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Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

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Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#111

Post by posguy »

btown wrote: post #101
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heartland is such an utter piece of garbage. I'd use almost anything before I'd touch it (or any typical shitty enterprise processor) again. Source: spent a year helping a client migrate from Stripe to Heartland to save a few basis points. Things like faxing docs to terrible APIs to constant lies from sales, who is a bunch of ignorant, rude good ol' boys, just like most of their competitors. Pure incompetence at virt…

As someone who's worked with faxed API docs before, that's usually just the tip of the iceberg of despair. Never again.

Yeah, I'd avoid direct integrations entirely, semi-integrated CC/Debit processing like Pax or Dejavoo is much less painful to implement, and costs less on hardware too. See my other comment.

Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#112

Post by komali2 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #94
itake wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that any more trustworthy? You can probably use the same source the server would use to verify that information. Not to mention, most phones may not have those sensors.

Some very popular phones have a barometer[1]. If you are getting data from a bunch of phones, and most of them are legit, then you'll have a good idea of where the air pressure 'should' be, and if you get a barometer reading that is outside that data set by a standard deviation you can probably 'guess' that it is not coming from a phone at the same lat/lon as the other ones. [1] https://www.phonegg.com/list/303-Cell-…

So users on phones without barometers cannot use your app, and you are decidedly mobile-only, forever.

Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#113

Post by wuliwong »

sdflkd wrote: post #20
alistproducer2 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I've heard that the Atlanta tech scene is dominated by business types... In ATL, can confirm. That's not to say there aren't good engineers here.

Can you speak more on the ATL tech scene? I've always been interested.

Also not OP but I am an ATL engineer:

I moved here from Philadelphia and was surprised that from an engineer's perspective the tech scene was significantly better in ATL. There were more jobs at more interesting companies. Obviously this is anecdotal from one job search 5 years ago. Philly might also be surprisingly poor.

One cool company here is BitPay. Not sure what they are valued at these days but they are a big name in the bitcoin world. I think they have some solid engineering there. I worked with Oracle for a couple years here right after they acquired a company called Vitrue for $300 million. It's not unicorn status but that was one of several acquisitions around that time. Acquisitions like that in Philly were much more rare.

There are a lot of huge corporations here which can continually spin off startups and Georgia Tech is a good source of new engineering talent. I think Atlanta has a healthy tech scene but not one focused in headline grabbing areas.

Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#114

Post by posguy »

jameskegel wrote: post #88
posguy wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, well Square seems to be in the right place at the right time to make this acquisition of talent. I still don't get how Square intends to retain/gain customers at the price point their at, Mercury, Heartland, etc are eating their lunch.

>Mercury Vantiv Payments

Depends who your dealing with, they may be owned by Vantiv, but the sales & support teams are still separate.

Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#115

Post by wuliwong »

FrobozzElectric wrote: post #75
charlescearl wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mailchimp?

I would imagine MC would qualify as a unicorn. Off topic - I always get such bizarre vibes when I interact with anyone from MC or hear of others' interactions with MC employees (ATL here).

I just read an article that there revenue for 2016 was estimated to be $400 million. Not bad. I don't know what the profits were but I would guess that gets them 'unicorn status.' :)

Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#116

Post by thaumasiotes »

cheriot wrote: post #24
pjc50 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting if there were a transfer market in programmers like there is in footballers, but I don't see it happening any time soon. (Partly this is because the rules of the game prevent replacing Lionel Messi with 1,000 cheap non-Western consultants hired through three layers of outsourcing)

What successful company has been built by "1,000 cheap non-Western consultants hired through three layers of outsourcing"? We don't need a rule against a losing strategy

> We don't need a rule against a losing strategy

Interestingly, these are common anyway. Some obvious examples are laws against suicide, incest, and infanticide.

Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#117

Post by ChuckMcM »

komali2 wrote: post #112
ChuckMcM wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some very popular phones have a barometer[1]. If you are getting data from a bunch of phones, and most of them are legit, then you'll have a good idea of where the air pressure 'should' be, and if you get a barometer reading that is outside that data set by a standard deviation you can probably 'guess' that it is not coming from a phone at the same lat/lon as the other ones. [1] https://www.phonegg.com/list/303-Cell-…

So users on phones without barometers cannot use your app, and you are decidedly mobile-only, forever.

Not at all, the question was how to combat or at least estimate fraudulent 'adjustment' of the karma in a location based service. The way to do that is to take information that is specific to the location, and changes, and provide that data in the input stream to help understand where your clicks/votes are coming from. If one in 5 phones has a barometer with a high degree of probability, then you can use set bounds on the likelyhood that all 5 votes came from legitimate users. It won't be perfect but it will make it harder for scammers to scam without being there.

Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#118

Post by sdflkd »

wuliwong wrote: post #113
sdflkd wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you speak more on the ATL tech scene? I've always been interested.

Also not OP but I am an ATL engineer: I moved here from Philadelphia and was surprised that from an engineer's perspective the tech scene was significantly better in ATL. There were more jobs at more interesting companies. Obviously this is anecdotal from one job search 5 years ago. Philly might also be surprisingly poor. One cool company here is BitPay. Not sure what they are valued at these days but they are a big…

Thanks for the info!

Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#119

Post by sdflkd »

alistproducer2 wrote: post #57
sdflkd wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you speak more on the ATL tech scene? I've always been interested.

From my experience going to meetups and seeing the kind of job postings that get thrown up out here, there's just more of an "enterprise" mindset here. A lot less "hard" tech being pursued. I think it's because there's not a lot of VC money (relative to the west coast and Boston/N.Y) so startups need to be more focused on generating revenue sooner. No long runways out here (for the most part). This seems to select fo…

Sounds like business plans I can get behind. I find it hard to believe the large-scale goals that are common in SV.

Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#120

Post by yangmaster »

pyromine wrote: post #35
utmachina wrote: post #4

I think the key problem was the hype train and the lack of product-oriented/technical leadership. remembered them doing very well on campus last two years of college. They had on campus reps to hand out "schwag"; probably not very fun to scale. The obvious bullying was the problem. If they had found some way to solve that and snuck their way back into high schools... then again, kids can be so cruel.

College student, it was fun for a year or two and then pretty much everyone gave up on it. The unique commentary was what made it, there was essentially humor that everyone could relate to and the unique perspectives people felt were too uncomfortable to share with their persona attached. It was fascinating to watch what would come up over the day

To add onto this, college meme groups on Facebook have largely replaced Yik Yak's niche in the past year or so. And those don't require millions in VC funding!
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