Some developers are trying to organize a developer boycott of iOS and Android offerings, getting them to pull their apps from the official marketplaces from both Apple and Google. At issue is that they feel Apple and Google haven’t done enough to fight on their behalf against patent trolls Lodsys and Macrosolve. To be honest, I doubt this will be effective, nor does it seem properly targeted. Apple, for example, has been quite aggressive on Lodsys, seeking to intervene in Lodsys’s lawsuits. And while Google was a bit slow and a bit more limited, it has also intervened. So I’m not entirely clear what more these developers want — and I’m wondering how many developers will actually cut off their two biggest sources of distribution over this. These patent trolls are certainly a problem and it would be nice to see a strong and swift response from companies like Apple and Google, but it’s not like the two have washed their hands of the situation and left developers totally hung out to dry.
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There are many risks involved in starting a business, and entrepreneurs know that there’s a good chance their ventures will fail. In fact, many entrepreneurs talk about how failure is essential to success. Few in the world have experienced as disproportionate a ratio of successes to failures as Kevin Ryan. Fashionistas know and love his ecommerce brainchild, Gilt Groupe. Those in the ad world know him for his work at DoubleClick. And if you’re well read on business content, you’ve probably clicked through Business Insider. But Ryan also is (or was) the man behind other companies, too, including 10Gen, Music Nation, ShopWiki and Panther Express.
He earned an economics degree and an MBA, did a stint on Wall Street and spent some time at Disney. Ryan realized in the early years of his career that he’d rather be in a small company and have more responsibility than be a cog in the machine of a larger one. With more than two decades of management, entrepreneurship and tech tycoon status under his belt, he jokes that “by now I’m completely unmanageable — I have to be an entrepreneur for the rest of my life because I can’t easily work for anyone.”
Mashable spoke with Ryan about how he manages his three businesses, became a tech leader, and outruns the competition.
Name: Kevin Ryan
Companies: Gilt Groupe, Business Insider, 10gen
Employees: Gilt Groupe – 830, Business Insider – 65, 10gen – 50
Fun Fact: “Don’t laugh, but I play competitive ping pong. We’re setting up a tournament now which I’m going to start training for. I was the DoubleClick ping pong champion for many years.”
Q&A with Kevin Ryan
You’re a serial entrepreneur in the tech arena — what first drew you to tech?
It was somewhat accidental, because I was working for a large media company, E.W. Scripps in 1995 — we sold comics, columns, crossword puzzles to newspapers. We thought, how could we expand our business? I thought, there’s only one newspaper in every town, but there’s a concept called the Internet, and maybe if we put everything on there — which sounds so obvious now — then people everywhere would love Dilbert and Peanuts. So we set up a website, and the Dilbert website, through a little bit of skill and a little bit of luck, became one of the most successful websites in 1995. It was profitable, ad-supported and commerce-enabled, and it was one of the top 10 websites. So in the beginning of 1996, I thought, this thing “the Internet” is going to be one of the most fundamental trends in my lifetime.
I went to the parent company and said, “you should give me a couple million dollars, and I’ll build up an Internet business.” They said “I don’t know, it’s risky, it might cannibalize our current business.” I said, “Forget it, I’m going to go start a company then, because this is really big.” And that’s how I really, full-time got into it. I went out and I was going to start DoubleClick. As part of this process, I came across a company called DoubleClick that had 20 people and had developed a really great piece of technology. And I realized I didn’t know that much about technology as these two engineers who had this dynamic ad-serving thing, and I thought, “Wow that is really important, really cool, I didn’t think of that.” So instead of starting on my own, I decided to join them. And then I became president and then I became CEO. We started with zero people and four years later we had 2,000 in 25 different countries, and we had gone public and made four acquisitions — it was crazy and incredibly fun.
What about your startup ideas — and there have been a few — were game-changing?
