inmygarage

Yes, yes and yes. If you do that, I am signing up tomorrow. I love consuming content via email, especially if it's curated. Bonus points for an "export all to Instapaper" button. Another tip: sign up for Charlie O'Donnell's NYC Tech Events newsletter for a good model on this. I also have another friend who is also obsessive about curation - email me off list (email in profile) for more ideas.

Some thoughts: 1. Jason Hirschorn's email list Media ReDEFined (http://twitter.com/mediaredef) does exactly what you are trying to do, and it is free and curated by someone who is fairly well-known in the tech world. I read it every single day. He does weekends too.

2. $0.50 a day is WAY too expensive.

3. Is your goal to be a curator or a creator? This seems like you want to be a curator, but what makes you so sure that your newsletter is going to be so much better than my hand-picked group of people on Twitter that I would pay $15/month for it? That is more expensive than Netflix, Rdio, Pandora, Dropbox, etc. not to mention free curation services like Flipboard, news.me (recently made free), etc.

4. What I found - people don't want to pay for content. Period. I had, over the course of 6 months, around 100 people subscribe to my paid letter.ly newsletter ($2/month, btw), while around 30,000 people visit my blog. It made me realize that it's more important to have an audience than it is to have some short-term cash. That said, I am not sure if the same necessarily applies to curators.

5. IMO, the rewards are much better if you are "known" as a curator vs. "paid" to be a curator.

Best of luck, though. Interested to see what happens!

Background: I had a paid email newsletter through the service letter.ly for around 6 months from July-December 2010. I have also had an on-and-off blog since March 2009.

What are your thoughts on Pinterest? I use it all the time - recent purchases as a result of Pinterest include a bunch of apartment furnishings, an iPhone case, some new t-shirts, etc. And now when I need something I have started using it as a search engine. I do think it has solved the problem of both breadth of options and targeted results.

Disclosure: I am female.

This is very exciting news. I used it during the free trial period, but couldn't bring myself to pay for it when I could just go back to Flipboard (which, btw, I don't like as much).

I believe it was just free desks at Pivotal SF, and the advice that comes along with sitting next to really smart people. My guess is that yeah it was likely free.

Congrats on your launch!

Do you have plans to integrate with services like Flickr, Instagram, etc?

The Quadrangle Conference that he references was called the "FourSquare conference". Coincidence?

What do you mean "laws don't apply on the internet". Someone very clearly broke the law here and should be caught and punished accordingly. That's not the argument - it's that a lot of companies can and will play dirty if they have to. Don't you remember the facebook/google PR scandal from a few months ago?

Background: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/05/12/facebook-bu...

I wouldn't be surprised if this was organized and executed by an AirBnB competitor.

It is just too malicious and meticulously done to constitute a random crime (do I watch too many crime shows? maybe.) AirBnB just closed a gigantic $100m round and they are doing phenomenally well, and here comes someone who makes "everyone's worst fears" about lending out their apartment to a stranger come true.

Excellent point.

You should drop the "potentially." Anyone with the opportunity to work with and learn from Tristan should consider themselves extremely lucky. He's one of the most awesome, humble and driven people I know.

Absolutely love the SMS feature.

I think what some people forget is that there are only about 500K iphone apps in the app store (about the same for Android? not sure on that), and the store is barely three years old. Over the next few years I bet that number is going to explode, providing a huge opportunity for a service like app.net.

It's unfair to say that Google copied Diaspora. When you're making a social product there are only so many ways you can style a text entry box and only so many words for "bundles of people". The feature set across most social products has at least some overlap.

Blatant copying looks more like the Plurk v. Microsoft situation from December 2009: http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/14/microsoft-plurk-ripoff/.

Pixel for pixel copying = lame, feature overlap = necessary.

Would you consider facebook's move to the news feed a "pivot"? They certainly changed the fundamental way you interact with the product and shifted its purpose (a directory of your friends vs. updates about what they are doing) Most tech businesses that has survived, one could make the argument, have "pivoted". No matter what you call it, it's just good business. A lot of people are calling the Stickybits move to turntable a "pivot" - but wasn't their purpose this entire time to create a new way for people to interact with media? Different interface, same purpose. Make stuff people want, right?

Opportunistic is a bit harsh. I think it's more to force Netflix to make this a priority. Sure they're "working on it", but I doubt it's a huge priority since it affects, percentage wise, a small portion of their audience.

I bought my mother a third-party device for her television so she could stream Netflix last Christmas only to find out that Closed Captioning wasn't supported. It was pretty depressing - she couldn't use it at all because she is hearing impaired.

There's a reason why there are laws in place for compliance - often times good business strategy and "accessibility for all" don't align.

These sorts of additions to the YC team provide a great example of how YC will scale its model. There's so much shared knowledge and know-how among the alumni and that's what will enable YC to create hundreds of companies a year without sacrificing quality.

I think of Daily Deals as equivalent to payday loans.

A lot of small businesses have cash flow issues. Daily deals sites propose to give extra liquidity in exchange for something your business is already offering. Seems like a great deal until you realize that the fees are egregious. And daily deal site fees ARE just as egregious, but they do a better job of marketing themselves/their fees.

Running a daily deal is great for a lot of businesses, but in many cases the cost to the business is much, much higher than advertised.

I think Travis enjoys living on the edge. One of his previous companies, Scour, was sued for $250 billion. (Source: http://www.crunchbase.com/person/travis-kalanick). I guess he fits pg's definition of "naughtiness"?

Congrats to Dotcloud and Duostack! Exciting news.

Is this Ebay's latest Stumbleupon or indicative of a serious move into local commerce?

This headline is linkbait. While there is a quip about "child soldiers" I don't think that's really what the article is about.

Quora got a ton of press right around the end of the year - big articles in a lot of major press outlets. That likely accounts for at least some of the spike.

Very interesting that you have to pay money to be in the program, considering the vast majority of these types of programs give you money as a participant (YC for example). What is the thinking behind that? I am curious whether it's better to have people pay (then it's clearly an educational environment) or to pay them (then it's a seed investment and performance-driven). Any thoughts from alums on how the entrance fee affected the group of participants and the general vibe?

I can't find the contact email on the site - where should we submit suggestions, feedback, etc?

I was initially skeptical of NYC too until someone at Uber pointed out "New Yorkers don't realize how often and how far they walk to get cabs". It's true - people forget that they'll walk a few blocks to get a cab. Uber literally comes right to your door, and people are lazy. The success of services like delivery.com and Seamless Web show that if your service involves not talking to anyone and not having to move, your chances of success are high, even in a market as crowded as New York City.

Dropbox, Github, Pivotal Tracker, Balsamiq

One of the most in-depth write-ups I've seen on YC anywhere on the web.

My favorite story from the Quora discussion on Chua's article (http://www.quora.com/Parenting/Is-Amy-Chua-right-when-she-ex...) was this one: "At one point, I attended a "piano camp" with other equally talented white students, and what struck me is that those students actually practiced for hours because they loved music, and genuinely practiced for hour after exhausting hour because they couldn't get enough of the emotional expression that piano afforded them. Piano held none of that for me."

I think it's obvious when someone is truly passionate about something versus just doing it because they think it will get them another carrot.

Is it possible, though, to have a functional society where everyone follows his or her passion? I believe it is, but would be curious to hear thoughts.

Get well soon, Andrew. Really admire all the stuff you're doing with Mixergy.

Disagree. There's actually a pretty significant collection of answers around the "Why is X popular?" tag, though most of the questions are about startups and traction, etc. "Why is Instagram popular?" is the perfect question for Quora.