(Warning: personal interpretation ahead.)<p>Didn't watch the video, but she seems to be complaining about the competition.<p>Competition is good. Competition keeps you on your toes and validates your ideas. She can complain all she wants that Pownce wasn't in the same space, but it sure looked like a souped-up Twitter to me and a bunch of other people, and they should've responded to that.<p>And the reality is, Pownce wasn't a worthy competitor to Twitter. Twitter started not by being a closed-in environment, but by trying to reach out to every device, website and service you owned. The API and SMS integration were critical for Twitter to get traction in the early days; everyone on a Mac used Twitteriffic, other web services were coming out all the time that talked to Twitter, and the SMS integration helped people stay connected and get used to the idea of Twitter in their pockets.<p>Pownce launched with a decent looking web app and a poor AIR app, back when AIR was the next big thing. Their v1 API took months to come out, and it only allowed for read-only access - their API didn't get up to snuff until eight months after launch, and by then everyone had lost interest.
I always disappointed when I see mixergy come up on HN. The article titles often look great - interviews, interesting topics, etc. - but I just don't have the attention span to consume talk video.<p>I think a killer start-up might be a mix of video and transcripts... maybe outsource the transcriptions since the technology isn't there yet. Then again, I might read a transcription even if it was garbled like Google Voice messages.
Wasn't Pownce the software where they were using string functions to round floating point numbers?<p>Doesn't sound like the sort of engineering know-how that would lead to a scalable system.