You have ideas within the company that end up being very important, and then there’s the idea of a new company. So Gilt has worked really well — we started it four years ago, now we’re up to 800 employees and $500 million revenue — so it’s really taken off, and it’s exciting to see the passion the consumers have for it. I feel really great about Business Insider — we have 12 million [monthly] uniques, and I came up with that idea four years ago — it’s a pure example of execution. Most people think that for startups, you have to have the best idea ever, one brilliant idea. It turns out actually that most entrepreneurs don’t have a brilliant idea.
You’re going to start an ad agency or a restaurant — is the idea that great? If you open a restaurant across the street and it’s great, everyone will go eat there, and you’ll be really successful without a great idea because it’s great execution. Any time I’ve started an idea, including Gilt, if it’s any good at all, there are 20 people doing the same thing. DoubleClick had 37 competitors after a year and a half of being in business. It’s all about doing it really well. In Gilt, we’re not even the first person to launch flash sales — ideeli was there two months before us. Yet we became much bigger and faster because the product is better. 10Gen is the only one that people don’t really know about, and it’s going to be very valuable and game-changing in parts of the technology industry. Tens of thousands of companies have downloaded that database and are using it right now.
In what ways are your companies symbiotic?
They’re not. In the beginning, we started six companies in about three years, and we shared office space. There were about 20 people working for each company, each with its own CEO, and I was the chairman. There were 10 people who did finances for everyone. So they were all independent companies from a financing point of view with different investors, but they shared a back office, which made it much easier. If we started a new company, we’d already have payroll and finances set up. So you would just focus on the actual business — hire the engineers, build the product, focus on the core.
But Gilt got to be very big very quickly. We had six business, and I thought a lot of them wouldn’t work because most companies don’t work. Turns out a lot more of them worked than I had planned. I couldn’t have 12 of these and still play the same role. So two decisions were made: I wouldn’t start any new companies, and I’d focus as much of my time as possible on Gilt. I sold off Panther Express and ShopWiki, went off the board of Music Nation, and I became CEO of Gilt and chairman of [Business Insider and 10Gen]. I spend 90% of my time on Gilt, and I’m an outside board member of the other two, so I spend two hours a week on each of those — hiring senior people, raising money and strategy conversations.
What have you learned from launching all of these businesses?
That there’s still just great opportunity on the Internet in so many different areas. One of the interesting things about my companies is that they’re completely unrelated — super-technical company, ecommerce, consumer company and a media company, not to mention a search function for shopping and technology infrastructure. It’s all about people. Your concept’s not worth that much, but if you can get a great team, then you’ll be successful. So that’s what I do all day long, I hire. I’m interviewing people all day long and retaining, making sure that our good people stay and are in the right spots.
When you’re starting a company, what’s your vision of success?
You start by focusing on the consumer, or the client, if it’s B2B. I don’t think about exits or profits, I think that I need to create a product that people really want. If that works and people are buying it, then over time, each year you spend a little time tweaking the business model, optimizing it. Year two, you think a little about that. It’s not winner takes all, but it’s not far off. Who’s the number two player to eBay, to Amazon, to Google? That’s why I’m always pushing as hard as possible to be that number one player. You get all the PR, which is self-reinforcing. No one writes about number two. People want to work for the leaders — so do vendors and investors. It’s about being there and going really aggressively in the beginning. I always end up raising more money than my competitors, spending more, hiring more people and hiring them faster to make sure that we win.
How do you raise so much money?
There’s no question that it helps when you’re raising money if you have a track record. It’s a safer investment for people — all of these businesses are risky, and they know they’re betting on people. They want to know that you’re someone who can hire and make decisions. And then the rest of it is the team. When I put the team together, I think about that — they’ve gotta be good because that’s the value of the company — you don’t have anything else.
Where is an entrepreneur supposed to find top talent?
In the very beginning, you’re not even using search firms because you don’t have the money to do that. You’re going out and finding people yourself. If an entrepreneur comes to me and says they can’t find a person or can’t convince people to join, I would say, “Unfortuantely, that’s the job.” If a sales person can’t sell, then you can’t be successful. If you can’t convince people to join you, you shouldn’t be doing this because it’s very hard.
