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Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

techcrunch.com

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Re: Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

#31

Post by simonw »

I'd love to hook this up to my Twitter account, but they require read access and I've already seen one person accidentally spam their Twitter stream (https://twitter.com/julien51 - to be fair to Prismatic this looks like it was a bug and they're actively reaching out to Julien to figure out what went wrong).

Our startup used to ask people for write access (purely so we could implement "follow" buttons - we never sent tweets on people's behalf) and it was a frequent source of complaints, so we eventually switched to read-only with an upgrade path to a write token later on: http://lanyrd.com/2012/blog/twitter-read-only/

Re: Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

#32

Post by jderick »

I like the concept but when I tried it out it didn't bring up anything interesting. It seems to have a heavy bias towards 'mainstream' news sites, which I rarely like to read. It seems like it is totally missing out on the 'long tail' which IMHO is where most the value in a service like this lies.

The bubbles showing my 'interests' at the beginning looked quite promising, so perhaps there is some tuning that could fix this (maybe even user configuable?).

Re: Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

#33

Post by MatthewPhillips »

nhangen wrote: post #29
bradfordcross wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, Alexia approached us months ago and had been converted into a believer! It's a pretty common story for us. People are grumpy about news apps because they've been frustrated in the past, then their friends share a bunch of interesting stuff from prismatic, then they give us a chance.

Well congrats, I'm glad to hear it. My co-founder uses your app every day and loves it. My beef is that it seems TC always ties news to funding cycles, which IMO puts the focus on the wrong thing.

The author of this article injected herself into a good 30% of the story, so you shouldn't be surprised that ego is a big part of what gets published over there.

Re: Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

#34

Post by achompas »

Congrats to the Prismatic team! I see Bradford is floating around answering questions, so I'll shoot over two:

(1) Is an iPad app on your roadmap? Anything you'd like to announce? ;)

(2) You once had an excellent post on your personal blog called "Learning About Machine Learning," with a list of excellent resources for learning about ML and statistics from first principles. The original post seems to be gone; are you hosting it somewhere else? I guess I could use the Wayback Machine if anything, but I'm curious whether personal blog exists somewhere new.

Re: Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

#35

Post by partisan »

Very cool. I envision a future where everyone gets their media through an "agent" that is truly tailor made for them. This looks like a step in that direction.

How will Prismatic monetize? It would be a shame to see a service such as this offer featured articles or some other form of influence for pay. In fact, it would defeat the purpose of having something like this that would bring smaller media companies to readers who want the content they provide.

Re: Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

#36

Post by ampersandy »

One thing that's tough to get right is timing email updates, and I think that Prismatic's default is great. If I get too many emails from you, I'll filter you out of my inbox (Quora).

I also enjoy that the updates selectively target a few of my interests, as opposed to struggling to cram everything into a single email.

That aside, the profile page is very buggy. The interest bubbles doesn't seem to be useful in any way, and the list view will keep stacking your interests if you click it multiple times. Under my profile, where articles (apparently?) should be, nothing is displayed. They only show up when I click 'Read.' I also don't understand the point of having a clickable 'username', only to have it change the text to 'Your Profile.'

Re: Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

#38

Post by ampersandy »

ejp wrote: post #37

Does anyone know why the app needs permission to manage Google Contacts? The rest of the permissions make sense, I just don't get this one.

The Google Contacts OAuth authorization includes both read and write permissions, though I'm sure the intent is just to get emails to invite friends, share stories, etc.

https://developers.google.com/google-apps/contacts/v3/#autho...

Re: Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

#40

Post by bradfordcross »

simonw wrote: post #31

I'd love to hook this up to my Twitter account, but they require read access and I've already seen one person accidentally spam their Twitter stream ( https://twitter.com/julien51 - to be fair to Prismatic this looks like it was a bug and they're actively reaching out to Julien to figure out what went wrong). Our startup used to ask people for write access (purely so we could implement "follow" buttons - we never sen…

Yes, please excuse this horrible issue. I think it is actually a UX fail, but we are not quite sure yet and tracking it down!
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