Scott_MacGregor

Patenting seems smart, but if the Green idea relies on government funding or mandates (laws) in any way to achieve profitability or sustainability you should be careful. As soon as the other side of the political spectrum takes over, the Green stuff might get unwound. It is a political target for both sides, meaning a lot of unpredictable risk. One side is pushing it on people who do not want it and the other side doesn’t want that.

There will still be a target market for certain Green things no matter who is in control though, because there is an identifiable subset of consumers who value it enough to pay for it.

Very interesting. The old transmitters used to work on AM only, then they came up with SSB. Maybe there is an even deeper layer available that can be encoded. Like putting the entire Cat-In-The-Hat book on one of the cats whiskers in "Songs about my Cats". Isolate just one whisker and then run another process on it. Maybe use shades of color vs soundwaves. This is intriguing.

You are assuming it is a "Buzz" because that's what your ears "Hear" after it comes out of a speaker and after being processed by radio receiving equipment of a certain design.

Perhaps the "Buzz" is not meant to be a sound anyone hears. Maybe it is something more like a dialup modem tone that is acted upon by something other than a shortwave receiver. Maybe there is more to this noise than just buzzing. Maybe the buzzing is a spurious side effect of some other process going on.

Old dialup in audio and visual waveform: http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=16475

Do you guys have any thoughts on this?

I like having a free trial period for things.

Yes release, but I think you should spend some time and learn how to make a PowerPoint pitch deck. Then spend some more time and make one.

((1+1)=2) No one sees the plate, he parks in the handicap spot. Maybe he has a legitimate handicap plate for the car.

I don't think someone has to be totally physically depreciated to qualify to legitimately use one of the spots. I'm not sure if I was hurting to too much to walk a long way I would want to advertise it to everyone with a special plate, and I'm not even a world famous person--yet.

For comparison, I think they should have included Centos in the scorecard. It's a popular good distro.

I doubt there is a book that you can read that will make you sound like a seasoned startup guy. You are already in the industry, so know your own pitch deck and know your own business inside and out.

Know about your competitors, and know and understand the key pressure points in your own business model. I think if you can do that you will sound like a startup guy--with a bit of seasoning in your own business.

Good Luck!

I have no direct experience with internships, but seems to me if the decision maker "committee or whatever" considered you as a "Hot" candidate they would be communicating with you in a straightforward manner.

If after trying to talk to them they treated me like this, I would believe that they consider some other candidate more appropriate for the position (for whatever reason) and take appropriate actions to move forward in another direction.

Development Server:

- In-house racked 64-bit dual processor Dell with Raid-1 SCSI & 16 GB memory running:

- RHEL 5.4 with XEN virtualization

- Apache

- Zend Server Community Edition PHP stack

- MySql

- JRE & JDK

- Subversion

- JIRA bug tracker (nice features and surprisingly affordable)

Workstations:

- Windows XP SP2

- Zend Studio

- Various browsers for checking site display

- ZoneAlarm set fairly restrictive

- Windows Live Messenger for easy free SMS contact when needed

The crime just moves to a new area. The criminals simply move to a new area that is not measured in the study.

Being an ENTJ (not an introvert expert by any means) I wonder if those who are more introverted would be more comfortable, and thus perform better, with walls (tall private cubicles) vs. being in a bullpen style development environment that is favored by so many startups?

Based on the assumption that a lot of developers are INTJ in the Meyer's Briggs.

Any input on this guys?

Good idea, if it were mine I would make text message to cellular the standard notification feature with a fallback to e-mail only if the text message did not go through, or if the customer opted in for it instead of text.

I would also try offering a 15 day free trial for the businesses and sell packages on a quarterly, 6 month and yearly basis vs monthly.

California taxes and business red tape are why we chose Austin over Silicon Valley. Texas just seems a lot more business freindly in many ways.

This business seems like a money maker in a unique niche--if you work it. I think you should try promoting it in forums dedicated to organic living by manually linking it in "hot threads" in addition to buying skyscrapers.

If it were my site, to get some extra money in the door right now I would try upselling a 3 year package for the price of 2 on a special page just before the customer hits the shopping cart. Plus add a little extra something to the deal (like a special info pdf) to increase the chance the customer will pay double.

Also, what about letting the customer choose herbs and some favorite fruits.

