brothe2000

I am thrilled to see the term "Punctuated Equilibrium" used in regards to language evolution! Very interesting!

Excellent write up. What I find in a lot of these sort of Agile process stories is what comes before and after the process is almost more important.

Developers and companies in general are there to build new things and push out new features. But what I have found is that sometimes the backlog and feature requests cloud the ability to focus on changing the entire product or user experience.

There is a lot of "feature creep" in products these days where rather than refining the current product, more is added on to it to "enhance the user experience" or to provide "more productivity".

There should be at least one sprint per month or quarter that is devoted to removing backlog and feature / functionality from the product. Yes, removing features from the product.

Making this a normal process gets people used to the idea that it is ok to get rid of something and to be constantly looking at how to improve by removing things versus always adding.

If what you are building has a credibility and validity engine built into it (versus just crowdsourced upvoting), this could be a valuable tool for gamblers and fantasy sports fans.

What was interesting to me was that I thought this was where higher level players could share insights on the general sport strategy.

For example, I would love to know how football teams identify the "Mike" and how defenses and offenses are read for audibles.

I've heard people say pocket passers read defenses from the outside in and running quarterbacks read from the inside out.

If I was a defensive coordinator, it would be good to know what an expert does in each of those situations.

Its real tough to be a solo founder and you need somebody with different skill sets to augment your own and to keep you on track.

The various founder dating sites and events are a means to an end. A lot of it depends on your pitch and idea but it's good practice and networking never hurts.

I met one of my cofounders on Angellist.com and the other on CoFounderslab.com.

I had a decent wireframe of the site and how the database and interactions would work but the other cofounders helped to elevate the rough idea.

RoomPoll.com would not be possible without my cofounders.

Did you try Import.io?

mailbox had their signup that showed you where you were in line to get the app which was pretty cool because it ticked down every day and you could see the number of people behind you.

Gmail was pretty awesome too.

Leadpages is a great company and provides a ton of content and training on best practices.

Nice. Clean, staightforward, and will probably drive some money your way.

It will be a great lead into other services and requests from customers.

If their goal was brand awareness they achieved it as I had never heard of them until now.

That being said I want nothing to do with them.

Revenue is increasing but their cost of revenue is increasing while their earnings per share stays stagnant.

I actually like what Microsoft is doing to try to adapt to the new world but they are losing money on Xbox One (it appears Sony may win this round) and Surface is a great product but overpriced and costing Microsoft profit as well.

I wish they did more hardware as that division makes some really cool stuff but Microsoft is starting to fall on the Windows 8 debacle.

It's hard to buy a surface for $1000 when a comparable laptop is $300 (not as light or small but spec wise comparable)

In the case of the App Store, Apple is perhaps missing a lot of revenue opportunity due to the raise of the in app advertising platforms that have been built to generate revenue.

They take 30% on the sale through the store but if it's a free game with in-game advertisement, I don't think they get anything unless its the iAd platform, correct?

I think that each person is their own variance. So somebody might rate on a 1 - 10 scale at an average of 7 while others rate at an average of 9 so you have to apply context.

I wouldn't mediate between the two of them, I would simply display the facts and let those viewing the data make their own conclusions the same way that a 1 star rating on Amazon is viewed as less credible than a 2 or 3 star rating because it "seems" more realistic. People who say strong words like Hate and rate 1 star are probably rating a lot of things low.

Make sense?

McDonalds had to compete with coffee shops, places with Wifi, installed RedBox to get people to walk into the place, and the general move toward healthier foods and locally grown food. That's part of the reason they bought into Chipotle.

I think some times startups say "I know this is the law but it's outdated and let's see what happens..."

Sometimes it's bad: Aereo Sometimes it's controversial: Uber / Lyft

But for the most part I think people act and then find out after the fact they did something wrong or not in alignment with expectations.

For example, is Soylent worried about somebody dying? Probably but that didn't stop them from doing what they are doing.

True... I guess the point is that the claim that startups haven't disrupted corporations is true in bulk but when you pick each company it is easy to see an impact a startup has had in changing how they operate.

Flickr definitely contributed to Kodak failing as much as the market for digital cameras. Kodak actually had digital technology but failed to capitalize on it.

Borders may have bad management but so do startups that fail which maybe says startups need better management too? Seems like a common denominator versus differentiator?

Radio Shack closed a ton of stores and is still losing money. IBM stopped selling computers because Dell and others did it better and cheaper (Dell was a startup at one time...) and Microsoft keeps fighting for relevancy in software on all fronts.

But yeah, some of my comments weren't exactly on point. I just think that to say companies aren't disrupted is a broad paint stroke that the article didn't fully support.