McKittrick

This is just silly. (and i don't mean that in a mean way...). Most people instances of perceived meanness are really just acting on a set of interests that don't align with your own. There's no malevolence involved, yet the perception is the actor is mean. Im quite sure Paul has in the past acted in a way that was perceived as mean by a non-aligned party, as have we all. Acting out of pure malevolence/meanness is different than that. That type of action is hopefully so rare that it is a terrible proxy for success/ failure.

isn't whether a trademark is being violated a legal question? HLS just gets to make this determination on its own and act? seems odd...

I wonder if this will effect their "gmail man" marketing? you know, the one where they blast goog for probing in your email...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMbQCom7VTY

Its interesting that despite their founders outspokeness, the influx of heavy weight VC, tech press expose's on their offices, etc., RapGenius is really no more or no less than a standard, multi-multi-page SEO site, no different than the countless others just like it. No brand, no user affinity, no direct traffic to speak of. Just a bunch of drift net pages crawled by Google waiting to pick off unsuspecting search traffic. My favorite line of this post was the last: "Much love. iOS app dropping next week!" - unless you are searching that term in google, Im not sure who that is addressed to.

if you talk to a reporter for a story, you're being interviewed. Let me rephrase, if I was talking to a reporter and the conversation was being recorded, I would presume I was being interviewed. If the reporter told me it was off the record, I would not consider it an interview.

Getting misquoted in an interview happens to almost everyone who has given an interview ever. It is a product of the interviewer trying to put an editorial spin on a story (i.e make it interesting) and human error (based on reporter time constraints). Being misquoted is the tax for using the interviewer's platform for marketing. For most people, the benefit of the publicity outweighs the tax. So you give the interview, knowing full well that the end product is going to come out somewhere on the spectrum of slight misquote --> just made up stuff. And this isn't going to change. But it is something to keep in mind when you're pitching PR for your startup. You will get misquoted, its a matter of degree. Share your words as wisely as possible. Unfortunately, unlike PG, the rest of us don't have a platform for setting the record straight on a misquote.

the dood abides.

No one likes risk. Even early stage investors. A good investor deck should convince the investor that whatever risks are associated with particular investment opportunity are seemingly mitigated.

Team - not your first rodeo, know how to win, subject matter experts. Focus - clearly stated value proposition. Dream - big market, big value. Plan of Attack - clear path to capture market share. Validation/ Traction - customers! Tech - solid, non-obvious, not easily replicable. (i.e. if your successful, someone else can't just hop into the market and eat your lunch). Use of proceeds - not just pay my salary, but grow this business. Next big milestone: profitability? another fund raise?

If you hit on these, then investors will want to put money in their favorite types of companies: the one's that don't look like they need it. ;)

good one "staunch"

the translation of laughter seems appropriate for a search app designed to be playful and fun.

I recently put all my apps into the cloud. I now access them through a single app I call a "browser."

very cool. now i feel compelled to go burn 6 hours in http://telehack.com/

what i find interesting is the disruption mobile/ tablets are causing. If you're a security company, what do you sell to a tablet user? who buys security software for an ipad?

what does your vc think about you spending part of your funding on lawyers to litigate a TM lawsuit against a Windows mobile developer?

I was being a bit cheeky. I agree that HN is different than the some of the blatantly awful aggregation sites. HN uses only headlines, gives attribution, etc. I don't buy the community argument though - lots of sites take linked headlines, snippets and degraded images and package it up with a comment system. Aggregation - community driven, algorithmic, etc. - is still aggregation.

finding it ironic that i found this article on HN, a content aggregation site...;)

The effectiveness of an ad should be measured by its price - or conversely stated, by the revenue it generates. Search advertising generates somewhere between $50 to $100 for every thousand impressions (RPM) for US traffic. Content/ display ads on a well optimized site will generate somewhere between $1 and $3 RPM. FB ads, according to their numbers, generate around $.35 RPM.

So in the advertisers mind, search ads are literally orders of magnitude more effective than FB ads.

W/r/t FB as a business however, it's all well and good becuase, even at $.35 RPM, with billions of page views /day or month, the numbers start adding up pretty quickly. As long as they continue to crank billions of page views, justoptimizing the site to move from $.35 to, say, $.40 RPM will have a massive effect on the growth...provided they keep cranking the page views.

yes, this is all getsatisfaction's fault. surprised nytimes missed that angle.

I don't think start-ups compete against each other. there's 1 800lb gorilla in the room and it ain't blekko or ddg. Partnering to make both of their services better makes alot of sense.

why do search engine launches get such enormous press attention?

It's just a flesh wound! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKhEw7nD9C4