jdrock

Based on my interaction with website API developers, most of them honestly believe that they are building an open web. But let's face it, the API is a benefit to them and creates a critical dependency for the user of the API. It's basically vendor lock-in.

I feel I could drive this car for another 5 years at least. That would be at least 12 years without purchasing a car and 8 years without making a car payment.

My car was expensive, but I feel it was engineered so well that it can last. Quality cars last a long time.

Just like only showing relevant news is an interesting challenge, so is only showing relevant ads. Advertisers don't want to show you ads you're not interested in; they want to show you ads you'll actually find useful. In many ways, that's a much more interesting challenge than showing relevant news.

Extending the advertising example, it's also a very interesting challenge to show people that highly-targeted ads can be a good thing. Just like it's an interesting challenge to convince advertisers to use your ad platform. Although they are not technical challenges, they are very interesting business challenges.

I just finished reading Tony Hsieh's upcoming book, Delivering Happiness. He describes how LinkExchange, his first big company, became boring to grow because the company culture wasn't fun. But he still enjoys working at Zappos because he and his execs managed to keep the company culture fun and interesting. He doesn't know everyone there, but it has a great feel to it. Keeping his employees engaged, serving his customers, etc. are all great joys to him.

Note that I'm not saying Zappos still feels like a startup. I think from the book it's apparent that it doesn't have a startup culture at all. But it does have an "engaged" culture. Everyone enjoys what they do.

Side note: I don't recommend reading the book. There are about 10 pages in it I actually felt I could generalize to be useful.

Remote work would depend on the ability of the programmer. We have a few dozen 80apps that need to be produced for various crawl packages right now (more coming). I expect each one would take 1-3 days of programming.

Other languages (Jython, JRuby) require techniques that break the security sandbox used by the JVMs.

The descriptions on the pages are fairly specific about the difference in responsibility for local vs remote.

The remote work is admittedly more straightforward, cut-and-dry programming. It's suitable for a student or freelancer looking for some entry-level experience or extra work.

Anyone that works locally will be exposed to some of the more complicated tasks we have and take on more responsibility.

We would really prefer to have someone local, but we have to be realistic about our potential candidate pool in Houston.

As a contrast, baseball is easier to quantify with stats because it's a series of discrete events.

In most sports statistical analysis, you try and drill down to a discrete event. In baseball, it's something like at-bat or on-base. In basketball, it's per-possession (though this isn't enough). But in soccer, what can you do? Per-possession is difficult because it overlooks the 21 other players on the field. Everything is team-oriented.

It was a success for us. Here's why:

1. It was early on - just a few months after our public launch.

2. We offered a limited free version in conjunction with the price increase.

3. We lost some customers, but they were only worth max $10 per month. We were able to work with some of those customers to setup custom plans that met their needs.

4. The customers we did keep went from being worth $50 - $100 per month to $100 minimum per month.

5. Our major competitors charge thousands per month, so we were still absurdly cheaper than them.

That was a year ago. I have since done some basic searching to see what the other finalists have done since then. As far as I can tell, only one (the winner) has done anything significant so far, and that's just raising money. Granted, it's just a web search, but it seems the rest have just done things like win other competitions, get grant money, etc.

We are the only ones actively engaged in business. And we only entered the competition for fun. (We used our winnings for free lunches.)

"Previously opened e-mail is not in 'electronic storage,'" Rhyne wrote in a motion filed last month"

Am I missing something here? How is web-based email not in electronic storage? Where is it then?

1. Monitor online ad distribution

2. Build directories of people on the web

3. Check for IP violoations (digital watermarking, etc.)

4. Build niche, localized search engines (picture searching, regional searching, etc.)

5. Collect information on product pricing, retail data, etc.

Crawling gets a bad rap. It's useful for a bunch of stuff.

Disallow: /directory/people/*

Disallow: /directory/pages/*

Done. Google crawls Facebook. Every social media monitoring company crawls Facebook (and every other social network). Tons of other companies do the same every day. I know this because many of these companies are our customers.

What really irks me is that Pete collected valuable data and whoever he shared it with was probably able to derive added value from that data - in ways that Facebook is not doing. Facebook is prohibiting value creation.

User Groups are more for that stuff. The cool thing about SXSW is that you can totally set up an impromptu user group and get 20-50 attendees if you want. In fact, that is how the Data meetup happened last year.