inkaudio

You missed the point. File sharing sites don't create content, they exploit Hollywood's archaic and stubborn method of distributing content.

As mentioned redundancy is important but you can accomplish plenty with just one developer to start, think ruby, python, ruby on rails, javascript, etc.. Based on my gut feeling I answered yes although this sort compensation seem to be rarely practical. It's a simple poll to a sophisticated problem. What if you can only afford to pay for 2 developers ? Or you can afford 3x the pay but the developer can really perform the task of 10 developers ? Moreover there are other variables that are not easily quantifiable in a pay check but may be important to the developer like the company's culture and reputation.

I think that's one of their biggest challenges, people are using meetup for this sort of thing. Another thing to keep in mind is 37signals encourage people not to quit there jobs until they have a hit. A lot of people forget that. Their motto is risk adverse, slow and calculated way of doing business. If you read their popular profitable and proud series, majority of the entrepreneur all seem to have work on their startups as a side project until they got traction.

Data communications carriers. I agree with you, yes Wifi alone is not enough, which is why companies like Clear/Clearwire partnered with Time Warner & Sprint: http://www.clear.com/about-us. So it's just one dot. But it's an interesting dot. Because there are literal hundreds of millions of wi-fi enable devices that can handle all kinds of communication with the right app. So we see the cable companies(with their optical fiber) partnering with upstart carriers(fiber or 4G connected wifi hubs) and more establish carries(more underground optical fiber or 4G) to make wifi ubiquitous in cities and bring more competitions to the giants like AT&T and Verizon. In NYC verizon is competing with Time Warner cable, so it won't surprise if time Time Warner get's more involved with mobile(i.e.: clear).

Similar to my thoughts. Twilio will not kill AT&T, the startup that will compete with AT&T will be that startup that can provide competitive hardware to carry data. And I think it may be in the form of quality and reliable nationwide wi-fi. Clearwire is trying but this is a difficult task.

Thanks for the link to distimo.com analytic, I'm looking into it. My marketing suggestion: contact blogs that a cyclist would read, blogs by/for cyclist or even a blog by a boutique bike shop. Perhaps some will write about your app.

And one more thing, voice control. Apple has a knack for refining old ideas and making it mainstream. Voice controlled computing has been available for years. Perhaps in the future many of the computer interactions for the non techie consumer will accomplished without using their fingers, swiping.

Sure there are many in the medical profession who fail at beside manners, but it is not the vast majority. And it's not just beside manner, understanding medical terminology, prepping and positioning the patient for the X-ray, X-raying the appropriate body part, operating the machinery safely and effectively, recording keeping, etc.. It's easy for an outsider to downplay the importance of all this, but that's because they don't do the work and never considers what happens when someone messes up: important care is delayed or a patient gets too much x-ray exposure.

The author does not fully understand the totality of the work these professional do. From the two example listed.

"Radiologists, who can earn over $300,000 a year in America, after 13 years of college education and internship, are among the first to feel the heat. It is not just that the task of scanning tumour slides and X-ray pictures is being outsourced to Indian laboratories, where the job is done for a tenth of the cost. The real threat is that the latest automated pattern-recognition software can do much of the work for less than a hundredth of it."

a very naive understanding of radiologists. This only one of the many task a radiologists must handle, including interaction with patient, which is the most important task. We are far away from replace that service with Ai. Software handling one task won't eliminate the need for radiologists.

"Lawyers are in a similar boat now that smart algorithms can search case law, evaluate the issues at hand and summarise the results. Machines have already shown they can perform legal discovery for a fraction of the cost of human professionals—and do so with far greater thoroughness than lawyers and paralegals usually manage."

Case discovery is only one of the many task a Lawyer must perform, case discovery alone won't replace lawyers. It will only allow them to be more productive. Lawyers still responsible for many other task, they have to broker deals, consult clients and in the case of trial attorneys, win trials.

more thoughts at: http://techiroll.com/post/10173031897/do-not-blame-technolog...

