neworbit

Travis kind of thrives on stepping over the line - his first big deal was P2P service Scour and he likes to tell everyone about how there was a half-trillion dollar judgement against them. I don't think he's likely to face anything like that with Uber!

I wonder what the Freakonomics guys will say about this - curious to see if they can draw an unexpected correlation (like twenty year ago birth rate or the like).

I'm going to need a new vaporware joke now! This one has served me since the dot com bubble days.

Seriously, this looks great. I am afraid I am no longer the target audience but I'll probably try it for nostalgia's sake. I have the strangest feeling that - like rewatching Star Blazers now that I'm not ten - it's not going to hold up that well, but if anyone can do it right, it's Gearbox.

As someone who has never done either, but has done startups, this doesn't make Techstars sound that attractive to me. Seems to make a lot more sense to focus on building your company, and save the schmoozing with 30 other entrepreneurs for happy hour.

Mentorship sounds great either way, but you might want that from someone more aligned with your market (not that it's bad to have advisors skilled in startup growth). Saying "you're going to spend the first month in meetings instead of building your first product" sounds like really the sort of thing you probably left your BigCo job to avoid, no?

Sony loses control of tens of millions of cloud accounts and their gaming infrastructure disappears for weeks, and people still think cloud = reliable and safe, huh?

Even giant botnet infections have nothing on that.

There's a place for everything, yes. Definitely convenience to cloud services. I am not of the opinion it should be the default answer.

Not really sure I agree, they're more expensive than more powerful windows laptops in the same size class. And I think I recall hearing that the ipad breakdown per unit is plenty profitable.

But I certainly do have to give you that nobody seems to match them in the same form factor, so that's reasonable enough.

Meh, I would have to say in retrospect that itunes music pricing is (or was) there as well, though not by Apple's decision necessarily.

Ok, I guess I should rephrase. Apple does not cut prices to beat competitors. They may set a price point initially that only works at scale, and rely on competitors not being able to match. But if Dell comes out with same-but-cheaper, Apple doesn't do price wars, and if Apple enters a market it's generally at a premium to existing brands. I still wouldn't expect cheaper wireless from Apple.

Bizarre thinking to say "Apple would charge $35/month for unlimited usage". When has Apple ever gone the route of price competition? They'd charge $99/month or more and people would gladly pay it.

In the same sense perhaps; hidden them from the end user.

If you mean "how do I use Dropbox to do exactly that", I share encrypted files with coworkers so that they are automatically replicated when connectivity is available. This addresses both the security-of-content perspective and the fact that even in the best of circumstances we will find necessity for offline access.

FUD about what Google might do in the future does not help me today nor really invalidate the point

Dear Google, you're doing it wrong. We understand that you would like google lockin on our file system, but the rest of us who do not necessarily have 24-7 100% reliable connectivity or prefer to work on things quietly offline (for instance, competing search technology) might think files resident somewhere else might not be so bad.

Google (AdWords)

it's a one time payment (often in stock, which tends to be accounted for differently) and not a recurring $500k a year

Ok, so if you want people to move out of their current overcrowded cities to somewhere else, I guess it makes sense in a command economy to build the cities and then move them in. What happens if people don't want to move, though?

For better or worse, that's how the system works today. DoJ will just conclude that it's legal.

Now certainly I don't like it - but the law is on their side, at least until/unless it gets changed.

Hundred, hell, I got four. (Not four hundred, four, trust me it's plenty - we sell Big Solutions Contracts.)

Start with your current connections.

Attend the conferences of the industry you're in. Ideally, present/speak at them.

Blog about solutions for your industry if you can do it without coming across as spammy.

Keep an eye out for articles/blogs/etc on problems that your offering solves. Follow up with people directly about that and/or post to the blogs saying "we do this and here's why we're great". (If you do this, absolutely do disclose that you're self promoting.)

Find someone with industry experience and/or a rolodex. Pay them a decent commission.

Find the right search terms to drive people to your site and make sure you have a clear description of the problem the customer is facing, with simple glossy answers for how you can help them fix it.

Damn, I was hoping this was going to spur Amazon to cut prices.

In this case, the whole cut :)

Code (supposedly) linked from http://www.thehackernews.com/2011/05/finally-source-code-of-...

As far as network effect, I would pay a bundle for Twilio if I was in an M&A position.

Yeah but come on, CD Baby is a warehousing and fulfillment company with a niche market that basically gets paid by starry-eyed musicians to let CDs gather dust and paid again to encode their music and send it to iTunes. Some small fraction of the bands actually sold enough to restock inventory. That's not a recipe for high margin success.

a) Probably, though I bet I don't know most of them. If I were MS M&A I would bet disproportionately on mobile, though, because that's an area they need to nail if they want to stay relevant. If they could get 70 out of 200, that'd be a darn good start.

b) Individually, not terribly likely. Collectively? Sure. (And it's $35M each, but the exact number isn't the point - let's say you could offer every ycombinator and techstars startup an average of $35M each, you'd likely end up getting two or three Dropbox-esque gamechangers, a few dozen decent products, and 150 otherwise good ideas folded into MS and dead-ended.)

MS would do a lot better to buy 200 promising startups (especially in the mobile space)

They're still too inconvenient and specialized. Waiting for GPS signal = fail.

Of course it's fast. They cache the whole thing :)

Amazon and Microsoft do not like startups - they prefer to build things internally. And when they do buy startups they tend to kill them. Yes, IMDB is a nice exception, and lately they tend to buy firms and let them run on their own (Zappos) but Amazon got too burned during the dot com runup buying firms that turned out to not be a good match, a la Junglee.

Question and answer sites usually fall in this category (irony of this being on Quora is not lost on anyone)

(raises hand) I complained about having to use an iPhone - mostly because of AT&T though. Thankfully, both Verizon moved in and I moved on from that job.

Very little collateral damage when you are hitting someone with a rock as compared to blowing up the surrounding block.

Yes - kinetic kill ideas are pretty sound.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment#Project_Tho...

Lifting that much mass into orbit is pricy though.