phylosopher

Agree. Every engineer and anyone else interested in building. Wish there was a TechShop in London.

Well design site. Maybe I'll get off my lazy butt and do a triathlon... or not.

How do people keep sites like this up-to-date when there are so many repositories of information and/or small players that are not standardized? Do they have go event by event or store by store? Is there a better way?

Thank you Jason. I direct a not-for-profit foreign government and private foundation incubator based in San Francisco. We just completed a one-month quasi-accelerator for companies that came to the US. None were ready for VC funding and we made this clear. Despite our best effort to get the entrepreneurs to focus on customer development, many spent their time on VCs and angel networks. They got meetings but not much else. We are going to make sure that all new companies participating in future accelerators read your post.

I wasn't a big Posterous user but I liked their mission and was hoping they would be around longer. I understand it's hard to maintain a service that aims to disrupt the incumbent. I would have sold in absence of any other option. Perhaps a solution is a crowd funding application for free service we want to keep around instead of them being acquired and shelved by tech giants. Or we could just pay for the service.

Great news and best of luck. Full support from San Francisco

Take a look at www.minggler.com, a service myself and two others started last year. We aim to automate who and when to reach out to someone. Haven't quite perfected the formula. Would love your feedback.

Not on the release candidate. Perhaps on the current release.

I recently visited Microsoft innovation labs in Mountain View and they were really touting how cool Windows 8 would be on desktops and tablets. I've actually been using the release candidate version on a dual boot laptop with Ubuntu for the past couple of months and have not been impressed or greatly inconvenience. I did ask the presenter, a Microsoft developer, how I could easily shutdown my computer as the shutdown button is now not easily accessible as in Windows 7. His answer annoyed me as he gave me three options on how to do it but didn't address the "easily" part of my question. This may be a pattern with Microsoft, lots of feature but limited simplicity.

Do you think that perhaps the recent "craze" to become a developer is not founded on solid group? Are people wasting their time and money? Definitely feel there is some merit to Peter Norvig's comments.

Happy ending. We got accommodation for free in the Mission in San Francisco for a small percentage of our fledgling startup, minggler.com

Just reviewed the first newsletter. Good cross-section of a very hot sector. Any chance you can include a section on 3D scanning? Also interested in copyright law.

You could call it a PR stunt and be right. For me it was inspiring. After watching the video I fired up trello and put in an idea for our service, minggler, on how we could leverage Google Glass. No it does not include extreme sports. Google gets railed so often for doing terrible marketing. They got this one right. Let them have their win and keep thinking of ways this new platform can be leveraged. We are.

I haven't lived/worked in the Bay Area for two years so hard to gauge mojo levels though I'll take the writer's word for it. However, I'm not convinced on Europe at least from my perspective as a self-funding entrepreneur living in Spain. There are a lot of incubators but funding still remains tight while funding in Silicon Valley is flowing. So what? The writer is talking about innovation. True, though without funding I believe most innovative companies that are taking big risk in Europe will die from funding starvation while in Silicon Valley, superstar innovative companies will find funding even if it is among a hundred copycats.

"pair programming is an excellent way for both parties to get a sense of what it is like to work together." So true and if you can convince a developer to do this, power to you. We are an early stage startup and we are two for two with this method and have carved out a strong team.

I would argue that high salary requirements can be negotiated if you can frame a strong vision. Developers are not investment bankers and often are not doing this for the money alone. Often, good developers are looking for a place where their voice has as much weight as anyone else and where they can grow with company. We wouldn't have it any other way.

I'm a former Googler who managed the deployment of their content distribution network. Outside of the codebase challenges that nostrademons articulated very well, Google has to deal with various big company concerns including shipping and logistics, human resources, legal issues in the many countries it operates in, hardware development, datacenter management, etc. To do this they have many talented people across disciplines. I was constantly looking for people to join our team while still maintaining the high level of ability and innate Googliness that Google looks for in an employee. In many measurements Google is still understaffed. Check out Royal Pingdoms profit per employee. http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/05/17/apple-staff-profit-per-h.... The difference between 2008 to 2010 is incredible and factors in growth in employees. Google still needs to hire... not for world domination but to maintain and improve the services that we love.