{5} Setfive - Talking to the World - Page 38 of 66 - Ramblings on code, startups, and everything in between

Last week, I was putting together a Google Chrome extension for one of our clients to help debug Javascript events on a page and I started wondering why don’t we have mobile browser extensions? Unfortunately, there isn’t a simple answer but I think looking towards the desktop can help draw analogies to where we are on mobile now.

So this desktop thing?

Looking back to the desktop, arguably one of the strongest drivers of Firefox’s growth was its rich extension ecosystem. Compared to Internet Explorer, Firefox extensions were easier to develop, leveraged web technologies (XUL, JS, CSS), and offered powerful abstractions out of the box. Because of this, developers began building powerful extensions for Firefox which drove “power user” adoption and ultimately helped spur mainstream adoption. Developers built extensions like Firebug, Greasemonkey, and companies like Rapportive inside the Firefox extension ecosystem. Following Firefox, when Google Chrome launched it debuted its own even simpler extension infrastructure and eventually the Chrome Webstore to help distribute and monetize extensions.

Although largely positive, the extensions developed for Firefox and Chrome weren’t always user friendly. Between redirecting search traffic and surreptitiously injecting ads, “greyhat” extensions negatively impacted user experience while generating revenue without generating value. These “greyhat” extensions fueled what’s colloquially known as Israel’s download valley and ultimately millions of dollars in revenue.

Right so what about mobile?

Compared to the desktop, the landscape on mobile is notably different because of an Apple and Google duopoly with Apple primarily monetizing hardware and Google monetizing search advertising. Additionally, compared to the desktop, Apple and Google have an unprecedented level of control over user devices, all but ensuring that devices will arrive with either Safari or Chrome installed.

I think because of this control, Apple and Google have little incentive to open up Mobile Safari or Mobile Chrome to 3rd party extension developers since doing so would compromise the browser user experience for little gain over the competition. But what about Firefox?

Although Mozilla has released a Firefox build for Android, I think they’ve recognized that trying to win market share away from Chrome on Android is a losing battle and they’re starting to seriously pursue FirefoxOS. Because of this, I don’t think Mozilla will invest in Firefox mobile extensions since it’s clear that there’s more opportunity in powering the OS layer of a user’s phone.

Yesterday, Daum and I hung out at HackHarvard and gave a presentation about how we started Setfive, the challenges we faced, and some of the lessons we would tell our younger selves. The feedback and resulting discussion was pretty interesting so it seemed like it makes sense to share. Some of these things are probably mistakes you have to make for yourself and 90% of advice is crap.

Don’t get bullied

Looking back, a lot of the early “negotiations” I did with clients was really them pushing me around and me accepting whatever terms they ultimately demanded. People were using veiled threats of yanking the deal, asserting that “I didn’t know how business was done”, and being overly demanding with changes and calls to manipulate the direction of the deal. In addition to professionally, I also remember several instances of real estate brokers and landlords trying to strongarm me personally. Anyway, so the takeaway has been in life or work there’s a difference between negotiating and bullying.

Don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know”

During highschool and college, I’d always been conditioned that when someone asks a question, especially an “adult”, I should obviously know the answer. Professor singles you out to answer a question? Better know the answer. Unfortunately, this feeling stuck with me into the “real world” and I had a tough time admitting that I didn’t know the answer to a question on the spot. This usually resulted in overpromising, having to backpedal later, or being stuck bullshitting through some half baked explanation. After being around the block, it became clear that saying “I don’t know, let me get back to you” was acceptable and the better move. Turns out, in the real world everyone isn’t a walking manpage.

“Big” $ numbers are just numbers

Coming out of college, the largest check I had written was for $5000 and the largest check I’d probably cashed was for around the same. Because of this, I had a hard time taking myself seriously while asking for “big” dollar numbers. After a while, I started to realize everyone has a different concept of what a “big” number is. $5,000 might be a mountain of cash to me but to someone else its just their monthly Salesforce.com subscription. Once I understood this, it became much easier to walk into a meeting and confidently talk about money.

If they look clueless, they probably are

Throughout highschool and college, I hadn’t experienced many instances where someone was trying to seriously cover up the fact that they were clueless. Over in the real world though, this seemed to start happening frequently. Initially, I had a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that the “Senior Developer” explaining his “master/master” setup was just entirely wrong. The issue with having these blinders was that it made it difficult to effectively communicate with stakeholders when there was someone bollixed in between. Once I realized that cluelessness was really cluelessness, it became much easier to marginalize the people that were lost and get shit done.

Everyone is not like you

Something that took awhile to realize was that not everyone is like me. I had a hard time figuring out why everyone didn’t “get” how to use certain websites or why everyone didn’t immediately jump on new tech products. Turns out, everyone isn’t a heavy drinking software engineer that reads Hacker News. After realizing that, it became easier to emphasize with different types of users and also better connect with stakeholders.

Anyway, these are my notes to send back to 2009. Would love any thoughts or feedback in the comments.