Think of all the people you know, the friends you have. Let’s say one of them suggests that you quit your job and join him in a startup. You’d be thinking, “Do I really want to work for this guy?” Think about it: Who would you do that for? You need someone who’s smart, charismatic, successful — a lot is just about that person, and a big part of the skill is inspiring people.
What makes someone a great entrepreneur?
You’re going to have to have a high level of passion, a high level of energy, you need to be pretty smart, because you need people to follow you. Every day people are going to think, do I want to keep working here, or do I want to work somewhere else? Everyone here can work somewhere else like that. They have to feel like what we’re doing is going to be successful, they have to like the environment and think it’s good for them — and a lot of that comes from the top. You need to inspire that feeling among employees.
When you run startup companies, things go wrong every day — that’s what I do all day. You want to be moving really quickly because speed is essential. I find so much about business is really just about judgment. You’re faced with suboptimal choices all the time, and you just have to make a judgment call.
You’re pretty involved in philanthropy — why is that important to you?
You need to be doing what you want to do and like to do, and it has to be a balance. If you want to be a CEO, you can’t spend all of your outside time on philanthropy. I think not only is it a great thing to do, but I find it good to have little breaks for tangential thinking. If you immerse yourself all day long in something, you get too close to it. So once in a while, it’s good to pull yourself out and be around a separate group of people. You come back with a fresh perspective. I always have thoughts for my own businesses coming out of other business meetings or non-profits. And it’s just intellectually interesting. I do think it’s very important, and it’s always nice to feel like I can add value [with my knowledge of the Internet space].
Gilt is your most famous venture — where did the idea come from?
I had seen this business model in Europe. Vente Privee is the biggest one, but it’s not the only one — there were three or four people doing it. It was the first time I saw a concept somewhere else that should be here [in the U.S.]. Usually it goes the other way, and most of the things I’ve launched in the past are just new ideas here. I’m always thinking of new ideas, and I was thinking, “Why would that work there and be doing a billion dollars in revenue, and yet no one’s doing it in the U.S.?” I spent two or three weeks thinking about that — I never do a presentation — but I think about the model, I spend time on the site, I think about economics and what works for the brand, what works for the consumer, what works for the company. And I just concluded that no one had done it, and that it could work here. I threw the idea out to a couple people, and some thought there were structural reasons why it would not work here, saying that France is a different market. And I just thought, “No, I think they’re wrong. I think it’s gonna work.”
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First time accepted submitter jonez450 writes “Times are tough in the advertising business. But PCWorld publisher Ziff Davis has come up with a new plan to gain a competitive edge: Paying other tech sites $1 CPM to place tracking code on their sites in return for data about their users via JavaScript. The company is also offering free content in return, but the ‘private’ Ziff Davis Tech Co-Op doesn’t want anyone to know what they are up to.”
When you use an operating system for several years, you develop a set of practices that enable you to work fast and be productive with it. Perhaps it’s a specific command line hack that you absolutely must employ on every computer you use, or some system settings that you just cannot leave at their defaults—whatever it may be, it’s something that helps you get the most out of your machine.
Here, we bring to you five third-party applications for Mac OS X that we think you absolutely must have installed, and customised to your preferences, to comfortably use any Mac. Some of them have a bit of a learning curve, and it takes some time to customise them to your preferences, but once you get used to them, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without them.
1Password
1Password is a well-integrated password manager from AgileBits that started out as a Mac OS X application and has since spread to Android, iOS and Windows. It’s available for $20 (for a limited time) from the Mac App Store and also has free browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari on the Mac.
1Password serves as a secure storage space for your passwords, personal details, notes, software licenses and credit card and banking information, autofills online forms with that stored information, synchronises all this information across all your computers, mobile devices and the Web and generates unique and strong passwords for you that are difficult to hack.
