emilyfm

Victoria is much more affordable than Vancouver (although rentals are currently tight), and has less summer rain (rain shadow from the Olympic mountains).

See https://github.com/sendwithus/vic-startup-jobs for local startup jobs.

It could be considered more of a Salish Sea triangle for startups, with Victoria, Vancouver, and Seattle all being close and each having advantages and disadvantages.

The one factor: meet a need.

If you're selling something, make it something that people want at the right price and make it easy for them to buy.

If you're selling advertising (you're a decade late on that one...), give people a reason to come back to the site - make the site sticky or have network effects.

Scaling comes later (assuming your initial design isn't a complete resource hog). It literally follows the money.

From the title, I was expecting this story to be about the con-trick use of the work "mark" (sucker, target).

TLDR; Gas (petrol) stations pumping less than you paid for is a problem in some parts of Mexico (they're mostly full service). These guys are trying to market a device to measure the amount actually pumped into your vehicle.

Very nice. As somebody else mentioned, the length of the day would be nice (it could be a third column of times).

The time zone borders map is a bit low resolution so in some places it gets it wrong (for example the northern sides of Roche Harbor, WA and Eastport, MA). Also seems to be a few years out of date (doesn't show America/Santa Isabel). But I expect these are outside your control.

Sometimes it's nice to know the expected daylight in a place that you might visit later in the year, so a way to choose the day of the year would be useful. Perhaps a year-long slider across the bottom of the page that points to a date (defaulting to today)?

That's more of a dustbowl caused by deforestation - doesn't have the arid (or semi-arid) climate of a true desert.

The Osoyoos "desert" isn't really arid enough, either.

Deserts don't have to look like sand dunes, they are any area with a low rainfall. Sometimes the plants that are adapted are virtually a forest, but it's still a desert. For example in the Baja California desert: https://mbgecologicalrestoration.files.wordpress.com/2015/03...

The ranks for the main search terms are similar.

Although my site is in English, over 50% of visitors are from outside the US. Bing doesn't really have the global reach of Google.

For example I get 250 times as much traffic from India with Google rather than Bing, 1000 times as much in Indonesia. Compared to 36 times as much in the US (which is much closer to the ratio of the other sites, which may be more US-focused).

It's probably a bit harsh to call Bing a "local US search engine" (like Baidu and Yandex in their countries), but it certainly needs to get more market share in other countries to compete globally.

One of my sites yesterday had about 64,000 referrals from Google, and just over a thousand each from Bing and Yahoo (and just under a thousand from Baidu).

Google has indexed more than 50 times as many pages as Bing on that site, and crawls far more aggressively (over a million pages per day), which will both be factors, but the main one is probably still that Bing has less visitors.

So for me Bing is still irrelevant as a source of traffic. Even though I'd prefer to see some competition for Google, there just isn't any. DuckDuckGo referred me just 32 visitors yesterday, so they have even further to go!

Why bother tearing it down? They just fall apart naturally after a few months (or weeks) or use.

Odd that this article doesn't mention a key reason that US workers are staying working into their "retirement" years: access to health insurance.

(also, B&Q is a British company, not based in New York like the article states).

Although I appreciate this list is aimed at a narrow case (incorporation in Delaware with operations in California), I'd still pay a little more attention to the "choose a name for your business" stage to avoid surprises.

At the very least, check the name isn't a registered trademark in a similar business (at uspto.gov), and that there isn't another significant company with the same name globally (opencorporates.com is a good starting point, as well as Google).

You don't want to limit international expansion later by picking a name that is a well-known company already. For example, when Burger King expanded to Australia in the 1970's the name Burger King was already trademarked locally, so they had to rebrand as Hungry Jack's.

Of course also do a Google search to see if words in the name are widely used, perhaps meaning something unsuitable in another language.

Finally, although maybe becoming less important, it's useful if the .com domain is available (either unregistered, or at a reasonable price).

Better to do all this before spending the money on incorporating with a name you might need to change later.

Note the SLA compensation (clause V) says it only applies if the data is stored in more than one C14 datacentre, which is currently not possible.

There's also Victoria BC. A smaller city, but that makes the tech and startup scene more important locally: by some measures, tech is now the biggest "industry" in the area, beating tourism. Plus, it's got the best weather in Canada.

Go with what sounds more like the interesting work (plus, it shows you keep your word).

Yes, the company name can have an effect. I worked early on for a major bank (global name), which made other banks more likely to look at and hire me, which made it even more likely major banks would want me, so I worked for lots of them. Got a bit typecast (but, that's where the money was ...).

So after Dell, you'd perhaps give off more of an "enterprise" vibe (and likely have very dull work!).

With the other company, it sounds like you'd be able to show more practical experience, and a less staid choice of company, which could make you more interesting to younger companies.

You have to separate work (and studying) from hobbies.

It's great if your work is what you enjoy doing, but that won't always be the case. So focus your studying on what appear to be long-term saleable skills that will lead to a job (or to an academic life, if that is your objective).

Tinyletter is also a Mailchimp product. So I'll have to avoid using that now, in case they decide to fold it in with a paid Mailchimp sub later. Fool me once ...

It's the same in most countries. Opencorporates.com is the first place to look. Some countries, like New Zealand, have images of corporate documents online for free, which gives you a copy of the signature as well.

Like domain names, privacy when you have a company is hard.

Buying the property through a Revocable Living Trust can make this harder (providing the name of your living trust doesn't contain your name, like most do!). Can cost only a couple of dollars to record the living trust, plus it helps with estate planning. Make sure the utilities are in the name of the trust as well, so they don't share your name+address.

One penny in 1840 would be around 20p today (http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency/).

First class post in the UK is 62p, so in real terms around 3 times as expensive as in 1840. (and the service in the 1840's had multiple collections and deliveries per day).

The normally used term is "creative hobbies".

Realistically, most of your domains are likely to be worthless (to others). They may be great names, but are they names that have a resale market?

NewYorkBagels.com for example would be something a real business would want to buy. Something "brandable" like bagelo.io is much less likely to find a buyer (apart from anything else, who would be looking for it?).

If I've made the wrong assumption, and your names are in fact good one to three word generic .coms for products that people buy, then there's flippa.com (has good free escrow included, and both paid auctions and free listings). If your name is really good, there's also sedo.com, who charge higher fees. Over the past year I've sold way more on Flippa than Sedo.

Don't be surprised if very few of your names get any offers, that's just the way the market is, very illiquid. It can take a decade or so to find the right buyer.