Another thing that might help to "build" your business out of the bootstrap phase would be an 800 phone number with regular business hours so customers can call with questions about planting or ask why their tomatoes are dying on the vine. It might help to build repeat orders and add some gravitas to the business vs. just being a website with no track history.

NOTE: Watch your traffic, the site timed me out due to too much traffic (5/10/2010 aprox. 9:15pm Austin Time). I'm sure traffic is light now, but if you get a lot of hits at once you don't want to turn potential customers away by timing them out. It is probably due to too many concurrent server connections not bandwidth.

I think it "might" make you a LOT of money if you can find a good enough hook to market to the big retailers, and also find a way to give a desirable kickback of some sort to the recommender to spend time using it.

My thought is a big retailer like Amazon might say, just a "Friends Button"? What makes your service unique enough that for instance Amazon won’t just put in their own "Friends Button"? How will you convince a retailer like Amazon to use your "Friends Button" service? What is the benefit to Amazon to use you for this service vs. doing it in-house?

Still though, I think that if you have a good enough business proposition to offer the retailers, this service could make you a LOT of money.

If your site is slow look at the logs and see if your server is paging memory.

Also you might want to configure your Apache server for maximimum performance.

Here is a link about optimizing Apache 2.2.3 if that helps: http://cloudservers.rackspacecloud.com/index.php/Configuring...

If you are asking about this because you are concerned about processor load affecting the number of clients that can connect, in Apache 2.2 the amount of memory and the Apache settings will have some bearing on this also.

For instance, the Apache MaxClients setting formula many follow is, MaxClients = Total RAM dedicated to the web server / Max child process size.

Child process size for serving static file is about 2-3M. For dynamic content such as PHP, it may be around 15M. More memory = more connections.

Apache server performance can be improved by adding additional hardware resources such as RAM, faster CPU etc. but you might be able to achieve the same results with some simple custom Apache configurations on your current setup.

Here is a link for Apache 2.2.3 if you are interested: http://cloudservers.rackspacecloud.com/index.php/Configuring...

In addition to your internet marketing, go in person to all of your local grocery stores, give the mangers a special free small trial bottle and ask them to order a case.

Get it in the local stores, and then go national.

To build a local customer base (cash flow), ask the store to feature it on an endcap even if you have to give it away at cost.

That sword is amazing. I wouldn't want to to have one of those guys mad at me, ouch--LOL.

This is cute. I like the hard driving music, plus it teaches kids useful stuff. The $2,000 "Buffet Bucks" seems like a good hook for users too.

If you are interested in PHP you might want to give Zend Studio a look. You can use it to develop in the Zend Framework using MVC.

You can definitely build some cool things with it, and PHP is marketable.

This is a long video, but it has good content. I liked it, thanks for posting this.

It's comming up fine now on IE 7.0.5730.11 + FireFox 3.5.1 + Chrome 4.1.249.1045 all on XP Pro SP2 behind Zone-alarm with mobile code control off.

For development, you can see what browsers are in general use right now with this link: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Here is Evolt's browser archive for downloading older browser versions if you need any: http://browsers.evolt.org/

Bug Report: At 7pm Austin time (April 10th, 2010), I cannot load your site in IE 7.0.5730.11 on Win XP Pro SP2.

Before the site fully loads it freezes the browser then leaves an empty (blank) broswer outline.

I tried twice and it happened both times. I had to use the task manager to kill the browser both times.

IE 7 is still in service for many users, thats why I used it to look at your site.

I would like to be able to color code the folders in MS Outlook with a right click just like FolderIcon XP does in Windows.

Congratulations Augusto, best of luck on your next step.

I work full time (plus) at our startup and hate to stop working for lunch. So I keep a supply of fresh fruit, plums and oranges mainly, on my desk. It's cheap, healthy, and keeps my energy and concentration up. Plus it makes for a good late night energy snack when I'm burning the midnight oil, which is most nights--LOL.

This made my day. LOL, how cute.

This is really something that will need to be adressed (fixed) in the near future before it gets out of hand and really impacts our industry in a negative manner.

Things like this seem to give a small minority of people anywhere on the globe the ability to basicaly terrorize and shake down companies and people in our industry.

I beleive that some kind of international free-harbor provision would be benificial to the internet and allow it to continue to grow freely.