Once it is set up, 1Password replaces your browser’s password-saving features with its own. Whenever you visit a website with a registration requirement, you can have 1Password generate and complete a complex password for you. And when you hit submit, it offers to save that username and password combination for future use.
The difference between 1Password and your browser’s default password management feature is that 1Password lets you take your passwords with you. And it lets you generate strong passwords easily, which are permanently saved in a date-stamped, searchable archive for easy retrieval later, so you can use a different one for each website.
Besides that, it also makes short work of entering your credit card details when shopping online, removing the need to fetch the card from your wallet and enter the details manually. It’s also a very handy place to store important data—such as membership cards, software licenses and bank account details—that you need on hand at all times.
I am not obsessed with privacy and security. The way I see it, there’s a long list of people an identity thief would go after before they choose to target me. And so I always kept one convenient password for all websites and figured that apps like 1Password were not for people like me.
But I was eventually won over by all the other great features of the app and decided to give it a try. A year later, I have hundreds of passwords stored in 1Password, all of them unique and generated by the app itself. I have it on my iPad and my iPhone, I can access it on the Web and it’s installed on my Mac, and the data is kept in sync via Dropbox and backed up to my Mac. It has become an irreplaceable part of my life.
To learn more about 1Password, check out the official 3-minute expert guide or this detailed video tutorial by ScreenCastsOnline or the $0.99 iBook or Kindle book by blogger Scott McNulty explaining all there is to know about the app. A free trial is available from AgileBits’s website.
Dropbox
We wrestled with the idea of adding Dropbox to this list, thinking that it’s pretty much known to everybody at this point, but it won out in the end because any list of our most favourite productivity apps cannot be complete without mentioning the service that makes some of them tick.
Dropbox is a free service (for beginners) that installs a folder on your Mac which it keeps in sync with the cloud and your other computers. Put any file into that folder and, within seconds (depending upon its size), it is available on your other computers and through the service’s Android, BlackBerry and iOS apps. And you can share it with other users of the service as well.
What’s more, there is a whole host of apps that tie into Dropbox to sync their own data across your various computers and devices. 1Password uses it to synchronise its encrypted database across platforms and lets you access it through a Web browser directly from within Dropbox. Similarly, Simplenote—my notes app of choice on iOS—can use it to synchronise your notes between your iPad and iPhone, while Notational Velocity taps into those same files to let your access your notes on the Mac.
The sharing features let you collaborate with friends and colleagues by providing a common place for storing files. You can create a folder and share it with any other Dropbox user. Once they accept the invitation, you’re both free to read from and write to that folder and the changes are always kept in sync, so both of you have the latest versions of the files in it.
Dropbox is very much a background service and, for the most part, you don’t even think about the fact that you are using it. But try disabling it for one day and you’ll suddenly find some apps that have stopped working and some files that are missing or out of date. The fact that it’s always there—always working reliably, yet invisibly—is what makes it such a great app.
Dropbox is available for download from the company’s website and new users can take a tour of the service to get familiar with its workings. The basic plan gives you 2GB of storage space for free and heavy users can get more with paid monthly plans. And if you do end up using the app, you may also want to take a look at MacDropAny, a tiny third-party app that lets you keep your Mac’s default Documents folder in sync with Dropbox.
LaunchBar
Once you install it, LaunchBar will quickly become the single most frequently used app on your Mac, bar none. At its core, it’s a launcher that enables you to launch apps faster than with any of the other methods available in Mac OS X. That in itself would be great reason to buy the app, but it does so much more.
The app’s entire list of features, which often summarises a bunch of features under a single bullet point, contains over 150 entries—yes, we counted. From making calculations to fetching information from your address book to composing an email or a tweet, from performing Internet searches to opening URLs to giving you access to your browser history, LaunchBar does it all.
To start with, you can launch apps speedily. Hit the keyboard shortcut to bring it up (which, by default, is Command-Space, because you’ll be using Spotlight much less frequently after installing LaunchBar) and then type the first few letters of the app’s name (often just the first letter) to select it, and then hitting return to launch it.
