northband

I know this is non-tech, but I got a couple extra tix to this weekend's Fare The Well show's in Santa Clara and curious if anyone wants to buy them for cheap.

I apologize if this is inappropriate - it's just it will be a good show and close if you're in the bay area.

We have a where we provide instructional training through the form of videos, web-text modules, and online testing.

We are wondering whether we need to collect sales tax? Our company is not in the US and so far we have been collecting sales tax but with the launch of a new service we're wondering if this is needed.

So curious - how many people out there are collecting sales tax on your apps?

Thanks!

We have several hundred GB of files and need to share them across physical locations as well as allow our staffers to access from anywhere.

We want something like Adobe Bridge for any files. Also like our own cloud.

Can anyone suggestion some tools they've used for this sort of need?

I'm new in the area and looking to meet up with Rubyists and some Javascript coders to work on some projects. Most importantly I'm looking for 'nice people' ;-)

Give me a shout out if you're in the area.

Today our payment processor shut us down w/o much, if any, warning and a very vague reason. To make matters worse, though we made several attempts to contact them we got zero help. I did eventually contact a staffer via Twitter who told me 'someone was looking into it' but that was it. So we spent the day checking email, twitter, and logs looking for some sort of sign that we're back up. Not fun...

Putting aside we were down for a day, and the fact we've done around .5M of business with them so far this year, we have no way of contacting them via phone.

I've been a champion of the concept of not providing phone support, instead use email - providing email is fast and reliable. However, after today I'm having second thoughts.

Over the last few years I've seen more and more substantially successful companies not offering phone support. This idea has been interesting to me as I think its not only cool but efficient.

For instance, in many cases phone support may be just a place for a customer to take out their frustrations, not really helping matters or delivering a solution any quicker. In my experience I often can help people out quicker via email because it saves me the emotional drama.

However, I think in order for this to be successful, email or web chat support needs to be efficient. I'm talking turn-around time in minutes not hours or worse yet days.

Even if a solution can't be resolved quickly, a customer should be notified that the issue is being worked on. Metaphorically speaking, not doing such is like not providing a spinner or progress bar when doing a lengthy web request. It builds tension - tension needs resolved.

That being said - more companies seem to be doing this. I'm asking the HN community on their opinion of this trend. Perhaps this will shed light on the concept and spike those doing it to be speedier on their emails ;-).

Do you think phone support is needed?

I'm putting together a simple web app that profiles artists. I'm curious which is better for search engines - having the artist at the beginning of the domain or after?

Now that I have launched an evening/weekend project into a saturated marketplace - what is the best way to market it?

Like you see on Google sometimes - such as when they did the Game of Life in the background.

I am building a super generic B&W webpage and want some 8-bit looking randomized subtle color changes in the background but have no idea on where to start.

Any tips appreciated.

Does anyone know where to get an affordable MBA online? Thinking about getting one so the suits take me more serious. I know its sad - but seems a piece of paper or acronym works in some circles.

The gist:

1. I'm a seasoned dev by trade supporting my family by coding all the time.

2. I work for others but finally now want to make something that is my own and may help give me some more freedom.

3. I've been approached by others to fix a certain problem, so I built a simple rails app to solve this problem.

4. The app is 95% done - I just have a couple features left before launching.

5. I could really use some help teaming up with someone on one of my last features.

Looking for kindness and someone I can trust to access my source code. I've spent a considerable amount of time on this and don't want to screw it up as free time for me is hard to come by.

Lastly, I can't pay yet, looking for some pro bono help. Good news is I don't expect to take up a lot of your time - maybe just some peer review and help figuring out my last feature.

The app is in Rails 3 - but this feature involves file uploading maybe it can be in a different language.

If interested contact me via northband_at_gmail_dot_com