Monday was a horrific day in Boston and its been an uneasy day after. I don’t have anything to add to the discourse but I would like to urge you to join us, along with the technology community in supporting the victims.

TUGG has setup a fundraise.com page here – https://www.fundraise.com/technology-supports-victims-of-boston-marathon-bombing and over $100,000 has already been raised.

In 2009, an engineer using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto introduced a new digital, open source, currency to the world called “Bitcoin”. Since then, the buzz, excitement, and adoption of bitcoins has grown at a phenomenal rate, with the total value of bitcoins in circulation hitting $1 billion as of April 2013. Talk of a bubble has coincided with the buzz, but both have also served to highlight the tremendous potential in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Great, so what is it really?

Paraphrasing from Wikipedia:

Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency based on an open-source, peer-to-peer internet protocol. […] Bitcoins can be exchanged through a computer or smartphone locally or internationally without an intermediate financial institution. […]

Bitcoin is not managed like typical currencies: it has no central bank or central organization. Instead, it relies on an Internet-based peer-to-peer network. The money supply is automated and given to servers or “bitcoin miners” that confirm bitcoin transactions as they add them to a decentralized and archived transaction log approximately every 10 minutes.

I’m going to butcher any explanation I try to provide but Quora has several good writeups on what Bitcoins are and how they work. A reasonable analogy though, is think about “Bitcoins” as a type of precious metal that has no intrinsic value but is able to store value, transfer value between parties, and be mined to find new pieces.

The key takeaways about how Bitcoins work are:

Unlike traditional currencies, no central bank controls the amount of currency in circulation. Instead, the total amount of possible Bitcoins is algorithmically limited by the protocol itself.
Transactions between parties are relatively anonymous and done in real time. Contrast this with other digital payments like credit cards or wire transfers where there is little anonymity and a settling period.
As of now, there’s absolutely no regulation as far as reporting, security, or anything else you’d associate with traditional financial institutions.
Currently, it’s all digital – there’s no practical way to “print” a Bitcoin and use it like a dollar bill

So what’s going to be disruptive?

There are dozens if not hundreds of startups playing in the Bitcoin space and several “large” companies have also started adopting Bitcoins as an alternative form of payment. Several high profile investors including YCombinator and Union Square Ventures have also made significant Bitcoin related invetments, signalling that savvy investors believe a potential market exists. Personally, I’m excited about companies attacking the following:

Hassle free, instant, and international money transfer. Paypal was supposed to allow us to do this, but even in 2013 its difficult and expensive to transfer people money – let alone internationally. If someone can address the current concerns of fraud and money laundering using Bitcoin they’ll have an instant winner on their hands.

Catapult in legalized online gambling. In the last few years, there’s been an ongoing discussion about if America should legalize online gambling and if so, how it should be done. Because of the decentralized, anonymous nature of Bitcoin, it’s conceivable that the emergence of a large enough Bitcoin powered gambling market would force the US government to legalize online gambling in order to get access to the additional tax revenues. This would obviously be a boon for struggling social game companies like Zynga, but also provide an enormous opportunity for new startups.

Provide a viable alternative to credit cards. Recently, there’s been a lot of action in the payments space including innovative companies like Square and Roam which are aiming to alter how consumers pay at the point of sale. Unfortunately, almost all of these new payment solutions still rely on existing credit card infrastructure to complete the payment which leaves them at the whim of interchange fees. Boston based LevelUp is tackling this issue but at the end of the day they’re still getting hit by the fees somewhere. An innovative Bitcoin company which provides a viable alternative to this existing credit card infrastructure would open the door to radical innovation in the payments space by eliminating hard interchange fees.

What might go wrong?

There’s a huge amount of opportunity in the Bitcoin space and the ecosystem is just starting to build out. With the Bitcoin boom of 2012 already inked on the Wikipedia entry, the next few months are going to be a critical time for the nascent currency. The single largest to Bitcoin is ultimately going to be regulation from sovereign governments. The US Department of Treasury has already issued several statements regarding Bitcoin and its clear the government isn’t happy with the situation as it stands now.

Regardless of what regulation is passed, Bitcoins are technologically different from previous virtual currency and the ecosystem has already demonstrated its resilience and innovation.

Just a quick one out there as I saw a bunch of posts trying to get around the following error:

The error of the occurs on the cache warmup part of the clearing. After looking around people referenced a bunch of different solutions, the most popular being to do a –no-warmup. However, we wanted to try to fix the problem rather than just avoid warming the cache.

The solution fairly quick and really easy. This is using 2.1.X of Symfony and 1.3.* of the JMSDiExtraBundle. Before we had in our AppKernel.php the following:

I noticed in one of the docs for the JMSDiExtraBundle it has the JMSAopBundle in the list BEFORE JMSDiExtraBundle. We tried moving this up and had success, so the final one looked like:

Hope this saves someone some time.

Thoughts: Where are the mobile browser extensions?