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I think before you want to make something like a CL killer, you first need to understand what is CL, why is that so popular as it is - essentially what is the primary driver of business for CL.

As other would have already commented, it seems that the simple interface is one of hte biggest drivers for CL. You would find the same if you dig through tons of forbes/media articles. I think that is not the case. That is just post-facto insight - something which gets generated a lot in the media.

The primary driver of business for CL afaik is data and the people who already use CL. If I want to sell something I go to CL because it offers me the most amount of buyers. If I want to buy something vice-versa. It is a self-fulfilling loop.

The only way to beat CL is to figure out how do you overtake CL in its primary driver of business. It will not be easy - I dont know even if it is possible. But what I do know is that anything else (neat UI, AJAX) is just inconsequential.

This is cool stuff. I think picwing will do great as a kind of clock for any kind of data, driven of the internet.

For ex.

1. A web startup could use it to showcase their website metrics (visits,pageviews etc.) in real time. 2. Could be used to show updates about a game - cricket scores for example will be a big hit. Especially inside an office where television is not accessible.

This is a really awesome write-up and lists everything I would have thought, but in a way I might not have been able to put acorss.

To put it succiently, 1. Cut down expenses, right now and ruthlessly. Negotiate with everyone on everything. Everything is open for negotiation.

2. Economic stress WILL KILL creativity. Your only focus right now should be get to positive cash flow. Not debt free but positive cash flow. Debt free will take time, but it will happen but what you need absolutely right now is +ve cash flow. Debt is ok as long as you meet minimum commitments. -ve cash flow will lead to economic stress which will kill creativity which will make it longer to go debt free.

3. Plan for Cash flow positive. On paper - In writing - Get someone to proofread.

4. If you are not able to get cash flow positive - get a consulting assignment or a job. START LOOKING RIGHT NOW.

5. If you are able to get to cash flow positive - look at your existing ideas-business lines and pick out the one which will create revenue fastest with the most amount of confidence. Work on it, and leave everything else for a while.

6. Don't go back to school. You know that is not a solution. There was a reason why you crossed into the free world.

I tried feedbackarmy - from a purely ROI perspective I think the usability methodology is flawed.

It seems that the folks who give the feedback are actually trying to be a bit too helpful - to the extent that they think about questions as a challenge and try their best to answer them.

For example - If I pose a question that "What does this site do?" in a usbility experiment, I am expecting to figure out if the audience immidiately grasp the utility of a site.

However in this case it seems that the audience takes that as a challenge modifying the question to mean "Can you figure out what this side does?" and try out very hard to find the utility of a site and in the process totally defeating the purpose of a usability review.

It might be an artifact of the way I posed the question, but then I was just following the sites examples. I think using the site in the way it is setup (messaging, mturk) the concept does not give a good ROI w.r.t usability.

However, one thing that I did like was that the turkers gave some suggestions to improve the site - some of which was really valuable. So maybe if you change your positioning to something like an active feedback/testing tool it might work better.

Take him as a co-founder - no doubt about it. Give him a 50/50 stake with vesting. It is best if you also clear leadership issues and decide on a CEO.

The question that you should really be worried about is how to make it work (read manage conflict) between the two of you. Consider him your startups greatest opportunity as well as the biggest challenge.

Apart from the reasons others have already mentioned for having a co-founder - You need a co-founder not just to save your startup but more importantly and more frequently to save you from your startup.

It needs to be done, there is no other way.

Or as captain kurtz said ..

"In a war there are many moments for compassion and tender action. There are many moments for ruthless action - what is often called ruthless - what may in many circumstances be only clarity, seeing clearly what there is to be done and doing it, directly, quickly, awake, looking at it. "

skim one, once in a while - mostly directly in the book store and only non fiction. Severe ADD for fiction - can't stand long prose.

useful stuff - plugins for wordpress, drupal etc. might be useful for distribution

Two things:

1. Just launch. You are about to quit anyways - so why not just launch, it obviously couldnt be worse.

2. Co-founder - I think two highly motivated founders is definitely ideal - but whatever little I have seen I think more often that not one founder is a lot more motivated than the other. This also seems (but again im not sure) to be the case with Apple(jobs vs woznaik) as well as microsoft (gates vs allen). Additionally, I think this arrangement might have some advantages (vis-a-vis leadership issues) also.

I hope you know that there is nothing that Drupal can't do.

notebook backup, website uptime monitoring service

yep ..makes sense.

I wouldnt really go so far to say that schools should be shut down because they do serve one good purpose - making friends (even though you could do that in other means), but its a good meeting point.

The big thing that needs to go from schools is structure and the focus on 'success'..

Essentially the fact that people from similar age groups are considered equal - have to take the same courses - for the same amount of time - subject to the same exams - and imparted an extremely flawed relative ranking system is all horribly wrong.

In the real world the harder part is creating that structure - learning from open markets, finding out what you want to do and from that figuring out the courses you want to take - the people you want to learn from - the peers you want to work with.

And success is not about getting good grades but more about taking your own path which gets you your own happiness and the ones you care about.

The rules are not for a startup. The rules are if you think of your real 'life' (like travel) as outside work and would hence like to spend as less time as possible for work and enjoy life for the rest.

In a startup your work is the biggest part of your life, and many would have said that it should be done only if you are absolutely passionate about your 'work' to not mind its taking over your 'life'.

Specifically incase of a startup:

1. You do need to work long hours. 2. Startups run best with atleast 2 founders. 3. Cannot outsource the most critical parts. More often than not almost nothing at all as money is scarce.

