If you are still talking about what stack to use, which language to (re)learn, what framework to adopt to create your app, you are wasting time. Too many of us fall into this trap. Of course, it’s natural. We want to start with the best tools, never be limited with what we’ve chosen and get [...]
Unless you’re building a mobile-centric app, chances are the mobile-first approach isn’t really necessary. Like all startup advice, “mobile-first” has exceptions. But unlike a general rule which as a few exceptions, the “mobile-first” approach has more exceptions and that’s the problem. Today, wherever I turn, I see a lot of people – angels and VCs [...]
If the purpose of authentication is to keep a site’s confidential data behind locked doors, multi-factor authentication can be explained very simply: It adds locks to that door. The more locks your door has, the more keys you need to open it. If you don’t know what multi-factor authentication is, it would be easier to [...]
Building a product on a platform someone else controls can be dangerous. Just ask Dalton Caldwell about his experiences with Facebook or any of a dozen developers who have seen their business models disappear with the recent changes to Twitter. It just takes one little change in the platform you’ve built on top of to [...]
The entire point of running a business is that you wind up with money in the bank. Anything that interferes with your customers giving you that money is a problem and needs to be resolved as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, when your customers pay you online, especially through a payment processor, there are a lot [...]
Handling online payments seems easy: set up a PayPal shopping cart and add a button to your site. That approach will certainly get the job done, but, if you want to do anything even slightly out of the ordinary with your payment processing, PayPal may not be the easiest option. And if you’re selling in [...]
Open source offers a lot of options, from being able to bring in a diverse group of developers to work on a project to being able to bend a particular piece of software to ends not thought of by the original developers. It also offers a steady platform to build a business on. Emma Jane [...]
One of the big concerns prior to Facebook’s IPO was that the company still hadn’t found a way to monetize its mobile platform — the portion of the company that is growing the fastest and theoretically presents the most opportunities. The IPO happened and Facebook hasn’t been doing as well as expected, due in part [...]
There’s a sense that there’s no way that open source projects can make money — that open source means that, no matter what, you work for free. But the reality is that open source technologies can provide developers with a platform for a great business model. Just what that business model is depends: the ecosystems [...]
