altay

Whether or not it's a good startup is another question.

Once, I got to meet Alex. My girlfriend at the time got really jealous, because for the next two weeks all I could talk about was this (brilliant, charming) parrot. She broke up with me shortly thereafter. Sadly, I'm not kidding.

Reasons #2, 7, 8, 14, 16, and 18. ;-)

After that happened, I spent a couple of months staring at walls, feeling sorry for myself. During that time, I listened to everything at venturevoice.com, read Founders at Work, and kept thinking "man, these success stories are inspiring, but what I need right now are some goddamn failure storiesX." (If you're in the same position, I highly recommend this book: http://tinyurl.com/362eg5 )

Anyways, you're both right. Founders at Rest: Stories of Losers Who Fucked Up and Gave Up would be boring and depressing. But interviews with successful people about their failures -- e.g., Evan Williams' Blogger saga -- would be fascinating and inspiring. The classic story arc doesn't let the hero succeed right off the bat. First he hits a low point, then pulls himself up by his bootstraps.

One of these days I'll write that book. Right now, though, I'm too busy working on my next startup.

Don't forget, Microsoft wasn't Bill Gates' first company.

anyone have any experience with lighttpd + rails?

That said, they've had a holographic video display sitting in the basement of the MIT Media Lab for close to two decades. I never understood why the world wasn't more excited about it. Guess it was a bit ahead of its time.

The holographic lathe was the coolest: http://www.media.mit.edu/spi/HHlathe.htm . You'd use this pen to shape a hologram of a cylinder, in real-time. The pen was a haptic interface, so you'd feel resistance as you "carved." Basically, you'd sculpt with light. Then you'd send your creation down the hall to the 3D printer.

I had the privilege of working in that lab for a little while. It was like living in the future.

Feature blight is a separate issue. It's good to try out lots of stuff, but you can't just vomit out feature after feature -- you have to iterate. After you release a feature, watch how people use it. If they're not using it, tweak it or axe it. Features need to earn a permanent place in your app.

I'm not sure if this is a feature or a bug. Either way, you can find me at aguvench on gmail.

Anyways, if you're inspired, go nuts. Lemme know if you want any help building it. Also lemme know if you want to hear the rest of the idea. (I think Phase 2 could get you one or two patents, and Phase 3 could disintermediate some dirty old men.)

Uh, is it weird that I've put so much thought into this?

Build a web-based version of that. After every round, the player is given two options... "play the next round" or "see more pictures of this girl." The latter is a paid link. Weekend hack => goldmine.

It'd be cool to offer some "goal templates" (e.g. "how to train for a marathon"), and allow folks to make and share their own templates. Match up folks with similar long-term goals to form a support network. You could even use that to jump-start the community... market it to a group of people (e.g. marathoners) who are already working towards some big goal.

Plus, this could be the basis of a better encouragement system. If every day's goal is the same ("run"), I don't have any particular reason to cheer you on the 12th day any more than the 9th day. But if you reached a specific milestone on the 12th day I'd give you props.

i'd be so rich right now, if it weren't for these bullshit scruples.

BUT, that said, I'm going to commit hacker heresy and recommend that you consider starting with Javascript. Here's why:

Hackery reasons:

- it's how I learned object-oriented programming

- it's how I learned functional programming. (well, ok, a little bit of Scheme helped, too.)

Practical reasons:

- in any project, no matter what the backend is, you're always gonna need JS on the front end

- with the rise of rich UIs (ajax and whatnot), people who really know their JS are in demand, and it's a niche that most hackers don't focus on

- you can learn from studying thousands of other real-world programs. (when you see something cool on some website, just pop open the hood -- or, rather, pop open firebug -- to see how it works.)

- it's the layer that's closest to the user. this forces you to keep everything in context while you hack.

- you said you're a good listener. empathy is key to UI design, so you might find this to be a good place to mix your strengths with code.

Ok, now all you real hackers can tear me apart for recommending a toy language. ;-)

I'd bet that the vast majority of successful companies start with a problem, and then ask "how can technology help me solve this problem?" Sure, there are notable exceptions that worked backward, e.g. eBay, Amazon, Viaweb. They saw the inherent potential in a technology and asked "what problem can this technology help me solve?" And, no doubt, if you can pull that off, you're probably more likely to hit one out of the park rather than "merely" build a sustainable business. But most of the stuff that programmers build these days are solutions for non-existent problems.

I'd go so far as to say that, often, those who best understand the medium have the worst ideas of what to do with it. The more time they spend on the nuts and bolts of the technology, the less time they spend exploring other domains, where they might find more interesting and mainstream problems.

I'm aguvench on gmail.

It can also do cool-in-theory but useless-in-practice things like use your phone as a remote control for your mouse or monitor the temperature of your phone battery (???). Oh, I think it'll fade the music and pop up caller ID on your computer if you get a call.

Main page: http://fma.sourceforge.net/index2.htm List of supported devices: http://fma.wiki.sourceforge.net/Supported+devices

Unfortunately, the wifi isn't free. And the bathrooms aren't quite as clean as Darwin's. =)