I really love Instapaper. The whole product through and through.
Marco Arment has done a great job with this product all the way from top to bottom. The bookmarklet experience is great, it’s fast, convienient, clear as to what is happening, the web experience is straight forward and designed well, and the iOS app is the first App that I knew EXACTLY what I was getting when I paid for it, and was 100% satisfied with the $4.99 price tag.
In 2011, from what I can gather I saved over 1100 articles to read later on my iPad (I don’t have an iPhone). Almost every morning either over coffee or my morning subway ride, I would catch up on my reading. It was really a great system.
Unfortunately, with the start of 2012, I am no longer going to be using Instapaper.
Like I said I don’t have an iPhone. I have an android device (a HTC Thunderbolt rooted with the CM7.1.1 ROM) and I am just a little tired of carrying around my iPad with me everywhere, that’s in addition to my laptop which I have in my bag more and more often now.
My Android phone is large enough and powerful enough to do everything I need to do on the go, so why carry around Y.A.D. (yet another device)??
For several reasons, Instapaper is not available on Android (a recent write up from Beta Beta beat can be found here).
Marco has stated he would split revenue 50/50 with whoever can make Instapaper for Android (that meets his strict requirements of course). That’s not good enough for me, so I am hopping over to Read it Later. They have a bookmarklet (not as well designed), an iOS app for my iPad, and most importantly an Android app.
Read it Later, so far, is not as great as Instapaper, but c’est la vie! I am enjoying reading a whole lot more on my phone that my iPad on the Subway.
Here’s to 2012!
Episode 1 of TechStars from this past Tuesday night. Don’t forget to watch it next Tuesday @ 9PM EST
Drama, Action, Suspense. TechStars has it all!
Shelby.TV picked up in the NY Times today (a repost from a gigaom article).
This is my first time something I have worked on is in the Grey Lady.
Under the new authentication program, only those willing to pay up can watch new episodes the day after it airs. Everybody else has to wait. Not all viewers have the patience, it turns out. In the absence of a free, immediately-available streaming option, many of them are turning to piracy, according to an informal study performed by TorrentFreak. The digital piracy news site tracked two Fox shows for five days after the authentication program began and found that the number of illegal downloads of new episodes increased substantially. Downloads of the most recent episode of Hell’s Kitchen increased by 114% and Master Chef saw a 189% increase in downloads.
These TV/Movie execs just DON’T get it! They have seen the music industry go through almost the same exact thing over the past decade and a half and these people don’t seemed to have learned on thing!
[time for some disruptive tech to swoosh in and win!]
[via As Fox Requires Web Viewers to Wait, TV Show Piracy Increases]
Going to miss Chris (and The Donald) today… come back!
But until then, I can’t wait to get my hack on at the upcoming (video) hackday.tv on September 10th-11th!
reecepacheco:
[Chris with Dan and Myles]
Today we are proud to officially announce hackday.tv - a 24 hour hackathon dedicated to showcasing innovation and creativity in the world of video. From booking the venue, to finding sponsors, API partners, et al… Chris is the man making it happen.
Q: Is peer programming a time sink or a savior for an early stage startup?
Back in January, during our first week in TechStars, sharing an office with Pivotal Labs, I saw something totally new to me: a profitable company that had two programmers sitting in front of one computer, writing code, together. Crazy. This Physicist had never seen that before!
I at first thought this was crazy, lavish, and unnecessary. This was what I later found out was called peer programming.
Dan and I could definitely not afford to sit in front of one shared computer, we were building a product from scratch! There was too much to do and not enough hours in the day as it was!
Fast forward a couple of months. We birthed Shelby.tv! We grew our engineering team by 50%, Myles is on board full time, our infrastructure is [more] stable and we are firing on all cylinders!
Over the past two months Myles and I have been working on one project in particular where we have split up tasks/areas for each of us to crank on.
Until this week.
This week we decided to sit in front of one machine, use his javascript expertise, and my knowledge of the shelby backend, to build something that will be awesome for the developer community and super duper awesome for Shelby!
At times, I thought, “is out worth both of us sitting here working on this one thing when we could be doing twice as much if we split up?”
This was totally not the case. Over a two day span we completed a tremendous amount, wrote great, (seemingly) bug free code, and avoided a lot of sunk time in hunting for errors. Pair programming allows a second set of eyes to catch typos and other silly, avoidable code syntax errors.
So the question posed here, is pair programming a time sink for an early stage startup? No.
That being said pair programming is just another tool in an arsenal that startups should use in appropriate situations.
A company like Pivotal Labs is wise to use it as best practice.
A company like Shelby.TV is wise to use pair programming as a tool to speed up development through challenging situations.
A: Savior
shelbytv:
Yup… Team Shelby is going to be on TV. It’s crazy that they even wanted us in the show, but we’re still surprised they let us into TechStars in the first place anyway. ;)
To answer some of your burning questions up front:
No - this is not your standard “reality TV.” We did our thing and the cameras were just there to catch it.
