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Hi. My name is Adam. I am the co-founder of Pure Adapt, Inc in Albany, NY. We own Detailed Image, LockerPulse, and a bunch of other websites. I write about our company, entrepreneurship in general, work-life balance, and whatever else interests me.
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Category Archives: Web2.0
Cuil is Horrible and Will Never Challenge Google
To the Cuil Management Team: Earlier this week it was brought to my attention that you launched your new search engine. With an index of some 120 billion web pages, you claim to be the largest and most relevant search engine around. So I just took a spin over and executed a few queries. And I must say – the results are horrible. How can a search for “SportsLizard” result in a link to my old blog that was moved over here a year ago? SportsLizard does happen to be one of the more popular collectibles sites on the web. … Continue reading
Does This Happen to Anyone Else?
This is driving me nuts. So I’m on browsing stories on Digg, which I am now officially obsessed with and fascinated by from a user perspective, a community perspective, and a business perspective. I click on a story in Firefox (3.0, but also happened previously in versions 2.xx) and about 1/10th of the time a page that should have a banner ad that looks like this: Has a banner ad that looks like this: With the javascript actually typed out: Am I the only one that this happens to? Wtf Digg. If this happens to anyone other than me, you’re … Continue reading
Pandora Knows Me Better Than I Do
Sometimes it takes me a while to do things I know I should do. Case in point: in October I read this fascinating feature in Inc. Magazine about Pandora entitled Pandora’s Long Strange Trip: Online radio that’s cool, addictive, free, and-just maybe-a lasting business. Pandora has developed a proprietary method to analyze music–Westergren calls it the music genome–that lets users create online radio stations generated by the software’s recommendations. Tell Pandora your favorite song is “Casey Jones” by the Grateful Dead, and within seconds it will create a station–Casey Jones Radio–that streams nonstop songs from artists such as the Youngbloods, … Continue reading
Hulu is Changing the Way I Watch TV
When hulu – Fox and NBC’s joint online video venture -was announced I didn’t give it much thought. ABC already allows people to view episodes of popular shows online, so I figured this would be much the same. Mike signed up for the private beta but I didn’t bother. After getting his invite Mike told me it was awesome so without much thought I decided to put my name in for the beta and see if I could take it for a spin. Now I’m addicted to it. Seriously, it’s amazing. Miss an episode of The Simpsons? It’s on hulu … Continue reading
It’s a Barrier to Entry Thing
I recently went back and visited with one of my old engineering professors. He seemed happy that I had started my own business, but the whole time we were talking I could sense a bit of skepticism. Then I said “I went into industry for a while after college but didn’t like it”. He looked at me with sort of a puzzled look and bluntly said “why?” Here’s the thing – product development and web development are very similar. At their core, each is just a challenge in problem solving and that’s why I love both. Hell, gun to my … Continue reading
It’s Not Hard to Make Money Online
Let me re-phrase that. I think it is difficult to make money online, but most people make it far too difficult on themselves. When starting an online venture, you should ask yourself “can I make money right away?”. Not when you’ve got 10,000 or 1,000,000 members. Not when you’ve got 5,000 people subscribed to your premium service. Right now, by the time you have 1/5/10/20 customers. How do I know this: because I’ve made the mistake as much as anyone. SportsLizard makes solid money, but it’s taken 3+ years and it’s still not enough for one person to live off … Continue reading
Wow – Grooveshark Could Revolutionize the Music Industry
In college, I downloaded music from our school’s network and used Winamp to play my music. I swore I’d never be one of those “fools” who actually paid for music and fell into the iTunes/iPod trap. Then I got an iPod for Christmas one year and realized I should start paying for my music (you know, since it’s legally and morally the right thing to do), so I fell in love with iTunes and to date haven’t looked back. Amazon’s affordable DRM free store is a great start, but they don’t have near the selection iTunes does. So I figured … Continue reading
Music Alerts is bLoWiNg uP!!!
OK, so I know I’ve been posting a lot about Music-Alerts. I was intending on writing a post today about how this has been a really up and down week. A lot of great stuff has happened, and a lot of frustrating stuff that makes me want to run full speed into a wall has happened too. It really has been one of those weeks where you drain yourself by running through the entire gamut of human emotions. Instead, I’m posting about Music-Alerts. After my little marketing challenge was done I expected traffic to taper off and traffic to level … Continue reading
One-Hour Marketing Challenge a Success + New Music-Alerts Feature
I wasn’t really sure how my one hour of marketing Music Alerts would pan out. Turns out it went well…really well. The StumbleUpon traffic has been nice, but it was those 10 or so emails that I sent that got the viral bug started. Blogs like Emily Chang’s eHub, KillerStartups, and even a popular Italian tech blog gave it good reviews, and the site went from about 30 visitors a and 1 feed created per day, to over 500 visitors and over 50 feeds created each day this week. Now I realize those aren’t HUGE numbers, but it’s a hell … Continue reading
My One-Hour Marketing Challenge
As I said back when I launched it, Music-Alerts is a site I’m really proud of. I think it’s a service that a lot of people could benefit from, and I think I did a pretty good job on the design and programming. That said, let’s be honest: the chances for it to actually make us any money is very slim. The only chance it has is to become HUGE so we could make money on advertising or affiliate sales. Currently, the links to the albums are affiliate links, so in theory if a crapload of people used the service … Continue reading