Thanks Matt! Great stuff!

Thanks For “Sharing” Matt!

Speaking of mad business skills, Thanks Matt and Louis.

I was wondering if there would be a way for you to give a summary or a way of looking up what exactly happens in each stage of the dashboards.

Also, I’d like to know how the selection process goes. Do you take an invention as soon as its submitted and run with it till you get to a certain stage? Do you wait till you have a few and do that? Do you review them till they get to a certain stage then wait till you get “X” number at stage 3?

It seems that stage 3 is the stage that everyone gets “stuck on” for weeks/months. Anymore insight on how you go about the process would be greatly appreciated.

What I would love to see is an automatic entry after the post if it is edited. This has a two part bonus:

1. You can easily see if a post has been updated, and
2. You can see if the author has “changed their tune”. :)

I frequently add info to my posts if I think of more to say.

[edited by KalelKent: 10/9/08 12:50pm]

I love these official advise forums Matt, fantastic idea!!! now ive heard rumors of a new website? from others online.

What about a “hide” button on our home page to remove the dashboard of a search that we are not interested in?

The hide button has been added, but only if the dashboard goes Red. I think they want the empty dashboards to be their so you give in and invent something!

Matt, Thank you for sorting things out, now we can get straight to the point.
I have been thinking of making a presentation to Black & Decker for their Price Pfister department. I would present a NEW CONCEPT IN BATHROOMS. This would include some of EN’s new products that address a bathroom. Presenting the innovations and covering all the needs with these new products, for the whole bathroom. You can also call this creative selling. I would like to know what you think. Any one that has a bathroom product can benefit from this. Feed back would be good form those that do have an interest in NEW CONCEPT IN BATHROOMS.

I’m confused… Are you suggesting we pull our products from EN and have you present them to the company instead?

If that’s what you are saying, I’m not getting involved.

Good Morning Mark :D

Good Morning Toni. :)

Matt or En guys, can you call your website host and explain to them the importance of RAM and why they need more of it. :D

If you host your own site, you have a memory card going bad. Sometimes the site is quick, and other times the site doesn’t respond. I just pinged you a few times and got “request timed out” a few times, and at times was as high as 487ms

Gladys, I’m in!! :D

Hope this helps find the problem. Slow response, data loss and time-outs.

Proxy Error
The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
The proxy server could not handle the request GET /forums.

Reason: Error reading from remote server

Apache/2.2.4 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.3-1ubuntu6.3 mod_ssl/2.2.4 OpenSSL/0.9.8e Server at www.edisonnation.com Port 80

Matt,

I concur, since the added feature the site has been Slowwwwww……

Double clicking on a request, like “return to forums index page” sometimes helps, I don’t know why that is.

I doubt it has anything to do with the site upgrades, unless something is getting hung up in the memory, which is unlikely.

Most likely one of the servers in the server farm has memory issues, or one of the servers is down altogether if they have appropriate redundancy.

It’s like driving to work, a route you know very well, and run into road constuction. You either get stuck in traffic, hit a dead end, or have to turn around and find another route.

This is the third time we’ve had this problem since I’ve been here. I’m guessing their hosting company is dealing with antiquated hardware and duct tape.

It’s not an EN issue, unless EN hosts their own websites. :)

Wow, I just tried to get on for the last half hour with no luck at all. I was wondering what was going on.

I’ve been having problems with the add to friends for about 10 days.Some technical upstream server…

This has been very good for my paranoia.
I’ve reached the raving but can still seem sensible

Adam, I added you three times as a friend, I don’t know what’s wrong. Let me know if it worked.

Yeah,thanks ,Toni,just checked.The kitten has landed.
I tried with you this evening and during the week.
The purple monster of insecurity has rampaged[and nearly won]

It really has been pretty horrible.

I finally added you too. Although I can’t understand half of what your saying, you seem to be a good enough guy. Of course we haven’t discussed whether you support an independent Ireland yet though.

Well,Mark,that may be the rock we perish on-on second thoughts.Very politic there,Mark,no hints.

Mental note:make lots of mental notes.

I tried to add you.It didn’t work.You seem to be o.k. yourself.

I have to say:

[There follows an apology for my existence.]

That about wraps that up.

