athst

With today's acquisition news, I think this is a good reminder of what happens to a lot of companies when they get acquired.

IndexTank was a good product, and it's a shame that they didn't continue with it. Yeah they open sourced everything, but that just isn't going to be the same as if the original team was still developing it.

When an acquisition happens, everyone in the valley is happy, but so often the users lose out in the end.

I think you can only say that this is a visualization of how things are in Crunchbase, not "the startup world" in general. It's ranking things based on the number of connections each thing has. For angel investors this may be a good indicator, but not necessarily for companies or VC firms.

Can anyone help me understand how this will work with the game? I don't see anything about flying virtual ships around...

I think that there's a distinction to be made between copying code and copying design.

Design is hard, and even though a design might be quick to implement in code, that doesn't mean the design was easy.

Just look at the Samwer brothers - they clone every good startup that comes out. Is what they do okay? Maybe they don't copy any of the code from the successful site, but they shamelessly copy the design, which is often the hardest part of the creation process and the main reason why the original site was so successful in the first place.

Okay, so that means I have about 60 days left of productivity/having a life

This is a really great article. I didn't realize that Slate gave their journalists a month out of every year to do something like this.

I think the description of her initially trying to learn ruby is really instructive for everyone who wants more people to learn how to code. There are just simple things you don't think about that a beginner can really get hung up on. For example, why can't you enter code into a word processor? How do you run scripts? I don't think programming books do a very good job of explaining these types of things, even now. Zed Shaw's Learn X the Hard Way series is probably the best at it I've seen so far.

great series. A couple videos I would recommend is the one with Mark Suster and the one with the Instagram founders.

I agree. You can't really criticize someone for selling, maybe they had to do it.

But it really does make you pause the next time you decide to commit to a new company. Today I got reminders in my email about how SimpleGeo and IndexTank will "sunset" their services within the next month after their acquisitions last year. I knew it was coming, but after having to spend all this time removing them from my app, I'll be a little more wary going forward of using third parties in the things that I do.

I like the point about how randomness seems to be such a big part of the process. If you're not using connections and are applying through normal channels, to me it seems like there is so much that can go wrong that isn't related to your ability to do the job. Maybe the recruiter had a bunch of email that day and missed the application. Maybe the person who screened your email didn't like the font or design of your resume.

To me, one of the big problems in the process is the lack of a feedback loop. Since recruiters and interviewers rarely give honest feedback (probably for good reason), it is hard for an applicant to know if they're applying to the right jobs or not. And faced with this lack of information that would otherwise allow you to be more effective and only apply to a few jobs that would be a good fit, the strategy becomes just spamming your resume everywhere until you get a response. On the company's end, this means that you have this extra mass of applications of wildly varying quality because no one has a clue what you're really looking for.

How could this feedback loop be improved? I'm not sure.

I think Readability's model is a little presumptuous. Why do they get to decide unilaterally that they deserve 30% of the revenue? It's not like the App Store where you agreed to it. Given all the work that goes into creating an article, is extracting the text worth 30%? If I was a publisher, I wouldn't think so.

To me, Instapaper's approach is much more straightforward. You have to have gone to the publisher's site in the first place and seen all of the ads. You pay a flat fee for the Instapaper app, and can subscribe if you like the service. Why make it more complicated than it has to be?

They've basically structured it as a business plan competition, not a startup competition. Not sure what kind of businesses they were looking to attract with this, but it doesn't seem very well suited to what we tend to think of as a "startup."

I can't stand it when sites try to be cute like this with their 404 pages. I guess it's a good thing for getting buzz, but what about a user who is actually trying to use the site and gets that page? It's awful. You were trying to complete a task, the site isn't working how you wanted, and to top it all off, now they're trying to be funny and lighthearted. It just seems like a site failure isn't the right time to be making jokes.

I agree with this - please don't make me connect with another login somewhere else. Give the choice of creating a separate username/password for the site.

This is pretty funny. Reminds me of how Steve Jobs dismissed it at the D conference when Google TV originally launched by saying something like "Google will find out in 6 months" how difficult the TV market is.

It may be superficial, but I wonder how much naming and marketing could be a factor. The name sounds a little bland if you don't know what it is. I wasn't that interested to learn more about it until I went to a meetup where a guy explained it in much clearer language and gave some examples as to where it could be useful.

It all depends on your budget and what kind of lifestyle you want, but if I had a choice I'd live in the Mission or Mission Dolores. The Mission to me feels like the most vibrant area of the city. There are a lot of the best restaurants and coffee shops around there as well. Since BART is right there, you can easily get to SoMa or downtown really easily. My second choice would probably be SoMa - a lot of tech companies there and some stuff open during the day, but at night it feels pretty dead.

