Lasher

Interesting article but a little misleading at the start. That first example (billing management software) touts 900 paid users @ $65 per month after moving away from the freemium model, but how many of those 900 users would have never become users at all if the software was not initially free? It's much easier to start charging a customer once they are locked in and familiar with the software. Maybe a "first year is on us then it's paid" model is a good compromise between freemium and paid software, with the option to upgrade sooner if you want support and/or some advanced features.

Agree with Softbuilder. Treating all function points equally and trying to come up with a generic "programming hours per fp" is about as useful as asking "How heavy is a rock?"

When the BBS came along it was awesome, then it was too addictive and the phone bill was insane. Then we discovered blue boxes and PBX hacking and it was really on. It seemed amazing at the time being able to pick up the phone, make a few tones and be talking to someone on the other side of the world, or downloading "warez" from a BBS in Europe.

For some reason I particularly remember walking to the store one day pre-internet thinking about this whole "virtual" electronic BBS world out there that only 1 out 1000 people actually had a clue existed and how awesome it was. When the internet came along it was a obvious to me that was it going to change everything, but I was too young and naive to think about the business aspect of it.

Other stuff, hmm. When you finished work for the day you were actually finished, but more likely to be in the office late because you couldn't work from home. The phone rang a lot more often before email. Installing software on another branches system meant driving there - uphill both ways, barefoot, in the snow.

Strongly recommend fulfillment by Amazon if you can make the numbers work. As a long time Prime member the only time I will ever consider non-prime is when there are no 'Prime' options available, or there is a massive cost differences which is rare other than on very hard to find product.

With ICANN opening up .[anything] to the highest bidders this kind of situation is only going to get worse. Stick with the global TLDs and the major (stable) country codes.

Hard to comment on this and not sound like a "hater", but wasn't the decline of MySQL as an open source solution pretty much inevitable the second Oracle acquired it? Oracle have handed other open source DB providers a gift, let's hope they make the most of it.

I'm a developer with extensive experience in building technology solutions and scaling them at all levels, from Fortune 500 all the way down to hobby game (400,000 lines of C / Lua) with a couple of thousand users running on a single PC. I love all aspects of building up a platform and can't get enough of it.

I'm drawn to the idea of being a technical co-founder and even have the financial resources to take a calculated risk on equity over initial income for a good amount of time. I don't live in CA, don't particularly want to move, and really struggle with these online "find a co-founder" sites when it's so hit and miss.

I feel like I have decent business sense but would prefer to spend my time building rather than dealing with VCs and fund raising and board meetings and paperwork so I just focus on small sites making "pocket money" and let the bigger opportunities pass by.

I guess my point in all this is that it isn't just "none technical co-founders" struggling here. This whole area of "partner discovery" is still wide open for someone to come along and find a better way to do things. Do any of the VC companies themselves do any kind of "partnering up"? If finding a technical co-founder is a challenge for so many people then perhaps there's a way for would-be leaders on the technical side to make themselves known to VCs up front, complete whatever interviews were necessary and let the VCs (or another 3rd party) do the matchmaking at a deeper level than just filling in forms on a site? Definitely open to suggestions in the meantime...

These are not new "dilutive" shares - the stock was always factored into the FB market cap so it's not like publicly traded shares are suddenly worth 60% less just because the float increases. But it does mean that for a while people who have been unable to sell are able to do so which is going to lead to some short term downward pressure. Once that is over Facebook will resume its normally trajectory, ummm, downward...