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The Stanford Class That Built Apps and Made Fortunes
The NY Times has a story about a group of students who took a 2007 course in app development at Stanford that turned out far better than any of them expected. Quoting:
"... by teaching students to build no-frills apps, distribute them quickly and worry about perfecting them later, the Facebook Class stumbled upon what has become standard operating procedure for a new generation of entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley and beyond. ... Early on, the Facebook Class became a microcosm of Silicon Valley. Working in teams of three, the 75 students created apps that collectively had 16 million users in just 10 weeks. Many of those apps were sort of silly: Mr. De Lombaert’s, for example, allowed users to send “hotness” points to Facebook friends. Yet during the term, the apps, free for users, generated roughly $1 million in advertising revenue."
This is what business schools teach? No wonder the US is going down the toilet.
teaching students on how to be shills for advertisers, dont write apps because they are a good idea but so you can shill adverts and products for questionable and obviously desperate businesses !.
there was a time when people would never even think of advertising in an application (we called it adware) or adverts on your own website ? the shame of it, a time when people had dignity, now i see a bunch of desperate fools trying to get rich by trying to jump into the long line of middlemen
"send “hotness” points to Facebook friends. Yet during the term, the apps, free for users, generated roughly $1 million in advertising revenue."
Somebody please just put me out of my misery. Humanity is fucked as a species.
It's not the quality of the app you write, it's how easy people find it and perceive it. I am very slowly learning this. Go read the book "Words That Work" by Frank Luntz. Whether you like it or not, it's true.
You are absolutely right and it's depressing. Most of IT is based on the premise of bullshit. It's one big lying bubble. I hope we're in another bubble and it will collapse soon.
Apps? Mostly bullshit. I am sure there are useful ones out there but are they free? What happened to tethering?
DRM? Bullshit.
Internet media? Bullshit.
Social marketing? Bullshitting.
Twitter? Bullshit.
Facebook? Lots of bullshit.
Contextual advertising? Bullshit.
Cloud? Bullshit.
Web 2.0? Bullshit.
Social web? Bullshit.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Maybe if you see your personal wealth as an optimization problem, and thus if you're doing consumer software - things like traction, user experience, virality as optimization problems - you'll begin to appreciate the complexities inherent in building successful products (which can look deceptively simple, but the reasoning behind something simple can be very complicated) and by extension, companies that actually work well instead of "work" like a Dilbert comic strip.
I can understand the left-leaning and socialists among Slashdotters will hate what I just said. But at the end of the day, whatever technological and scientific advance you or I made have to serve human interests. You can't say "I like to do [math|quantum mechanics|machine learning|art|product design|rockets|science fiction|...] because it's fun" without "I".
Ayn Rand, are you back from the dead?
You are being a little bitter overall and apps are a valuable new market. People have phones that they want to be more than phones and apps fill that need.
However as new market there is a situation where kinda any and everything sells, so there is a lot of money to be made on crap. People buy something not because it is that good but because they are looking for something to get.
As time goes on and the market matures, there'll be less of that. Apps will have to be higher quality for people to want to buy them.
Also you are right apps are no kind of "breakthrough". They are just programs for mobile phones and now tablets. It is a logical extension of what a smart phone is. "Hey we have a phone that is a computer too, we could probably sell programs on there, just like a real computer!"
These apps aren't breakthroughs in any sense of the word. It's ridiculous how people can make money from doing nothing groundbreaking. The clueless public buy into it. I have never understood how internet media/web design/app companies can be started by students with bigger egos than ability and what they make is so painfully trivial, why are they being rewarded?
People are generally rewarded for being good at exploiting the market, and not much more. A good product makes that much easier to do, but there are plenty of examples all throughout history of the inventor being screwed because they did a poor job of commercialisation. Conversely, you don't need a particularly inventive or even functional product if your marketing is good enough. If you judge success as "making lots of cash" then purity and quality often have nothing to do with it; it's also worth questioning who's really smarter - the guy who slaves away in a forgotten office for 40 years to make something amazing, or the guy who makes a few million on some inane crap, then spends the next few years working in comfort (and with plenty of resources) on something amazing while the money rolls in from the well-marketed crap.
A guy at my university put together a (fairly basic) interactive website with a slightly inventive concept a year or so ago - it got some good publicity, then was taken down by the university, causing a controversy that netted him much, much more publicity. Just to make the point to a few of my friends that it wasn't really anything that special, I had a clone working the day after the original was taken down - I literally coded it over night, and I'm by no means a great developer. The guy who made the original got a £200k investment in his 'concept'; my copy got all of a few thousand hits. Honestly, I say fair play to the guy - all I really succeeded in demonstrating was that the technical skill wasn't all that valuable, and that the associated marketing and media-wrangling was what actually netted him a good chunk of cash.
It's nice to see there is someone who knows IT and is grumpier than me! I prostrate myself before you!
While you're saying all these things are bullshit, quite a few people made billions and thousands if not tens of thousands made millions. Businesses (e.g. Nokia, Borders) that can't follow are seeing a hit in real revenues, people are fired, and whole companies are going belly up.