The books is nice though but refers to a different lifestyle. The only things that work for also for a startup life are his thoughts on GTD - handling email etc.

blogger works for me. WP has been a headache, sometime back the edits wont reflect in the published site until much later.

This is neat stuff.

Actually we (reviewgist.com) could also do with something like this. Infact, we spent some time working on a similar system for our needs, but anticipating a dis-proportionate consumer response dropped it. But if you go through our site, you would know exactly what I am talking about.

Also to answer your question, imo go with 1.

Just make something useful.

Forget about patents. Patent pending refers to a provisional application and is not legally enforceable. Essentially, anyone can get a 'patent pending' on anything.

Patents are important only if you have enough money to either sue someone or if you have tons of money to interest someone to sue you. Assuming none of the above is true, and as someone commented above, cross this bridge when you come to it.

I think pg nails it when he says that talking to tons of investors takes up lots of time, and given the extremely low probability of a deal going through it comes out as extremely hard.

One of the reasons that exacerbate this problem is the presence of 'wannabe' angels in the investing community. These will typically be folks who worked long and hard in a big company or possibly got rich as an early employee and now fantasize about doing angel investments. Obviously the ambiguity of the whole process is too much for them to ever go through an investment.

IMHO the fund raising process is all about waisting as less time on the folks who will not invest and figuring out the potential investors.

Possibly pg should elaborate more about how founders can predict the 'successful' investors and skip the bad ones.

I think labmeeting is a great idea and also something which could be very useful.

Specifically, I believe there is a lot of value in breaking up the traditional research publication methods - Conferences, Papers, Journals and the costly (atleast for developing nations) access to this material controlled by a view publishing houses.

Research and collaboration needs to open up for everyone and should work freely over the internet rather centered around conferences etc. If labmeeting can enable something like that (which I guess is something its founders would have though about) it can very well change the way research is conducted.

Yahoo is bang on with this one.

BOSS + Amazon Cloud counters the huge infrastructure edge that Google services enjoyed till now.

You might not believe it, but I had the exact same idea sometime back. I think its brilliant(obviously ;)) - allow me to share some of the things I thought about.

1. I think the risk to bloggers not being fine with is overblown. Everybody loves free publicity - and if some of them are not keen, then just drop them. The internet is big enough to find enough interesting content.

2. You can do it in a subscription model. People come to your site and upload their details - preferences etc. You promise them FREE magazines through mail covering their topics periodically. They have nothing to loose. Once you have enough people covered you can get paid for highly targeted ads.

3. Offline model might work well on an on-demand basis. You might want to tie up with local printing shops and send them the formatted material on-demand and always updated. They sense local demand and print based on that. Kind of like a franchisee model.

4. The things to highlight are highly targeted content - ( I have never seen an old school magazine which has more than 15% relevant content to me) and almost up-to-date - (I rarely see a news item in an old school mag which I havent read about online)

i think its a usability issue. Bigger and clearer up/down buttons might help.

1. "has it really made life easier for a family of four on the streets?". It absolutely will, how can you have any doubt on that. Ask any family of 4 if they are better of riding a car than scrambling onto a scooter.

2. "According to Tata, the Nano complies with Bharat Stage-III and Euro-IV emission standards" (From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Nano)

3. "The Nano will also replace many overloaded and worn-out two-stroke polluting vehicles, both two and three-wheeled." - again from the wikipedia.

However if the ozone is what you really care about, how about starting by dumping the SUV's for smaller cars in developed nations.

http://www.merawaala.com create,share and embed comparisons .. kind of like a youtube for comparisons

Even if you are able to get it out with the help of another developer(on contract or otherwise) it still doesnt cut it because this is just beta and there is a long way ahead for you to build a business.

For this reasons, and still more, I would suggest that to take this forward you absolutely need a technical co-founder. Try to find one, and even if you have to give a very high (~40-45% stake) consider it a good deal.

Additionally, 12 months is too long a time for beta. Cut down your featureset ruthlessly so that only the ones required to expose the core functionality of your site remain.

On the outset if you think the startup would do well, then I would suggest to join even at a 4% rate - the reason being that its better to join a more promising startup at a below market compensation rather than the other way round.

One way of coming with a good figure is as follows:

Assuming your market salary is x /mnth and the founders is y /mnt. Also, assuming that you get funding in about an year. Then finally based on the assumption that the startup equity is a function of hte risk that you take, then each founders total investment comes to:

12y + 18y

and your investment comes to:

12x

So essentially your stake in the company should be around

12x / 3*(12y + 18y) + 12x

Also, there is no basis for your stake to not get diluted and incase the startup goes for multiple rounds 4% might looks like a very high figure which the founders might end up not being very comfortable with.I would suggest, and for other reasons also, that you might consider negotiating a bigger stake and accept dilution.

It seems like entrepreneurship is what you are really excited about, but medicine appeals more to your altruistic self.

Clearly, you should go for entrepreneurship - also there are going to be ample opportunities in entrepreneurship to truly help people - possibly have a bigger impact then you might have by studying medicine which will take care of your altruistic leanings.

The only question to ask is :How experienced is the team in converting ideas to businesses ?

...and if not then it's like someone attempting to build a car factory without knowing what a gearbox is.

What worked for us (http://ReviewGist.com) was what Mike suggested at http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/11/how_to_get_in_t.html.

Essentially: Make is short, not more than a couple of sentences and relate it to something already existing.