jmpeters

Finally a business model I can believe in. Despite not having an MBA I'm going to speculate that there may be slightly more demand for this service than for Facebook's digital fish in an aquarium.

molehill != mountain

Facebook is like AOL and MySpace. It will remain popular. It will make a lot of money. It will make its founders rich. It won't live up to its hype. Given its closed, proprietary nature, it won't be where true innovation happens on the web.

I don't blame the Facebook crew for the overhyping of their product. That blame rests with the investment community, tech journalists, and a reasonable-sized chunk of the blogosphere, who collectively are about as discerning as a clique of 15-year-old girls. They think that what's "hot" is whatever they think everyone else thinks is "hot," which creates an echo-chamber effect surrounding every half-way successful web business that comes down the pike.

Great info, thanks.

Paysimple looks pretty good: http://www.paysimple.com/competitors.html . Anyone have any first-hand experience with it?

Thank you Woz and Jobs! Hey everyone, I just found out about these great things called "Personal Computers"! You should check them out, they're really cool!

Ideas are overrated. Execution matters far more. GrandCentral is very similar to a company called ThinkLink which preceded it by about five years. Facebook coopted ConnectU's ideas. The history of high technology is replete with similar examples. Yet GrandCentral and Facebook deserve their success. They weren't the most innovative in their respective spaces, but they executed best. That's what counts.

The author is in search of generalizations where none exist. The closed nature of the Mac and the iPod says more about the personality of one individual -- Steve Jobs -- than it does about some larger trend. The statement that "new technologies are becoming so complex that many are beyond the possibility of democracy playing a role in their development" is belied by Linux and other large-scale open-source systems, which are every bit as complex and as impressive as anything produced by "corporate or government initiatives overseen by elites."

There are plenty of successful examples of both top-down and bottom-up approaches to innovation in the marketplace today. Innovation is alive and well, especially in the high tech world, and attempts to put the great diversity of innovation happening today into one of two tidy academic cubbyholes seems like a waste of time.

I totally agree that "Art of the Start" is a waste of time. It reads as if Guy just collected a couple years worth of notes and Powerpoint slides from his inane pep talks and grinded them up into book form. And yet, paradoxically, it is difficult to criticize Guy. The very fact that he has managed to achieve some measure of Internet renown from the warmed-over banalities in "Art of the Start" represents a certain type of business success that I can't help but begrudgingly admire.

In a strange way Guy reminds me of a fascinating series of articles about Noka Chocolate that I read some time back (http://www.dallasfood.org/modules.php?name=News&file=art... While the author of the series clearly demonstrates that Noka chocolate is grossly overpriced and deceptively marketed, I ended up respecting Noka's chutzpah for convincing so many people to pay an exponentially higher price for repackaged Bonnat chocolate.

Such is Guy. He repackages the same slogans and epigrams that you can't throw a rock in the business section of any bookstore without hitting, and yet he is perceived as a creative business author. His entrepreneurial resume shows only the Web 0.01 Nutsack that is Truemors, and yet he has convinced a respectable cross-section of our industry that he knows something about building startups. You have to respect that. Guy Kawasaki: the Noka Chocolate of Startup Gurus.

Mmm, maybe Fake Steve Jobs is DHH. :)

I agree with the article in general, but you lost some credibility by equating Snipshot to Photoshop. I realize that you have an investment to promote, but please.