Good question! Many pre-launch startups lack an online presence, so it’d be hard to tease out answers before talking to someone.
2,470 karma · joined October 11, 2009
It should only take five minutes or so to apply.
As for value capture, there's no master plan. Getting to know smart people is enough of a reward.
1. We're looking for any information that will convince us that you're likely to complete the project. Academic background is merely one type of proof. A Github profile is another. Or recommendations from peers. Or a record of running marathons. You get the idea. We're open minded.
2. We funded a neural network to generate puns in the last batch. Non-conventional creativity is fine! At the end of the day, the project has to be useful to some humans. Even if it just makes them laugh.
The actual goal isn't to "beat" any other language - it's just a theme for the event.
Although proprietary, Objective C (and iOS) is a widely used platform. It also has a relatively small ecosystem. There aren't a lot of great libraries, and wheels frequently get re-invented. Our hope is to change that.
We open source projects for two primary reasons:
1) Because we use lots of open source projects internally. It makes sense to reciprocate where we can.
2) There's no better place to meet great engineers than in GitHub pull requests.
We're also working with a) encrypted indexes b) only writing the index to disk rather then any content. this shuts down a lot of neat features (generating snippets etc.) - but users that are willing to forgo features for added security might find it useful.
get on the train or get off it. social, realtime, location etc. are the new technologies of this generation.