evanjacobs

I've also looked into licensing live sports data from Stats, Inc. and it is prohibitively expensive (i.e. tens of thousands of dollars to get started). It seems like the timing is right for a crowdsourced solution for live sports data that is developer friendly.

This is a surprising decision. I think most people were expecting Amazon to move away from Mobi but they probably expected Amazon to adopt EPUB especially as EPUB 3.0 is near release.

I'm really surprised that there was almost no mention about the competition between these companies for hiring engineers. If there is indeed a "tech war" coming (and I believe there is) then the company with the biggest and best army of engineers will win and there is a fierce competition among these companies to build those armies.

Lots of sloppy inaccuracies in the story. My favorite: "The best of them [customer service reps] could answer a dozen emails a minute". Ummm...that should be "hour".

Yes, it appears that Amazon is bootstrapping this by using UPS to deliver packages to the store but there's a bigger vision at work here.

This is another attempt by Amazon to solve the "last mile" problem. Amazon already saves a ton of money on shipping costs by packing their own trucks and driving them from distribution centers (e.g. Fernley, NV) to major metropolitan areas (e.g. Seattle, WA) and depositing them at USPS for final delivery. Amazon could even remove this cost for those people who choose to pick up their packages at (essentially) Amazon PO boxes.

Offering spammers a regulated way of reaching a mass audience also gives Twitter the ability to be much more aggressive in shutting down accounts who pose as real users.

I think there may be a different approach: let spammers (aka bots) flourish and let users upvote the most helpful ones.

In short: 1. Create a second type of Twitter account for bots. 2. Give users the ability to opt out entirely of seeing bot replies. 3. Give users the ability to upvote helpful automated replies.

I wrote a blog post with this suggestion a while ago: http://www.readwritehack.com/how-twitter-can-win-back-develo...

I wrote up some other tips based on my experience at Madrona Startup Weekend in Seattle at http://www.readwritehack.com/how-to-succeed-at-startup-weeke...

Would love to see some data from a popular site about how often the "forgot my password" link is used and whether it is evenly distributed or only used repeatedly by a subset of the user base.

Another attribute that I would assume of "less adept computer users" is that they usually use the same computer for all their tasks. Again, I'd be interested to learn if the "forgot password" link is used less as more browsers are seamlessly integrating password remembering features.

Doh! Thanks, fixed.

I really like the idea and I think there is a great need from both developers and customers for this service. Have you thought at all about how to drive the demand side of this marketplace?

It appears that the strong bias against single founders (at least from the investment community) may be softening a bit. In a recent talk at DogPatch Labs, Mark Suster advised starting a company on your own and then hiring a cofounder: http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-suster-entrepreneur-advi...

One other data point for you. Groupon.com was purchased in May 2009 for $250,000. Source: http://mixergy.com/domain-business-tip/

VCs often say they invest in team first and idea second but USV decided not to invest in AirBnb despite having no (obvious) reservations about the team or their ability to execute.

Does this mean that ideas are more important than investors really let on?

As a tweethook customer, I'm sad to hear it.

"it's really easy to underestimate impact"

And I bet the guy who made the video which inadvertently spawned this idea probably didn't imagine the impact it would have on another man's life.

How far back does your data go? Twitter's API doesn't really allow for historical searching so there may be value to someone who wants to, for example, compare trends over time.

I was curious why Amazon let Heroku be acquired by Salesforce late last year. Now I know it's because they were already working on Beanstalk.

I wonder if this will cause average users to begin understanding and using the "tab complete" interaction. That could open up interesting uses in all kinds of apps.

That's what I'm trying to figure out. If my service is successful with a less perfect domain I might be able to come back and purchase this domain at some multiple of today's price. However, if I spend too much money on the domain then I may not be able to have enough money to get to product/market fit.

As a back-up plan I've been collecting variations of my "perfect" domain at standard registration rates.

The cost is approaching $10k now but I don't know what the final value might be. There is less than a day left for the auction.

It's hard to say since an A/B experiment would only be possible if I owned the "perfect" domain and could test it against a less perfect one.

Where are you located?

"The worst problem was that they hired bad programmers."

Can you provide any specific examples of how bad programmers hurt Yahoo?

Ideas aren't worthless. Ideas are plentiful. Ideas are made valuable by extraction and refinement of the key elements.

You should try to tell the story of Storyteller using the product itself instead of the video.

It's also worth noting that people can move between 0, 1 and N passionate things during their lifetimes.

I'm going to start a business to sell services to the US government. Even if I only capture 1% of the market that's $36 billion per year!

Hey, after this we only need to publicly publish the frequency and variety of our sexual intercourse and we will have finally opened up every last previously taboo subject.

There are several considerations that a rowing coach must make when deciding the rig of the boat as well as which rowers should occupy each seat.

These considerations may vary for each rower and include:

1. arc length (i.e. the distance traveled by the blade of the oar)

2. force curve (i.e. the amount of force applied during each part of the time the oar is in the water)

3. boat feel (it is a much different sensation rowing in the bow, middle and stern of the boat and different rowers are "better" in different parts of the boat)