I imagine this would attract a lot better audience than Startup Weekend, because it implies that you actually were able to get something started on your own.

Seems bizarre to me that he would be so dismissive, I didn't think Brin had that kind of attitude. Even as an outsider I found the memo compelling enough to read all the way through.

But it also brings up a point about Google+ that it seems to encourage long posts like this - most of the Google+ posts I come across tend to look like huge walls of text.

I don't agree with this at all. The main points seem to boil down to: "I want my smartphone to be a desktop computer." If you try to use your smartphone for the same purposes as a laptop, yeah, then you'll probably hate it, but if you approach it as a different device and explore new and different uses, the phone becomes a lot more powerful.

When it was first released, a lot of people said that it was the next best thing. Take a look at Robert Scoble's initial coverage. The only problem was that, since it was an app, I don't think they got the level of attention that they were due. If you used it back then, it really did feel magical.

Now that Apple acquired them, they can use their platform to really promote it and get it on everyone's device by default, which will help a lot more people to find and use it.

I wonder who the demographics are of the people who use StumpleUpon. I don't know anyone who uses it, and no one ever really talks about it, but somehow they manage to put up these huge traffic numbers that keep growing. It would just be interesting to see how they're growing outside of the standard echo chamber.

(1) No I wouldn't be interested in the answers to those questions for a regular person, and that's the point. Seeing extraordinary people in ordinary situations is interesting. For example, I would like to see Barack Obama walk into a Starbucks and order something. I would like to see how Bill Gates shops for groceries, if he does at all. In the press, you only get one view of a person, and it is often repetitive - unusual situations can be a lot more telling about the real human underneath.

But even if it wasn't interesting in itself, there is more to this story, because there is so much subtext. The story doesn't work for a regular person because a regular person wouldn't have helped create that camera. A regular person wouldn't have a company that tourists would want to get their picture taken with.

(2) It is not unsurprising that he acted like this. After reading all of the other stories about him, one might think that he wouldn't stop to help. Another type of celebrity or CEO would have been offended that the person didn't know who he was.

(3) Judging and trying to guess about his character is part of the fascination of all this. Since he was so reclusive, we really don't know what he was really like. And maybe little moments like this give a little insight into who he was.

This is an interesting story precisely because it is so ordinary. Over the past week we've heard and read so much about all of his grand accomplishments. After all of that, this is a little story that reminds us that he was a human being.

And it's not an inane story either. How often is he not recognized in public? Does he get pleasure when he sees a family using his products? You'd like to think that interactions like this made him happy, and that's what makes it sweet.

Stock wordpress install? Come on guys

Like everyone else, I'm happy for the founders. But as a Typekit customer, I was pretty disappointed to see their email announcement about this today.

They were doing well and were on to something big - why did they have to sell now? I love their product, but they still have such a long way to go and so much they could improve on. It just seems so early and unnecessary.

I agree entirely. Sites like Youtube and Yahoo! Answers have been maligned in the past couple years with the rise of sites like Quora and Google Plus, but to me, the interaction on Youtube feels a lot more human and authentic than on the other sites. You don't even have to build it up into a whole thing about free speech. It's just that there's something about those communities, perhaps the anonymity, that allows people to be less guarded and it gives you a stronger sense of community.

Who cares how viable it is? The fact that he built it, and it sorta works, is awesome.

If you said this came out of DARPA instead of some guy in China, I doubt you'd get the same critical comments.

I have the 13" i7, and for me it's great for web development (I do rails). The three-finger swipe to switch full screens introduced with Lion is actually really awesome for doing terminal stuff.

The screen size only becomes a problem if you're doing stuff like Xcode development with the iPhone simulator open, because there just isn't a lot of space. In that case I much prefer to have a big monitor, like 27".

I agree with this entirely. I was at a company that used Jive software. While it was better than anything we had before it, it wasn't perfect either. I would have like to try out other tools instead. The problem was that it was implemented in a top-down fashion without any input from the people who ended up having to use it the most.

That's how I feel about a lot of "enterprise" web products these days - from the outside they seem very successful because they have good sales teams that can convince managers to implement the product and get big sales numbers, but the product is actually lackluster and employees would use something else if given the choice. The power of the sales organization hides deficiencies on the product side.

I like this idea a lot. I wish you could just view the listings on the site instead of having to wait for a weekly email. That's what I was expecting, and having to wait is just annoying.