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I've been following Andy's blog since the beginning - amazing to see the progress in just 7 days!

Maybe to pay homage to Steve Jobs? Otherwise, I dunno.

Seeking Work - Remote

Let me handle your screencasting so you can focus on doing what you love: working on your code. I'm an experienced marketer and product manager who wants to help put your product on display and reduce your support volume. Let's reach your target market and better support your users.

Contact me: justin.burdett AT gmail.com

I think the change in mentality will take a series of successful Pittsburgh companies. There's no lack of resources for a student (or anyone) who wants to start a company in Pittsburgh. If you've got a skilled team and an intriguing market and problem you're addressing, you can absolutely get the resources you need here.

Local companies like The Resumator, ShoeFitr, ShowClix and others are making national headlines. As these companies bring in or continue to bring in revenue and investment dollars to town, and become a cool or interesting place to work, it'll be easier for students to stick around and put down roots. Some of them might even think about starting their own project after awhile.

Any advice or thoughts about what we (Pittsburgh startups) can do to get students excited about our respective companies and convince them to take a role with us over another job?

The videos I've saved work for me when I browse Instafilm on my iPad. It may depend on your specific video - if I remember correctly, some YouTube videos are unable to support HTML5.

I was just about to make something like this for myself. Thanks for making it! Looking forward to an iPad app.

One quick bit of feedback: I notice when I'm logged in and try to refresh my saved videos (say to refresh to see whether the video I just hit "Watch Later" would appear), the app logs me out. Everything else appears to work great - including leaving the page and coming back to it. Just when I hit refresh. When I log back in, the video appears in my queue like I'd expect it to.

It's probably on your radar, but being able to save TED Talk videos and Mixergy interviews would be great.

I've seen Luis von Ahn (founder of Duolingo/ReCaptcha) speak twice about his new project (once at a CMU Project Olympus update and once at TEDxCMU a few weeks ago).

A few things that may be of interest to the HN crowd:

* This project is currently academic in nature, funded by grants he has received. However, he does see an opportunity to monetize the product if they choose to by offering translation services to companies or organizations in the future.

* The product is currently in testing. According to their metrics, the crowd-sourced translation is as accurate a professional translator. At TEDxCMU, he showed a professional translation side-by-side to a Duolingo created translation - the two were nearly identical. Likewise, according to their metrics, the education received is as good or better than the leading language education solutions (ie, Rosetta Stone).

* He showed some amazing projections on how quickly they can translate a set of text from one language to another. I forget the exact projections so don't hold me to this, but with 1,000 users it would take, say, 3 months to translate English Wikipedia into Spanish. With 1M users, it would take less than a week.

All in all pretty amazing.

Hi Vladik - I'm working on a product that is somewhat related to this. Could I email you about it? Or shoot me an email: justin.burdett AT gmail.com

Not sure if we're going to directly solve your problem at the start, but I'd love your input.

I disagree. Everyday is a part-time collaboration by 4 people that hasn't taken on funding, let alone $41M worth. And Everyday has a business model that doesn't mine data about you: it's $1.99 on the app store.

So, I guess it's like Color in that it uses pictures, except that it's different in just about every other way.

My pal, Robert Shedd, took his company overseas to Ireland after participating in Philadelphia's DreamIt Ventures. He's written a tiny bit about the experience thus far: http://blog.shedd.us/greetings-from-ireland%e2%80%a6/

He's definitely someone who could tell you about the culture and ecosystem from a US background if you're considering applying to the program.

Since you asked... check it out! http://www.deliriumapps.com

(Shameless plug) We're looking for beta testers soon - ideally, you have an iPhone and use Highrise and/or LinkedIn a lot

Nice! Definitely do it. We've been so thrilled to be part of the program. I'd be happy to answer any questions or meet up sometime to talk about our experiences so far. Email's in the profile.

My company is participating in the current AlphaLab (Pittsburgh) cycle. Although we're still learning all the details about what being in the Network will mean for us, I can't imagine that this will be nothing but good for us, our company and the AlphaLab program as a whole.

I'm applying this year. Working on the final touches as we speak. Looking forward to it!

For a second there, I thought this was a Google Group for parents whose kids are or have participated in Y Combinator (replaced HN with YC in my head). That would be an interesting group.

I'll plan on being there. Didn't know rms was moving out west!

