the startupist
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It’s been increasingly trendy in recent years for entrepreneurs to take advantage of previously innovative business models and apply them to different verticals with varying degrees of success.
One of the latest startups to apply X business model to Y industry is Pleygo, the Netflix of Legos. $15 to $40 per month rents you or your kid a lego set to build and enjoy. At the end of the month, it gets returned, sanitized, shipped back out for the next Plegyo-er.
I consider myself a bit of a playtime purist, and see absolutely no value in renting legos. The rental structure shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of legos. Pleygo treats them as a puzzle-of-the-month, when the whole point of legos is to acquire new sets, keep them, and then combine them to build new exciting buildings, vehicles, and creative creations.
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Yahoo! buys tumblr.. All cash, tumblr stays separate, people keep their jobs.
Most importantly, less pressure to turn tumblr into a cash machine in the near future.
Sounds like a decent deal to me.
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This Week in Viral Web Apps: Social Roulette - where you have a 1 in 6 chance of deleting your Facebook.
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Another acquisition for Yahoo!, another shutdown. Typical.
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“The future is extremely hard to see through the lens of the present. It’s very easy to unconsciously dismiss the first versions of something as frivolous or useless. Or as stupid ideas.” —- What a stupid idea. by Dustin Curtis
In which Curtis previews and dismisses both Pinterest and Vine many months prior to their debut and subsequent hyper-popularity.
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ATTN: fantastic theme developers!
Tumblr users can now interact with posts straight from the blog index and permalink pages on your theme! This is super exciting news! Previously blog visitors could only like or reblog posts through the controls in the corner of post permalinks.All you have to do is incorporate our new Like and Reblog buttons anywhere in your design — we’ll take care of the rest.
If you’ve been using other methods to add this functionality to your themes, you’ll need to update to the latest code. Visit our updated Theme Developers documentation for more information.
Want to learn how to create your own custom theme or help invent new ways to use Tumblr with our API? Check out our developer resources page!
It’s not like they come out and say it, but this seems to be a feature specifically targeted toward the Tumblr experience on touch interfaces.
(via staff)
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Ghost is on a mission to simplify blogging. It is funding now on Kickstarter.
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“I think there are a lot of people that think we don’t know how to generate revenue, that we aren’t generating revenue. This is wrong… We’ve been building merchant tools all along. We’ve seen revenue growth every month, and March was our biggest revenue month so far.” — Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley at TechCrunch Disrupt NY -
Google has finally announced the complete sunsetting of the Meebo bar. Google acquired Meebo for $100MM+ just under 1 year ago and switched off many of Meebo’s products.
This is one product shutdown that many users will likely welcome.
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