Hi Pierre,

Would you be able to comment on how your process and decision on picking a speech engine company?

Thanks

it was simple - I tried all the major engines on the market and take the best one for iOS. All companies almost offer the same license (20 to 30% of your income).

I think it's absolutely great that they've donated all the proceeds to Wikipedia :) Congratulations. It's heartwarming to know that although there are some free loaders, you were still made a pretty penny.

On the other hand, how come all the design work, copy writing, etc are considered free? That's just masking the actual cost of the product.

We made those things with our own hands.

But surely your time was worth something. Isn't that the first lesson of running a business -- pay yourself first?

If you're doing something you really love, money is just a side effect.

Loving what you do never bought groceries. So the actual answer has to be 'I have enough money from other sources to live on'.

Perhaps they draw fixed salaries from the business as a whole, and since they'd intended to donate the proceeds of this particular project to charity anyway, they didn't see any point in allocating any portion of their sunk fixed costs to it. Note that they didn't include rent, electricity, etc. either.

The money spent on essentials may also be essential, but things can both be essential and the side effects of processes which have some other primary intent.

I'm not sure why you don't get this, but there's a huge gap between not having money be the primary intended result of your actions and having money not at all be a result of your actions.

The design/dev/video costs were minuscule compared to the production costs.

"I think it's absolutely great that they've donated all the proceeds to Wikipedia"

Looking at their quirky web page of comparisons, I think it would be hilarious if the wikipedia deletionist camp responded by deleting all the articles quoted on their page. I'll never donate a penny to wikipedia until that social problem is eradicated. "Here's $70K of value... whoops deleted"

Think of it as increasing the signal-to-noise ratio by $70K?

Essentially, that's what happens when you take in outside investment. If you can build a cool product and bootstrap it, it need not be that way. Once you're taking in external shareholders, you're semi-bounded by their wishes.

It's possible that their analysts division is separate from the investments division. Anyone from investment banking care to comment?

I worked at an Investment Bank 15 years ago. They might be separate, but they have lunch together, go to the same holiday parties, stand in the same elevators and all get a bonus based in part on overall bank profits... It's frowned upon to take a physical baseball bat and use it to on analysts because that would leave a mark.

Yes, there is always a chinese wall which separates the public and private sides of an investment bank.

The wall you are talking about is between investment banking (private side) and the rest of the bank (public). The two sides don't see each other on the internal IMs systems, if they try emailing each other, their emails get auto routed to compliance, etc. This ensures that private insider information from M&A advising to the companies doesn't leak and get traded on.

In this case Goldman analysts and traders are both sitting on the public side of the wall. Neither analysts or traders know anything private about the companies that can't be found out or calculated without some sleuthing. Additionally under current regulations in the US, the analysts are required to release their research reports to their clients simultaneously( no client advantaged over another ).

In a sense, yes. D3 is at a lower level - basically taking any DOM element and mapping it to data. It doesn't have to be a chart or a graph. It could be a list of items or a table.

The library provided is more or less give some data and you get a chart.

As with most comments, I'd say very slick and straight to the point demo. The typing text did kinda annoyed me abit - it's probably a give or take as I don't have patience reading things - would prefer to let me jump in and play around with it.

Just curious, did you have to write all the graphing yourselves or did you use a library?

Yeah, we ended up writing the graphing library ourselves. Due to the nature of the data and frequencies of redrawing the large open source libraries were too CPU intensive.

I'm interested to know how this compares to private/Ivy League schools. It seems to me that you would also have a price to pay in order to gain access to top education although certainly, in the Chinese case, it's more extreme since there are so many students vying for the same few spots at top universities that everyone is trying to gain some sort of edge.

Just wanted to say that I really love this editor. Really simple to quickly create diagrams. Great job!

Great great job! I love the demo and love the clean interface compared with Trello. I think eventually you'll reach a point where you need to decide if this is still a side project or there's some potential there. Leaving it free for now is perfectly fine but eventually as more and more people use it, it might cost you a whole lot more (in which case, it might be a good thing). Good luck!

Thanks! Glad you like it. Yeah, I've got some features I would like to add but am holding back b/c they would result in increased operating costs. I'll need to make a decision in the next 6 months or so.

I think that's a very interesting thought. I deleted my Facebook account after I felt that it sucked up too much of my time just browsing status updates. Before, every so often, I would check Facebook to see if anything new had been posted. It got to the point where I had enough and now I feel less anxious about constantly going on the Internet. Information was overloaded for me.