Have you read Flann o’Brian-The Hard Life,The Poor Mouth,The Third Policeman[a sublime book].

Ireland’s genius has always been independant until the onset of the modern world-the trough became irresistable.

Well after reading a bit about Flann o’Brian I now understand why you type the way you do. It was as easy to follow as chasing a butterfly through a pricker bush.

With that said, Your stance on non-stance is interesting. Of course you are talking with somebody who believes the Declaration of Independence is one of the most important writing in world history.

And, with that said, what does this have to do with EN or EN.com? Go back to work!

The Song of Songs.
Yeah,you’re right.It’s back to the drudgery of youtube.

Adam – do you know Bono from U2?

Not personally[ha,ha],Patrice,but I have problems with him and his outfit.

They’ve done some great songs-loved beautiful day.Apparently the Edge can go bonkers and tends to go off on one,on his guitar-cant help himself,which I like.

I cant understand how Bono has the brass neck to preach about poverty and starvation and he a multi-millionaire.There’s a worm in his brain somewhere.

I always thought U2 were always tilting to pretensiousness on a grand scale,but seemed to avoid it-just about,but it taints their endeavours for me.

So,there you go,Patrice

But he’s always visiting other countries and trying to raise money and make people aware of poverty.

He’s still awesome no matter what you say :)

Blunderbusses at 2000 feet,Patrice,wearing very dark glasses

Well, the site is worse today. Thankfully I have a meeting in a few hours, so I have something else to do besides “refresh, refresh, refresh”

I am glad (refresh) it’s just (refresh) not me! (refresh):D (refresh, refresh) :D

www.bettertoilet.com

It is really painful trying to navigate throught the EN site today. It’s probably a good thing because it forces me to go food shopping..ughh

And Adam, I like my very dark glasses…I even wear my sunglasses at night and I especially wear them while listening to U2!!! Hahaha

“I wear my sunglasses at night..so I can so I can…” Cory Heart sung that I think it was :)

outside I’m laughing,Patrice,but inside,I’m laughing as well-no sunglasses

I’m having the same pain with the site. I finally entered the Spencer’s Lighting search (sorry guys, I was sick). It took over two hours and a couple hundred refreshes to get it in. Sitting on one green.
Actully, this has been a common problem with the site for me. If I click on a link once it goes to about 2 bars and freezes. A second click has worked most of the time. Today the second click just made the timer bar disappear, then I had to click twice more and maybe it worked.

Well, I’ve been clicking through for the last 10 minutes without a hitch. Of course it’s 3am eastern time, but not a slowdown in sight!
:D

Mark and all that may have questioned my idea. What I ment is you can present more than one product with one presentation. The products together make a complete statement and therefor it is a more attractive avenue for the company to consider a big investment in completely though out product.

But in fact, wouldn’t your idea be the same as a live product search, submitting a bunch of ideas to a company in hopes that they pick some, or would you demand they select the whole batch? And who would pitch my product, you, or would you have a team of professionals who do this for a living? I’d be concerned about handing over my product to somebody who would use it just to persue their own goals.

Anyway, this conversation has nothing to do with “offical edisonnation.com Q&A”, so I’ll leave it at that. I’d be willing to discuss this more on it’s own thread. :)

Hey Guys,
We feel your pain. Mark, I don’t think it’s a memory issue but we’ll run a diagnostic to check. Edison Nation is actually hosted on a series of servers, dedicated to us, that live in a datacenter. We have a ton of RAM on these servers. A stick of RAM did go bad about 6 months ago and caused similar problems and was easy to fix. In addition to replacing the bad RAM, we added more servers as backups.

We’ve been tracing this one and think we have narrowed down the cause but are still testing. We’re working diligently to find the source and fix it. Everything seems to be good at the moment and we’re going to be monitoring it all day since there are a lot of people who need to get submissions entered before midnight.

We’re sincerely sorry for the hassle everybody!

Jason,
To answer your question about the logistics of the stages… We don’t have a defined process yet as we’re still learning the most efficient way of doing it. Generally speaking, most submissions are reviewed to a certain stage (usually G3). They typically are then picked back up once the search closes and our goal is to get to finalists within 2-3 weeks from close – but it all depends on how many submissions we need to process. After that, the timing is greatly impacted by the retailer’s response time and ability to get their legal department to sign off on the acceptance agreements for the product(s) they choose to take on (that’s where the Spencer’s search is being delayed, for instance).

