Focus on success first -- and think about your "exit paths" -- and the costs/benefits of being on GAE vs. another option as an independent decision.
Bottomline: starting a business (that succeeds) does change you expectations for "action" which will likely poison you from academia. I hypothesize if you fail in the startup that the PhD will not be an economic option at that stage!? The implication: it's hard to "reverse" this decision.
In my experience Google has not kept up with the assault of companies trying to beat its algorithms!
Personally, I am i. managing an open source project ii. picking up/tasking the kids to school (generally spending time with the kids) iii. biking regularly to get/stay fit iv. lunches with friends v. looking for the next "thing" I want to get involved in
Ahh .. but you can see I am a little older than you!
I have been spending some time supporting an open source home server from www.amahi.orgIt's easy to install and will eventually target "consumer" users.At this stage you get users/file share creation and authentication, a VPN, and importantly, the ability to install more applications over the web.For example. the newsreader sabnzbd can be installed with one click after a community member spent...
The real question is what do you want to startup? -- a full scale business with lots of employees or a one man shop?
.. or to be really geeky, add a button to darken the color in the menu bar (simply change the .css with a little javascript!)
"Stopping" anonymous users can be done with a little bit of design in the sign-up process.
If money is required adding some ads down the RHS of the screen would easily make that much ...
just my 2 cents...
When we focused on doing it ourselves things picked up. One "trick" we used that worked was to 'SPIFF' sales people who had complementary products to give us leads. This lead to our eventual acquisition ...