benackles

There are exceptions, but only as an anomaly. Also, that doesn't really get at what's wrong with each of these exiting thoughts. Did Heroku keep shipping as a result or in spite of selling their company?

I'm not arguing against the practice of acquisitions. However, when a HUGE company buys a small team (famous for agile development) I find it hard to believe statements arguing that more resources are going to lead to "increased velocity".

Every time a company is acquired, they say the same thing about how their larger parent is going to bring them greater resources and distribution. In reality, almost every company experiences the exact opposite effect. The early adopters and passionate base often leave and the company wallows in the murk of bureaucratic org charts.

I think the stories of what happens a few years after the acquisition are much more informative. Given their involvement in the Ruby on Rails community, I'm sure within 3 years we'll see this story show up as a 37signals Exit Interview.

http://37signals.com/exit

Seeing news like this makes me less inclined to be an early adopter in Milk's next project. Going into business with the primary intent to start a lot of projects and fail until one succeeds seems like a recipe for failure. While it's always an inherent consideration in every startup, it should never be your core strategy. Unfortunately for Milk, it seems like that was exactly what they had in mind. Kevin has a personality that makes people WANT him to succeed, but every user has their limits on how much they will continue to forgive.

The author clearly doesn't understand the concept of a "social entrepreneur". Just making something conducive to sharing and socializing is a gross distortion of the term social entrepreneurship.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't social entrepreneurs creating and managing a venture for social change, not enabling people to share pretty beads and sexy dresses.

While the word "social" get's thrown around in every possible way, we are losing our semantics by labeling any blowout success in "social media" as a force for positive change. While Pinterest is a very interesting step forward for creative expression, it is hardly a product of social entrepreneurship.

I don't have time to read the article, but I added it to my reading list on Readability. Oh, the irony. Even though I prefer Readability, Marco has done a fabulous job with a team of one.

For a consumer product, $5-9/month is probably a good price point depending on the product. To a business, $20 per month is a great starting price. Businesses have a different set of demands than a consumer. The value of Basecamp has definitely proven itself to be worthy of that rate. There are "free" services out there that do similar things, but to a business they probably feel more secure paying for a service, knowing that they'll be around for the foreseeable future.

That was the first thing that caught my eye too. I would tend to agree with the assessment that a perfect domain name is negligible compared to having a successful product offering. You can take that too far, but for the most part a domain name doesn't matter all that much. It's a stupid investment for a struggling entrepreneur to spend thousands of dollars for a new domain. I think another significant reason they decided to go ahead and purchase the domain now, is that it was part of a larger effort to rebrand the product.

That's a good question. I'm not sure if there's any list of issuers. However, it is an open project and therefore any entity could become an issuer. They list a few possible sources on the FAQ. I think many of the code education startups, such as Code School, Treehouse and Codecademy would be an excellent fit.

[1] http://openbadges.org/en-US/faq.html

[2] http://codeschool.com

[3] http://teamtreehouse.com

[4] http://codecademy.com

I believe out of a legitimate concern of a few companies taking ownership of the web. If there weren't standards who knows where we would be. Standardization is the reason we all don't live under rules of AOL and Internet Explorer. Now the power has shifted to three dominant players (Apple, Google and Facebook) potential controlling everything. Initiatives to standardize new technologies or trends continues to be important as the web evolves into new areas. Gamification has a lot of space for standardization. Mozilla is a great organization to spearhead new standard initiatives.

This is an element of gamification. Gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics to solve problems and engage people. Within game mechanics there are six components. One component is achievement represented by badges.

What's up with the lack of capitalization?

p { text-transform: lowercase; }

This story, along with much of the content produced by Forbes are in violation of Hacker News Guidelines [1].

While these are simply guiding principles, they are an important measure of what is permitted within the community.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter."

Before I posted this question, I had two companies that came to mind; Automattic and 37Signals.

Due to the massive popularity of 37Signals recent post on hiring remotely [1] I have a hunch there's a growing interest in distributed workforces.

If your company's distributed, I'd love to hear about it...

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3410773

I realize that GoDaddy has reversed their position on SOPA. However, to me and to many others the damage has been done. I've been with Media Temple for a couple of years now and have been extremely happy with the service and support. On the other hand, GoDaddy has been nothing but disappointing. This is just the culmination of 5 years of frustration.

We the consumer have enormous power over these rigid companies with interests that aren't inline with their customers.

Maybe he secretly owns it and collects affiliate fees. I wouldn't put that past him.

The comments are much more interesting than the news. 100% negative public sentiment on the most inflated IPO of the year. That can't be a good sign.