gopi

I think UK needs US style property taxes to discourage this 'housing as investment' behavior. Yes, UK has council tax but from what i understand its not that high.

In most US cities (except SF, LA, NYC) the ratio of average house price to median income is very reasonable (about 2.6). One main reason is the high property taxes which average about 1.5 to 2% of the house value. The tax also increase substantially for second homes. This discourages using a second house as investment/store of value.

Buffett has every right to consider taxes as part of a investment decision and legally minimize it as much as possible. But he should quit saying that tax rates don't matter to business decisions

There already are some services, likes angieslist. One problem is the review/reputation system. Without purchase proof anyone can review/rate providers and this in time will make the rating system unreliable.

A mobile app version would be better. Instead of email send push notification. Also restricting the number of characters to type (twitter style) can encourage entries?

Unfortunately immigration wise your only option is h1b. To apply h1b via the company you start you should prove that you don't control that company. This means having a US co-founder and getting funded (thus bringing your equity to less than 50%). Even with all this getting h1b is still a uncertainty as you may not win the h1b lottery process.

I would suggest to run your startup from India but incorporate in US. FreshDesk is the best example following this model

Its just a simple script to generate affiliate SEO'd sales pages from a keyword DB with some markov chain magic to make the page text unique.

This kind of stories are common in the affiliate world or atleast it used to be...In 2003 i wrote a simple perl script which made me over $1 Million!

In this case Bob would pay IRS 20% tax for the price appreciation happened when he lived in CA. The 4% tax applies only to the price gain during his stay in Puerto rico.

In this case a portfolio accumulation strategy known as Value averaging works better. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_averaging

Isn't this what REIT funds suppose to do?

Your first idea was done before and FB shut it down http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/11/miss-being-able-to-comment-... http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/03/facebook-threatens-to-sue-t...

What was the problem?

Hmm, Seems the Google Cache version of this article is full of viagara links? - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xBaBObi...

In my view Premium keyword.com domains are best for services with not much frequent usage (like freecreditreport.com). For servces with repeat usage brand names are better, thus facebook and amazon are better names than socialnetwork.com or buy.com.

So by that logic i think Cofactor.com is a much better choice than the more generic Experiement.com

Reading this strengthened my belief in the limited government

The article missed the biggest one. Whatsup is built by outsourced russian talent. Jan hired the first programmer thro RentaCoder!

WhatsApp is not really free but supposedly cost $1/year from the second year. Yes they are doing free renewals for now and i am guessing it will not be long they begin to charge again.

They have 400 million active users now and will be around billion users by next year. If they charge the usual $1/yr in the emerging markets and say $5/yr in the developed markets that will get them around $3 billion revenue. Also they have almost 90% gross margins as from what i read its a tight operation with just 50 people and 600 servers.

So with a $2.7 billion EBITDA by 2016 the $19 billion dollar valuation is just 7x multiple and very reasonable. This is not even considering the strategic value of WhatsApp to Facebook!.

Maybe i am wrong, but is there a chance that this types of incidence happens more with urban cops than suburban?

The first thing that hit me was this dude has the look of Steve Jobs

So you think the average indian home price in india which at present is much more than US or Canada is going to be 10x more in the next decade?… Go read about Japan, their investing/saving culture is similar to India and their home prices are still recovering from the crash in 1991

Seems Chennai is slowly becoming a big player in SaaS startups thanks to Zoho. Maybe we should call this people Zoho mafia :)(like paypal mafia)

At present i have almost 25 books in my kindle collection called 'To Read". Impulse Book buying is so easy with Kindle i buy every time some book is mentioned in a blog post or an article.

I think this phenomenon of using house as a place to park money exists mainly in countries with insignificant property tax. For example in India, China and most of Europe people park their money in property rather than stocks. A 2% yearly property tax may change it!

One benefit of being a indian language speaker (or other language not in hackers dictionary) is we can easily choose reasonably secure passwords that are remember-able by simply using native language phrases (combined with numbers and mixed caps)

>> "How can I send someone a check?" is a counter-intuitive business model for most people

Great Point. This was the sole reason for Groupon's success even though were a lot of coupon companies before. Imagine what would have happened if Groupon charged small business to distribute their coupons instead of paying them?

Actually Michigan tax free areas are already there in a small scale for both business and people. They are called Michigan renaissance zones -http://www.michiganadvantage.org/Renaissance-Zones

In my opinion MI income tax is low a tax holiday will not move the needle for most people but if Federal taxes are eliminated that may be effective. Also i am not sure its constitutionally legal for our federal govt to give tax preference to some states/cities.

If you are a US citizen and planning this for tax purposes then forget it.

As a US citizen you have to pay tax on your worldwide income. Even if your offshore company don't pass the income to you, you have to pay tax because of something called Subpart F income (google it).

So tax wise the best you can do is to relocate to a no-tax state like Florida or Texas and save the state income tax!.

How is this different from the secret Asian admission quota Harvard and the other elite US universities have?

I am not worried about the adults but Kids who can now easily access all the pervert filth's of the world (many times accidently).

BTB, I am not talking about blocking porn, just users should go through a password wall. Also the users should be able to change this default setting if they like. This is not much different from the password protection for adult content offered by many cable tv companies.

Why not both?. I like compound or blended names with one part of the name subtly telling what is about and the other part make it a brand (ex Photobucket, Pinterest etc)

Its easy to trademark such names too.