I'm sure it's just a place holder until he can secure north.com or some variant of that. The foundation video series run by Kevin seems to have gone through a dozen domains.
This doesn't surprise me. To me Kevin seems to have a drive to tackle the latest interesting trends in social and always with a new twist. Success or Failure. This is a good quality. Good Luck Kevin.
Actually, I'm not so sure. It's easy to tell people: "North.com, with a hyphen in between every letter." It's not that hard to type, and once you've typed it once, it's in your address bar.
From an SEO and aesthetic perspective, it's a shitty domain name. But from a branding perspective, it's not bad. It's memorable, easily verbalized, and allows him to brand under "north" instead of some longer or abstract name.
If the model sounds familiar, that’s because it was
kind of the idea behind Milk. But the world has
changed since then, according to Rose. “The biggest
thing that’s changed in the last three years is that
back then we spent a lot of time spent building out
the back end… But the scaling piece is a solved
problem,” Rose told me.
They shipped one app, Oink. Oink didn't fail because of the amount of time required to build out the backend. It failed because it was a me-too product in a sea of me-too products, and didn't do anything to differentiate itself or provide meaningful value to its users.
I sort of laughed as well, but everything he launches has a big PR launch day, and I imagine there was excessive engineering time spent on making oink scalable.
I think the statement makes sense if you are Kevin Rose, but it is ridiculous as a general insight. Worrying about scaling before you find out if the dogfood is any good is nuts.
Right. There were at least half a dozen other apps in the App Store doing the exact same thing that launched before Oink. It's been a couple years since I've thought about this space, at all, but some of the others were:
29 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 76.5 ms ] threadFrom an SEO and aesthetic perspective, it's a shitty domain name. But from a branding perspective, it's not bad. It's memorable, easily verbalized, and allows him to brand under "north" instead of some longer or abstract name.
Probably not true. Anyway, that's not what the plan is:
> He envisions North as a team that has one product person, one design person, and a full-stack engineer
Edit: On an unrelated note, it looks like Kevin must've been binging on Wes Anderson films recently. The North website looks like one of Anderson's film title cards. Compare http://wesandersontitlecards.tumblr.com and http://www.n-o-r-t-h.com/
Edit 2: Yep, Futura. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futura_(typeface)#Usage and check out the CSS on the North website.
I think the statement makes sense if you are Kevin Rose, but it is ridiculous as a general insight. Worrying about scaling before you find out if the dogfood is any good is nuts.
For example, if you were in the mood for a certain dessert, you'd see the ratings of the dessert in a city versus the ratings for the place.
* Stamped: http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/26/stamped/
* Chewsy: http://chewsy.com
* Foodspotting: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/foodspotting/id350727118?mt=...
* Ness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ness_Computing
Guess I can take off early for the weekend then.
http://www.n-o-r-t-h.com/commerce/show-cart