Just over 5 weeks ago I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to seek new opportunities. I had no idea what I wanted to shift my full-time focus to and began connecting with people, researching and interviewing with a handful of companies — ranging from huge web presences all the way down to tiny startups. I considered companies in different spaces from finance all the way to video. I met with dozens of folks to see what they were up to and what their company was about. That led to me being wired on caffeine for a few weeks when I had 3-4 coffee meetings scheduled each day, but I digress. I am elated to announce, likely to the surprise of many, that last week I jumped onboard the smallest company I chatted with — Notifo.
Notifo recently graduated from the Winter 2010 batch of the Y Combinator startup incubator run by Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris (rtm) and Trevor Blackwell (who spends his time working on Anybots). My title is Co-Founder alongside Chad Etzel (also a Georgia Tech Alum). We recently closed an angel round.
What’s it do?
Notifo is a mobile notifications platform that consists of two parts: the backend to serve up hot PUSH notifications rapidly and mobile clients to interact with them. Notifo currently has an iPhone app but will be expanding to Android next, then other smartphones. The biggest draw of Notifo is that people can send notifications to mobile clients without having to personally develop mobile apps, a time consuming and expensive process. Instead, users just have the free Notifo app which can be used to receive notifications from a number of services that use the simple API (post over https with basic auth).
An example notification coming from GitHub and then the listing of other notifications in the Notifo app.
Version 2 of the iPhone app is currently under beta testing with a scheduled release in the next month (after compatibility testing with iOS 4). It will feature some interesting features with utility adjacent to notifications that will be driving our early user adoption.
Doing mobile dev means we will need to have many devices on hand to test various builds of the application. Ex: for Android we need something that runs 2.2 for c2dm (Android’s push) as well as some older versions to test a pre-c2dm workaround.
The flow of things is that the user creates an account on the site or within the application (currently only the iPhone app is public and released) then signs up for services and grants them permission to notify them. At the moment there aren’t too many services, which explains why I will be doing some sorts of developer evangelism with various how to articles and coding up various neat scripts as mentioned below.
Below you’ll see some of the individual controls users have on each service they receive notifications from. There is also a page (not shown) where you can set things like quiet hours.
The Hacker News service (add Notifo username to HN user profile) notifies you of replies to your HN comments.
What do you do?
I will be doing what I love doing — a bit of everything. Traditionally this has been mainly front-end tasks but as I have never touched mobile development, I’m eager to learn and help out where I can. For example, random things I have been working on include a Google Chrome extension to send the current page to the phone (similar to the chrome to phone functionality but that was Android-only), a Safari 5 Extension, adding functionality to the Notifo WordPress plugin created by Hacker News user ErrantX in addition to various things around the Notifo web app, including some PHP/Redis tinkering and lots of aesthetic improvements. I also have been planning on making a section of the site to promote interesting uses of the Notifo API and services from those in the development community.
How you can get started with the Notifo API
On Monday GitHub added my Notifo service hook. This allows any repository admin to specify a CSV list of Notifo usernames to be notified upon each commit to that repository. GitHub has information on how to start working with service hooks on their github-services repository page lthat they want people to fork.
Notifo Service Hook now live on GitHub. Just click the Admin button for a repo you own then scroll to Service Hooks.
I’ll briefly go over what was involved with creating a Notifo service hook and using the API. First off, there are two types of accounts on Notifo: user accounts and service accounts. User accounts may subscribe to service accounts in addition to being able to send notifications to themselves without needing to send a subscription request first. Service accounts may send messages to any user but those users must first accept a subscription request sent by the service. Notifications sent from a user account to that user cannot change the avatar shown when the notification is received. Both types of accounts have their own API secret key that must be used in conjunction with the username before interacting with the API. In addition, interacting with the API must be done over HTTPS.
In the case of the GitHub service hook, we decided to use a service account for GitHub so that there can be multiple subscribers and so that everyone would see the lovely squidcat icon (avatar set inside the Notifo website). ;-)
This particular script is in Ruby and two loops are taking place. In the first loop I run through the CSV list of subscribers (Notifo usernames) that is specified on an external file, open an HTTP connection and specify basic authentication and SSL to the subscribe_user API URL and send a POST consisting of the username. That sends a subscription request to the user — required or the user won’t receive subsequent notifications. In this case the user will end up missing the first commit notification but it will work for the second after they accept the request.
