jakestein

I highly recommend Instapaper for offline reading on the iPhone. It also has an added benefit that I spend less time reading long articles while at work. Instead, I just click the Read Later bookmarklet, and the article is waiting for me on my phone in easy to read, text only format.

I often hear people (including Brad Feld in the relevant article on the front page of HN right now) saying that a corporation is the right choice if you plan on seeking funding, because venture investors don't want the pass through income that an LLC can create. VC's generally don't want to create Unrelated Business Taxable Income for their investors.

I don't understand why these VC's don't just create a corporation to buy stock in a LLC's. I know for a fact that at least some venture firms do this (I worked at one that did). A corporation can own stock in an LLC, and corporations (when the elect to be a C-corp, which I assume the VC would do) don't generate pass through income.

The only explanation I can think of is perhaps if someone is making small, angel or YC style investments. Then, the administrative cost of setting up and maintaining an additional "blocker" corporation for each investment would be significant in comparison to the total dollars invested.

I am very curious to know what the reason that firms that are investing hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars don't do this.

also registered twice

They posted an (admittedly biased) comparison of some of the other web based image editing apps a while ago on their blog. http://aviary.com/blog/posts/aviary-photoshop-express-picnik...

I just went through the trademark process with my business. If you use the abbreviated form the filing fee is $275. http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/qs/ope/fee2009january01_...

Costs beyond that are lawyer's time for doing a trademark search and filing the paperwork. I used a lawyer (and ended up spending about $1,200 including filing fees), but you can also file it yourself if money is tight.

I think it's definitely worthwhile. The odds of having to make use of your trademark are low, but having the trademark is extremely valuable if someone comes out with a similar product or service with a similar name.

My company (www.rjmetrics.com) develops software that you can use to analyze your users in different ways than web traffic analytics, things like tracking customer lifetime value, churn analysis, and segmentation by any data on which you track your user base (registration date, geography, plan, etc). We actually recently wrote a blog post on why a tool to analyze your database is a great complement to a tool to track your traffic.

http://themetricsystem.rjmetrics.com/2009/01/22/rjmetrics-vs...

For the record, we use Google analytics and of course we are ravenous consumers of our own dogfood.

Title Insurance. See this article from Forbes magazine: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/1113/148.html

Summary: Fancy this: racetracks that keep 93% of your money and return only 5% in winning tickets. They wouldn't last long, not unless they could somehow rig the rules to both forbid price competition and make the purchase of race bets mandatory. That's more or less what the title insurance industry has done to American homeowners.

We use Snaps also. I'd definitely recommend it.

Agreed. I think it's unrealistic to hope that level of traffic from the first 2 days of being on slashdot and digg would continue. And it's clearly a good thing that our new company blog got lots of exposure. So I'd greatly prefer a sharkfin to a flatline. Especially since, as swombat suggested, we have been getting residual traffic as well.