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We Pay Our Rent By Buying Coffee

Posted by michael on from the 1000-lines-per-cup dept.

Wired is running a story on Delicious Monster, a startup Mac software company whose main office is a Seattle coffee shop. Hope they're drinking decaf.

3 of 442 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Security? by Yaztromo · · Score: 5, Informative
    I'd wonder about security though. These guys are working on wireless internet on a public network while developing proprietary software. What's to stop one guy with a snooper and a latte-wielding disguise from stealing all their work?

    It's called data encryption, in the form of a VPN. Look into it.

    Really -- this problem has been solved for a long, long time. Create your own virtual network within the network by implementing an encryption and authentication system so that only those systems and users belonging to the company can connect and intercommunicate, and your work just looks like garbage to anyone wishing to snoop in on you.

    Yaz.

  2. Re:Delicious Library by tdemark · · Score: 5, Informative

    Tellico seems to better about spreading the integration around (Amazon for books, IMDB for movies).

    Don't mean to burst your bubble, but, next time you are in IMDB, scroll to the very bottom of the page and read what it says.

    - Tony

  3. Re:next version concerns by wjsdelicious · · Score: 5, Informative

    We will absolutely have sharing your collection be "opt-in," on several levels. We aren't Safeway.

    Amazon already has 1,000,000x the data on people's buying habits and their relations to each other than we'll ever collect, so I suspect that if marketers were going to have a field day, they'd be calling Amazon long before us.

    It's true that it'd be _possible_ for us to do less-than-good things with the data we collect, but we're not going to. We're going to use the data to create new virtual communities of people with common interests, and bring our fragmented society closer together. If you don't want to join in those communities, don't check the preference box.

    Mike has always been against us making the "buy similar items" aspect of our product too prominent, because he didn't want us to seem like a front-end to Amazon. And when we were looking for a way to help the world with our money, It was his idea to give all of our Amazon associates' money to charity, so it's clear to our customers we are NOT trying to encourage them to BUY BUY BUY.

    Any new technology can be used for good or evil. I would expect people on this forum would recognize this truism isn't an argument against progress; it's a caution against recklessness.