movingahead

Good to see how other developers evolve. I wonder if OP would start with PHP today or go straight to Python/Django?

This is delirious. The OP should have just read pg's essay on how to apply to Y Combinator. He clearly explains there (and here again) why the X for Y representation helps in getting a foothold.

Also, what does OP expect founders to do? Declare their complete vision beforehand to impress the audience. The purpose of a vision is not to get popular with the tech press, but to guide the founders.

I know this is early days for Flipkart's music service, but are there any numbers available on how customers have responded to it.

Yeah, that is what I picked up from this post. But, I still don't understand how towing and recharging the batteries can cost $40k. Either the original claim about the cost involved in recharging is wrong, or this post claim that the fix is to recharge the batteries is wrong. There is a third highly unlikely case that Tesla is fleecing the customers, who in its mind, made the mistake of letting the charge fall down to zero.

For the sake of electric vehicles, we need to know which of the three scenarios is true.

Yes, this is what we hope the future looks like. But, for this to happen, the device manufacturers need to collaborate. We still don't have a universal phone charging adapter. Imagine how messy things will get if Apple, Samsung, Nokia etc each start making their own docks which are not compatible with others.

I do something similar with adding a description of what I have read on Pinboard. It makes you think about what you have read and in turn read less.

I think you are taking the title literally. The OP is making an analogy of being rich - will try to throw money at every problem. If someone is short of money, he will deal with whatever he can get for cheap.

I am evaluating my startup idea and the first question work well for me. There is a huge system around us constantly praising cool things, and its easy to get in to a trap of building something that is cool.

Personally, I stick with Color and AirBNB. Color (the original app) was the epitome of cool. They were building something different, were innovative but I found little value in their product. AirBNB (if you take away their immense success) is a generic idea which has done well thanks to fantastic execution. Color and AirBNB are on two extreme ends. I stick with Tim O' Reilly's work on stuff that matters call.

The second question is 'the question'. Whether there is market or not, I will only know after my product is out in open.

Your third question doesn't apply to someone who is in the evaluating idea stage. At this stage, you are leaving everything to jump in to your startup, so you obviously love it.

Plaintext passwords at Microsoft - shocking.

Used this product from its early beta. It is pretty useful. Happy for the Rapportive team. They have slacked off in the recent past, probably because of the acquisition. I have started using Xobni's Smartr for the past week, because of their mobile app.

About 1) Yes, broadband is less prevalent in India. But, storage costs are low. It is easy to get it from a friend who has the movie.

In how many cities do you find a legal DVD renting service for INR 50 ?

2) You are spot on about the 2nd point. It is a marketing failure on the part of movie studios that DVDs are still such a niche market. Multiplexes and cafes are booming, so why not DVDs. Availability may again be a factor. Before Flipkart, buying a DVD was a chore, esp. if you don't live close to a shopping mall.

I really don't get the premise of this post. If someone wanted to dig in to my life via my Facebook account, he or she could have done earlier also. It would have taken many more clicks though. Timeline is another way of presenting the data.

The problem is with Facebook's privacy controls and I think they have improved from the rock bottom that they had reached. Timeline will change our behavior on Facebook and that is something the News Feed also did. I don't see how that is necessarily bad.

This attempt proofs Google can do better in social results than what it is doing now. But, this also shows what great importance Google gives to Google+. They have made a conscious decision to compromise search quality to push users to Google+. A lot of us may believe that this won't work for Google+, but Google must think otherwise. Google has made their bet on using its most potent weapon - search to increase the user base of Google+.

This also shows why we need a strong alternative to Google Search. I hope Bing hooks up with Twitter, Facebook and other services like Foursquare to make a better social search. They have tried too long to beat Google at its own game.

The idea of sharing frequency is very interesting. I think this is one of the primary reasons that Twitter always seems more active and interesting than Facebook. Twitter has built a notion that high number of tweets are not a bad thing - 10 tweets per hour won't raise as many eyebrows as 10 status updates on FB.

I am pretty sure Google, Facebook and others will appeal in a higher court if this lower court does go ahead with blocking. There are clear provisions in the Indian IT act which prevents the website from any damage until it cooperates with the government and removes the objectionable material.

There has been a huge debate in the recent past whether the categorization of content as 'objectionable' can be done by the Govt. or whether it should be left to courts.

People are invested in Facebook with their updates, photos etc. Unlike what the OP contends, people are not going to switch over their usage to a competitor based on features. Bing is as good as Google for most queries, but how many people have switched to Bing? Google is not attacking, it is defending. FB messages is already way more efficient for quick communication than email. It may not replace email, but can occupy significant market-share.

No matter how many places Google pushes G+, people are not going to switch unless they can achieve the same functionality by copy-pasting a link.

@prayag : Right to Freedom of Speech is a legally enforceable Fundamental Right in India. Are we talking about different Indias ?

An elected member of parliament is not a member of government in India, and I guess, everywhere else. Legislature and executive are two separate parts of a democracy.

Do you understand that a country with a large population will also have a large amount of user-generated content? It is not people with low wages, but court of law which should have the power to decide what content is inflammatory. The meaning of freedom and democracy doesn't vary with amount of population.

Can you name some companies which were using its API? Their developer site doesn't take any names.

Can someone who understands this situation better why we cant have Google Apps on the Kindle Fire? I know that a manufacturer has to go through a device verification process with Google to get your device verified and only then you have access to the Android Market and other Google Apps. What prevents Amazon from doing so?

Facebook's seamless sharing has lot of privacy implications. There have been many instances where I have read something and felt that it was inappropriate to broadcast to my network. The value of sharing comes from sharing things which we feel are interesting or important. This behavior of sharing everything by default means that we will miss out on the quality stuff even more. When everything is shared, the good articles miss out from getting attention. Seamless sharing is reducing the overall value of Facebook.

On the other hand, I do like Ticker. It gives Facebook a real-time feel though it gives away the fact that you are online even if you are offline on Facebook chat.

GMail Labs has a "send in background" feature which does exactly this.

Its ok that they require verification through official documents but PayPal is known for locking people out of their accounts even after they have submitted these verification proofs. The Resolution Center is a farce. I have uploaded many different documents, but it keeps showing me the same verification problem. This has gone on for over an year now. PayPal is not important to me and so I can just ignore this problem. I don't even the worst bank here, in India, keeping people out of their accounts in such a way.

Is this a common practice across most companies or something unique to Facebook ?

Facebook can make a web browser - or just acquire RockMelt, with which it has worked in the past. Rockmelt is based on Chromium, so FB won't have to take care of the browser basics, similar to how Amazon has forked Android for Kindle Fire. But, a Facebook ad network available off-site will be more interesting. I don't have experience with FB ads but social ads as imagined by OP seem interesting.

I have decided to try Diigo for the time being. Google doesn't seem serious about bookmarks and I like the suggested tags that Diigo throws up.

Google Bookmarks doesn't sync with Chrome Bookmarks. That doesn't leave it as an option then.

How does Google bookmarks work with Chrome ? Is there an extension for adding labels to links ?

From a student point of view, this is great news. If you don't have a personal subscription to the digital libraries of IEEE/ACM, the amount of hoops that one has to go through to access a research paper, is apalling. I believe that a peer review system used by journals is beneficial, but putting the papers behind a paywall is obstructing access to knowledge.

If anyone has a reference which justifies the paywall charges, please share it.