The second loop is nested within the first and sends the actual notification to the user. In this case we want to sent information about the repository commit. The external payload contains that information so I’m merely passing along that data in some of the parameters for a send_notification:
- to – the Notifo username
- msg – the commit message
- title – repository name and branch
- uri – the GitHub commit page, opened when the user double-taps on the notification (a single tap expands the message; useful for long commit messages)
Parameters must be URL encoded so that explains the long URI.escape chunks. There are tons of ways of URL encoding and escaping strings though. In summary: for a service account establish HTTPS connection with basic auth utilizing service name and API secret key, loop through users, send subscription notification request then the send message.
How about an example for sending a notification to the user from their own user account? Let’s tackle that in JavaScript:
This example comes from the Chrome extension I was hacking away on so that localStorage stuff probably isn’t relevant to you. Just hardcode or require parameters for the username and API secret key instead of taking them from localStorage. Creating basic authentication in JavaScript requires setting the authorization header and sending the base64 encoded hash of the “username:key” token. Calling Base64.encode() requires a base64 encode/decode library to be included within the page. I open the connection to send a POST to send_notification() with some parameters. The only difference about sending a notification from a user account is an optional code style=”display:inline;”>label to describe the application. Note that this was simply a quick JS example and there is more that should be done for production code. Also, due to same-origin security policy there is a JavaScript dilemma with doing cross-domain POST requests that involves a tricky setup. A quick search on StackOverflow should yield a few of the ways to get past that.
How about an example in PHP? Here's the function WP-Notifo uses to send notifications:
You can start to see similarities between all these pieces of code. The only real difference between everything is how each particular language sends the actual POST. The above examples were the vanilla plain examples and did not make use of any handy API libraries. Notifo currently has a few API libraries on this GitHub repo page with libraries for more languages to come. Don't see a library for your language of choice? Fork it, code it and submit a pull request.
The Office
Chad and I work out of a garage in Menlo Park. I brought my own desk to work the first day. As for what the startup life is like — it's absolutely brilliant working next to a smart person for hours on end. I woke up at 5:50am my first full day, went to work and got home at 11pm. The second day started just as early. In a startup no one benefits from you slacking. It's not about reaching 5pm or 6pm and clocking out; it's about moving fast, completing your objectives and creating passionate users. (and then exiting, working for Google and enjoying their sweet, sweet froyo machine in Building 43 everyday).
The current Notifo office.. in a garage in Menlo Park, CA. Just gotta watch out for those big spiders and you'll be fine.
The other wall (not pictured) serves as our own write-once note keeping device.
Never underestimate the importance of a great coffee maker in a startup setting. COD (Coffee-On-Demand) units like this Breville serve up K-cup goodness in seconds.
There's a lot more I could say here but this blog post started out with the intent of just being a simple announcement. I'll save the more thought-out blog posts about product development and technical talk for the near future. Keep up-to-date on Notifo happenings with the company blog and Twitter.
Thoughts? Questions about working with the Notifo and/or the API? What would you like to build out to test Notifo? Any improvements to the API or product concept in general?
Update: Checkout the coverage on ReadWriteWeb and the Notifo blog.
congrats man! looking forward to watching this service grow!
Congratulations, Paul. I wish you the best of luck in this new venture!
JazzySammy. That is all.
“just a simple announcement…” Anything but, bruh. Looks like a lotta detail to me. But anyway, Congrats! I hope you plan on expanding your target market to other platforms, and I’m sure you will. Mine is WebOS, will consider Android in the future if their UE improves.
Congratulations! Wish you much success.
You guys need to push RSS feeds :) Superfeedr is your best friend for this!
Congrats on the gig, it’s been interesting following your move, especially with all the #newjob posts. Adding syntax highlighting to that gist would make that code a lot easier to grep (it didn’t get an extension so it didn’t kick in automatically).
A nice REST library like rest-client or HTTParty would also drastically reduce that sample code (unless you wanted to stick with the stdlib).
Good luck!
syntax added to github gists! i forgot to add filetype extension
Good luck, bro! I installed notifo and am checking it out now
Cool! Thanks for the update. Looking forward to watching you and Notifo in the coming months…
Congrats on taking up such an exciting new adventure! Really glad to hear you picked a small co where you can have a giant impact, instead of the other way around. +1 for the k-cups too. Those machines are a godsend to the weary hacker.