This also works with documents, bookmarks, browser history, address book entries, songs in iTunes and pretty much everything else on your system. So you can, for instance, hit ‘F-I’ to bring up your financial records spreadsheet and ‘T-N’ to summon The Next Web from your bookmarks list. Everything on your Mac is accessible via the keyboard.
It also has built-in actions that allow you to do things with the selected content instead of simply opening it. For example, you can bring up a file, attach it to an email and address it to someone, all from within LaunchBar. Or you can select a file and open it with a different app than the one it uses by default.
When you start typing numbers, it performs calculations (and even handles complex scientific calculations with aplomb); it can look up words in the dictionary, perform Spotlight searches, copy or move files between folders, delete or rename items, browse through your iTunes library or address book, create iCal events, and so on.
One of the features you’re likely to love the most is its clipboard history tool. Whenever you copy anything on your Mac, LaunchBar saves it for later retrieval. It can store up to 40 items and you can go back and bring any of them to the front with a convenient keyboard shortcut. It becomes so ingrained into any workflow that a Mac without it feels very restricted.
Finally, there’s the search macros feature, which is so great we could write a whole article dedicated just to it (and maybe we will). LaunchBar includes a host of templates to let you search websites like Amazon, Flickr, Google, IMDb, the iTunes Store, Wikipedia, YouTube, etc., and also lets you build your own. You can set up a macro, for instance, that lets you search The Next Web just by typing ‘T-N-W’ in LaunchBar.
And it gets better!
The default templates include Lucky Google, which is a macro for Google’s ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ feature. With it, you never have to remember website addresses. Just enter “next web” in it to be brought here or “next web twitter” to be taken to our Twitter profile—the possibilities are endless. We like to tell people about LaunchBar just so we can tell them about how great this one search macro is.
To learn more about LaunchBar, you can either go though the company’s extensive help documentation or, better yet, watch an excellent overview of it from Don McAllister of ScreenCastsOnline. At €24 ($33) for a single user license, it is the most expensive application on this list but it’s easily worth several times that. Download the free trial and give it a run—you’ll thank us later.
MercuryMover
MercuryMover, a $20 utility from Helium Foot Software, is a recent addition to our list of must-have Mac apps. It’s probably not for everyone, but for people who are anal-retentive about their computing workflow, it’s a great app to have. It’s a window-management application that frees the placement and size of windows on your display from the tyranny of the mouse and puts it under the control of your keyboard.
As all expert keyboarders know, keyboard shortcuts can often be—or, at the very least, feel—much faster than mouse movements for many tasks. If you often switch between open applications using the Command-Tab switcher instead of the Dock or Mission Control, you probably know what we mean.
With MercuryMover installed, you press a keyboard shortcut (by default Command-Control-Up Arrow) to bring up an overlay on top of the currently active window and then use the arrow keys in combination with modifier keys to move the window in either direction by 1, 10 or 100 pixels. Using the Command key modifier moves the windows to the edge of the screen in whichever direction you want, and pressing the ‘=’ key positions the window at the centre of the screen. A different keyboard shortcut lets you perform the same actions to resize the window as described above.
But here’s the real kicker: once you have resized a window according to your preferences, you can hit Command-D while MercuryMover is active, assign a letter on the keyboard as a shortcut and save that window’s size, position, or both size and position. Now, whenever you want a window to use those settings, you can just bring up MercuryMover with the window active and hit the letter you chose earlier.
Once you have the sizes saved for your most frequently used apps’ windows—and combined with the ability to quickly move any window to any screen corner or the centre of the display—it makes it very easy to arrange windows according to your workflow and quickly revert to your settings after they have been disturbed.
Like we mentioned before, it’s probably a niche requirement, but if you are obsessive about your window sizes and placements, MercuryMover is the program to have. To know more about it, check out this screencast showing the app in action by Macworld senior editor Dan Frakes and give the demo a try, which is free for the first 100 uses.