You may think all these are bullshit, but to the investors, entrepreneurs and all related newly minted rich; or the newly fired people from older companies - the effects are very real.
Technical skills *alone* is not valuable, correct. But if you find ways to ensure whoever coming to your website will generate new users and stay (virality factor) and also grab publicity at the right moment, and you understand what "right moment" means instead of naively going to TechCrunch while your website's fundamental design is not all that viral and not all that usable (e.g. the Color app that got $41M in investments) - then, only then, will you have some chance of success.
In short, it's all about execution, and most people think it's simple.
Unfortunately, the key to a successful business is to give people what they want (possibly making them think they want it along the way). All of the crap mentioned in TFA is completely and utterly worthless shit... but then again, most people are idiots and will make it profitable (either through sales or providing eyes for advertising). I'm not thrilled that the majority of my peers will engage in this sort of laughable behavior, but unfortunately there's no indication that they're going to all grow brain stems any time soon, if ever.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
ya, it's not, on the whole, a lot of money. But considering it's one course (of probably 5), in one term, it's not bad. And they're students, who would be expected to be slow since they well, are still learning after all.
Shipping is the only feature that is an absolute must have for any application. The rest is just chrome.
The best minds of our generation are occupied finding the best ways to leverage advertising revenue.
Pick one or two features to work on. For the original iPhone it was a real web browser. Windows 95 and nt4 it was the ability to do things in hours that took weeks or months on Novell and unix
Code the rest later little by little
You have to be a fool to think that apple coded the iPhone sdk in the 9 months between the original iPhone and when they announced the app store. It was partly done but not ready for release and the original model won mindshare in the mean time.
.....meaning "more profitable". Microsoft is profitable, but I think you'd have a hard time selling the argument that this makes them "better" in any software sense. They are better at making money, and I'm sure plenty of economists would argue that that is the important metric. One of the reasons people pine after the "golden age" of technology is that people who are better at making money are much worse at making something worth the money being paid for it. It's not that the "golden age" actually had products that were great (they weren't), it's that the quality is falling as people divert effort away from engineering as well as they can to promoting as hard as they can.
In the end, a good enough salesman can sell ice to eskimos. A good enough salesman can therefore make money when giving you nothing at all. It's certainly better for the salesman, but how is it better for the consumer? And since companies that produce things are themselves consumers, inferior consumption means inferior output even on the few occasions the companies are being honest and accountable.
For further explanation, please see Isaac Asimov's depiction of how to identify irreversible decay in the Foundation series.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If what you want to do is make quick and easy money, and you do not really care about learning much in the process, your choice is pretty clear. On the other hand, if you think that taking on a challenging problem that will require you to spend late nights reading research papers is more "pure" and is a better use of your time, then you should be in graduate school. If you desperately crave to sell your technology but cannot stomach the idea of working on idiotic apps that require no real effort, then you belong at a startup, assuming you can deal with venture capitalists and legal minefields.
Palm trees and 8
a university teaches students to create product for a private corporation.
that corporation claims fantastic profits of 1 million dollars, and the professors involved claim a massive educational success.
What the fuck is really going on here? Let's read the fucking article for some clues.
"His team’s app netted $3,000 a day and morphed into a company that later sold for a six-figure sum."
Where have i heard this shit before? Oh yes. 1999. Pets.com. What was behind that tech bubble? It sure as hell wasn't technology, students, or legitimate business activitity. Rather, it was a massive fraud perpetrated by investment bank 'equity research analysts' who were riding a gigantic speculative bubble, which was no different than any other speculative bubble in history, from Tulipmania to the CDO market.
"Venture capitalists also began rethinking their approach. Some created investment funds tailored to the new, bare-bones start-ups."
Ahh yes. The same shitbags who drove VA Linux to become the largest IPO in history, selling shares to the clueless masses. If you want to know what an IPO is, read Running Money by Andy Kessler, and Trading with the Enemy by Nicholas Maier. IPOs like this nothing but a fucking scam. They are the transfer of wealth from the ignorant to the well connected.
I know that 'true techies' like to harsh on Best Buy for selling people 'extended warranties' and Kaspersky's Smirking Douchebag Suite 9.5 but think about it; the IPO scam is no different than what Best Buy does. It sells shit product to ignorant people for profit. It is not much different than from any other street hustle.
Now, let's look at what kind of 'income' these people are bringing in. "Their apps caught on with millions of people and were soon bringing in nearly $100,000 a month in ads."
What kind of ads do you see on facebook? "One tip for a flat belly". "Acai berry revealed". "Obama gives mom's money for college". "Earn your bachelors degree from Diplomamill Subprime University".
The whole fucking edicife of this 'app industry' is propped up by bullshit and intellectual prostitution.
Am I Jealous? Yes I'm fucking jealous. I will sit on my shitty treadmill of a job at my evil corporation where It is timed to the minute when I take a piss and where my email is monitored, and I wish I could make $1000 a day selling 'hug apps' on facebook. Yes I'm jealous.