I’ve been a fan of your site for a while and I wish you the best of luck with this venture. I bypassed San Francisco to come to Cambridge MA where I’m hoping to work for a startup internet marketing company, so I’m in a similar boat. Congrats on the funding and this opportunity.
Congrats. Sounds like you’re having fun.
Congrats. And also… good luck for your future :)
Congratulations, Paul — really happy for you!
Congratulations paul, I wish you all the best and I will be probably using your service pretty soon. Nice to see another YC company starting up, I interned for one last summer http://foodoro.com it was a great time
Sweet looking digs. Certainly don’t need more than that to make some awesome music! Congrats and good luck.
This is absolutely super, Paul! So good to see you move into something that excites you so much and that has such great potential. My very best wishes for you!
Bruce
Congrats, Paul! With 2 Georgia Tech alum on the founding team, Notifo has to be awesome.
Hey Paul congratulations on finding a cool sounding gig out there. I wil I was having as much as you lol. I look forward to reading more about what your doing in SF! :)
Congrats. I remember reading your moving post.
Rock on, Paul! I think this is great.
Definitely going to find a way to use this.
You should paint the garage walls with some RustOleum Dry Erase paint. Would no longer be a write-once device.
http://www.rustoleum.com/CBGProduct.asp?pid=128
Congratulations! Looking forward to see what Notifo grows into.
Hey Stammy you should set up a web cam that snaps a pic of you guys working or better yet a video every so often. Would be nice to follow a start up in real time!
Hey Paul set up a web cam to snap a shot or take a vid of you guys working. Would be cool to see this venture progress on a day-to-day basis.
Hey Paul, keep up the good work! Hope everything will work out great for you and Chad! And for a buy-out from Google. Hah. By the way, I just signed up for notifo and push.ly. Keep hacking mate (come to Greece sooner or later btw)
Congrats man! Wish you the best on this venture!
Congrats! I’m a big fan of Notifo and am sad to leave it behind when I jump to Android.
Thanks Gavin! Considering that we have 4 Android phones in the office.. we will be working to have an Android version out soon. ;) Froyo has some great stuff for us in regards to notifications.
Hey I have an idea for an iPHONE application. You inventory a PUBLIX store, noting which aisle everything is in (probably they already have these kinds of lists, or would pay to do it). Then when someone makes a shopping list, the iPHONE app organizes the list by aisle and tells you the fastest way to buy everything, for instance: Start aisle 1: buy soup, canned tomatoes, pasta. next aisle 3: buy shampoo, soap, and deodorant. Funding comes from PUBLIX or KROGER or whatever grocery store wants the exclusive rights to the patent. Makes grocery shopping a lot easier and faster since you wont have to circle the store looking at the stuff on your list! And never ask ‘excuse me where can I fidn condensed milk” ever again.
man we don’t want rss for comments
My new job! http://bit.ly/deYI2l @Notifo (YC W2010) Gets a Co-Founder…. @Stammy. RT for great justice.
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Congrats Paul RT @Stammy: My new job! http://bit.ly/deYI2l @Notifo (YC W2010) Gets a Co-Founder…. @Stammy. RT for great justice.
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Notifo (YC W2010) gets a Co-Founder… Me http://bit.ly/cRJvMY
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Notifo (YC W2010) gets a Co-Founder… Me: http://bit.ly/cRO25h Comments: http://bit.ly/bxwpom
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Read @Stammy’s full post about joining Notifo – http://paulstamatiou.com/notifo-yc-w2010-gets-a-co-founder-me
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My new job! http://bit.ly/deYI2l @Notifo (YC W2010) Gets a Co-Founder…. @Stammy. RT for great justice. (via @Stammy)
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Its official @stammy finally announces his new job http://bit.ly/deYI2l @Notifo (YC W2010) Gets a Co-Founder.
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Congrats to @Stammy & his new job as co-founder of @Notifo (YC W2010)! http://bit.ly/deYI2l
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Congrats! RT @Stammy: My new job! http://bit.ly/deYI2l @Notifo (YC W2010) Gets a Co-Founder…. @Stammy. RT for great justice.
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HNews: Notifo (YC W2010) gets a Co-Founder… Me http://bit.ly/aQU6BY
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Congrats to Chad and Paul! Looking forward to v2
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So before this, was Notifo a one-man YC-funded startup?