Yes - my mother will probably be embarrassed by my language.
No - I am not wearing eyeliner.
No - Joe is not that tall in real life.
Yes - you will probably get to see Dan doing his Arnold impersonation.
Yes - Myles is really that intense.
No - Henry does not hook up with Snooki this season.
No - Sadly Intern Zero wasn’t around for the taping.
In all seriousness, I know that David and David always put TechStars’ first, and Bloomberg did a good job of staying out of the way and just trying to catch the action.
So, if you want to see the birth of Shelby, or if you’re at all interested in TechStars, entrepreneurship or startups in general, you’ll probably get something out of the show.
(Source: shelbytv)
Come check out some of the Tech behind Shelby.tv at this months NY Tech Talks Meetup next Tuesday (04/26)
Sign up for the meetup here
…and sign up for Shelby @ http://Shelby.tv
This morning on my way to the office I did what I usually do most subway rides. I turned on my e-reader and read.
Today it happened to be my iPad (I bought an O’Reilly book and thought the big screen would be best) but sometimes its kindle on my Android phone, and sometimes its my kindle on my kindle. I have different use cases for each but love reading on all three. On the iPad I read more short form content than on Kindle and I wouldn’t read on my iPad outside in the sun (I feel like my iPad is a little bit of a vampire).
But I digress.
Point #1:
I was reading and riding this morning and I looked to my left. Kindle. I looked to my right. Kindle. I looked down at the riders sitting in front of me. Blackberry, iPhone, Android.
No joke, everyone around me was reading or playing a game. A mere year ago I felt like I was the only one riding the subways of NY reading an e-reader.
We have come a long way. Some people (eg my brother) say the like the feel of books and will never make the switch BUT the wave is moving to digital.
Point #2:
This is part of a greater trend of people feeling more secure using technology in their every day lives. I want to explicitly throw in television. Tech like Boxee is becoming an accepted thing in our living rooms and is known about more and more people. That’s why we are building Shelby.tv, we believe that there are better ways to do the things we do everyday. It shouldn’t be a process to watch things your friends are talking about and enjoying (we do that all the time with traditional tv), it should be simple to discover and enjoy.
Shelby is the best way to discover and enjoy video on the web. The Future is arriving soon.
(p.s. see what i did there? check out Shelby!)
(p.p.s when will then be now?)
This is some interesting insight from Albert. At first I thought the Google +1 was an interesting idea, a little but of a little brother, tag-a-long move, but an interesting idea, at least as an experiment.
BUT, what Albert points out is VERY interesting. Google is admitting that implicit data signals are seemingly not enough anymore. Could the underlying signal of this move be that something might be rotten in the state of denmark? Probably not, but something is up, and it’s more than just a new product called +1.
continuations:
Adding an explicit signal button with +1 is an admission that the implicit data sources are not enough. Clicking on +1 is saying to Google explicitly: I think this is interesting. Now the real challenge for Google will be making this an actually useful signal.
Reece has hit the nail on the head… we want Shelby. We want Shelby bad!
So we are building it with that in mind. We are normal people. And we are building our product for normal people.
reecepacheco:
Shelby.tv is us. It’s the product we want now. It’s the way we want to communicate. It’s a chance for us to be ourselves, at present…
In considering the potential of Shelby, we’ve been questioned about our passion. We’ve been questioned about who we are and if Shelby speaks to our personality. We’ve been questioned as to whether or not we’re “the right guys” to build Shelby. So to quote the infamous Bill O’Reilly…
“Fuck it! We’ll do it live!”
This is our voice. This is our product. And this is our company. We know how to build products and we know how to have fun (Four Loko flipcup + karaoke… works every time).
Quick take-away: I hope not!
I think that the iPad is a wonderful device. I do not own one but am just waiting for the second iteration to come out because a camera, better design, and a device with kinks worked out is what i REALLY want.
That being said, I have also been waiting to see if a quality, equally (or sub) priced tablet on the Android platform would emerge. Recently, on woot.com there was an Augen 7” Color Touchscreen device for ~113 incld shipping. I thought about it but in the end of the day its no iPad. And that is a dangerous place to be for Android Tablet’s.
“Not an iPad” is similar to the “Not an iPod” statement that has been said ad nausium for the past decade. All those companies making devices that play music that were well… lacking.
I like the Android platform (as a user) and think it has tremendous potential for growth and improvement. I think Android phones have avoided being classified as “Not an iPhone” BUT I definitly think the statement that a tablet is “Not an iPad” will be the theme for the next decade.
[an aside… this => I’m buying more $AAPL !]
Kinda glad I didn’t pursue this back in September… ie babeleze.com (anyone want to buy a domain name?)
Shai Agassi’s bold plan for electric cars | Video on TED.com
Totally worth watching! We need more thinking like this in this country!
