Diaspora asking for donations? What happened to the $200k and where is this new money going?
Then again...NY can be an expensive place to start a company
Then again...NY can be an expensive place to start a company
They spent $114k on salaries, taxes, workers comp, etc.
8.5k on hosting and whatnot - how on earth are they using that the resources to justify that?!
8k on LUXr training. 2.5k on "Diaspora graphics/printing." Probably a waste, but you gotta spend the budget somehow, I guess.
14k on housing and travel... curious.
So the 200k turned into 114k in their pockets, 14k of hotels/flights/etc, some training and a bunch of wasted hardware.
Yeah, 29k is poverty, especially in NYC, but these are NYU students. There's plenty of financial aid to go around, but in reality, it's an overwhelmingly wealthy college. I'd be extremely surprised if their parents weren't already paying their rent/living expenses. And despite pocketing 76% of the cash, they don't have anything to show for it, and nobody's really believed they had a shot since that code release a year ago that showed they had no real technical skills to back up the project. Which probably explains the huge expenses for idle servers. I don't doubt their dedication or belief in themselves or the project, but for the love of god, stop indulging this fantasy.
I really have no idea why people thought the project had a serious shot in the first place. From the get go they were talking up hugely ambitious features like video-chat while never explaining how they intended to deal with the core architecture of the project.
Simple fact of the matter is that they happened to announce when being pissed at Facebook was a common sentiment, and people expressed their anger by throwing money at these kids. It really didn't take more than a cursory look to see that the chances of something worthwhile being built, let alone taking off, were minimal.
Why do people keep saying this? It exists. You can use it.