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congrats – so jealous you get to work with @jazzychad
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Congrats on your new job! http://bit.ly/deYI2l @Notifo (YC W2010) Gets a Co-Founder. /via @Stammy ^TO
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Congrats! RT @Stammy: My new job! http://bit.ly/deYI2l @Notifo
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Congratulations to @stammy on his new gig as co-founder of @notifo http://bit.ly/aOHp98
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Congrats Stammy! RT @krystyl: Its official @stammy finally announces his new job http://bit.ly/deYI2l @Notifo (YC W2010) Gets a Co-Founder.
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this is what i want to know. I’m not sure and I’m not trying to thread crap but is the title Co-Founder the proper word to use? I’m curious because wouldn’t a "founder" be someone who started the company from the beginning? From what I understand Paul joined afterwards (after the angel investing).
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Congrats Paul! Hope you guys can continue to keep burn low by eating essentially every one of your meals at the Googleplex.
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Like I said in an email to jazzychad last week, Notifo is my favorite YC company. It’s an amazingly simple service that does exactly what I need without much setup. Congratulations!
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striking resemblance to notify.me which came out several years ago…
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yes, it was… YC definitely set me up on several "cofounder dates" during the course of YC… some of them looked promising, but ultimately none worked out. Eventually I had to just bear down and prepare for launch/demo day. As soon as I stopped looking, the right person came along :)
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Congrats! RT @Stammy: My new job! http://bit.ly/deYI2l @Notifo (YC W2010) Gets a Co-Founder…. @Stammy. RT for great justice.
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“@Stammy: My new job! http://bit.ly/deYI2l @Notifo (YC W2010) Gets a Co-Founder…. @Stammy. RT for great justice.” [Congrats on the new gig
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contact me (email in profile) with your Notifo username, and we’ll fix the crashing issue for you.
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Notifo (YC W2010) gets a Co-Founder… Me… http://paulstamatiou.com/notifo-yc-w2010-gets-a-co-founder-me
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Notifo (YC W2010) gets a Co-Founder… Me http://dlvr.it/1mLv9
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There is all sorts of info at http://notifo.com/ – but if you have other questions, feel free to email us: contact at notifo daught com
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My new job! http://bit.ly/deYI2l @Notifo (YC W2010) Gets a Co-Founder…. @Stammy. RT for great justice. (via @Stammy)
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I keep meaning to add a few features to WP-Notifo.If you want to collaborate on it or hack around drop me a line and I can add you to the plugin page as a commiter :)
(by the way – the code you used in the thread, it is in WP-Notifo but I am pretty sure it originally came from another example, can’t find the source though)
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I keep meaning to add a few features to WP-Notifo.If you want to collaborate on it or hack around drop me a line and I can add you to the plugin page as a commiter :)
(by the way – the code you used in the thread, it is in WP-Notifo but I am pretty sure it originally came from another example, can’t find the source though)
ps: congrats :D
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I’ve been meaning to get in touch – would love to get added as a committer. :) I’ll email you at the address listed in your profile.
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excited for @jazzychad and @stammy, @notifo is one to watch http://bit.ly/9VFNob
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Notifo (YC W2010) gets a Co-Founder… Me http://bit.ly/95YHn5
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congrats jazzychad & paul!
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Sorry if I missed this in your post, but what are you currently doing with Skribit? The Skribit website (as well as your HN profile info) still has you listed prominently.
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Being a founder is about what you do and how much of yourself you are able to put into the company, not when you join. If Chad had hired someone with Paul’s skillset and then told him what to do, that is an employer-employee relationship. That doesn’t look like what’s happening here. They’re entering into a partnership as equals to discover and build something new together.
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Congrats Jazzy & Stammy!
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Cool! I’d be interested to hear your experience with 1) getting into YC as a single founder and 2) working alone in the ensuing months. That’s quite a feat.
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Congrats dude! RT @Stammy: My new job! @Notifo (YC W2010) http://bit.ly/deYI2l
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Congrats Stammy! Great news. I’m looking forward to using the product.
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“@Stammy: My new job! http://bit.ly/deYI2l @Notifo (YC W2010) Gets a Co-Founder…” yay! welcome! ~ @jazzychad’s sis
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Congrats paul & jazzy
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Notifo (YC W2010) gets a Co-Founder… Me http://bit.ly/9jzEz5 http://ff.im/-maSyc
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I’ve been considering writing a post about my experience to this effect.Basically it boiled down to sheer ignorance. I didn’t know that being a single-founder was such a big deal (in a negative sense), so I didn’t know I should have been worried/nervous about it when applying/interviewing.