Speed Download
Yazsoft’s Speed Download is another app that you can have in your arsenal for a long time without even realising that it exists due to its being so good at its job. It’s a download manager with a fast downloading engine and an FTP client, and mixes in other features like P2P sharing of encrypted files with other Speed Download users, iDisk integration, support for RSS and the downloading of YouTube videos.
The main benefits of Speed Download over your Web browser’s built-in download manager are that (a) it’s much faster; and (b) it supports auto-resuming of downloads. Speed Download’s engine uses various tricks to ensure that you are maximising the bandwidth your broadband pipe can deliver. While this may be bad news for others on the same network, it does mean that you can download files much faster.
If your Internet connection ever drops, Speed Download automatically resumes downloading the file when the connection comes back. I’ve also found its resuming feature to be more reliable than the integrated download manager of Web browsers, which is a feature that comes in handy when you are downloading large files over a spotty broadband connection. It even allows you to limit the download speed so that it does not maximise your bandwidth, thus preventing your browsing speed from slowing down.
If those two are the only features you want, you can purchase Speed Download Lite, which is the $20 sibling of the full offering that gets rid of all the other features such as FTP, file-sharing and iDisk integration. You can also try Leech, which is a cheaper and just as capable Speed Download Lite alternative from Many Tricks.
If you want more, the full-featured version of Speed Download offers all the other features described above and is a capable all-in-one offering for all your online file transfer needs. Don McAllister has a great two-part tutorial for the app over at ScreenCastsOnline and Yazsoft offers a free trial if you want to give the app a test run before plonking out your $25.
In Conclusion…
If you have simply scanned the names of the apps, we recommend that you scroll back up and take another look at the LaunchBar entry before going on your merry way. Its custom search macros feature is such an indispensable one that we would pay the full price of the app even if that was the only one it offered. And it piles over 150 features on top of that!
Of course, these are just five apps from a pool of thousands. With the Mac App Store making it easier for users to find and download apps, the list of favourite apps will be different for each person, but we hope you found our recommendations helpful. If you have any favourite Mac apps of your own, let us know about them in the comments.
Back in July, after announcing it would decouple unlimited movie streaming from unlimited DVD rentals and charge more to keep both, Netflix predicted it would end up with 25 million subscribers at the end of Q3. This morning it advised investors that prediction has been slashed by 1 million, however most of that shortfall is predicted to come from fewer DVD-only customers than expected, which is expected to come up 800,000 short. While we’ll still have to wait for the actual Q3 results to see how things pan out, the company still claims its projection of 12 million subscribers to both services is right on. While it backtracked on the total numbers, it also outlined its reasoning for raising prices by improving the DVD business, raising more cash to spend on streaming licensing and ultimately “remain price aggressive” and keep its individual offerings at $7.99 each. Much of the kicking and screaming online indicted Netflix’s streaming library for failing to live up to the new price, anyone surprised many cutters seem to be coming from the DVD-only side?
Netflix admits it will end up with fewer subscribers than predicted, shrinks DVD-only count originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 15 Sep 2011 08:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
There are many risks involved in starting a business, and entrepreneurs know that there’s a good chance their ventures will fail. In fact, many entrepreneurs talk about how failure is essential to success. Few in the world have experienced as disproportionate a ratio of successes to failures as Kevin Ryan. Fashionistas know and love his ecommerce brainchild, Gilt Groupe. Those in the ad world know him for his work at DoubleClick. And if you’re well read on business content, you’ve probably clicked through Business Insider. But Ryan also is (or was) the man behind other companies, too, including 10Gen, Music Nation, ShopWiki and Panther Express. 
As all expert keyboarders know, keyboard shortcuts can often be—or, at the very least, feel—much faster than mouse movements for many tasks. If you often switch between open applications using the Command-Tab switcher instead of the Dock or Mission Control, you probably know what we mean.
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