But the one where a soldier in Iraq is woken up to a his daughters alarm message wasn’t. It got us a standing ovation at the New York Tech Meetup and was featured on Engadget and other places.

Overall people are going to have their opinions and that’s cool.

But the concept really is as ridiculous as waking up to an FM radio station, except the sound you wake up to was chosen by a friend or someone close to you (Happy Birthday song.) …..and no your friends can’t choose any youtube video to wake you up to only ones we or the community deem worthy.

Well we are glad our work has made such an impact on your life that five years later you are still talking and writing about it I can’t imagine others contemplating all the energy you have exerted towards our work and agreeing with you that it is indeed awful. Though and again, everyone has their own opinion.

peace and good luck to you matt!

Ryan

p.s. My alarm is set for 8am help me wake up http://bit.ly/x0wbf0

We must say for the first web site and or idea we ever created we are proud of our work. I mean the idea has been copied dozens of times, appeared in every technology blog, landed seed funding, presented alongside Google & Facebook and has 1000s of dedicated users.

Was it a business no, but again for the first website and idea we ever created it was an awesome journey where we learned a lot and made great connections/friendships!

Peace and good luck to you,
ryan spahn

My group B consists of writing the following – what is it, why am I interested in this idea and who can use it. Once I have these down, it is a bit easier to search for similar ideas.

I take the group B and do a list of 100 exercise. 100 ways the idea can be used – http://bit.ly/list100. That gets me thinking a lot about the idea and adjacent ones.

Finally I sketch a prototype on paper and if I feel like it try a functional prototype (a couple of weeks of coding effort). With the prototype, I try to find some interns who may take it up as a project and pay them some money to do the prototype. I tried to find some target users. Have discussions with them on whether it is useful and how much can they pay. Actually try to find a couple of paying users (as early adopters). This is the acid test. In one case, I had to give it away for a year before I discovered paying users.

I never used to follow this procedure before. But the concept of an idea funnel (like sales funnel) is a good one to have. It may vary from person to person or company to company.

I’d like to first reference “supply and demand.”
Basically, the piracy argument often ignore that people are unwilling to pay much for a service because other similar services can be obtained for free. (I won’t pay to see one particular movie because I can pirate other movies). This is often used as a focal point in debating the validity of the “lost sale” argument, though Pirates are a bit fascist and you can’t really reason with them.

What this means is, the more someone is use to something being worth a given value, the harder it will be to convince them to pay a different value… hence the need for regulating prices.

Second, escalation.
“So in so has chopped X value from their price, if we don’t do so as well we won’t make sales.” Seems rather minor until you consider that the Digital Distribution Industry is kind of killing Commerce.

After say, 50 years, maybe more, things will balance out… but right now you have a small group of big name people making all the money. This is effectively a monopoly and hence the publishers are at the mercy of a single distributor.

Steam, being a good example here, tends to hold -75% sales. Now since so many companies are doing these and the “product awareness” that said events generate gains value (in a store of thousands, what is one title?)… well, it can hurt more by choosing NOT to do it.

Third, Greed.
Really, this is where the biggest problem lies. Once the profit from an item is no longer contributing to “a new or improved item” (new movie) said profit is excessive.
At this point, all rights should be dropped and the item released to public domain… but people don’t do this.

Worse is the profiteering in nostalgia. Simply because demand exists does not mean you should sell high… by which I mean that as digital products age they should depreciate in worth… not remain generally constant.

The thing is… so many people look straight at the big issue “Obvious Greed” and make a mess with everything else. And what’s rather worse is that the internet has created this whole “I’m stupid and deserve everything” society.

Technology has been noticeably taking a massive U-Turn away from functionality and towards “OOooh Shiny.” And we’ve all been falling into this “Tech Society” trend where we ignore the reality and try and live our digital lives.