I agree, plus he gained a skill of knowing how to write iPhone apps + Objective C. It made him more marketable for future jobs/offers. (I am assuming he did in evenings and weekends)
invest your money in social causes, if possible your time into it as well. OR spend more time on working what you did to be rich on the first place, so you can spend even more on social causes BUT do take out time to relax and enjoy with loved ones as well.
I would think that as a single developer your first app should be really simple and more on the lines of getting a hang of the SDK, time to get the app done ... basically more like a tutorial project that you release to the world. With that knowledge, I would think you'd have a better idea to innovate and monetize in the next apps
I was almost in the same boat as you, but decided to get a MAC so I can do some iPhone Development as well. If you are not planning to do iPhone or Mac Development I dont see much benefit in context switching apart from the fact that it's cool to own one ... my 2 cents.
This is really sad. Recession or No-Recession, he would have done the same thing. I mean you can always cut your expenses, get a low paying job or go back to your home country(if you are an immigrant). His actions basically affected 3 families directly + also might indirectly bring uncertainty in the lives of other fellow colleagues at the startup.
This is neat idea to market, First create a CUIL clone in terms of appearance.Second bring it down, so people who missed it (including me) want to see it and Then relaunch it again with a new name :-) ....
The first thought that goes through my mind is that the employees scanning the docs will be able to read the docs. So I am guessing, you will only mail documents which you don't consider private.
I think its handy to have a start in the programming world with C or C++. It being your first language, you will definitely have a good grasp of pointers, memory etc (as they are closer to the machine). Infact, I had taken an assembly language class(sopho/junior year) as well in school where we had to sometimes hand compile an Instruction to Binary. I thought it was really cool to actually see a PSHA (Push register AR) convert to say 1011 1001 and how it triggers the gates in a microprocessor. I hardly use assembly in work or personal projects, but knowing all these memory saving techniques definitely help you in writing good code in Higher Language Languages.