kwis

While using two languages is an overhead, it feels like it plays to the strengths of both sides.

Zite is one of the most used apps on my iPad, and has been for ages. I would've happily given you a few dollars for it, but I guess this worked out well for everyone.

It's quite handy. My partner has slow, unreliable, high-latency Internet in his house and there are an entire class of performance problems that are extremely obvious when I work from his place that are barely measurable when I work from a 100mb line that's only a few milliseconds away from a major datacenter.

That's as illogical as it is self-righteous.

I've long thought that somebody will make a fortune by setting up a company that clones successful America-centric startups into Europe, Asia and/or Brazil; using a fast-follower strategy to test core ideas, but then implementing them in untapped markets.

Fortunately Groupon is issuing a new S-1 tomorrow, so it's likely that those who are looking for more information will get it.

Homeaway.com, VRBO.com, and roomarama.com all offer similar products, and they built their businesses without dishonesty or spam.

If they'd been a bit more subtle and a little patient, they could've engaged in massive identity theft and financial fraud without ever making it clear that AirBNB was the attack vector.

It appears that's allowable now, since the patent has expired.

The big boys have portfolios of patents that they fling at each other until some sort of cross-licensing deal is reached, whilst smaller players just have to cross their fingers and hope that nobody decides to tax them too extravagantly.

I omit the possibility of creating non-infringing products simply because it's virtually impossible to bring any meaningful product to market without infringing on somebody's overly broad patent.

That said, you make an excellent point about the importance of project prioritization. A management team who is good at identifying high ROI projects will stomp all over one who sprays pointless change requests at their dev team.

USAA competes with the same sort of value proposition (convenient banking with great service, but without a B&M presence), and is a fortune 500 company with millions of happy customers.

It's hard to find discussion about retail banks on the Internet without finding satisfied USAA customers telling their stories.

Not everything needs to be a contract or a lawsuit. Sometimes it's fine to take a man at his word, and then simply tell him to walk away if his word is no good.

But it doesn't say anything about tilting.

But I couldn't see anything I could use today, as a consumer, merchant or developer, so it didn't feel like it was here.

And I couldn't really understand why it was so great, even if it was here... so it didn't feel world-changing.

I've seen a lot of companies do this, where they pump up things that are still in the pipeline for one reason or another, and the net result is that visitors like me feel like we wasted our time by giving you our attention.

Constraints: - little/no capital required. - location independent, or available at your current location. - must provide enough income to service/remove debt. - should provide a routine.

Assets: - can do "everything but coding", with most experience in a tech sector - a reasonably large amount of free time.

Possible opportunities: - sales, for either a local or a remote company, either in-person or on-line. any product. - consulting (niche yourself and show you're really good at one of your many skills, and pick something that can be sold without always being at the client site.) - what else can you do?

I'm attempting to strip away the emotional baggage from the situation, to make it easier to see what might be possible. Maybe that could help.

I feel like your PR is ahead of your product.

When I was 19, I didn't see it as a valuable skill, I just thought it was obnoxious bullshit. Today, I see it as so valuable that when faced with a pile of potential candidates, nearly everybody who graduated magna or summa gets at least a phone interview.

No, you just misunderstand the actual statements.

Deflationary currency doesn't mean that people don't buy anything. It means that the supply and demand curves shift, reducing (but not completely eliminating) investment and consumption. The magnitudes of the shifts vary depending on the product being discussed, but the direction of the shifts is the same in every case.

I've never taken any issue with what you did.

The standard approach would be to pick a city like NYC, and pound the pavement selling the site to every high-influence group you can possibly identify, do that to get a decent inventory built up and then launch with that inventory and start proving the model.

Then, pound the pavement in other high-influence cities, work to get inches in the media, do biz-dev deals with travel/vacation sites, get yourself interviewed on local radio and tv, find every possible way to insert AirBNB into the news stories of the day And frankly, with the real estate crash, there were a lot of possible ways to insert themselves into the news.

Or they could just spam craigslist.

That said, my big question continues to be 'did they disclose this behavior to their investors'.

No she didn't. She was a passenger and the car was parked.

> The McDonald's case is the poster child for frivolous litigation because,

It's the poster child because if you don't bother to learn any of the facts, it sounds outrageous. And the world is full of people who can't be bothered to learn the facts before they form strong opinions.

I didn't spam. I talked with customers before the product was even finished to make sure we were solving a real problem, to make sure they understood our marketing message, and to make sure we really understood the space.

This led naturally to a situation where I had paying beta customers, and even more customers who signed up and started paying as soon as we launched.