I’m confident that as time goes on, we’ll be processing more submissions quicker and on a more consistent-feeling schedule. I can also tell you that there will always be exceptions and as soon as we have it just right, we’ll discover more improvements that we can make – and we’ll make them.

I’m curious what you find. The site is working fine since late last night.

These problems seem to happen only on the weekend. Somebody probably forgot to put in a new backup tape and froze up the system. :)

Anybody that knows computers knows not to blame EN for this one.

BTW, i’m one of the few who know the difference between memory and harddrive space :)

Thanks Matt,

It seems to be working good today. That’s saying a lot on the last day of two searches.

“Anybody that knows computers knows not to blame EN for this one.”

Gremlins were first conceived during World War II, when mechanical failures in aircraft were jokingly blamed on the small monsters…So, I think we know what actually happened now?!

Mark: You have totaly misconstruded (? spelling) my idea. At no time is it ment to work without the EN team. EN does encourage us to be agressive and creative.

Ron, I am glad you understood that bathroom products, presented together (in their catergory or any other catergory presented) a presentation could be more effective.

Grrrrrr!!! Am I the only one who still can’t submit tonight? I just spent 40 minutes trying to upload one file and it still won’t upload.

It just took me 4 attempts to get logged back in to get to the forums.

I am so frustrated! I planned on submitting 10 ideas to the Springs Creative Craft search this past weekend and wasn’t able to even get logged in, let alone submit anything. Now, I have 14 prototypes sitting here that I put money into I didn’t have and now I can’t list them??

I will keep trying until midnight, but I don’t see how I can get 14 of them done in time. That’s why I had planned on doing at least 10 of them over the weekend.

Matt, any chance this search will be extended so we can actually submit our hard work?

Signed,

Close to tears in Oregon (LOL)

Kurt Ask Team edison if you can send them the
info and they can put it in for you and then
you can go in and edit whatever you need later.

Kurt or Becky,

The site has been working good most of the day, although a little slow in the afternoon.

If you are using windows, try clearing your browser history. tools/Delete Browsing history/delete temporary internet files.

Hope that works for you.

Thanks Mark,

Glad to hear it’s been working better. Unfortunately I’m not available during the day, except on the weekend when i could get in.

In the last 2 hours I have been able to upload 4 documents. I thought I was going to actually get to list one, but I got a proxy error message.

I only have three items in my browser history, but I’ll clear my cache and see if that helps.

So you think I’m the only one having troubles, now?

Kurt & Becky,
We’ve tracked down the issue. It’s related to the uploading of media.

This is a simplified explanation: We have a limited number of processes (or proxies) that handle transactions. When you click on a link, one of these proxies does the work for you and delivers a page. It usually happens in milliseconds. However, if you upload a huge file, that proxy is tied up for as long as you are uploading. If you get a ton of people uploading extremely large files at the same time, a bunch of the proxies will be tied up and the Web server isn’t smart enough to know to not try to re-use the proxy that is already in use. That’s when you get those proxy errors.

This only rears it’s ugly head when we’re uploading a ton of files at once (that’s unfortunately usually when we’re down to the last-minute deadlines). What we’re going to do is turn off the ability to upload media today. Tomorrow, we’re going to install some software that will ensure our Web server doesn’t try to reuse busy proxies and we’ll turn the uploading feature back on (likely with slightly tighter file size limitations as well).

So, tonight all you need to do is get your submissions in. Post your idea and all of the details but don’t post any media. Some time tomorrow, I’ll make a note on this forum that you can start uploading media again. You’ll be able to edit your entries and upload your media by visiting your idea database page here: http://www.edisonnation.com/account/my_submissions. You must get your submissions in tonight but don’t have to get your media uploaded until the end of the week. We’re also going to accept entries until noon EST tomorrow.

We’re sorry for the hassle but we’ve tracked it down and will have it fixed for all future searches.

Thank you for your patience and understanding :-)

OK Everybody. The change noted in my previous comment has been made. Everything should be smooth now.

Thanks, Matt! My blood pressure just went back to normal.

Wow, service at midnight. Unheard of in this day and age.