Survivorship bias
Impressive numbers in this tweet have to be accompanied by other data to actually mean something:
- What were the returns of those who responded to other similar emails? And how many of those emails were sent?
- How well did those who did not respond to this email with their investments elsewhere?
Without that it's just an anekdote about your uncle winning in a lottery.
Casper and the middleman
Interesting observation in Recode's article about Casper:
In the booming world of online mattress sales, these reviews sites had accumulated massive power — often turning up high in Google search results for general queries like “mattress reviews” or brand-specific ones like “Casper reviews.” And without many showrooms to allow customers to try out these mattresses, online reviews carried even more weight.
Casper started with an idea to remove the middleman by selling online and allowing customers to deal directly with the manufacturer. The middleman then was the showroom. When the competitors followed Casper to the new battle ground, the Internet, and Casper was no longer the only one there, new middleman naturally appeared – the review aggregator.
Atlassian acquires Trello
Atlassian has announced that it acquires Trello. TechCrunch reports:
Atlassian today announced that it has acquired project management service Trello for $425 million. The vast majority of the transaction is in cash ($360 million), with the remainder being paid out in restricted shares and options.
I think I've been using Trello in some shape or form since its inception in 2011. The product grew, but kept its original spirt and idea. And now it has grew to almost half a billion dollars.
Atlassian suggests it will continue development of Trello. The immediate plans are outlined in Atlassian's press-release:
In addition to launching a new version of its existing Trello integration for HipChat, Atlassian will be launching Trello integrations for its other leading collaboration products, including JIRA Software, Confluence and Bitbucket. The integrations will be available in the Atlassian Marketplace, which is one of the largest enterprise software marketplaces in the world along with Amazon's AWS Marketplace and Salesforce.com's AppExchange.
Integrations are good and are a natural thing to happen after such acquisitions. Would be very interesting to see how Trello will change little details.
Nik Software: once $500 now free
Google announced that a set of 7 plugins for wode range of photo editing tasks is now available for free (get it here).
PetaPixel recaps history of Nik Software:
You may remember that Google acquired Nik Software and its popular Snapseed photo editing app back in September 2012. Although Google killed off Snapseed for Desktop in March 2013, it was still big news when Google started selling the entire Nik suite (originally valued at around $500) for the “low price” of $150 later that month.
Now it’s free.
Nik Software was founded in 1995 and now a decade of depelopers' effort and creativity is avaialbe for free. That's something hard to compete against.
Changes at SourceForge
Somehow I missed that SourceForge and Slashdot were sold at the end of January.
New owners promised to stop monetization practices that undermined the developer's trust and caused prominent apps to leave the site. And they already started delivering on that:
Our first order of business was to terminate the “DevShare” program. As of last week, the DevShare program was completely eliminated. The DevShare program delivered installer bundles as part of the download for participating projects. We want to restore our reputation as a trusted home for open source software, and this was a clear first step towards that.
A move in the right direction, but it remains to be seen how much that would help to ensure SourceForge.com's future.
Crowdfunding not working out for Jolla
As Jolla team announced in the their New Year greeings, there will not be enough tablets for all the backer of the project:
The bad news here is that we are not able to complete the production to fulfill all contributions. In other words, all of our backers will not get a Jolla Tablet.
As industry we are still looking for ways to fund reasonably large projects with significant research component. And crowdfunding isn't a way to go.
David Barnard on being successful in apps business
Great mini-series with David Barnard on the Release Notes podcast:
David shares very interesting case for how important search traffic is for building financially successful apps.
List of Unicorns
Private companies valued at $1B and above – research from CB Insights says there are 140 of them. Uber on top with $51B.