c2

It is annoying, only because it is obvious tabloid-level gossip and has nothing to do with the events involved. We should be talking about the Canadian start up scene, Waterloo in particular, not this guy's age. But something tells me something about his age is the reason this got upvoted so much.

Age is no different then skin color, marital status, or any other attribute you could assign to a person. I always (try to) by default ignore it from headlines and articles.

Exactly, Buffett's whole investment philosophy revolves around margin of safety. What's the margin of safety in a fast growing speculative space such as tech? Zero.

Not to say that you can't pick winners, but it is wholly different from buying a controlling interest in a company which has the potential to reap high profits with tighter management (see, Coke, Wrigleys, Wendy's, Railroads, etc).

Jobs also started NeXT when he was 30 after founding another well known company years before. My point is age shouldn't be a barrier to starting a company you believe in, especially not the imaginary "30" line.

"Older" hackers take note: Biz Stone, Evan Williams: 30+ founders club. They were both over thirty when twitter started.

Unfortunately, chances are, you do have it all wrong. The most important thing as an entrepreneur is to not give up, but also to know when to fail. Successful entrepreneur's more often then not have many many more failed ventures then successful ones. It's a skill to know when to start all over again (as painful as it may be).

iTunes is Apple's IE. It's like a virus on the computer. You can't delete it (the instructions are 20 steps long: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1224). It's slow, clunky, and annoying. Even after you delete it Apple will pester you to update it.

Not much to do with anything, but every time I see "iTunes" I feel the need to vent. If there's any black eye in terms of Apple's pristine record of user experience, design, and execution, it's iTunes. But it does stick out like a sore thumb.

Considering Y Combinator is already 5 years old and hasn't changed drastically, I think we can expect the same in another 3-5 years. Iteratively improving their process, using their data and experience to make better decisions, and ultimately improving their success rate.

I expect to see some Heroku sized exits for YC companies as well. Maybe in 5 years there will finally be a YC company which goes public. In either case, I don't see YC drastically changing.

Kind of ridiculous they require the VP of engineering to have a PhD. I haven't heard great things about Google's culture, and if this is the kind of requirements they had to put the technical leadership in place, a lot of what I heard is starting to make sense.

The problem is finding them - that is the opportunities to serve relatively niche markets. Unless you are talking to and involved in such an ecosystem you will have no idea it exists or how to appropriately address the niche market's burning problems.

But I agree - from my experience these are absolutely the best avenue for a return on investment. On the flip side, 9 times out of 10, you won't need any outside investment to get the product off the ground, all you have to do is post on a few specific forums and you will have a business overnight.

It seems HN has lost a lot of very valuable contributors lately due to the impact HN has on general productivity.

Have you given any thought to measures to stem this tide of dissent?

The most productive people would probably tend to have the best insights, and if the trend keeps up it almost feels like I'm getting advice/comments from those with generally lower productivity.

He did. Your comment was a long winded apologetic on why Apple was justified in lying, bending the truth, and promoting half truths.

You started by saying "I don't agree" then ended up "Apple needs to state their viewpoints" which is subtly justifying their behavior.

In my opinion, this is an open and shut case of Steve not being honest in his keynote, and he should be called out.

It's especially disappointing to hear this as a fan of Apple as I don't think this kind of reality distortion is necessary given Apple's success. It just makes them look desperate and much lower then their actual position would dictate.

I understand, but I really hope you were exaggerating when you said you were "devastated" that another competitor got some press coverage on tech crunch. In terms of the emotional roller coaster that is the start up world, that would not even register on most people's disappointment radars.

You know what's better then tech crunch? Cnn, New York Times, Washington Post - think bigger, and definitely think more main stream then tech crunch.

Alright, that concludes the motivational part of my speel :)

For actionable ways to increase your visibility, social media is your best friend. Spread the word on facebook, leverage your friends and family to start talking about your web site on people's walls. Use twitter if at all possible. Tweet celebrities that you have a crush on them on your web site. Put that url every where. Social media is all about shameless self promotion. The idea is good, people won't think of it as spam.

If having a single competitor who happened to get press coverage before you is enough to deter you from pursuing your idea, you aren't cut out for start ups.

Iphone wasn't the first phone, Kindle wasn't the first ebook reader, google wasn't the first search engine.

You get the picture. Go fight for your customers.

This is one of those deals that make absolutely no sense to me. Even less sense in fact then the Time Warner/AOL debacle.

Can someone explain any drop of rationale Intel might have for doing this? I am coming up empty.

One of the things I was really mad about Netflix was the fact they stopped publishing their list of most viewed instant play movies as far as I can tell because customer's were using it too much.

