I wanted to get your point of view.
All this is for Jason, about Memory hole:
It’s a nice little idea, but don’t bother. You’re already developing AnyFu, which has much more legs, and AppIgnite. I understand the idea of having an app to show what AppIgnite can help people create, but other than that, this is a waste of focus. If you make it, you’ve got to market it, and that is going to suck away time better spent on either marketing AnyFu or getting enough of AppIgnite finished that you can release it to a widespread beta, or in to the market.
Given that you already have a lot of consulting work on, and you have one project that’s almost ready to go – AnyFu, and another project that you should be finishing – AppIgnite (which sounds a hell of a lot cooler than Memory Hole) what the hell are you thinking of starting another project that will be very cheap and pushing on that?
I think you’ve lapsed in to a developer way of thinking about the project. You’re thinking it’s a very short term project you and Guyon can hack on. That’s fine as a project to refresh your brains and give you some motivation on AppIgnite, like going to a hack day. You’re not taking in to account the marketing side of pushing it beyond the first dozen or so users you’d get from TechZing listeners. Unless you give it a good push, it’ll die, or sit there with a few dozen or so users and you’ll be stuck maintaining it and making sure it’s up. That sounds like a big time sink when you’ve already got better projects that are further along.
With Memory Hole you’re in the same market as Evernote and it’s clones, and you’re very close to people who could hack something against Delicious or Diigo to get a similar product. So you’re going to have to market it strongly to get traction. With AnyFu, you have competition, but it’s all at the low end of the market and you’re targeting the high end, that’s going to make the marketing much easier, and the members will help do the marketing for you too.
Ack, you do what you want, but it beats me why you’re not completing your much more interesting projects and thinking about entering a market with something that’d be very easy to copy.
Regarding Memory Hole – Anki does largely the same thing
http://ankiweb.net/
@Paul Silver – Fair enough. I might just build something simple for myself since I need a better way of organizing and remembering the things I want to remember and nothing I’ve found works the way I want. This is really more of a “scratch my own itch” project than a “million dollar venture” concept. But your point is well taken.
@Steve French – Yeah, I’ve actually seen Anki before and I’ve played with a handful of similar spaced-learning apps, but none of them work the way I need them to. I’ve also attempted to use Evernote and Pinboard and Instapaper and while they all solve pieces of the puzzle, I have something a little different in mind that’s actually quite simple. While I may release it for “show and tell” purposes, but mostly this is just something I want for myself because I’m drowning in information overload, yet I can’t seem to remember the information that I should be able to remember.
@Helmut Granda – Diigo looks kind of cool and actually seems quite similar to EverNote. The problem for me is that it has a lot of features that I don’t care about like sticky notes and group collaboration, but lacks the key features that I want like spaced learning via email. But for most everyone else I’m sure it would prove quite adequate.
Here’s some quick info on how to date a fossil – just in case you come across any. 😉
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geology/carbon-142.htm
For more on carbon dating, check out the wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating
The part of the Memory Hole which helps you remember things is actually very interesting for me. I was thinking for some time now about a system which could help me… not remember things, but get into a state that relates to that thing. For example a couple of shows back, you mentioned a website redesign that involved going through a lot of photos, clips, etc. to find some style and trigger some creative thinking. On my side, after listening to an episode of TZ, I feel like I want to create something / finish project I’m working on. Or after browsing HN I think about new solutions.
The problem is that all of those take a considerable amount of time. TZ is 1hour+ long even if J&J talk quickly 😉 Do we really need an experience that long to influence our moods? Is there any effect similar to spaced-learning for errrr…. experience-recall? For example if I kept my version of facebook notes that were made when I felt like searching for more information, could I get back to that research mood by getting some random old and recent facts from the list and post it to myself at 19:00 when my mind is trying to decide between doing something useful or watching House? That’s pure speculation from my side of course. The idea of keeping some distilled information and spaced-learning got me thinking though. You can find many people talking on the internet about connecting feelings to some gesture, so that you can recall it when needed by repeating the physical action – provided you train it long enough to make that connection permanent… I’m not sure if it’s based on something proven, or just tabloid science.
Did anyone else consider something like that? I think that with some self-discipline it should be fairly easy to create a personal map of connections like “this paragraph made me consider many what-ifs”, “this paragraph made me feel it’s important to finish something”, etc.
Jasons-infinite-hole.com
For Colby, take a look at Snap Circuits. It is like Lego for circuits.
@Gordon Oppenheimer – Good suggestion! Actually, Colby received the Snap Rover this past Christmas and uses it all the time. It’s definitely cool, but I wonder how much he really understands the circuits. I think I might sit down with him and ask him what he thinks is going on.