But I am glad for one thing. At least I understand what I am doing, and why I'm doing it, and don't lie to myself about the true nature of my work.
I say congrats to these students. Yes, some of these apps are really stupid, but so was the ChiaPet, the pet rock, Lava Lamps, etc. In fact, there have been a lot of stupid products over the years that have made their inventors/developers/etc. millions. This class accomplished exactly what business schools want students to learn: develop a product, find a market, sell the product, make money. From TFA one former student is now employing 30 people and just raised 6 million dollars in venture capital. At least he is now affecting the economy in a positive way by providing jobs. I wish more schools would take risks like this to encourage students to do create businesses. Perhaps a lot of the products will be basic and not technically innovate, but some of them will. And as one person posted, over time as the phone app market matures, silly apps will be less attractive and people will want good games and productivity tools for their phones.
Only one thing is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet. --Mark Twain
"Or am I just bitter because they did it first?"
Yes.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
oh well. there's no "delete comment" on slashdot. guess ill go join the ranks of disobey.com and fade into obscure lunatic ranting .
You got me there.
I do think however that genuine geeks are more interested in improving and learning than fleecing people. It just so happens that the skills of a geek are often helpful for businesses, such as system administration or coding. We secretly want to improve everything and if we had the resources to do so, the world could be amazing.
Enginertopia
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Lesson number 101010 in life: "Dumb shit sells and makes far more money than quality stuff. Put advertising with that free crap and make even more money".
Dude! We can see your prostrate!
Support SETI@home
Income is nice, too, if you want to keep shipping. Chrome will only fetch a limited amount it.
This.
Wall St. has been giving all the stock broker jobs to geeks.
Advertising jobs are going to geeks.
We might actually create a fairly pleasant world eventually.
There is also the issue that people who don't understand jake shit are being dis-enfranchised, but that might be temporary, i.e. eventually we might create a society in which ignorance of mathematics, science, and programming is widely understood to directly lead to poverty.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I liked it too...
One can question the whole issue of graduate / business schools in other ways too:
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
And this: ... Professors, lecturers and researchers have been entrusted by society with the task of serving the society through their search for a better understanding of reality. Only in this context does academic freedom have a real meaning. ..."
http://www.responsiblefinance.ch/appeal/
http://dublinopinion.com/2011/05/06/an-appeal-from-teachers-and-researchers-of-economics/
"The authors of this appeal are deeply concerned that more than three years since the outbreak of the financial and macroeconomic crisis that highlighted the pitfalls, limitations, dangers and responsibilities of main-stream thought in economics, finance and management, the quasi-monopolistic position of such thought within the academic world nevertheless remains largely unchallenged.
The question is, how repeatable is it for everyone to be in on something at the right time in the right place? How about instead building a world that works for everyone?
"RSA Animate - 21st century enlightenment "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC7ANGMy0yo
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
> "I can understand the left-leaning and socialists among Slashdotters will hate what I just said..."
I'm a left-leaning slashdotter. Could you explain why I'd find what you said offensive, or are you operating under the mistake assumption that "left leaning" = "people who believe business is evil, by definition".
That's 1 million USD split 75 ways for roughly 4 months of work.
Congratulations you're making $50/hour.
Ah, so when you come back from the dead you're the antithesis of what you were when you lived. Makes sense.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
you're would actually work here.
For good or bad, the American economy depends on fads. Anything that becomes a predictable commodity shifts to the third world where labor is cheaper. Fads are America's comparative advantage right now. Either we tariff more, or live with the ugly fad treadmill.
Table-ized A.I.
They discovered iterative development again I see.
Not back on it, still on it.
A guy at my university put together a (fairly basic) interactive website with a slightly inventive concept a year or so ago - it got some good publicity, then was taken down by the university, causing a controversy that netted him much, much more publicity.
Oh, FitFinder, done by someone at University College, London. Now if that had happened at Stanford, the student would have been hooked up with a venture capitalist and encouraged.
Stanford is really a venture capital and real estate firm which runs a university as a sideline. In 1992, Stanford University spun off the management of its endowment to the Stanford Management Company. They set up shop at 2770 Sand Hill Road, which is where almost all the Silicon Valley venture capitalists have their headquarters. Within a few years, Stanford was investing in venture capital funds, executives were moving between the academic business unit and the financial unit, and Stanford was turning into a major player in the VC industry.
Stanford actively helps to create startups and takes equity stakes in them. Stanford owns part of Cisco, part of Yahoo, part of Google, etc. They're not just a passive investor, like most universities.
I am *so* tired of seeing the "1 weird old tip for a flat belly" ad. Not only am I uninterested in losing weight, but this particular tactic loses its potency when I see the exact same phrase over and over.
Should have asked if I wanted fries with that.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
We secretly want to improve everything and if we had the resources to do so, the world could be amazing.
Enginertopia
The desire to "improve" everything can also lead to a dystopia....