Perhaps Envato my can help, that's the company behind themeforest, audiojungle and the whole tuts network of sites. They may be able to provide suggestions, there are an Aussie based startup who are profitable, have experience (been in business for 5 years) and they only sell digital based products and subscriptions.

Well it's design, so it would be the equivalent of trying to write software to replace the need for a programmer or any worthy craft. If you want unique quality work you'll have to pay it, otherwise you'll have to settle for a generic template and build on that.

Although I agreed with most of Jason Fried thoughts on dispora, I thought the jury was still out. It turns out his prediction was right.

...That’s an impressive start if victory was measured in press coverage, cash, and cool. Here’s the problem: Diaspora has all the wrong things at the wrong time. Competition that kills isn’t pre-announced — it catches an unsuspecting incumbent by surprise.... love the underdog, but I fear for the product-less underdog that has all the wrong things at the wrong time.

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2330-diasporas-curse

I agree with this post with one caveat, I've done this, I've shipped many times, all failed projects or what I consider temporary embarrassments. Shipping is not enough. People must want what you are offering, and you must have a means to reach those people. I've learned a thing or two reading hacker news, some sort of balance is important. Taking a break from news feeds to focus on your work is a good idea, but don't think launching is enough.

From what I read, "rails doesn't scale" is really a misnomer, because there are number of things that can be done to scale rails. I think Haiping Zhao of Facebook made it clear, that it's really just an efficiency problem. Bottom line, rails requires more computing power than jvm for sites like twitter. Which are only a handle of sites.

Ironic thing about this is Zynga sees their relationship with Facebook as one of the weakness, as reported in their S1:

"Facebook is the primary distribution, marketing, promotion and payment platform for our games. We generate substantially all of our revenue and players through the Facebook platform and expect to continue to do so for the foreseeable future, the filing explains...Any deterioration in our relationship with Facebook would harm our business and adversely affect the value of our Class A common stock."

So Google+ could even benefit from working with Zynga, if they wanted to that is.

I think most people use the ipad to view content or play games. see: http://mashable.com/2010/07/08/ipad-usage-report/ It not so much about lugging a computer around, but using the ipad while you're on the move. The Ipad is so much easier to use in that way. There are plenty of photographers and videographers who use it to show their work. People are using it to replace e-readers (like me). Restaurants are using it to manage their living social deals, loyalty programs and square credit card processing. And I notice the form factor(touch screen no keyboard) makes it simple for them to use while moving around. Most non technical people won't pay more for Macbook if ipad is good enough for their needs. So I don't see ultra thin Macbooks threaten ipad sales. For me I love using both. Ipad for magazines, books, portfolios, casual games, occasional web browsing. And Mac book pro for everything else, coding, writing music, editing pictures.

The tech/work behind Avatar is far more expensive then Toy Story. There are plenty of poor quality animation that pop up in films by major studios. And there are a number of quality cg animation by students for example http://vimeo.com/1470875 Avatar is really an edge case, majority of the shows on Hulu don't cost that much. For example: http://philipbloom.net/2010/04/10/house-season-finale-shot-e...

The finale of a popular show was shot using the Canon 5Dmkii. A camera many amateurs are using to capture their content. There are some stories that are best told with the big tech and budget of major studios, but like I mentioned, in most cases, the cost of promotion and over paying for hyped talent is keeping everything they do very expensive.

Well actually content creation is getting significantly cheaper. Case in point have seen what artist able to do with small budgets and a Canon DSLR Hybrids ? http://vimeo.com/groups/beyondthestill*

Instead of looking for new talent, they continue to over pay veterans who continue to have flops after flops, of the top my head I can think of Jennifer Anistons and Nicolas Cage and a quick google search: http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2010/12/rupert-everett... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1165345/King-mo...

So the problem is the big studios and the major record labels are content with the status quo have access to major promotional channels. Promotion is still very expensive. Even on Youtube where some indie content creators can thrive, the big players still dominate.