82 karma · joined September 22, 2010
I don't know much about how VCs structure their portfolios, but recognizing a need in the market and betting on a badass team seems like a pretty solid strategy to me.
As for me, I'm happy for them. I hope they succeed. I hope them and their investors make a ton of money and it encourages other teams to build more awesome products.
I have no experience, so I can't say who's right or wrong. I just think it's sad that these type of arguments have given some drugs so much of a stigma that it set back medical research in this area for 40+ years.
But the thing that makes the SF area great for startups is the proximity (and thus density) of startups and tech in general. While long-distance networking has come a long way, it's still no replacement. If NYC's goal is to build a stronger tech community, I think they're better off building their own East Coast tech culture vs. trying to import a culture from SF.
Disclosure: as a Cornell grad, I'm definitely biased and psyched about it getting more involved in supporting a tech community (a $350M donation didn't hurt either)
The worse part isn't that it preys on startups, it's that it prays on startups and new entrepreneurs that aren't plugged into the HN/SV scene (I was looking at angel groups in TX).
I don't think that a nominal fee (~$10 - $20) is necessarily a bad thing (but really, why bother?), but anything on the order of $100 or more is too much for a startup to be spending on that type of thing- a definite red flag. What investor would want to invest in a startup that spends all of its money looking for financing rather than creating a great product/service?
Also, when a store puts their own barcode over one, I generally don't feel any guilt about peeling it back a little and scanning the original.
On the flip side, SAP revolutionized business software and as a consequence, business organization. That's pretty interesting too. I know which side I would come down on, but simplifying the debate to profit margin misses the point by a wide margin.
That being said, I hate the new Google Reader. I used it primarily as sharing tool, and the new sharing makes that more difficult. I think two fixes would make this better:
1) Being able to share easily with different circles. While I might be okay sharing publicly something interesting, there are plenty of less-than-appropriate funny articles that I only want to share with a few friends. This is one of the strengths of Google+, and it'd be great if Reader could take advantage of this.
2) Being able to see shared articles from other people. I understand they want to increase traffic to Google+, but this was always a great feature of Reader. In effect, each friend that used reader became their own feed. It'd be great to still have this feature and even though you're decreasing traffic to plus.google.com, you'd be increasing the overall use of Google+
I'm not saying this would work for every or even most kids, but if you can use the kids natural excitement to teach them important skills (not just cash flow, but money management, value of work, etc) then why wouldn't you? I think this is a great story, and I hope when I'm a parent I can engage my kids with something as creative.
For companies that don't rely heavily on internet tech, understanding why you don't want to use IE6 is beyond most people.
Another idea (and you may already be doing this) would be to log all communications, and maybe even make them visible to everyone in the "class" via a web login. People are less likely to say something stupid if they know it's being recorded, and it gives teachers an easy resource to fall back on if a "he said/she said" scenario comes up with a student.
That being said, I think it's a great way to mitigate risk for the teacher, but I wouldn't let that overshadow the main benefit, which is ease of use.
Having an intermediary certainly won't eliminate risk, but it might mitigate some of it. I don't think it's a tool that all teachers will use- it's going to depend a lot of teaching style. My gut instinct says enough will use it to make it an interesting tool, and anything that adds to a teacher's box of tools sounds good to me.
I like it because it will add some much needed competition into the journal pricing. Most likely, Nature is not going to change their pricing. If you have an article worthy of being published there, most people are going to pay a few grand and be happy to do so just to have their paper published. Assuming publishing prices do become transparent, I don't think it will drastically change the pricing system, but it will allow people to evaluate the value of such a publication.
The best analog I can think of are colleges themselves (and not just because of the academic connection). The value of both colleges and journals are significantly affected by their reputation. The price of the colleges have not leveled out, nor have they gone to zero (closer the opposite of both), but the prices do reflect the perceived "value" of that education. Hopefully the same will happen for journals.