yubrew

i don't see it, where is the value add?

"Almost none are remotely capable of this." -this may be true, but what can you expect from a university?

the best we can really hope for is to provide students with a support system for entrepreneurial activities, and to expose entrepreneurial students to potential mentors.

the rest is up to you.

this is randy komisar on "teaching entrepreneurship" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4crM-PDRpk

that's a really interesting idea. the biggest questions i have are.... 1. how much will it cost? for equipment, sensors, etc? 2. is anyone willing to pay for it?

If you don't want to ask anyone in particular, you can ask yourself other feasibility questions like: -how heavy will it be? will it affect the flight of the plane? -how much do current planes cost? how does that compare to the cost of adding a camera device? -how many people fly planes? how many planes do they have? -how often do people crash planes, and why do they crash? how expensive is it to fix? how does this cost compare to a camera that could prevent a crash?

my initial guess is that there is no feasible business model there, but what if you twist your idea around a bit? such as sharing videos of airplane flights? and modifying video equipment so that it could be installed on model airplanes? that could potentially be useful.

i said contextual 'text' ads. what i mean is that you can't have adsense and YPN text ads on the same page, and if you have YPN on the same website, it needs to have a different color scheme than the adsense box.

http://www.johnchow.com/google-updates-adsense-tos/ http://www.johnchow.com/adsense-intellitxt-together-at-last/

i think the idea is that they will innovate and add features much faster than e-bay or other competitors will.

from a user's perspective, i would much rather use the tools and software provided by a capable team that caters to my needs. that said, you don't really need a brilliant team, just one that does the job better than other current competitors. this is a great opportunity that aligns well with the strengths of the founders.

you'd be surprised. i work for a market research firm for start ups, and most of it is knowing how to search online, figuring out who to call, and pounding the pavement to get feedback from people most likely to use it.

that said, it's a lot easier to build something catered towards a specific user first than to build something, and try to find a use for it.

how about seeding events automatically from other bigger sites first?

meaning, you will need to contact and gain compliance with carriers. this could be a very substantial barrier. how do you plan to overcome this? --hopefully you don't take this negatively, i'm curious what you come up with :)

try out adsense or yahoo publishing network. G cares if you mix adsense with other contextual text advertising. banners, text link ads, display ads are all fair game.

right, if advertising revenue greater than cost of SMS, then there's potential for profit. that part is easy to get.

but i still don't understand technically how such a transaction would work. how will you get a carrier to not charge me when i send SMS to someone? where is it that you step in the process? will i need to SMS you, and then it parses the number and message, and sends from you to my intended recipient?

isn't SMS pricing controlled by carriers?

you have a good point, it's much better to be working from passion than working for money. but when you're young, it's more about gaining experience. so the real question is "what should i do to gain the most relevant experience to prepare me for the future?"

summer jobs are a place where you get paid to learn. not only do you pick up technical skills, but you learn an assortment of soft skills (e.g. managing people, communicating, success metrics, company culture, etc). if working on your own projects will yield more relevant experience than at any summer job, then go out on your own.

in the end, summer vacation is long enough to learn a ridiculous amount, but short enough so that if you don't like it, you can grind through it.

This is a really good article. It reminds me of when I was starting up my real estate business. For real estate transactions, there are a ridiculous amount of moving parts. For real estate investors that are testing all boundaries of how transactions are done, you really need an experienced, knowledgeable team to help guide you through everything.

I churned through 6 title companies, 10 different real estate agents, more than 15 different private investors and more contractors than I care to remember in a 3 year period before I formed a great, reliable team.

You won't really know how good a co-founder is until you "try him out." The best point about this article is to establish a steady supply of talented, entrepreneurial people and keep trying out co-founders (or replace whatever position you need) until you find a great match.

I thought it was a full list initially, but now it's too late to edit.

got link bait?

Oops, I didn't find the other story. My bad fellas.

YC and pg do not even try to push the image of having prophetic ability. He repeats over and over that there are great ideas, business models, and people that are not selected.

I got interviewed for this summer. While I am disappointed that we were not selected, I understand that there's a bunch of great people, with great ideas, and only a handful of spots. When you're trying to pick the best 19 apples from a barrel of 420 apples, you're bound to throw out a couple good ones.

My question is, how many people that were not YC selected went on their own, and now are successful? same question but with people that were interviewed and not selected?

I know what you mean (biomedical engineering). In health care, it's standard practice to have at least 100x price mark ups, but a fair amount of barriers.

After talking to a couple people in biotech start ups, it seems pointless to pursue something unless I am a cofounder. The marriage of science and business is often not pretty.

did anyone else notice that this is a YouTube video that is way way more than 10 minutes (56:45 to be precise).

they must be making exceptions to the 10 minute upload limit.

I'm trying to get a better understanding of the pros and cons between flash/flex and silverlight.

Flash is the standard for online video, with ~98% PC's with some version of flash.[0] Our team can hack in flash/flex very easily.

Silverlight is being touted as the next platform by Arrington and Scoble. We might get a lot more press as being the first Silverlight app. Also, if silverlight provides a technological edge, then we can be one of the early adopters and beat everyone that's still using flash/flex.

The cons of Silverlight is that I'm not sure how much I trust Microsoft to screw me later. While the platform is free, the hosting and bandwidth will switch to pay-for-use after the beta is over. [1]

Opinions?

[0] http://www.forbes.com/2006/06/07/video-internet-youtube_cx_df_0607video.html

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/faq.aspx