

Ask HN: Rate my startup, Nrds - jparicka
http://nrds.co.uk
Your feedback is much appreciated.  Thank you!  ~ Jan Paricka
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zimbabwe
Looking at your front page for 30 seconds, I have no idea what you're
offering, and so I close the page.

Also, is that top-right page-peel really necessary? It makes it look like
you're trying to pile gimmicks onto your page to impress newbies, and by
default it blocks some of the text on your page. Not cool.

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estromberg
The "invest in us" page reads more as a gimmick than a real business
opportunity. Private companies rarely, if ever, list valuation amounts or
concrete prices at which a share can be bought- this makes your company look
amateur.

Also, the line "This is an opportunity that could be big enough to IPO, and
will certainly have a number of interesting exit opportunities," sounds more
like the daily spam in my inbox than a serious business.

~~~
mediaman
This also violates federal securities laws and could earn you a C&D from the
SEC.

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ekpyrotic
I find this all v. dubious:

"What’s important about a NRDS Datacube is that it is given so much written
material stated in enormously varied ways, covering enormously varied subjects
and such exhaustive explanatory information, that when it is asked to do
something — analyze text, lookup a reference, or anything else — it is able to
understand language rather than merely sort it."

What do your mean by 'understand'? If the message analysed the statement "It
is cold today.", what would its conclusions be? Surely 'understanding' that
statement requires understanding the experience cold. Please clarify for me.

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catch23
<http://nrds.co.uk/DemoEngineInput.html> doesn't do anything...

~~~
dryicerx
No dice for me as well.

Also tldr;

A video showing what it does instead of pages and pages of text would be much
more helpful.

 _side note:_ A speech-to-text interface for your engine would be quite badass
if it really does understand regular language. Would be like Goog-411...
except better.

 _side side note:_ Wolfram-alpha needs a telephone speech interface.

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huhtenberg
Whoever made the logo copied it from this one -

<http://logopond.com/gallery/detail/42366>

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jparicka
Thank you to everyone who has given comments and criticism. We do appreciate
everything you have to say, and we will be making changes based on your
thoughts. Unfortunately, due to a problem with the engine, the demo will not
work. We are working on getting it back online as soon as possible. This is
unfortunate, as we feel the demo is impressive. Please keep the comments
coming - we're taking everything into account.

~~~
ntoshev
I was going to ask you if you are testing the demand for such a thing without
building it first - I'm glad this is not the case.

I work in natural language processing and couldn't figure out what should I
expect from the demo. It is all marketing speak to me. I upvoted the
submission in hopes someone would summarize it. Would you please try to
explain it to a hacker in one paragraph here?

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jasoncartwright
You need to seriously rethink your copy. I read a few pages of the site, but
still have little idea what benefit your product is to me. It reads like it
was written by someone's who has english as their second language. Harsh, but
true.

* "Unlocking the mathematics of LANGUAGE" means nothing * Demo doesn't work (at least for me) * Page curl in top right is a waste of your and my time * Who are 6com? Their 90's looking site is linked to from every page, yet is in a foreign language * For a company that appears to generate metadata every page lacks meta tags, or differentiating title tags * Typos - "taxanomies", "DemoEngin"

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twohey
As others have mentioned: it is not clear in 10 seconds what you do. That and
your demo is pages of text, nothing I can interact with.

I need to be able experience your product in some way. Reading about your
promises of a revolution in looking at data is not enough. It comes across as
vaporware.

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imownbey
The page appears to be down for me.

<http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://nrds.co.uk/>

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raffi
It looks like you're competing with these guys. <http://www.textwise.com/>

I get the feeling your site may over promise on this a little, I get a lot of
"the sky is the limit" but not much on what one would do with this.

I tried using semantic fingerprints (from Textwise) to create features I could
feed to a classifier for creating a personalized job ad filter. My results
were pretty mixed. Maybe I was trying to get the wrong things out of the
technology.

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gojomo
The 'Try It Out' and 'Demo NRDS' links don't lead to any demo.

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mlapeter
I almost get the sense it's a flat out scam from looking at it... especially
as someone else mentioned about the links to foreign language sites, etc, and
asking for large amounts of money from investors so upfront...

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chaosmachine
Is this an elaborate joke, or part of some "alternate reality game"?

~~~
jparicka
This is no joke, we are just unfortunate that the engine went down. Perhaps I
asked for a feedback to early?

I am trying to get hold of my colleague to bring the engine up again. I am
hoping this will be done shortly.

I agree that the text needs to be looked at - this is the reason why I asked
for a feedback.

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jlm382
The main issue with the homepage is that it doesn't immediately capture my
interest to learn more. Your buttons on the bottom "invest in us" are large --
bigger than the actual body text!

Instead, why not make two or three super important points that describe your
product, and have that take up the majority of the body?

You could also A/B split test multiple version of the homepage, and track
which versions lead to more people ultimately trying your product, or clicking
on more pages.

Hope this helps.

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dmix
I would hire a copywriter; the copy seems to be the weakest part of the site
from looking at it briefly.

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anigbrowl
One question I couldn't answer from the front page was whether this is aimed
at regular users or is a business-to-business product - I sense the latter,
but it's not obvious. Please repost when your demo is functional again.

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mahmud
You have the image nailed down. Perfect. You come off as both casually hip
(the logo) and very well established. The little tear-down sheet at the upper
right corner is a nice surprising touch, but might quickly get old ;-)

My best wishes!

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ninguem2
"this is a document DNA"

What is this supposed to mean, lack of apostrophe notwithstanding?

Also, the title of your submission sounded at first reading as if you were
insulting us.

