Brands that people rave about but actually suck
BOSE (go with Sennheiser instead)
Black & Decker (go with DeWalt instead)
Beats by Dr.Dre (Sennheiser again)
FIJI water
Schwinn
Alienware from DELL
Greygoose Vodka (suggested alternative: Tito’s handmade vodka)
Lululemon
Monster cable
Maytag
Victoria’s secret
Gibson (Rickenbackers)
Source: reddit.com
Today knowledge is ubiquitous, constantly changing, growing exponentially… Today knowledge is free. It’s like air, it’s like water. It’s become a commodity… There’s no competitive advantage today in knowing more than the person next to you. The world doesn’t care what you know. What the world cares about is what you can do with what you know.
Source: giothegreat
About that 99 cents…
What’s the reason behind the $x.99 and $x.95 price tags?
The real reason for this was to force cashiers to open the cash drawer and give change, thereby making it harder for them to steal from the shop owner by simply pocketing the sale. It has persisted over time as there’s also a psychological benefit where $24.99 looks cheaper $25. Sales have increased by as much as 20% by making this one simple change.
An old discussion on .99 vs .00 pricing on 37 signals.
More discussion on Fogcreek.
Digital Fishing
Go fishing a unique and innovative physical-to-digital game for Yoobi, London’s first temakeria. A revolutionary use of QR codes has enabled people to ‘fish’ for free sushi in the weeks leading up to the restaurant launch.
Neatest use of QR codes yet. Great job by icoDesign.
Source: digitalgirlsclub
Would you rather serve a market or a boss?
Man in a complex society can have no choice but between adjusting himself to what to him must seem the blind forces of the social process and obeying the orders of a superior. So long as he knows only the hard discipline of the market, he may well think the direction by some other intelligent human brain preferable; but, when he tries it, he soon discovers that the former still leaves him at least some choice, while the latter leaves him none, and that it is better to have a choice between several unpleasant alternatives than being coerced into one.
Quoted from Individualism and Economic Order by F.A Hayek, via John D.Cook’s blog.
I, of course, have gone with the former.
When someone stumbles onto the same idea you had years ago…
Just saw hashify.me and realized it was basically the same service I built and been using since over a year ago. I call it ‘Wysp’ and it’s a simple notepad which stores the entire document in the URL. If you use Chrome, you can even use the ‘Add custom search engine’ feature in Chrome to enter your notebook data even before hitting the site like in this shot…
That’s a nifty use of the ‘Add custom search engine’ feature even if I do say so myself. Once you hit enter/return, the ‘Wysp’ loads up with what you had typed and you see this…
Wysp comes with a bunch of features I needed, like a clean design, auto-save, word and char counts etc. But the best feature is the one that I saw today in hashify.me - storing the entire document in the URL itself. So the text you see there can all be got back from its URL: http://dffrnt.com/snippets/snippet.html#What%20I%20type%20here%20will%20show%20up%20in%20my%20notebook.&fs-36px&fc-rgb(51, 51, 51)&sp-0
I’m storing extra style and font information also in the URL, so technically anyone, anywhere can get back all the data from the URL just by parsing it. But storing data in a URL has lots of other benefits:
- Compression: You can use bit.ly or other URL shorteners to compress the URL, and since all the data is in the URL, this means the data is compressed. Hashify.me uses this, kudos to them. But the one downside is that this system doesn’t scale very well. The more people use the service, the longer the bit.ly URL gets and the less efficient the compression becomes. You could switch to a different service or build one yourself from the ground up to account for this shortcoming… just seems a bit messy to me.
