Both were point mistakes, which I think anyone would agree are bad but just huge mistakes. Running what is effectively a bank that loses $400m over the course of a couple of years in a constant bleed is not a mistake, it is negligent.
Well, considering the price has been pretty stably above the current point (not stable in general but definitely above this point for months), I think it's safe to say if you had that Bitcoin you lost a potential opportunity to have made a lot more money. The worth is simply what people have been willing to buy at, and that price has recently been quite high.
I think it is safe to say people lost "a potential opportunity to have made a lot more money?" in 1000s of cases. Things are only ever worth what people are willing to pay for them. Just because that price has been high recently doesn't mean it's stable. Someone paid $4,500 for a Beanie Baby once.
So very true if you have to peg that 400mm to a specific exchange rate for another currency.
You can ascertain the value of 1 BTC in your favored currency rather easily given a choice of marketplaces. Less so with 100, or 10000+. Most market-places couldn't handle the volume without a substantial shift in price before your 400mm mark was hit for say, USD.
That said BTC seems to want to reach the type of ubiquity that allowed USD to be a universal currency of sorts during it's heyday. With means to convert in and out being varied from the strictly regulated to the strictly unregulated.
I love the way this API is presented on the page. It's awesome. It exposes itself in such an obvious way that it leaves no question about its capabilities and usage. Makes me want to jump right in.
> "[The U.S. patent system] is not obliged to register change in ownership."
That I hadn't known; the implication being, if you intend to leverage a patent with lawful permission from its licensor, it's still possible to get screwed (by being misled about the rightful owner's identity, for instance).
BBRY Market cap today: $4.3 bn
Cash: "about $2.6 bn in cash"
Patents: "estimate [...] between $1 bn and $3 bn"
That leaves not a whole lot of value in the company's other assets after the cash and patents - their personnel, supply chains and branding are valued at almost zero in the market. I'm kind of amazed by that.
It's easy to dump on PMA, but what it was built for, it did (and mostly, does) excellently.
When I used PMA for the first time I was a very young programmer, and it really amazed me that such a tool could exist. Oddly enough, this was a really inspirational piece of software for me.
This article reads like a general argument against government subsidies in general - replace "STEM education" with "corn" or "new energy" and the argument is still valid.
Given that it was published on nature.com, best known as the publisher of one of the top science journals in the world, I would bet that the intended purpose is to stimulate discussion, not to explicitly endorse this view as written.
I received 15 emails in 10 days when I signed up for Full Contact. Yeah, I wanted to check out your product, so I signed up and tested it out. No, I don't need to be reminded that you exist every sixteen hours.
I had, separately, been discussing one of the less common features at Full Contact with a real person there, and pointed this out to him, forwarding all of the emails back to him as well. He apologized sincerely and helped figure out why this was happening (over email, of course :) ).
It's just an insanely reliable way to turn my opinion from 'this product is intriguing' to 'this product is irritating.'
If you're going to send email spam (and most startups have to, at some point), at least make it pleasant.
No, don't just make it pleasant, make it easy for me, the customer, to control. Three levels is probably the most you need: 3) Trivia / social spam, 2) Announcements, 1) Security / billing / account maintenance; three little checkboxes, three bits in a "contact status" byte field somewhere in your DB. Do it. It's not the simplest thing that will work, it's the simplest thing that makes your customer feel like they have some control in the trust relationship you're trying to build with them.
And make it possible to actually close and delete an account; LivingSocial I'm looking at you.
I gotta be honest, I can't figure out how to use this.
I imported my Google Reader data (or so I am led to believe), but all I see is a generic feed full of (admittedly interesting, but not what I want) generic news stories. I see a way of adding 'interests' but not 'feeds'.
My confusion is somewhat assuaged by the awesome '/people' page.
Is this a Reader replacement, or a Reader poaching?
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[edit: I see that this tool does not include an RSS reader, which I thought it would based on the invitation screen. This does not do anything that I use Google Reader for... which is to read RSS feeds!]
You can add both feeds and topics - it'sa bit of a whole new world :) give it a go and see how things work out for you. we are always actively listening on twitter and feedback@getprismatic.com
[1] The current market value of the claimed 700k BTC loss in USD.