Curious to see where they move check-in and location integrations. I've noticed they've been using my foursquare data to show me "Which place do you like better?" in the sidebar. They could do a lot more recommending of places like restaurants, bars, stores, and tie in deals.
As described in https://www.facebook.com/about/location, you will soon be able to "check-in" by attaching a location/venue and tagging the people you are with to any status update, whether it is text or a photo or a video - and you can now do it from your computer, rather than just from your smart phone.
I saw that much, but I'd love to see a write-up on their implementation. We primarily use Munin with a couple of custom plugins. It's fine for the sysadmin side, but we were thinking of pushing some app data stats to a customer facing interface. Tools like GeckoBoard look much better than Munin graphs.
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This is a great breakdown, thanks. Now can you explain why so often I receive an email on the iPhone and one of two things happens:
1. I'm not in MobileMail.app, get a notification that an email arrives, but when I enter the app, nothing is there. When I manually hit the refresh mail button, the new message downloads and appears.
2. If I'm in MobileMail.app a new email arrives and I see it up top for a few seconds, and instantly it disappears. Again, I have to tap refresh to re-download the message.
1. I'm not in MobileMail.app, get a notification that an email arrives, but when I enter the app, nothing is there. When I manually hit the refresh mail button, the new message downloads and appears.
Your iPhone is connected to a push server; the server sends your phone a few bytes that indicate a new message is available to be downloaded, but it does not begin downloading the message itself until you enter MobileMail.app. (Messages.app is different since your carrier pushes messages in their entirety).
Come on man. What does this have to do with the article? In any case, I have had no such problems with my iphones, so I'd say you either got a faulty unit or maybe it's a service provider issue.
I think it's somewhat relevant since the article discusses incoming mail handling in MobileMail.app. And obviously it's not a hardware issue or 'faulty unit' as you say. It's a well documented issue.
What does this (potentially rare [0]) bug have to do with the article? Why should the author of the article be able to know the reason for this bug? Why are you asking that question here?
How does Hipmunk make money? Commissions on flights are extremely, extremely low. That's why sites like Kayak, Orbitz, etc. are plastered with ads - they make the majority of their money through advertising and upselling.
I know these guys are smart, so I just hope it's not one of these cases where a couple of people think that some products are not well done but that they know how to do it right and clean, to realize later that the reason other sites are like this (plastered with ads for example) is because, in the long-term, there is no other way.
For example, AirBnB came out to solve a problem with short-term rentals, with real people and real reviews from other real people. In my experience, the reality is that most of the offers are actually the same professionals you find in regular rental sites, with sometimes the same unclear and deceptive rates, and without many reviews from real people. (YMMV) When I realized that, I felt that they started out with an idealistic goal that couldn't be really fulfilled. Hoping the same thing wouldn't happen with HipMunk.
They received VC funding of $1mm. So that will buy those 3+ [1] developers some time.
According to an Oct 2010 article by TechCrunch [2] "Orbitz pays Hipmunk the standard rate of $3 per flight sold". Hopefully they did some renegotiations recently or have some other contract in place that generates Hipmunk more income.
I thought I remember reading somewhere that Hipmunk was pulling in close to $1mm in affiliate revenues from Orbitz, but I can't find the source to back it up. Otherwise, perhaps that's just how much in sales they're generating to Orbitz.
Kayak makes around half their revenue from referrals and the other half from advertising. There's no reason Hipmunk couldn't settle for less revenue per search.
They have fixed costs (independent from the number of tickets bought) in the form of payments for search results to ITA plus whatever company overhead (maintenance, salaries, etc).
Whether Hipmunk can afford improvements in user experience while earning thinner margins than the competition is not entirely obvious to me.
Hipmunk will grow up living on whatever profit margins they end up being able to generate. Kayak at this point could not learn to live on significantly less.
That dumpy looking building to you is actually pretty nice looking on the outside and inside in person. It's also the third largest building by square footage in Manhattan, the main carrier hotel in the city for providers like Realty Trust, Equinix, Telx and home to a ton of high profile companies like Nike, Deutsch, Armani, Spotify among others.
To clarify - time it took to complete the challenge was never factored into the application process. We simply pulled this data because we thought it would make for an interesting metric to display in the post.
The real question is, did it pay off? Did going exclusively to TC generate the traffic and buzz you were looking for? Would love to hear more about the results.
So PadPressed has somewhere close to 200 customers total. Not a ton in the grand scheme of things, but for an alpha version we're really happy.
I know I sit and preach multiple customer acquisition methods and distribution, but honest truth is, we haven't done any of that over the past 90 days except for the TC coverage. Our shit has been GHETTO. Literally, I left spelling mistakes, unoptimized funnels, analytics,etc. just to see at the worst case scenario how we'd do.
We launched, got the TC coverage, had an influx of customer support (supporting your startup is so overlooked) from customers, and then a trickle down effect of press. Some say the TC bump doesn't do much, but in our case it paid off. We're doing a real release, the new design is breathtaking, and planning real distribution channels/partnerships.