It would be neat to consider other types of images you could "clean up" or alter for people - sort of like a Posterous-meets-Photoshop app. An obvious example that comes to mind would be to remove red eye from pictures. I know a lot of photo editing apps can do this already, but just think how much easier it would be for most people to just send an email and get a cleaned up version back. Boom, done.

Don't know how feasible this is, and you've got a lot of room to grow in your current segment already, but would be neat to see where else this could be applied to!

If you like this, you might also like the well-curated Give Me Something to Read at http://givemesomethingtoread.com/

True, but 37signals also offers an affiliate program, so it's possible that ad was created by an affiliate member. I don't have a link handy, but I remember when they reported early results of the affiliate program they specifically mentioned people finding success with search engine marketing.

Part of the trouble is also that the decision makers in charge of adding staff and directing the digital version(s) of the Daily Collegian are not well versed in the technology themselves. They probably just copied and pasted the job post from last time and added in whatever new they needed, without knowing that these can be extremely diverse skillsets. "Let's make an iPhone app! Add it to the job description!" A lot of people think if you're "good with computers," you can do it all.

I had written this for an HNer who had asked some questions about what went on at the meeting, but looks like they deleted their comment. Thought it might be useful for others to see what to expect:

The meeting is pretty informal. I didn't bring anything special with me and haven't applied formally to AlphaLab yet.

You'll meet with 1 AlphaLab employee and they will stick close to the 20 minutes you have with them. I'm pretty familiar with the AlphaLab process, so we skipped those details and instead talked about my idea. They asked about the concept, business models, the market, what some of the competitors are up to, things you would expect. At this stage, they weren't brainstorming too much with me, more listening. Then they asked about my background a bit and asked me where I was in terms of talking with potential customers. Then they opened it up to any other questions.

I asked about when is best to apply, early, later, asap? - turns out they do not look at any of the apps until after the deadline. So it does not hurt you or help you really in any way to apply now or 1 minute before the deadline. This was important for me since right now I'm a solo founder actively looking for a technical co-founder (get in touch with me if you're a developer looking for a new opportunity with interested customers!). I was advised to wait until I did find someone before applying, or if the deadline approaches, include a plan for how I would plan to outsource or find help to build the app.

The other aspect is even more informal networking with the current founders of AlphLab and some of the other hopefuls who hang out before and after their meeting times. This was helpful for some feedback on the pitch, brainstorming, stuff like that. Plus interesting to hear what everyone is working on!

I don't have a good gauge on how the meeting went, but it seemed to go smoothly and I left feeling even more pumped up about the opportunity. Good luck!

I also went to the first Office Hours session - very useful, great opportunity to meet with other Pittsburgh entrepreneurs (current, former and aspiring AlphaLab members) and the AlphaLab staff. I was able to get some great feedback and even got a new connection to a potential customer as a result!

Awesome! I coach a local HS program in Pittsburgh and run some middle school Ultimate as well. Might have played you guys at some point, used to play for Penn State.

I'm big into the Ultimate (Frisbee) community and while we typically do not play with a Wham-O brand disc anymore, we do owe a lot to this man's effort to bring Frisbees into the mainstream. Thanks for everything.

To clarify, your @reply won't necessarily appear in everyone's feed. It will only appear if:

1) They are the user you are sending the @reply to, OR 2) They follow you AND the person you send the @reply to.

So for example, if I follow @balsamiq and @fogbugz and @balsamiq sends an @reply to @fogbugz, that message will appear in my feed. But if @balsamiq sends an @reply to a user I do not follow, I will not see it in my feed.

So long as you start the tweet with @[twitteruser], your @reply will only appear in someone's feed if they follow you and also the person you are sending the at-reply to. Or if they are the person you're sending the message to, of course.

Agreed - Also in Pittsburgh here. Looks like he was able to get office space on the North Side that qualifies for that tax credit. Not a bad area at all - just a short walk along the riverfront park to PNC Park/Heinz Field!

Maybe. Even if Fake Steve is a character, Dan Lyons wrote the words. If he wasn't prepared to take some flack back, he shouldn't have started Fake Steve in the first place. I'm willing to bet both writers are fine with the exchange, possibly even amused by each other. Frankly, we'd all be lucky to be roasted by either one of these guys someday.

I think you're reading too much into it. John has posted to Fake Steve articles he enjoys in the past. Gruber receives and dishes out this kind of stuff all the time. I bet if you'd ask him, he just thought the article about him was funny, wanted to link to it and decided to play along a bit.