Peter Thiel on Distribution

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Larry Rubin

Blake Masters has been writing an extraordinary series of summaries from Peter Thiel’s CS183 course (“Startup”) at Stanford. This week’s entry, If You Build It, Will They Come? is a masterful discussion on distribution.

On viral marketing:

Marketing people can’t do viral marketing. You don’t just build a product and then choose viral marketing. There is no viral marketing add-on. Anyone who advocates viral marketing in this way is wrong and lazy. People romanticize it because, if you do it right, you don’t have to spend money on ads or salespeople. But viral marketing requires that the product’s core use case must be inherently viral. Dropbox, for example, let’s people share files. Implicit is that there’s someone—a potential new user—to share with. Spotify does this with its social music angle. As people use the product, they encourage other people to use it as well. But it’s not just a “tell your friends” button that you can add-on post-product.

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My Friend Jen On Cutting The Cord…

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Larry Rubin

My adventurous friend Jen on the sheer delight of cutting the cord…

Update:
Ladies and Gentlemen, I have quit comcast.
Aside from the cost savings, which I’ll get to in a second, the process of quitting has been delicious.
First, there was the outbound call:

Me: Hello Comcast, I would like to cancel my service.
CC: Sorry to hear that ma’am. Could you tell me why you’re canceling today?
Me: I don’t want cable tv anymore and I have found another internet service provider.
CC: Oh, well I’d be happy to offer you more channels ma’am.
Me: Maybe you didn’t hear me. I don’t want cable tv anymore.
CC: I’m sorry to hear that ma’am. Let’s look at your internet service. You said you’re switching to another provider. Do you know which one?
Me: Yes.
CC: <pause> Oh, well, did you check their download and upload speed? Because many providers advertise a higher number then they offer and Comcast is the fastest on the market. You’re currently at 12 mbps. We can offer you 18 at the same price.
Me: I’m getting 68, actual, and it’s half the price.
CC: <pause> Oh, well, OK. If you ever decide to come back to Comcast, just give us a call, OK?
Me: Sure.

1 Day later, I got a followup call and we basically went through the same script.
I then ripped out all of Comcast’s hardware: 3 different boxes w/3 power cords, 1 remote, 2 or 3 ethernet cables, 3 coaxials

In its place:
12 months internet for $400. 100mbps advertised, getting ~68. — No hardware except ethernet cord out of wall.
1 *much* better wireless router $120 (+ power cord)
1 Roku box + HDMI + remote cable which not only offers shittons of channels + Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc. but also streams internet radio $89

ps – comcast told me when i moved in, that if i ever quit cable i could plug the coaxial into the wall and get basic channels. i now get my occasional local news fix + ~22 other channels

12 months from now cost w/comcast: $1188
12 months cost from now w/out: $609

24 months from now cost w/comcast: $2376
24 months cost from now w/out: $1009

It took determination to finally pull the plug, but man I’m glad I did.

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PhoneGap Reverse Geolocation Lookup

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Larry Rubin

A little something I hacked together to translate lat/long coordinates into a city name when using PhoneGap (Cordova 1.7.0). The lookup is handled by the Google Geocoding API.

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How to Create a Facebook Login Using OAuth 2.0 and the PHP SDK

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Larry Rubin

The Facebook login is one of the fundamental building blocks of many social applications. In this tutorial we’ll use the PHP SDK provided by Facebook to build a very simple application that authenticates the user with their Facebook account, retrieves the user’s User object via the Graph API, and then displays the associated user information on the page.

We’ll start by using the Developer App to establish a new application. After customizing a few settings, we’ll use our new App ID and App Secret to build our application.

The code for this tutorial is based on the example code that comes with the PHP SDK.

Create a New App

On the main Developer App page click  the “Create New App” button. The following dialog will appear:

create new facebook application dialog

Enter the name of your app (e.g. “My Test App”). You will be able to change this later if you need to. Agree to the terms and then click Continue. The next screen contains the basic settings for your app.

Continue reading →

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