Can anybody guess the product used in this blog post? It was newsworthy recently.

Agreed, and I believe they did the right thing in this situation. Hats off.

Almost every startup has gloomy periods, and often more than one. The patent is a really bad signal IMHO (I did this once). It's great that you value your relationship, and you should try to keep it that way if you can. They will need some help transitioning you out of the company, and so you should give them more than the usual 2 weeks notice IMHO. I gave 3 months notice once. Best of luck

This is a great post by Chris Fralic from First Round Capital on the subject: http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/04/the-art-of-the-introduction...

No doubt, Philly is on the upswing

That is a great site, thanks for sharing.

There is another website with a Kato-centric viewpoint that talks about recent copyright issues. This article is specific to whether you 'rent' or 'own' software. He specifically talks about how renting software is actually better, and is a very interesting viewpoint.

http://techliberation.com/2010/09/20/the-end-of-software-own...

Thanks for the compliment on the letter too.

I've never really thought about renting software, it might make it more practical to get legitimate copies of something like photoshop, which is fairly expensive.

For the web (and really and computer software) I am in the more liberal camp of http://unlicense.org/ (no affiliation to them) I think opening up everything to the public domain will speed innovation, among other things.

This is a great story of Josh's career and worth watching. Especially the first 15 minutes which are stories I'd never heard before (and I live in Philadelphia).

I second his comments that Philadelphia is a fantastic place to live/work as an entrepreneur. The tech/startup community is humble, helpful, and extremely tight. This community combined with the art, history, and diversity of Philadelphia make it an awesome place to live.

capistrano.

You should spend time understanding all of the given capistrano recipes before you should start building any of your own since many things are already done for you.

I wasn't able to do this without staring at the capistrano code for a significant amount of time, but it was worth the effort IMHO.

Hi ajju,

I wrote the blog post, posted to HN, and then sent out a tweet to my friends which might explain some of the new users. I recognize a couple of the commenters, and FWIW they are entrepreneurs that have technology companies. Here is the tweet: http://twitter.com/chriscera/status/1527260033

The purpose of the article is to point out that the core of the Vuzit viewer is our reliance on web services. Another topic is that anyone could write their own viewer using our web services. The last point is that we only used our published APIs to build our Viewer and our website. My understanding is that nobody else in the marketplace has designed such a technology, and is offering it as a commercial service.

I would love to hear more comments on our Technology and Company. Do you care that it's made from AJAX vs Java vs Flash? Do you care that it's based on Web Services? Would you use it for your website, product, or service?

Any help from the HN community is greatly appreciated! Best, -Chris

Have a hard time believing you. The tweet was 39 minutes ago (as of now) but all the comments were made much before that.

The topic was interesting to an extent, but you could have avoided the spammy comments.

Even without the comments, this story doesn't seem to clear the bar for "interesting to hackers in general". You may have better luck promoting your story on www.reddit.com/r/programming

Hey Chris,

Vuzit itself looks like a useful service. What I am not clear on is what value someone would get from writing their own viewer to embed in their website when that seems to be the hardest task they would be "outsourcing" by using your service. Is it to customize the look and feel (possibly by using a technology like Flash as you suggested)?

It's great that you guys have an API. I'll take a look at it when I need to embed docs on a web page.

Hi ajju,

Thanks for the explanation. You're correct about outsourcing, and this is the #1 reason why we have customers :)

We often get requests to build something specific for a mobile device, customized skins/toolbars, annotation tools, exporting forms, etc. It's impossible for us to do everything, so we changed things around a bit to allow others to build their own interfaces on top of our own.

We will continue to enhance our viewer for our core audience, and we will focus on areas that we believe we can deliver the most value.

I'm hopeful that with our new approach, it will empower other products and services to use 90% of what we have built and add the last 10% themselves.

I hope that clears it up, and thanks for the feedback. -Chris

I would be interested in using this tech, but want the full server tech and docs on my own server. Is this something you license?...or it your SaaS only?

I think it looks great, and there aren't enough good PDF editing tools. It reminds me a little bit of PDFEscape, so you might want to check them out if you haven't already. Best of luck! -Chris

Cheers, thanks Chris. Doculicious could definitely be used just to create PDF's, without using the web form stuff. Especially if what you really need is a template that needs filling out consistently. I have a bunch of templates in my account I use directly from the site that never get embedded.

Yeah, I've seen that site before. Probably time to have a look around the 'net again to see what's out there :)