Nerdlife

At least now I have a publicly know excuse for being busy!

http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/29/y-combinator-backed-gazehawk-heatmaps-with-web-cams/

Keep an eye on our blog at http://gazehawk.com/blog/ for some interesting technology/startup posts.

Time to go deal with my ever-growing inbox .

Context: There’s an organization that sponsors Shabbat dinners. It’s really awesome: they basically pay you to feed your friends. That being said, they need a copywriter. Here’s a paragraph in the email they sent confirming my sponsored dinner:

As of Monday, July 19th, the new NEXT Shabbat program will begin providing new NEXT Shabbat’s with up to $14 per guest (maximum of 16 guests) for the first three meals a host registers after that date. After those three meals, hosts will receive up to $10 dollars per guest. As a returning NEXT Shabbat host, your meal-payment will be based on the number of meals you’ve held already. However, since you have a meal scheduled to take place between July 19th and August 19th, you will still receive $18 per-guest for that meal. Following that meal, if you’ve already held at least three meals, any meal registered after July 19th will only be eligible for a payment of $10 per guest. By joining with us as we make these changes to the program you will give many more people the opportunity to host and will enable thousands to participate in home-based Shabbat meals for the first time. If you’ve held less than three meals, any meal registered after July 19th will be eligible for a payment of up to $14 through your third meal. You can also see how many meals you have already hosted.

As always apologies for the lack of updates: I promise there’s a short (but major) update coming very soon, followed by more frequent posting (there’s a reason I’ve been so quiet lately).

In 5 easy steps:

1. Find hammer
2. Give up on finding hammer…grab pliers
3. Attack drive with pliers, destorying circuitry but leaving platters untouched
4. Cut finger, swear and bleed profusely on drive
5. Repeat steps 3 & 4 until you realize that nobody cares enough about your data to read it directly from platters. Toss drive in trash, go grab a band-aid

Tada!

This post on Hacker News got me thinking about the costs Dispora’s going to have receiving all of their money and fulfilling their promises, so I did a little digging. The numbers below are estimates, but they should be fairly close to actual costs for these services (assuming no huge burst in donations over the next 6 days):

$ 5510 = $190k * 2.9% Amazon fees[1]
  1800 = 6k donations * $0.30 Amazon fees
  9500 = $190k * 5% for Kickstarter
  4150 = 5000 cds with jewel cases * $0.83 (random googling, I assume the "note from our team" will be on the jewel case insert)
  1380 = 400 sheets of stickers * $3.45 (zazzle, 20 sheet of stickers, 2 stickers per person)
 10200 = 3000 shirts * $3.40 (customink, Gildan 50/50 1 color on white front only)
  9000 = 3000 postage & packaging for shirts + stickers * $3
  2000 = 2000 postage & packaging for just stickers * $1
  1200 = "Turnkey hosting" for 600 people[2]
  2800 = 4 new computers*$700
======
$47540

[1] I’m not sure if Kickstarter gets a bulk discount here, or if it’s Dispora’s account history, so a volume discount may apply. I also assume all transactions are billed at the $10+ rate (2.9%) rather than the < $10 rate (5%) for simplicity.
[2] Turnkey hosting and phone support are hard to estimate...it may be more if they need to pay for phone support, but I think this is a reasonable number. I'm also including project hosting costs. I know they say plenty of hosting companies have offered their services, but you can't guarantee that will be there.

Keep in mind that this misses three big points:

1. Declined credit cards & canceled/fraudulent donations – I have no clue what the expected amount of these is
2. People who requested a gift for donating who never give their contact info
3. The huge overhead for packing/sending all of these items, though I imagine a day of pizza and soda for volunteers can get all of them packed (the con I used to help run had similar “mailing parties” that were fairly effective)

With that in mind you’re looking at about 25% of the funding going toward transaction fees and fulfilling the rewards. This leaves around $142,000 left for them, which is still plenty of money. Though I don’t want to think about what an accountant would say about this money and how much he would charge to make it legitimate.

Don’t get me wrong: I think Diaspora is a great idea and I’d love to see it succeed, but I wonder if the founders considered the logistical overhead to this whole thing. Granted, this would have been smaller had they only raised $10k, but it’s still a big task to undertake. I hope they’re ready for it and they don’t let us down.

As promised here’s the example code from the meetup I gave last Monday. It’s fairly small, so I only describe what it does briefly in the top comment. Feel free to use it how you wish (though if you make a lot of money off of it you owe me a t-shirt):

Read more…

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