As for working alone… I had done so many personal projects at nights/weekends after work at my day job that working alone was just natural (again, ignorance was bliss). I was also able to draw from each of the previous projects to piece together what I needed to build Notifo very quickly.
This is the advantage of working on a bunch of different small projects all the time. The criteria I used for starting a new project was that I had to do at least one thing I had never done before which required me to learn a new language/technology/framework/API/etc…. after a dozen projects or so, this built up to a huge arsenal of skills to throw at new projects. Never stop learning.
That said, having had a co-founder for about a week, there has been an obvious increase in productivity, so for that I am truly thankful.
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So, whats gonna happen to skribt?
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Congrats Paul!
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Awesome for both of them. In a related note: can someone reply to my comment so I can test Notifo’s HN integration?
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Notifo (YC W2010) gets a Co-Founder… Me – http://su.pr/2VMC8Y
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By digging in, I understood what Notifo was about, but it wasn’t really clear at first. On the main page, you say "What is notifo" with two paragraphes, one for user and one for services. I think it might be better if you seperate those two horizontally with a nice subtitle such as:USERS ————– SERVICE
And honestly, the "push notification" isn’t really easy to understand because it really can means lot of thing for a developer like me, and absolutely nothing for someone like my girlfriend.
I think a good example is needed for the new user to truly get what notifo is. And also, a good example of why a developer would want to link to a service like notifo. I mean, I understand now what Notifo is about and I think it’s great; however, as I said, I needed to read a lot.
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hi :)
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This is great feedback, and I agree it needs to be improved. Since Paul is a great writer, hopefully he will be able to help in this regard.
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Interesting service.I was thinking the other day, what I want is geolocation push notifications to my iPhone. For a trivial example, I have been meaning to ask my coffee shop if I could have some of their empty ice cream tubs. Every day I pull up at their drive through caffeine-deprived, pick up my coffee… and forget to ask.
Sure would be great if, while I was sitting there waiting for my drink, my phone blipped "Ask them about the damn tubs already" :-)
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Congrats Chad. Glad you finally found the right match, Paul, you found a winner. Chad is a great dude/connector/hacker
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- Reading: Notifo (YC W2010) Gets a Co-Founder… Me http://goo.gl/NtlC
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Cheers, Paul. I’m really glad that things worked out for you. Welcome to Silicon Valley, enjoy the ride. :)
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wherrrd congrats @stammy @jazzychad on @notifo news, y’all are livin the dream http://bit.ly/caYiI5
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You could probably roll your own, using IP geolocation on a push email server.The hard part is setting up the notification in the first place. You might be able to wire up something to Google Maps that lets you put pins down that can be queried by your server.
Or something like that, anyway. Sounds like a neat idea :)
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I love Notifo :). I wrote a plugin for GfW so I can get notified of machine events on my iPhone.
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He’s leaving it running and supporting it a little, but not spending much time on development, probably even less than he planned now that he’s a cofounder at a startup instead of just an employee somewhere.From http://paulstamatiou.com/exploring-san-francisco-silicon-val…; :
>Skribit is a niche product that serves a small market well and it is with that in mind that development will continue, but in a part-time manner. Some changes will be taking place around the site to focus more heavily on converting users to paid Pro accounts (and pay off our convertible note) rather than building out certain community features that require much upkeep; making Skribit more of a tool than a destination. Ultimately, I need to land a paying job and focus on paying off my out-of-state tuition, which is still a six figure number.
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Notifo (YC W10) gets a Co-Founder… Me – http://su.pr/2VMC8Y
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You weren’t able to find someone in your personal network first? I’m surprised, especially since you already got YC funding.
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I suppose "partner" is a tempting word to use in this situation, but there may be legal connotations to designating higher-ups as "partners"–in particular, the connotation of being something like an LLP or law firm.
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Congrats to Jazzy – looks like a great talent addition!
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Congrats to the both of you and on closing the angel round! Hope you guys push the envelope in this space ;-)
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Reading @Stammy’s Notifo (YC W2010) Gets a Co-Founder… Me — PaulStamatiou.com http://bt.io/FUIf
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