

Pixel art stickers - Youpinadi
http://www.stickaz.com/en/17-invader

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csaba
I tried this out. I think it is really good idea, but really bad
implementation. I wanted to draw something, and save it. But I had to login
first. If you log in, you lost your drawing. Then I redraw it from scratch,
then clicked on the save, and the server went down, so again, lost everything.
Sometimes the cursor draws without any click, and ruins all your previous
work, and you can't turn it off (maybe a bug). Then I tried other way. What if
I just draw a small part, and save it? Before save it automatically cropped my
pic for best fit (if you resize your drawing area, you lost everything).

So, for about the tenth time, I finally finished my "nyan cat", and published
it, to see what's gonna happen? Some time after, I got an email, that they
refused to publish it, and gave me some bullsh*t (one or more of the
following) reasons. So one, or more? Why don't they tell me specifically? And
some of the reasons were hurtful for someone, who tried so hard to finish
something.

Anyway... As I sad before, I like the idea, but the implementation is pretty
flawed, and painfully slow.

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stevenrace
So are the 'classic' sprites public domain? I'm sure the other characters are
some minor variation of the original - but it leaves me wondering if copyright
has a lower threshold/bound in terms of resolution?

In a 7x7 grid theres still a lot of variations (2^49?) - ranging down to the
'single pixel' works of early 20th century avant-garde monochromatic
paintings.

Anyhow, neat product and I'm sure even a lawsuit from Midway/Atari would be
good press.

~~~
skymt
There's one case I recall that's close enough. A couple years ago there was a
chiptune cover album of the Miles Davis classic Kind of Blue, complete with a
pixel-art version of the cover. The photographer of the original cover art
sued over the pixelized version. You can read the whole story here:
<http://waxy.org/2011/06/kind_of_screwed/>

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nagrom
It's very pretty, and I'll likely buy some.

But oh-my-gosh is your server slow! Having to wait 60s between page loads is
stopping me from exploring your collection and buying stuff. You need to fix
the speed issue, because it's costing you money, right now.

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Axsuul
Could be that they are in France :)

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nagrom
It shouldn't take so long to get from the UK to France though, eh? ;-)

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gatekeepr
So I guess you are familiar with the french street art artist Invader
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Invader>)

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gabma
it seems so! :)

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DeusExMachina
You might want to know that in Italian the name of your startup reads (and
sounds) quite badly.

~~~
carlob
I think they know, otherwise they wouldn't have this:

"It all starts with the kaz" prominently featured here

<http://www.stickaz.com/en/info>

~~~
brador
Explanation for those who don't speak Italian?

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carlob
Kaz sounds a lot like cazzo which means dick.

'Sti cazzi' is a common phrase that is used to express lack of interest in
central Italy (who gives a flying fuck!) or amazement in northern Italy (holy
shit!).

~~~
Youpinadi
We are sorry if we have offended he italians (especially the ones from the
center). It's pretty hard to come up with a name that has no meaning anywhere.
If we have enough success, maybe Stickaz will mean "pixel art stickers" in
Italy later! Like the Nintendo Wii ;)

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quicksilver03
Italian here (living in Paris BTW): I don't think you've offended anybody,
it's just that the name sounds really bad in Italian.

Naming products for an international market is quite difficult: in the 90s
Sega tried to sell their game consoles into the Italian market and failed
miserably because (my interpretation) nobody wanted to publicize that he
bought a product whose name means "masturbation". The Nissan Pajero is another
example, they had to rename it Montero in some Spanish-speaking countries.

~~~
noupoze
Good comment, although the Pajero is from Mitsubishi, not Nissan.

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sarbogast
Your model is excellent. I love it. It's simple, it looks good, and contrary
to what others said, you actually have a pretty innovative business model with
the possibility to sell crowdsourced designs. But if I were you, I'd make it
more interesting for graphics guys. The real innovation would be to do a 70-30
cut like for iPhone apps. If it worked economically, even if it merely covered
your costs, it would attract much better designers and many more buyers that
would also buy your own designs on which you could make more profit. You're
solving a real problem here: geek decoration. Be more ambitious about it!

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mydpy
Careful -- Atlus got sued for their game 3D Dot Game Heroes (which was
fantastic) over copyright-infringing user-generated avatars. This seems eerily
similar.

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mikeknoop
Something random I wanted over the weekend: drop-shipping stickers. Let me set
up an account and order stickers via an API given a customer address.

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madlag
Do you have some really LARGE ones ? I just want to restart some post-it war
with more modern ammo ;-)

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Youpinadi
We have some large ones! Also you can choose the size of your pixels (up to
5cm), which can make even models with few pixels pretty big!

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uniclaude
I like the idea, and the website looks good.

However, the website is very slow, I don't know much about your tech team, but
IMHO this is something you should investigate if you want to increase your
conversion rate.

Good Luck.

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fufulabs
We built an app thats scarily similar in spirit to this. its at
<http://tiny.by> Pretty cool coincidence

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carlob
I noticed some problems with English version (e.g. each is singular), you
might want to have a professional check that for you.

~~~
Youpinadi
Thanks for the input, we will fix it!

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Floopsy
That's pretty cool. I like it.

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pfisch
So...if I start selling stuff on ebay, does that make me a "start-up"?

I'm pretty sure you are a couple of guys who setup a wordpress site with a
generic theme on a shared server. Also it seems to be having trouble handling
the small amount of traffic that comes from 5am hacker news.

~~~
Youpinadi
Well we are really 4 french guys, we are located in Paris in a small office.
This is not a wordpress, but a prestashop and the theme is not generic. And
the stuff that is innovative is that all the products are created by the
community using the studio (<http://www.stickaz.com/en/studio>). Have a look
at <http://www.stickaz.com/en/info> for more infos about the Stickaz concept.
Tell me if you find similar businesses (appart from sites that let's you
decline an image on mugs or t-shirts). Hope you look at it with a different
angle :)

PS: we know puxxle, we existed before them and there's no user generated
content on puxxle.

~~~
pfisch
It definitely looks like wordpress, and it says it is wordpress and prestashop
on the bottom. Also prestashop looks like it is just an ecommerce plugin.

Did you guys take VC money or something? This just looks like a normal
business to me. I mean I run a small business that makes mobile apps. Is that
a start up as well? Is any kind of business with a website that sells
something a start up?

~~~
uniclaude
As much as I agree with the whole discussion surrounding the definition of a
startup, your arguments are weak and pointless to say the least.

Would this company be more of a startup if their website was powered with a
custom made app written in Erlang on the backend and Haxe on the frontend? ...

Would this company be more of a startup if they could lure some VCs to invest
in them? ...

Please come back to earth and provide constructive comments, or better
arguments, like pan69 did [1].

[1]: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4592559>

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Youpinadi
What do you think?

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Roritharr
Pretty Nice designs, but i find the price a little bit too high considering
that your designs are so minimalistic that you are competing with 5mins of
Photoshop(to recreate an image) and 3$ of sticker printing paper.

Nonetheless i'll probably order a few for our glass doors in the office.

~~~
Youpinadi
We propose 40 colors, which is pretty hard to find when you try to do a DYI
pixel art with photoshop. Also the stickers we propose are high quality vinyl
(which is repositionnable). I often see guys do home made pixel arts and
Stickaz is just here to make their life easier and their designs cooler!

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jnardiello
The name in italian sounds hilarious. Awesome

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matthiasb
Exit through the gift shop...

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mapster
cool

