BenSchaechter

We're adding support for other countries currently. I believe Germany and France are in there right now...but that is something that is definitely on the list.

The maps are made with SVG and I make them on my own so they suck up a good amount of time.

edit:typo.

I believe I just fixed this. Sorry about that. But just to be sure, which browser are you using?

Good suggestion. I'll add that in.

I graduated in May and got a job with a startup merely because I spent my spare time building a fairly cool product built in Ruby on Rails. I would argue if you've shipped a product and can show it off, thats more valuable than having a degree from a well-known school.

But my real advice: Start a startup out of college if you've got no debt and have a good idea. It is what I'm doing right now and I'm pretty sure its the right time to take risks. At the very least you'll fail, have another product, and be even more employable than you once were.

I'm borderline addicted to Crystal Light.

That was one of the most well-written, to-the-point explanations I have read in a long time.

I'm interested to hear other peoples' thoughts on comet versus polling. I've done polling solutions before and am in the process of setting up a comet based solution.

In my opinion, having fewer requests to the server is better. But if someone can combat me on this, I'd really be interested in hearing another voice.

Maybe. But Steve Jobs is currently a lot more liquid than Zuckerberg.

Now, playing devil's advocate and judging by the number of upvotes this comment got -- couldn't the idea behind evercookie be used for good and not evil in some instances?

I'm curious more than anything else. For example, using this persistent cookie as an alternative to having users login?

Heh, after a quick look at some of the source code for storing the "cookie" in the browser history:

// sorry google.

var url = 'http://www.google.com/evercookie/cache/ + this.getHost() + '/' + name;

I've been doing quite a bit of work with SVG maps in Raphael and I have to say that relative to that, building maps is dead simple with this (and renders amazingly quickly).

However, I'm having a pretty tough time getting this stuff to interact dynamically. Do you have any examples where you're interacting with the maps with javascript (i.e. changing colors, etc.)

All in all, awesome work, though.

Just a few off the top of my head: Any major blog (TechCrunch, Mashable, Gizmodo) or media website, Stackoverflow's entire network. Most well-trafficked websites take advantage of advertising in some form and support a number of employees.

However, Quora probably doesn't have to stick with "pure" ad models -- and I don't expect them to. Just because they say they aren't focusing on monetization right now doesn't mean they're completely blowing it off. The Quora team is full of some pretty smart people who I'm sure know a bit about what they're doing.

Many very successful sites/businesses are able to monetize just fine off of advertisements. I'm pretty positive people wouldn't pay to use Quora when it launched -- or at least Quora wouldn't have had nearly the same rate of growth had they charged their users initially.

I completely agree on the Startup School piece of advice. I flew out from Nebraska last year and met more entrepreneurial/like-minded people than I ever knew existed. That event was one of the main motivations for me to move out to the Valley.

I still keep in close contact with a number of people I met from that event last year. There are very few places where you can meet fellow hackers who are entrepreneurial focused. Hearing what the speakers have to say is just the icing on the cake.

I'll start off: Calvin and Hobbes.

We had to add a third...so it was named Locke.

Yup, TechCrunch has three Disrupt conferences per year. The next one is slated for September 27th-29th.

URL: http://disrupt.techcrunch.com/2010-sf/

I think #8 (BE YOURSELF) should really be the first thing on the list. As someone who is now working at a startup straight out of [a really random, lesser well-known, liberal-arts focused] college, the single most important thing is to see how well you connect with the team.

People are really the most important part of any startup in my opinion. Don't try to be someone else. If there isn't a fit, you shouldn't try to force one.

HTML5 makes me thoroughly excited for the not-so-distant future web. From both an end-user and developer perspective.

Isn't CrunchBase a wiki?

Now if only someone could leak Steve Jobs' reaction to this...

Thanks for that. I definitely need to put some more thought into the design. Hope to have something out next week that is a bit better.

I plan on building it out quite a bit more and do some more customizable stuff.

Good call, I'm using 3.x -- Will focus on making it cross domain compliant with next update.

Hardest thing in my opinion: perseverance. There are going to be ups and downs with starting and running a business. I don't know if anyone really started with the "right idea" -- but as you persevere and keep going ideas evolve and things will hopefully work out in your [business's] favor.

I'm flying out Sunday, but if anyone wants to meet up Friday night I'd be down. I'm staying in Sunnyvale, but plan on being in San Francisco for most of the day Friday.

Thanks for the feedback. We'll definitely take that into consideration for our next deployment.

Hi there,

I'm the main developer for GoPollGo.com. Some pretty big changes are coming along in the next few weeks and we're definitely fixing up the voting statistics portion of the site.