I was just thinking today, "I wish there was diskprices.com but for RAM". THANK YOU! Please could you add other locations? (In particular amazon.co.uk)
Glad you like it :D Alternate locations are on the list, though it'll require reworking a decent amount of code - I don't currently track the geographical location and it'll add to the scraping overhead unfortunately - but it'll happen! At the moment, I'm mostly focused on getting Amazon Associates to approve me. Ha.
Or in other words, spend your time and money not on advertising, but on making a product so compelling that your users/customers advertise for you. Think Dropbox, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Skype – no advertising, but a product that people will encourage others to use.
I would imagine that if you were entering a crowded market with an idea that simply cut costs, but provided no real unique consumer facing benefit, you could afford to ride on CPC.
So… it does work like that. The value of the collection and of your house is a combination of its raw value, as well as less tangible/quantifiable factors (location, condition) – not to mention supply/demand.
The accumulated effort of building your house – and thus the worth – is encapsulated right there in the number of rooms, location, and condition. In fact, I'd bet the human effort in building a house (planning, building, decorating) is more than the cost of bricks and mortar.
I love the app, but there is one thing I'd change to perfect it, because I'm a heavy label user:
When choosing a label, there's no immediate visual feedback to show which label you've selected. This might not sound critical, but using a finger on a moving train can lead to inaccurate pressing!
Compare that to the web interface: select a label, and there's immediate feedback saying "this conversation has been moved to/labelled "whatever_the_label_is".
I'd like to either see my selection invert, or a confirmation similar to the web interface.
(And agree with the OP: taking up valuable screen space with a thick border is inefficient).
"Sending your friends/family/colleagues a link on MegaUpload (or similar) was essentially putting a paywall between them and the file you actually wanted to give them."
However, if you want to transfer a large file to someone, and are not technically savvy enough to have Dropbox, FTP, or some other hosting, you'd probably Google how to send a file, and services such as MegaUpload and Yousendit would be the top results.
The services are biassed to make things as easy as possible for the uploader (free, no sign up required, just enter recipient's email address, redirect to subscribe page after), who is unlikely to take into account the things done to make things a little harder for the downloader (delayed download, premium paywall, throttled free service). For clients who have neither the budget nor the wits to pay for the premium service or their own hosting, the free service worked fine for occasional use.
Surely one reason for Netflix, Hulu, etc is to aim to provide a single point of access. Without this, you'd have to sign up to an account at HBO, Fox, Universal, Everylabeloutthere, then download each of their apps to get at the content.
That is, until Mr Entrepreneur creates a service that scrapes, aggregates, links to, or otherwise makes it easier to access all these content producers from a single site. The content producers might even decide that hosting, billing, and all that coding takes too much, and outsources it to Mr Entrepreneur. That hosting, billing, and coding costs Mr Entrepreneur, so he'll want a cut to cover costs, and some more to provide a profit incentive. Still, as a single point of access, tempting the producers with the promise of its big user base, the service can negotiate bulk licences…
And so, we're back to where we are now, where you access content through an intermediary, and pay for the convenience.
Capitalism comes in for a lot of criticism, but arbitrage and innovation is one of the things it does well (as long as there is balanced competition and regulation.)
That said, just because that's the way things are done now, that doesn't mean it's right. There is always scope for things to be done better, and for some of us, that ease is provided by torrents and such.
