jsb

According to the website, the fee is (number of users * 0.001). Since the current fee is $2.91, the number of people who've signed up is around 2,910. Seems like at least a few people willing to throw in a few bucks to give it a shot. It'll be interesting to see what will happen to growth as the rate goes up and up.

He was an alumni of CMU and I think its fair to assume he had some amount of pride and spirit regarding his alma mater that he then spent teaching at. Just like many people have regarding their own university or college.

If you don't know or care who Dr. Pausch is, that's fine, but I'm not sure why the rest of us who respected, enjoyed or were inspired by his message and life should not have the opportunity to share our condolences and remember him together.

For what it's worth, I am from Pittsburgh and intend on starting a startup in the Burgh. I have a lot of pride in the Pittsburgh region and consider it a goal of mine to help do a my small part to re-energize the city.

The Google index algorithm is a trade secret. Whatever they published while at school is available and is often studied in search engine classes, but the most recent version algorithm is probably only available to only the most necessary people. PageRank is part of this algorithm but isn't the only part in determining where a result will fall.

This "FriendRank" algorithm will also be a trade secret. The patent here based on my quick scan is patenting the method that they will use to advertise to people using this FriendRank through Google's services or future services. For example, where it will be placed on the screen and how it will look.

True. Penn State demands two home games for every one away game at Pitt because the football (and whatever tiny amount of money they raise from men's/women's basketball, if any at all) revenue pays for the ENTIRE cost of varsity Penn State athletics. They're very proud that none of our tuition is used for athletics. So they argue they need to have so many home games to ensure they continue to fund all of the other sports teams.

Plus Pitt would benefit from the rivalry much more than Penn State would. Pitt would sell out Heinz Field, something I'm not sure they have done other than maybe for a Backyard Brawl, while Penn State sells out over capacity for games against Florida International, as well as every other opponent.

Oooooh Oooooh Oooooh Let's Go State!

I'm a current Penn State student and you guys at Xobni and Weebly really are a great inspiration for all of us in Happy Valley. Thanks for blazing the trail for the rest of us. It was great to hear you speak at the I2V conference a few weeks back.

1984 (George Orwell)

The Four Hour Work Week (Tim Ferriss)

Getting Things Done (David Allen)

Deception Point (Dan Brown)

I worked in a new media marketing department as an intern for awhile and this is exactly the kind of things they were looking into doing. They wanted to generate buzz by promoting in various online communities as a "community member." Not surprisingly, this is where they had their most success. I fortunately didn't have to participate in the buzz generation but there's no question everyone is looking to do this kind of marketing, whether you like it or not. Marketers will do anything to get eyeballs on their message.

I think it creates value in the ability to keep track of your personal social network. Its not entirely difficult to manage contacts on your own, but I think its nice that at the very least I can send a Facebook message to someone (if not gather their contact information via their profile if they choose to include it) if I'd like to ask them a question or catch up with them. In the past, you might have to ask a mutual friend or spend some energy figuring out how to reconnect with them.

But I agree that their revenue is generated mostly because most of their users have trouble limiting their time on the site, which can be considered a negative impact.

Having met one of Xobni's co-founders recently and hearing more about Xobni's vision, I can tell you that they are not just planning to be a plug in for Outlook. Xobni Insight is a plug in for Outlook, but it is just a starting point for the company. They do want to expand into Yahoo and Gmail clients, various instant messenger clients and who knows what else to help organize your personal information. Give them some more time and I'm sure you'll be seeing more offerings before long.

I would use it in productivity software.

The users would input their to do list and the AI would suggest the best next task for them to complete. You could have the user input some information about their lifestyle - married? family? when do they work? etc - and the AI would take into consideration these factors when determining the next best task.

I hope this is true. I just started using coRank.com to attempt to open a social news site for a niche market. Digg's platform is just much better. We'll switch in an instant if this happens.

I used to want to be in the video game industry but I found the long and sometimes unpredictable hours a major drawback. It sounds like even he gets a little tired working the job - "It can be a lonely career."