jerrell

I've been using SendOwl for a few years now to sell music education eBooks and albums directly through my website.

I can't recommend it highly enough.

Here are a few things I like:

- It works 100% reliably, has never let me down

- The checkout process is easy and neat from the customer's perspective

- Supports PayPal and Stripe which is the ideal imho

- Integrates with all popular email providers so you can do product-specific followup sequences with bonus gifts, etc. after purchase

- Provides simple support for running an affiliate program

- Support it absolutely superb: personal, swift and effective

- They handled the EU VAT mess better than anyone else I saw

- Monthly fees are very reasonable, I think I pay just $20-30/month

- It's easy to issue refunds and/or re-issue download link emails if you need to, so customer support can be handled quickly for those things

- You can create product bundles to support multiple products or discounted versions of products. After trying e-junkie and Clickbank before SendOwl, I can't tell you how much easier this feature alone made my life!

- You can do upsells/cross-sells during (or after) checkout

- They've been continually improving and extending the features offered in substantial ways - but without making a total mess of things.

- The reporting/analytics is simple but effective.

- In integrates effortlessly with e-commerce in Google Analytics so your sales (including dollar amounts) just show up in GA automatically.

Okay, that turned out to be more than a few things. I love SendOwl.

Wow. I cannot believe the pettiness of comments here. VLC is a fantastic media player, and I'm quite appalled to see the conversation here dominated by such little gripes. VLC plays media more reliably than any other program I've tried, on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X. And whether or not you consider it perfect, reaching the 2.0 milestone is something to be lauded, not bitched about.

Seems like the modularity would help on the marketing side: people will be much more receptive to BERG Cloud product #2 if it connects to a device already in their living room. I think this is probably true whether or not there's a technological reason why it needs to.

I was immediately won over by "FLAC", "Scrobbling" and "Speedy"! I've been struggling with iTunes and Songbird for a while now on OS X, and a replacement would be very welcome.

I've been enjoying using Enqueue for a day or so now. My only gripe so far is that I expected to see Play/Pause controls in the option-click/right-click menu of the dock icon. My keyboard's media keys just launch iTunes and I'd like an easy way to pause the music when on a different desktop to the Enqueue UI.

Really interesting idea.

One issue I was conscious of while reading the description: I'm not sure the intersection between the early adopter cohorts for different markets would be very large. There is a certain mindset involved, sure, but people need to also be passionate enough about the subject or pain point to bother with bleeding edge products.

If you try to just sign up as many people as possible who self-identify with the early adopter mindset, it may take a while before you have broad enough coverage of interests in that audience for it to be useful to startups outside the core "tech for techies" market.

That's a nice idea!

To be honest though, my concern about bookcases is more about accessibility and DRM than it is about the physical and aesthetic value.

There is something special about physically browsing shelves, but what really worries me is that my collection of books will have no single 'library' containing them in 20 years - whether physical or electronic.

Heading to a gig for 7:30 so can't stay long - but looking forward to it!

I'm surprised not to see anybody mention Nozbe.

It's been around quite a while as a web app, and does a great job of balancing simplicity with functionality and features. The web interface is excellent for just letting you get on with what you want to do - i.e. things work just as you'd expect, and there are no frustrating UI punishments for doing things 'the wrong way'. The iPhone counterpart has recently had a major overhaul and is now just as slick and easy to use.

It's pretty hacker friendly, too - for example, you can export all your task info to a plaintext file, edit it however you like, and later re-import. There's a simple syntax for adding new tasks with metadata by email or Twitter.

I'd highly recommend giving it a try.

I very much like the idea of producing webapps rather than iPhone apps in my business, and I think they could probably provide all the functionality I require.

For me the catch is monetisation. With the App Store, this is clear: I release paid apps. With webapps... Advertising seems viable, except that my apps need to work offline (and may solely be used in that way), which as far as I know scuppers the advertising approach. So what's the alternative? Set up a paywall and require users to login to get the webapp in the first place? That seems to defeat the point somewhat.

Anyone have bright ideas or links to clever thinking on the subject?

AppMiner.com and iApper.com are both showing listings. A Google search shows up some other sites, but the mentions seem to have disappeared now.

I have submitted a bug report, but I'm not sure if I can expect much response.

As far as I know, these sites are already 'misbehaving' by scraping the App Store info, and Apple seems to turn a blind eye - will they bother plugging security holes in an interface which is already being abused?