161–170 of 239 posts
This. This is the answer I have always looked for. > "But, but, how is WhatsApp any different than iMessage / Facebook Messenger / Hangouts?" I have made this exclamation multiple times, and my friends in India and Singapore and other parts of Asia just turned up their palms with a "I dunno, everyone uses it and told me to get it." I refused to use it since I like to use as few messaging platforms as possible (just G…
You only need one friend you care about using a Blackberry or Nokia for it to matter though. The long tail matters when it comes to communication.
The message of the article is good but it's not seeing the forest from the trees. Having just read the Forbes artcile on the company and Jan in particular, some interesting things stood out: 1) Jan had money to start and was able to take time to build a user base and find the real value in the App and didn't need to go around "raising money". The SMS component of the app wasn't the initial focus. The company didn't n…
If anyone has used the J2ME version of WhatsApp, can they describe how similar it is to the smartphone versions? For example: • Do you get a notification as soon as messages are waiting, even if the J2ME app hasn't been run recently? • Are photo/video messages available? • Are the group messaging options the same?
Yes all of them work. Not just that they work surprisingly well. This is the best J2ME app that I have ever used on my phone.
The message of the article is good but it's not seeing the forest from the trees. Having just read the Forbes artcile on the company and Jan in particular, some interesting things stood out: 1) Jan had money to start and was able to take time to build a user base and find the real value in the App and didn't need to go around "raising money". The SMS component of the app wasn't the initial focus. The company didn't n…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US is a pretty big market. 320,000,000 people, most with at least some disposable income. There are also plenty of advertisers that want to market their products to Americans, which means you can choose between ad-sponsored or for-pay business models.
There are also plenty of companies targeting the US market. The rest of the world? Not so much. To give you an example: there is no reddit equivalent in French. The closest things we have are a few French-speaking subreddits that have very few subscribers since reddit scares people who don't speak English before they can reach the French-speaking subreddits. We also have a few very poor quality reddit rip-offs with n…
The French consumer market has tons of holes like this. And we're talking about a huge, wealthy market with plenty of mobile devices and solid broadband. It's not a wide-open market, but there are tons of opportunities.
I'm hearing more and more about French startup accelerators, and I'm seeing a lot more seed-stage startups. So people are making an effort to serve this market. But there's still a lot of opportunities.
The key take away from this article is not to build your app in J2ME but to recognize how big the world is outside of America. American focused startups face lots of competition in a relatively small market.
Ya.. that is definitely the takeaway. If you address all platforms, your market is suddenly both under served and absolutely huge.
So be very, very careful about trying to 'serve' that demographic.
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Ya.. that is definitely the takeaway. If you address all platforms, your market is suddenly both under served and absolutely huge.
One such "platform" is made up of the 80% of android phones that are cheap and basic with small data plans and limited access to slow wifi. The anecdotes from the 80s & 90s when annual PC sales for any given year were a substantial portion of the overall PCs in use at the time are interesting. The realization that software could be written for the newest machine and it would run everywhere soon enough is not directly…
The really fun thing about WhatsApp is that it is essentially a product for the developing world, and to make money doing that you have to be seriously efficient.
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That's surprising since Reddit at least translates their site into every language - how many times have you googled something and gotten back a reddit hit for an English language reddit page but with Portuguese UI? so reddit has done more than many to internationalize their site. Probably a strip of language names along the top, taking you to language-filtered frpnt-pages would help. It would be ugly, but it's Reddit…
to most french people, it's the actual content being in english that isn't helping...
That said, http://fr.reddit.com/ should be the top posts from the French-language subreddits, not just the main frontpage with a French UI.