dsulli

I really enjoyed this video - both information dense, unique, and funny!

That's a good idea. Having that, plus an 'expected wait time' would be really useful. When I push the button, if it tells me I'll need to wait for 4 minutes and 23 seconds for the next elevator, I can use that time more effectively ... maybe go grab a coffee and come back, or perhaps even take the stairs instead.

I don't think owners of office buildings realize how painful it is to have slow elevators. We moved our office out of a 30 story building with 4 elevators, because the unbearable wait to get in and out of the building during peak times.

I just finished reading his biography, so it's interesting to see the young Steve. For historical context, their main products at the time were the Apple II and Apple III, so this was before the GUI / Lisa / Mac.

Right. If someone builds something interesting enough to get on Oracle's radar, then they become an obvious target for litigation. Doesn't make sense to build anything with Java, when there are so many other free alternatives available.

Definitely a cool idea. The best way to fly from Manila to China is on Cebu Pacific. No flight search in the world will tell you that, because Cebu Pacific is a local budget carrier and just advertises locally.

That's true - there definitely would be some room for disruption in the domain registration market.

The thing with GoDaddy, which is bigger than it's 8 nearest competitors combined, is that they've been successful on the back of mass marketing, and earning more dollars off of every single customer they have.

All those add ons, that we geeks so easily ignore, are just mindlessly added on by a large majority of other customers who really have no idea what they need. So instead of earning $2 or $3 for the domain registration service, like other registrars do, GoDaddy ends up earning $200 or $300 from those customers (which gives them more money to use towards marketing again).

I think a major hosting company with a good reputation might be able to make inroads into the domain registration industry (Amazon or Rackspace perhaps), but I don't think most people would trust their domains with a startup.

Just one more option - Twilio has a voicemail transcription feature as part of it's API, with automatic call back. So anything recorded could be available as text that way.

Sure - no problem - the application is Generic Domain Finder - just search it on Google. The current app in the search results is still running GAE.

The things I loved: - tight integration with Google accounts - easy integration with other Google apis (we used a few)

The frustrating thing was dealing with the black box. We used an api to get domain availability. Every time it returns more slowly than the equivalent call on our linux based cloud server.

With GAE, you're basically stuck with what you get. With a generic Linux based cloud server - you have more room to optimize your environment, or even take your code and run it anywhere... AWS, Rackspace, Voxel...

I still believe in what GAE is trying to do - and I'll definitely try it out again for future projects.

I was using this on a project for a while. But compared to running the application with PHP, it was always slower. Sure, I've developed applications with PHP since 2001, so I really know how to tweak it and optimize it. But, with App Engine it was really frustrating. Requests really took long to complete, and there was no real way to figure out what was going on behind the scenes. We created an 'always on' instance, but it was still quite sluggish compared to the exact app running on a standard linux, apache, PHP system.

I would still try it again down the road, but it's really not a good fit for what I'm currently doing.

Yup - honestly, it's the truth. Most freelancers DON'T pay for Photoshop. They don't have to - because they don't work in a corporate office, where software piracy can easily be enforced by BSA.

I know a lot of people 'want' to pay for the software, because they feel it's the right thing to do. A system like this will help them to do the right thing.

Hammers don't cost $2500.

Sometimes heavy equipment is added on by contractors. For instance, I can dig this ditch with a shovel, or we can rent a backhoe, and have it done in a few hours.

The big problem with Facebook is that their business isn't defensible in the long term. There have been lots of other social networks come along in the past (AOL, classmates, Friendster, Myspace). The prior ones are all in shambles now, that people have moved on to a new place.

I don't see why another network can't come along in a year or two, and start stealing away visitors from them.

Compare a few publicly traded companies in the range of 50 to 70 billion dollars market cap (all seem to have a pretty strong 'durable competitive advantage', as Warren Buffett notes):

Comcast (63B) - millions of subscribers for phone, internet, and cable services, paying money every month for services.

Amex (55B) - receives a chunk of every payment that their millions of card holders make. Card is accepted at stores and websites around the world.

3M (62B) - sell 20+ billion dollars of "diversified technology" products a year.

When I first heard the Airbnb idea - I was really skeptical. This is one of the cases where the actual implementation of the idea turned out better than the pure idea itself.

I've booked a couple of places through the site when I was traveling in California, and the result in both places was better than I would have expected.

Awesome - someone should expand this idea into a book!

I definitely have no problem paying for a good browser app, if it helps me: 1. do my work faster 2. give me a competitive advantage in my business 3. provide a higher level of service to my few clients

I'm not sure I would specifically pay for an extension to analyze social data. I'd have to see the end results first, and evaluate it based on that.

In terms of pricing, don't limit yourself at the $1 to $3 app level. Evaluate the pricing based on the value provided to the customer. If it helps your customer earn $10,000 more over the course of a year, there's nothing wrong with charging $100 for it, or more.

For the customers not bothered by the transaction cost - there's not much different between $1 and $30 or more.

I'm pretty content with hostway. They have one of the lowest prices for domain names, and have a decent interface. They also don't try to upsell any of their other services when you are going through checkout.

I would stay away from 1and1. They have some pretty sketchy billing practices.

Hah - I doubt it. With titles like this, I think they rather read the print version of Fortune magazine monthly.

I think culture plays a big role. When I was in China for a while, it seemed like the government wants to build a Chinese copy of other things. Whatever technology exists elsewhere, they seem to want to have their own version of it that's Chinese.

Philippines is another country with a lot of smart people, but I don't feel that the people in power there really have a building culture. Even with their last round of elections, they bought their voting machines from a Venezuelan.

If technology and startups really are in the culture of a country, there are lots of opportunities everywhere, to try and make a difference.

I guess it's better if things can come from the top down, like in the case of China - to jump start things a bit.

The other thing, with Nigeria. It's economy has been growing steadily over the past decade. But, it seems to be primarily driven by foreign oil companies.

Is there any room for doing start ups related to this? Oil exploration definitely requires a lot of capital. It would be hard to imagine what kinds of contributions a lowly Nigerian hacker could make in this area. Lastly, I know that India benefited quite a bit by having a large community of overseas Indians. People who came to USA for school, and later stayed on and worked here after graduating. As I understand it, these people provided some of the key contacts as the outsourcing boon started.

This is a CEO of a company that wants to get a product out the door. Sometimes that's not easy. He's basically using the tools at his disposal. It sounds like he's given his team a year, and they still haven't delivered. An email like this can sometimes shake out the non-performing team members and lead them to quit. In a company with 7,600 employees - I'm pretty sure not every one is a star performer.

Anyways, I've worked for a CTO who basically was a raving lunatic. Every couple of months there would be some kind of a blow up. But, looking back, we also did some amazing work under him, and created a cutting edge service still used 6 years later.