apedley

I shuddered when I saw the word Access Database. (bad memories of porting those evil things). I don't care how much money is in those things, I will leave it to someone else :) Much like these guys are trying to do.

Well he also seems to forget the amount of effort but in by the speaker. Of course a more famous one will be paid more, (s)he has spent thousands of hours doing appearances, books, etc all to gain some notoriety, all without the assurance it will pay off or come back to them some day. 30k an hour just isn't accurate if you see all the effort over the years to pull it off and the pre and post work needed to be done per speaking engagement.

Haha, I should have seen that coming. "Using my experience at Servly"

Servly.com being a server monitoring startup :)

I think this post raises some good points but really misses the mark.

Firstly support. On dedicated hosting on some providers, yes you will get a quicker response than from Amazon or Microsoft or whoever your cloud provider is. However, when there is a problem with their service, by the time I find out about it I am normally looking on their site to see they have already been notified of the problem and are already looking into it. And Microsoft Azure does have phone support for any critical issues.

The 2nd great thing about the cloud is that, it isn't just your problem. They are hundreds if not thousands of companies affected and they are more likely spending far more money than me with them. Hence I get the rapid fix of any issues, without being the big client.

Benchmarks - not sure why that was brought up, you can benchmark on any cloud provider. On Windows Azure I can find out everything from CPU to memory usage and do remote profiling.

Dedicated will give you better costs, machine to machine wise but I would rather pay $1,000 + more a month to have someone look after all my hardware and the ability to scale as a I wish, rather than have to pay someone (who would cost far more) to monitor, upgrade and plan for it continuously. If $150 to $1,500 is an issue and you are prepared to spend a large part of your own time on this insignificant issues, then I suppose you are a startup and not a business yet.

I understand doing everything yourself at the start, staying as lean as possible, but if you are looking at that scale and hiring people then the costs of the cloud are FAR more attractive.

Libraries have a short life left. I don't know many people who go to them anymore considering the vast amounts of information on the Internet and now eReaders.

Libraries may offer other services than just the loaning of books and dvd's but in that case community centers will appear or other businesses to fill those needs.

I know some people don't have access to the internet or a computer but that is changing. I don't think libraries will disappear overnight but they are going (as we know them).

The current Australian government doesn't understand economics either. A mentality of take from businesses and give to the poor. They might realize one day that if they provided more for small businesses, there would be more jobs and hence less poor.

I also find that jobs for Java are generally about maintaining or expanding old systems.

The majority of jobs with newer companies or even newer projects at larger companies tend to involve C#, at least in my city.

My startup is in asp.net, for the same reason yours will be. I am lightning fast at it and that is what counts.

.NET can be just as fast, it has one of the better development environments (in my opinion) and is just as great as any other languages.

It is scaling rather well with my startup.

I think the only reason it doesnt get as much attention is due to it's perceived startup costs. But no problem at all if you join BizSpark. (Best deal MS has ever put out for startups)

I offer PayPal as an option but I hate doing so. PayPal are useless but some people still want it as an option.

The $12.99 price is a special price and always has been. You can still find discount codes and apply it to them when you renew to get it at the same price.

Godaddy can be insanely cheap if you never auto renew and always manually renew with discount codes.

Though yes you need to get off Godaddy. As do I. Just waiting for a little more revenue from my site to move to Rackspace Cloud :)

It does for me. Maybe the host went down for a few minutes?

It can work, it just takes longer and is harder to maintain the momentum when you are only working on it in small chunks.

If you could drop to part time work to cover the expenses then that might be a more viable approach but unless your startup is launched and generating revenue (even 1 sale a week) within 3 months you will notice that it gets harder to keep going, pivot and really get decent traction.

Quantum entanglement, zero point energy, just to name a few things. While I agree these technologies might not be viable for a while, saying we are never going to leave the solar system is fairly short sighted. We always find a way :)

SEO is shifting to Social SEO.

Essentially what you like on facebook, tweet or with a +1 button will become the higher ranked content.

Link building is a dying concept

Social gives us what we want, great content rising to the top. It is the future. Develop great content and engage with your followers and network.

Traffic will follow.

Thanks, certainly looks promising. I have a few to checkout now.

thanks, looks great.

very close, but Mailgun are programmable mail boxes, I can easily do the coding for sending emails etc, I already have that, I was more after the list management and list statistics/tracking when sending emails.

