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ryanon Ask YC: Can someone recommend a Ted.com-like video player platform?

FYI we will be launching the slide-sync feature in the next couple of days which we hope will be really useful for video lectures.

Ryan

ryanon Ask YC: Accepted YC and regret it?

If this is your first startup, then it's definitely worth it.

We weren't 100% sure going in, but coming out can say it was absolutely the right move.

ryanon Social Networking Goes Open Source With Insoshi

Plus, he wrote the book! :)

ryanon Startup School videos on Omnisio, synchronized with slides and questions

It's actually a scaling issue - our server is seeing an order of magnitude more traffic than even our launch spike. We are working on a solution right now :)

ryanon Startup School videos on Omnisio, synchronized with slides and questions

We are working on a feature that will let you whitelist a set of people who are able to add comments. The author can also choose to disable commenting completely.

ryanon Startup School videos on Omnisio, synchronized with slides and questions

Thanks!

We started around end of October last year.

ryanon Startup School videos on Omnisio, synchronized with slides and questions

Sorry we had to bump up the number of php-fastcgi processes to handle the large number of simultaneous users that suddenly hit the site :)

ryanon Be Good

The talk on which the essay is based: http://omnisio.com/startupschool08/paul-graham-at-startup-sc...

ryanon Packed House At Y Combinator Startup School

Videos are going up now at http://omnisio.com/startupschool08

ryanon Packed House At Y Combinator Startup School

Here's the link: http://omnisio.com/startupschool08/jeff-bezos/27:35

poor guy

ryanon All startup school talks as individual videos

These are also going up, with slides, at http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08

ryanon Solo founders: how do you stay emotionally efficient?

You might consider getting a co-founder. It's likely your moods will be out of phase, so that when one is down the other can be the motivating force and vice versa.

Also accept the fact that doing a startup is an emotional roller coaster - one day you will believe you are about to take over the world, the next you will wonder why you are wasting your time. Just accept these short term variations and focus on building a great product :)

ryanon Omnisio (YC Winter 08) launches

We are considering several ideas, but think about this: with all the additional data we have about videos (comments, tagged people/highlights, synchronized slides, and metadata about individual clips in a compilation) we can better place mid-roll video ads.

The ability to sync video + PPT is also useful for corporate training and online university courses etc.

In the end we are only 5 months old and still figuring stuff out :)

Ryan

ryanon Ask YC: Demo Day, the results?

all 19 companies gave amazing presentations. I'm sure all will be spending the next few weeks talking to potential investors and figuring out how to take their businesses to the next level.

Expect to hear a lot more news about the companies from this batch - there are a lot of really amazing teams.

ryanon (YC Winter08) Addher.com goes Beta

Nice work, I see this getting a lot of traction

ryanon Ask YC: Why do people share on social websites (like Youtube, Digg, Reddit, YC)?

According to a survey from McKinsey[1], in answer to the question 'Why do you upload videos?':

* 65% seek fame/want the world to see their videos

* 59% do it for fun

* 41% want to share experiences with friends

* 29% want others to benefit from their videos

* 12% do it for other reasons

[1] - http://www.aedipenavarra.es/include_asp/fichero.asp?id=35

ryanon WebMynd Could Change the Way You Bookmark Websites

Congrats on the launch guys. Great work!

ryanon From zero to a million users in 8 days - Graffiti (the facebook app) tells us their story

Nice interview.

I just added a link to a whole bunch of videos of Facebook app developers telling their story complete with presentation slides (from the Community Next conference).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=71986

Disclaimer: they are hosted on my site :)

ryanon Omnisio - YC applicant - looking for feedback

Thanks for taking the time to provide feedback. I like your comments about making our message simpler and to the point, and will work on this.

ryanon Omnisio - YC applicant - looking for feedback

Thanks for the honest feedback.

Yes my claim is very bold and ambiguous :) Conference videos are just the first niche we decided to focus on, but ultimately we will provide tools for representing a wide variety of information online, and corresponding tools for people to very easily create professional looking tutorials.

ryanon Takin' a class, readin' a book.

I bought the book because Tom Byers is great, although I haven't read it cover to cover.

As much as it's possible to reduce entrepreneurship to 'theory', this book does a good job of it. It's good to be able to structure your thinking about strategy and marketing and operations etc, although I think in reality most entrepreneurs are so busy trying to execute that strategies are pretty quickly thrown out the window :)

Check it out in the library or bookstore before you buy it. An alternative is New Venture Creation by Timmons and Spinelli, which I quite like.

ryanon Seth Godin: Shoestring opportunity

We'll he's basically doing this with http://www.squidoo.com/ right?

Although that site seems so spammy to me - I can't believe it's #628 on Alexa.

ryanon iminlikewithyou invite in exchange for site feedback

Good idea. I have a bunch of iilwy invites that could use good homes. Problem is my site hasn't launched yet. but ahh... check out my splash page and tell me if you like the logo/color scheme :)

www.omnisio.com

First 3 replies get invites.

ryanon Paul Buchheit: Whose reality are you living in? Whose reality would you rather live in?

"When I was in Architecture school, all of my professors tried to convince us students that there were no new ideas, everything had been done. That nothing great was created/designed/invented by individuals, it was all thanks to groups. That the heroic in architecture was impossible and undesirable. That Wright's Falling water was banal, just a bunch of concrete plates stacked up above each other. All of this foolishness was washed away when I worked for Paul Rudolph in NYC who single handedly was designing some of the most beautiful and heroic buildings I had ever seen. The experience saved my world view of what is possible."

Have you read The Fountainhead by any chance? :)

ryanon Matrix list of web forums?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software

Also look at the forums section at http://www.opensourcecms.com/. No matrix here, but you can play with the various packages and read others' comments.

ryanon How Digg uses LAMP to scale downward

I've heard 'CRAM' - Capistrano, Rails, Apache and Mongrel.

Maybe CRAMM to get MySQL in there... dunno how you work Linux into it :)

ryanon Looking for startup idea feedback

The first thing that came to mind was the funerals.com story in 'The Monk and The Riddle' (http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_25/b3686077.htm)

I'm not implying this applies to you :) It sounds like you are sincerely passionate about the idea.

I think it's a valid approach to realize there are companies out there doing this, they aren't popular, and it's probably because they aren't 'doing it right'. So if you think you know how to do it better, by all means do it! Good luck.

ryanon .com vs .net domain name?

Here's a scenario: my co-founder and I are trying to finalize our company/website name. We have two names right now, one we like slightly better than the other.

The problem is, the .com for the 'better' name is held by a squatter who wants $25k! I hold the .net and .org.

The 'worse' domain is slightly longer (an extra syllable), and from my tests so far people find it a bit harder to pronounce. The positive is I own the .com/.net/.org

So my question to the bright minds here: how hard do you think it is to brand a company with a .net domain (and potentially purchase the .com when we can afford it)? I know some companies have done it.

Would you go with a slightly-better-name.net, or a slightly-worse-name.com?

ryanon The wait is over! Download Joost!

Could I grab an invite? ryan@junee.org

Cheers, R