- You can store your data client-side: Want to save the document? No need for a ‘save’ button, simply click the ‘bookmark’ button. Since the ‘bookmark’ button saves the URL and since all your data is in the URL itself, bookmarking = saving the data. I’ve been doing this for over a year now…
Bookmarks are saved back to the cloud if you use a bookmarking service, I’m using Google Bookmarks which comes by default with Google Chrome and I can also search for my documents from the default bookmark manager. I can even search for the content ‘inside’ my Wysp documents as the bookmark manager searches both the bookmark title and the URL for the search keywords. Handy.- Versioning: Since the document is now a URL, and since ‘Wysp’ auto-saves, you can step backward and forward through every edit made to the document by simply using the back and forward button in the browser. I think this is simply the most useful feature of ‘Wysp’ - I just use it all the time while writing drafts and switch between edits to see how things are shaping up.
So, why didn’t I tell people about it? I did have a few beta testers but even after a year of using it I still don’t see a way to monetize it.
So, why am I posting about it now? Because hashify.me is public, and thus there is no sense in keeping my efforts to myself anymore - Wysp’s only plus point was that it was unique, but now that hashify.me is out, that plus point is negated and I am now free to talk about it.
The other thing why I’m writing this down is that it has happened many times before - someone else stumbles upon a idea and that becomes popular, but I had had the same idea over a year before but never posted it publicly. Like, my idea for ‘Single Input Logins’ that I posted about 2 years ago here went popular when someone else stumbled on the same idea just a few months back. Today’s hashify.me was the fifth such instance I know of, when someone has made popular an idea I had had first.
The first time I saw someone had built a business out of my idea was in 2007 when Modu brought to market my 2005 idea for a modular cellphone. I was shattered then, but over time I’ve learnt the lesson that ideas are 0.002BTC-a-dozen and that the true value of an idea is exposed only when brought to the market in a scalable and profitable way.
But… since I don’t have much else to talk about on this blog (besides Apple and Science), the next time someone stumbles on one of the 1,816 (and growing) ideas that I have stored away in one of my wysps, you can expect to see a post on that here, along with whatever efforts I had been making to bring that idea to market. It pisses me off when people claim ideas as their own while offering no proof, as well as making no effort to realizing their ideas prior - I’ll be damned if I made that mistake myself.
Or maybe I’ll just post my ideas on here anyway even if no one stumbles on to it, like how I did with Gyrotasking.
Why every PC manufacturer wishes they ‘lost’ like Apple
As makers of products that change the world and re-invent entire industries , Apple deserve their ‘loss’.
PageLeap - Google Chrome Extension W.I.P
PageLeap is an extension I made to scratch a personal itch and I use it heavily every day. I want to release it to the public, but the desire to add more features is so overwhelming that the extension has been on the back-burner for 6 months now, as I try to think up of what potential features users might want and how I should go about implementing them without adding bloat. Here’s PageLeap…
…a simple list of quick shortcuts to pages you visit everyday. I’ve finally decided to screw features and post it as it is next week. It’s better than never being able to release it at all, right?
Stalking Horse Bid
On October 22, 2007, technology company SCO asked a bankruptcy court to approve a deal whereby a purchaser would acquire “substantially all assets used by the Company in connection with its SCO UNIX Business and certain related claims in litigation.” The agreement included a “stalking horse” provision: If the purchaser, York Capital Management, were to be designated as a stalking horse in subsequent bidding for SCO’s assets, and if others outbid York, then SCO would have to pay York a $780,000 breakup fee and reimbursement of all expenses incurred by York up to $300,000. In this way, York would earn its expenses and $780,000 by acting as the stalking horse and preventing other bidders from making lowball offers.
If you lost faith in human creativity after spending a few minutes on YouTube, this should revive it.
Source: Wikipedia
Can these new payment services beat Paypal?
Recurly, Stripe, Chargify and 1000s more to come. Why will they succeed when Google Checkout, with all that Google-y muscle, hasn’t? Perhaps their ambition is to just carve out a niche for themselves instead of replacing Paypal as the dominant online payment solution. Now that makes sense.
Or perhaps they plan to be behind-the-scenes and do B2B (eg: power the Saas businesses) rather than handle B2C themselves (which requires oodles of user trust that comes from brand recognition).
