sdizdar

Majority of credit unions outsource their online banking to companies like orcc. My credit union has better online banking than Wells Fargo (not hard to beat).

The ATM access do require small changes in behavior (i.e., don't forget to get cash back in Safeway), but it is quite possible to achieve.

Actually, if we move all our money from big banks to credit unions and small local banks, the end result will be the same as re-introducing Glass-Steagall act.

This is excellent: I especially like revision control and "undelete" (still not as powerful as Google Docs but enough for majority of apps).

Allowing access to only a single folder is an excellent feature (Google Docs does not have that): basically you can make Dropbox as a dropbox or sendbox.

And shameless plug: if you need to real-time replication of multiple Basecamp/Google Doc accounts with Dropbox try this: https://cloudHQ.net/ (and you probably understand why we are excited to finally get "single folder access feature").

I guess this boil down to the following four points:

- NoSQL is good in scaling: but do you really need to scale? Is your business so great to handle 1M users? Simple MySQL (and PostgreSQL when mysql is not ok) will go a long way for many many installation.

- NoSQL are in good in scaling but it is pain to maintain it: it hard to hire somebody who knows it good, there are no good management tools, etc.

- NoSQL requires you to make your application logic more complex and not portable

- There is no clear NoSQL leader and clear mainstream knowledge. And a lot of these NoSQL implementation requires some secret sauce known only to engineers maintaining and developing big NoSQL installations at Facebook, Google and Amazon.

In short, for startups, NoSQL is one more variable introducing risks and unknowns. So I think startups should not go NoSQL unless that is the core of their offering.

I'm not sure, but there are a few horror stories here in Bay Area about policy like this (you go for a two week vacation (no email, no phone) and you got terminated when you come back).

The problem is that eventually the policy like this will create a backlash and burn out. However, it will be hard to find why ... As of now, this policy will work because balsamiq is cool and hot. But after your company is not a startup anymore ('running repeatable business mode') you need to find something which will be more predictable. If nothing you might want to recruit a more senior people which do have a family. And then you will get into this "it is hard to find talent" bs.

Also if this is really a policy, why not to accrue minimum vacations anyway?

I wonder why would somebody go with S-corp instead of C-corp if they plan to be big (meaning raise money)? Majority of startups will not have enough of profit to pay founders at the beginning, so tax advantage does not look very appealing.

Please talk to the layer to understand liability for your particular business. As a officer of a company you are still personally liable for some things and D&O will not cover it. In other words, don't think incorporation will make your private assets 100% safe.

Thanks for the feedback.

I completely understand your concern about trust. As of now, we are small (just two of us). But we worked in small and big companies handling very sensitive customer data with integrity and professionally. If nothing, you can check out our linkedIn profiles. Also, you can always call us or email us to learn more how we operate. We hope that trust in our company will come with time.

Regarding 37signals requiring login/password, our service does realtime continuos synchronization and that cannot be achieved using only the API.

Hi, This is Senad. Founder of cloudHQ.

We also have Chrome extension which embeds Dropbox/SugarSync/Basecamp into your Google Docs interface: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search?q=cloudHQ Kinda cool (useful if synchronization is not really what you want)

Regarding pricing, we will have a free version - my idea is that cloudHQ will be free if services used are free (i.e., if you don't pay 37signals, you don't pay us).

At least somebody is using it.

I understand your point.

However, it might be that as cloud services become a critical for businesses and individuals will not be going for "free" solutions. Reminds of "Starbucks dilema": wanna a cup of coffee for 50c and have diarrhea or Starbucks coffee for $4? And how hard could be to make a good coffee?

I believe that everybody will have a least one "cloud storage" account. Actually probably multiple "cloud storage" accounts since cloud storage providers will try to specialize and differentiate (i.e., you will have Google Docs account, Dropbox account, iCloud account, etc.). So 21M is a conservative number.

And don't forget companies of all sizes are going into cloud: so replace 21 million users with 21 millin users via their employeer. (Ever tried sharing documents using MS SharePoint?)

Actually, the album is very important too. The album as a whole makes a story and by tagging photos you can make up actors of that story. For example, what about if album is "actors of porn movie X" or something like (the title of album could be more innocent) and one of photos in that album has you tagged?

