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I agree with you on the down payment but from a slightly different POV. There are cases where even saving up to 20% to avoid PMI doesn't also help - particularly states like NJ where you could own a "modest" $300k house but still be out $10k + per year in property taxes.

In order to get mortgage + taxes down to a reasonably "affordable" amount (approx. 40% of take home spent on housing) you need to be looking at up to 40% down to offset the tax expense.

Despite ebay's initial "Svpply is not going away" claim, this took about a year longer than I expected.

Fancy.com is my alternative of choice.

Great tool!

I'm coming at things from a non-coder perspective and found it easy to use, and easy to export the data I collected into a usable format.

For my own enjoyment, I like to track and analyze Kickstarter project statistics. Options up until now have been either labor intensive (manually entering data into spreadsheets) or tech heavy (JSON queries, KickScraper, etc. pull too much data and my lack of coding expertise prevents me from paring it down/making it useful quickly and automagically) as Kickstarter lacks a public API. Sure, it is possible to access their internal API or I could use KickScraper, but did I mention the thing about how I dont, as many of you say, "code"?

What I do understand is auto-updating.CSV files, and that's what I can get from Kimono. Looking forward to continued testing/messing about with Kimono!

If your product is for kids, you may decide there's no point in trying to get "tech press" coverage anyway.

If you want users, go after mom bloggers. They are the ones that will buy your product if it's good.

You may be surprised about how many people are involved in art/paintings, at last in the "contemporary art" era. Damien Hurst and others collaborate with (or employ) teams of artists to complete their work. Related reading: "The $12 million Stuffed Shark" by Don Thompson.

Sidenote aside, I tend to be bearish on Assembly too, but I'd also love for them to prove us wrong.

edit: grammatical things.

Without actually caring, I do agree.

The choice to go into greater detail regarding appearances, as opposed to making some sort of sweeping statement about "hipsters" or "Brooklyn-folk", came across as mostly unnecessary.

The author's underlying point, that crowdfunding is not the godsend that many think it to be, was lost in a poorly chosen post title and a poorly formulated rant.

Simply put - investors via crowdfunding need to recognize the risk they are assuming. Likewise, companies choosing to raise funding from non-accredited investors need to recognize the costs and extra steps associated with IRS and SEC compliance.

The author's "quick overview of basic problems that investment crowdfunding faces", interestingly makes no mention of the implications of crowdfunding on companies that would previously be deemed by professional investors as non-fundable.

At this point, it's too early to write off crowd-funding simply as a bad idea - especially without any inkling as to how the SEC even plans to address it. Personally, I hope Mr. Kang ends up eating his hat. But time will tell...

Thank you for summarizing what I was really trying to say here, chaz. Even half of YC's consumer focused tech companies should be so lucky.

The team, the direction they took the product, and the VCs/funding aside, Ade's clearly massive effort is inspiring and should be congratulated rather than completely drown out with sarcasm.

Seriously? 30 million users at FormSpring's peak seems to be executed relatively well. It was no Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr, but 30 million users is a damn good failure as far as I'm concerned.

Now if you want to talk about social plays that capitalize on trends with without adding any real value that are not executed especially well, then we can talk about Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning"s travesty that is Airtime.

I'll be curious to see how the Medium/Svbtle model works the advertising/paid model introduced on the front end, rather than building critical mass around great content producers and working it in later on.

Regarding the P.S. - is this why there is now Chec and Ribbon.co (a d/b/a for Kout Inc.) doing similar things?

Kickstarter or self-hosted crowdfunding site, getting the attention of people is going to be the difference. With Kickstarter there is at least some sort of community and set of discovery tools that can draw a bit of extra attention to really great or already high profile projects. It seems self-hosted crowdfunding sites would place the burden of funding entirely on the project poster's personal network and PR prowess.

Dynamic volume/quantity pricing would be cool.

Tees are light enough that whether I order 1 or 3 any increase in weight (and thus shipping costs) will be nominal.

"Start doing the math and it gets scary: Apple would have massive margin, and vendors who didn't accept iPhone payments would be at a massive disadvantage..."

That's if we do Jason's bad math. His assertion that X% of $Y billion market is pure profit assumes that 100% of the X% of mobile are iOS purchases. Even still X% must be further drilled down to Apple's actual cut. So, assuming Apple could take 1% of the $600B restaurant market and facilitate $6B in transactions, their cut assuming his crazy 10% transaction fee would be only $600M. Common jCal sensationalism.

I'm the furthest thing from an Apple analyst, but it seems that all "built-in" Apple things like iCloud, the App Store, etc. are not simply cheap entries into a market to make money. Each deeply complements and satisfies a fundamental need with a piece of Apple hardware. A payment application of this nature doesn't seem to sit quite at the "essential" level of Apple's other apps/services.