Same with the "New Release" DVD page, which is now hidden but still accessible. Again, customers were using it too much. That one I could somewhat understand as it caused contention for physical DVDs, but the solution seems to be buy more DVDs, don't hide a useful feature.

If Amazon's selection improves, I will be the first to cancel the Netflix subscription and I truly believe Netflix will be in trouble. They just aren't anywhere near as customer focused as Amazon.

Independent of a platform which can shut you down just because you are a competitor.

It's amazing that people seem surprised that such a path is even an option.

I suppose you could argue that Level3, the big DNS servers, or InterNIC, or even DHS can shut you down too, but that seems awfully different then Twitter shutting down twitter app competitors, Apple threatening to pull content (competing) apps if they don't get their 30%, and Facebook potentially forcing apps to use their credit system or go home.

I'm really hoping people realize that this walled garden approach is hurting them in the end, and as these platforms move the goal posts more and more for what is acceptable, you might find you have wasted a few years of your life chasing a ghost.

It's up to you which path you choose, but for me, today, I'm making the decision to abandon these platforms and go my own way.

I didn't mean it to be a broad generalization. Each platform has it's own problems, this is just the latest in another reminder that each of these can shut your business down with the flick of a switch or if they catch wind of competition they don't feel is right for their particular walled garden.

I trust myself to deliver products my customers want and find useful. That's enough for me.

2010 was the year to invest in platforms. 2011 is the year to invest elsewhere. So long Facebook, Twitter, Apple - I no longer trust your platforms enough to put any significant resources into development.

It's time to end the walled garden resurgence and the best way to do that is on the ground floor.

Your comment is funny but true. People will always find rational reasons to explain away sky high valuations. Even the first time around, Pets.com had a very high market potential if it capitalized successfully on projected internal sales growth rates and expanded to the size of the pet care market.

I take all these comments very very lightly. In my experience, the surest sign of a bubble is when the non-savvy bench investors in your life start talking about "great investment opportunities". When 9/10 people in your office are buying a house as an investment opportunity, there is probably a bubble. When 9/10 of your office is investing in the secondary facebook market (or something similar) chances are there is a bubble.

Interesting that a whole sfgate article came out of a single comment on this site.

Anyone else find their tag line a little amusingly worded?

"Bump is the simplest way to use your phone to interact with others in the real world."

I can think of at least one use of my phone to interact with others that is pretty dead simple.

That's replacing one middleman (Amazon) with another (Apple). Also Amazon typically has much better selection then Apple, not to mention all the content you already purchased on the Kindle store and were planning to read with your iPad becomes inaccessible, if Apple does end up pulling the Kindle app.

I think we are going to start to see Apple pull more and more moves like this. They are basically where Microsoft was at their peak. Apple's share price is sky high, their growth and margins are phenomenal, and at this point to continue to deliver shareholder value, they need to grab money from more and more sources - that means squeezing their position for every possible dime. What's next after the iPad? What comes after the app store? Well, why not tighten up monetization of the app store by directly tying revenue with publishers.

I'm eager and a little weary of seeing Apple's next moves over the next couple years.

The flip side of course is that these apps make the iPhone/iPad more appealing to more people. I can see Apple shooting themselves in the foot with their predatory practices against app publishers. Losing a big chunk of your margin while developing apps for free for Apple's products is only going to be sustainable for so long. And more likely then not, it will drive away the big players first where each percent means more.

To be fair, I have no objection to Apple in this case. I was simply surprised at how fully Apple customers have embraced the "protect us from ourselves" mentality.

A lot of the comments here are actually pretty disturbing to me. As if the general population assumes that Apple should be the caretakers of how customer's use their own phones, and that the general population isn't capable enough to make their own decisions regarding their own property. Very 1984 vibe to it.

I don't think an incubator program would be enough. There's something to be said to living in close proximity to hundreds of different angel groups and investors, which is why most of the successful start ups come out of Silicon Valley and why SV is the best place to be. There are start ups that can become successful despite the distance from SV, but it's just going to be another hurtle to overcome in a fragile start up's early life.

There are notable exceptions though, GroupOn from Chicago, and for a Canadian example - Shopify from Ottawa, Ontario.

I don't really care what my office looks like. The most important thing to me is the team I'm working with followed closely by the things I'm working on. The appearance of the office space is so far down the list of my priorities as to be negligible.

As long as I'm excited to go to work, the actual appearance of the office makes very little difference to me.

Very true point, China has a good record of gender equality. Much better then it's neighbors and also the West.