YC is One of Fast Company's 50 Most Innovative Companies (fastcompany.com) |
YC is One of Fast Company's 50 Most Innovative Companies (fastcompany.com) |
It feels more like a trivial app put together on a hack weekend or Man Month than actual innovation.
To quote the article: Occupy’s initial public offering, if you will, puts it in very good company.
If I will? No, actually, I think I will not.
The IPO part is a joke, sorry the humor was lost on you.
Cheers
(I feel slightly bad for picking upon Reddit, they were just the first example that came to mind when glancing at the list.)
Congrats and Thank you Paul - for helping out the passionate inventors push their ideas to the next level - what Paul has done to the startup community in the Bay Area, is what Jim Harbaugh did to the bay area for football :)
Dropbox - the only thing they've done recently was take small evolutionary steps on the innovation they showed 5 years ago when they launched.
There was so little to say about what else they've done that you basically just mention they're growing and making money. Which is great, but does growth and revenue make them the 22nd most innovative company in the world?
They're also like Google in that most of the hard work is behind the scenes, which tends to affect users' perception of how much the app is doing. To an inexperienced programmer it might seem like it wouldn't be hard to build a search engine-- and in fact it isn't hard to write a crawler and build an index. What makes it hard to build the actual Google is (a) the scale on which they operate and (b) the refinements they employ beyond merely searching an index. It's basically the same with Bump. They have to operate on a large scale, and to work reliably they have to deal with all sorts of weird edge cases.
Twitter belongs on the suspect list too, how can they still be one of the most innovative companies in the world for a product largely unchanged in 5 years, during which time a jaw bone was printed and transplanted into a person?
This is innovative: http://news.discovery.com/tech/printed-jawbone-120207.html
This was innovative: "It was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July."
What Bump does is mutually authenticate two smartphone users by having them bump their phones together, and correlating the accelerometer readings. On top of authentication you can build all sorts of things, starting with exchanging contact info. The hard/critical part is reliability.
Just a guess. I haven't used it.
What sort of confuses me is that normally he is shouting from the rooftops about how a startup changes a user's life, but that's absent. I don't get it, especially because I am bullish on Bump.