Regarding sharing, why would you want to tag somebody with his/her public profile without even telling him/her that?

This seems 100% reasonable to me. If somebody tags me I want to see that photo - and the entire album (since context is also important). I don't want that somebody starts taging me on some photos and then sharing these photos with others without me having chance to untag myself.

Does Apple iPhone uses mobile TPM? Any known mobile phone?

We kinda started something... http://cloudHQ.net/dropbox Basically real-time synchronization between Google Docs and Dropbox (and other services). You can also synchronize Basecamp to Dropbox. Gmail and other Google and 37signals services are coming soon.

Backupify is also an option, but they backup to their own storage which, again, is not owned by you.

Shameless plug...

Regarding Google Docs, you can use cloudHQ for Dropbox (http://cloudHQ.net/dropbox) to continuously synchronize all your Google Docs to Dropbox. We will add Gmail and Picasa soon ("just" need to migrate code from showzey.com site).

I don't think it is smart to just "move out" and stop using Google. However, to have everything replicated to something you have a full control (not to some AWS storage or one more service) is a good practice. Dropbox seems as an excellent choice since it will be replicate all data to your home computer (and it works).

The things what Lodsys is doing right now is actually very good. There are more copy-cat trolls coming to the market based on the same idea "buy some patents and let sue many private proprietors and ask them $1000 to drop suite".

Eventually, it will be obvious even to our representatives in Washington that something is broken and they will be forced to fix it.

As they say, our representatives will try doing the right thing but only after they try all the wrong things first.

It is possible to get an invite? We would like to try it. This is exactly what we are doing by ourself when supporting our customers by combining Rapportive, Twitter, Google Spreadsheets, and magic.

Piracy and licensing is other huge problem. Stealing licences of software product is normal approach even in companies which have close ties with corporations in US. Meaning even repackaging and distributing copies of enterprise software to other clients.

Yes video game violence develop a shitty moral compass. So does Mein Kampf. So should we start banning books which we think develop a shitty moral compass?

I have this weird vision that apps (and apps stores) are just a temporary solution for current lack of fast wireless connectivity and not so strong CPUs in mobile phones. I believe that in 3 years from now, apps will be so passée...

But just imagine that they can implement something even cooler: I can actually see menus of these pizza places with prices - and information whether they are open or closed? Really...

I thought 4sq is an East Coast thing...

Seriously, I really would like to know how many active users are on 4sq. Is there any data about it?

In majority of corporations responsibility and accountability ends somewhere between VP and CEO.

Sometimes, when you think somebody is your director competitor, they are actually not competitors in eyes of your customers or users. It is important to determine whether your users or customers think this company is your direct competitor.

Isn't idea guy actually domain expert which understand certain problem in a area like nobody else? She or he could be a medial doctor, maybe veterinarian, maybe small business owner, maybe cook, etc. Idea guy does not necessary need to be business guy which means that idea guy might be also a geek - and matching two geeks from different field is a big challenge.

For software companies (and probably to all other industries which hire 'knowledge workers'), it should be very important to give enough of vacation time to their employees (developers).

For me that is no brainier, but unfortunately, very few hi-tech companies actually understand that. So you have high-rate of "burn outs" which cause all kind problems (bugs, bad design decisions, etc.). The management mantra is still: The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Also, I was surprised how it is very hard to find a hi-tech company offering something like unpaid sabbatical leave or fulltime sabbatical replacement position (i.e., programmer working in sales for one or two months). Some banks and hedge funds do that.

Actually, VMware is more like Palm - they started something disruptive and defined the market, but somehow lost the edge (Cloud Foundry is two years after Heroku, four years after Amazon, etc).

It is also important to mention prediction regarding prices of real estate (which also influence rent). For example, prices of real estate in Japan are still falling down - nearly 20 years of constant decline [1].

There were articles in 2007 [2], how Japan's real estate crash may finally end after 16 years, but oh well.. we know happen in 2008.

[1] http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/01/12/house-price... [2] http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi-bin/D.PL?xct=gd.e070...