Interestingly I have found that the apps I build for myself then decide this would be great for others, lets build it for everyone to use, have been the most successful of my apps.

It`s an old traffic method but it does work. Not that I do it anymore. But back in the day I did make some interesting connections with it, getting to know people and their blogs.

I prefer to be the content creator and focus more on delivering value than trying to skim off others value.

But it`s not really spamming you are adding some value. It`s just low value content generation.

Completely agree.

Maybe they should have used Azure. At least that forces them into a staged deployment. (of course not that it was around when they started MySpace).

I was wondering why it received such a huge investment.

That`s brilliant :) Great post john.

I thought this was common sense. Every step needed for a user to signup in anything will eventually make a difference in conversion rates.

I have had a very similar experience.

First 1 I spent 12 months developing and only generated a few hundred dollars.

Few more in between all not generating much interest.

One took a few weeks of dev time and a bit coming out of it, still big potential there so I will pursue it, it just involves getting out to more businesses.

The most recent one built in a day to test the waters. Lots of positive feedback, 1 more day to polish the site (ie. make it look pretty) and now a large company is getting on board and lots of small businesses jumping in. (2 days work total) Obviously I have a lot more days of dev to keep expanding it.

I think the actual thing you learn is don't reinvent the wheel, just do something better than everyone else. And second start VERY simple, then build. Otherwise the app is too complex to get a quick and rapid user base who will then spend the time to use your app more.

Wow, they only just figured out that managers don't need to have a greater technical skill than those they are managing? I thought that was management 101?

Managing and engineering are 2 different skills. While managers benefit from technical knowledge it certainly doesn't need to be greater.

And with Marissa Mayers comments on Google wants to connect the real world to the digital world, where have they been. In case they weren't aware, internet connected appliances, location based apps, RFID, QR codes, mobile phones have been around for a little while now.

Google's search engine is great though slowly declining in quality but that is all they have been great at. Android is a decent mobile OS but it only received market pentration due to it's zero cost. Their social attempts have all failed. They only seem to get wide market adoption from free software or services, which I suppose they use to keep their search engine traffic high so they can maintain their advertising revenues.

They seem like a company unable to create another profitable software line.

I went to the page and was confused. I may not be as chat savvy as some but I didn't know what I was meant to enter in that box on the front page.

Then I assume we are chatting based on Twitter hashtags?

I know it seems trivial but stating that in a short sentence somewhere on the page would make all the difference.

I believe this will really help lower the barrier for entry.

3 Things

1. I asked why is it revolutionary? 2. It needs pictures. 3. More emotional copy. How does it solve the person's problem (which is obviously finding that person a partner) but are you targeting a specific niche within that niche? Some people want love, others want fun, others want things that can't be described in public :)

So how is this different from every other dating site. (and they are a LOT of them)

I had someone sign up for a subscription, 1 payment each week for 6 weeks. After the 3rd it stopped charging the client. It was just frozen, saying the next payment was due to be taken out of their account on a date that past 6 days ago.

So contacted support and their reply was, well how do we know they actually subscribed.

Well I don't know, maybe they could have looked at their records and seen the IP address and paypal account associated with the subscription with their attached bank accounts and credit cards.

Paypal is great when it works but when something goes wrong it really goes wrong and support just doesn't help.

Anyway, I use a proper merchant now for CC payments. I will most likely implement PayPal once again but just as an option and right at the bottom of the list.

I agree with other commenters. The investor didn't give you the money to invest in, they gave it to you to invest in your business.

In Australia we have easy access to high interest savings accounts that can be attached to a regular savings account. So money you put in this account can't be accessed by an atm or used for daily transactions but you can put it into your main savings account instantly when ever you want. But for every day it is in this high savings account you will earn 5% interest.

Ask the angel investor they would also probably have some great ideas.

But focus on investing that money in your business. You have a burn rate of about $5k-$9k would increasing that burn rate by investing more into your business (people, sales, marketing, etc) help you reduce that burn rate quicker?

Anyway I have no idea what business you are in, but use it to invest in your business, that is what is was given to you for.

So the chip executes the code to the spec as perfectly as the imperfect human wrote them?

India and Persia would be 2 very hard countries to monetize in the traditional ways. Their income levels vary greatly from the US. They still have lower, middle and upper class they are just on different scales. There middle class has around (and this is a general est) $7000 per year salary, which is quite good in India.

So monetizing to any great extent will only work with large scale traffic and small cost of purchase.

What sort of site do you operate?