bharath

Its easy to create perceptions of yourself that are simply not true. I was one of the people who got that mail. I really thought about shooting an upset sounding email to Paul. But thought the better of it -- amazing that every other person on that list did the same. Only when I met the YCombinators on the interviews to a subsequent cycle did I figure that they were nice people (inspite of not making it). Absolutely no hard feelings, though. Looking back, I simply was not prepared enough to do a startup. I eventually got around to realizing that I did not need money to built a product -- just a committed co-founder -- and so thats what I did. Yesterday's rejection did not sting at all.

How about this one?

http://tinyurl.com/2os5mw

A relevant quote that stuck to my mind from the movie "contact":

"Young Ellie: Dad, do you think there's people on other planets?

Ted Arroway: I don't know, Sparks. But I guess I'd say if it is just us... seems like an awful waste of space."

For an experienced team -- probably not. A bunch of 26 year olds will definitely have a crisis of credibility -- even with a functional product (which is the case with us). To a very large extent, a group like YC will give us the kind of credibility we need to approach the Indian angel/VC community. Not to mention the fact that the Indian press will love it :)

There are too many competitors in this area. The web market in India is relatively nascent and good for "me-too" ideas.

"Acquirers are less prone to irrational exuberance than IPO investors. The closest you'll get to Bubble valuations is Rupert Murdoch paying $580 million for Myspace. That's only off by a factor of 10 or so."

-- PG, circa Nov 2005

:)

This could be good news for India-focused Web 2.0 startups given the Orkut demographic.

Here is an example:

http://www.google.com/adwords/gadgetads/success/sixflags.htm...

One country that has a lot of gain from maintaining the peg is China and it happens to have the resources to do so if it comes to it.

"I can guarantee that you won't go in the order or at the pace you expected. You will need to adapt the pace of the presentation to the needs of the VC."

-- This is something I can relate to based on our YC interview last year in Boston. We actually prepared a pitch thinking we'd actually have time to parrot it out. How wrong we were :) Well, at least we know what to expect if we get called again.

Awesome. Now I can get back to reading Tom Friedman.

Startups that make what people really want are likelier to survive the downturn when it does come. For example, Peter Lynch has said that downturns are a good time to invest in companies that make breakfast cereal -- people don't ever stop buying that. A case in point are the Indian outsourcing companies that saw their stock skyrocket during the last recession -- at a time when American companies were using them as a means to cut costs.

Its interesting to see Google try and accomplish the same goals (marketshare in the online office space) through much smaller acquisitions (writely, zenter).

Seems like yet another application of Luis Von Ahn's notion of "human computation". Using human cycles to solve computationally intractable problems:

http://tinyurl.com/2wtrco

Its interesting to note that given the usability constraints of captchas people will almost always go for a "more usable" and algorithmically complex alternative if one is available. The use of akismet to stop comment spam in blogs in a case in point.

There are 2 cases to look at: 1) Personal email IDs: Most people used some form of web-based email. For those of us that use Gmail for example, I dont know if spam is that big of a problem anymore. Some spam (at least for me) makes its way through the gmail filters -- but its at a level where I can live with it. I would imagine that Google's recent Postini acquisition will end up making the Gmail anti-spam solution better. 2) So that leaves us with enterprises. The solutions proposed in the article will not work for enterprises. DKIM for example, will not work in the botnet case. CAPTCHA based solutions have usability constraints -- they cannot be mandated upon customers and others who frequently mail people within the organization. So most enterprises are forced to rely on gateway based antispam solution thats basically a cat and mouse game.

Dubai is run by folks with vision. Folks who realize that oil is a finite, non-renewable resource and they need to spend their petrodollars preparing for the day that it runs out. Apparently, its quite the tourist destination. Indoor skiing, snorkeling and duty free shopping just a 4 hr flight from Frankfurt.

Misleading title. Tor promises an anonymous source IP and nothing more. Its still good for that application.

I didnt dispute that. Its still true.

This kind of stood out:

"Read this instead: 'The Prince' by Niccolo Machiavelli. Why: It will provide you with the precise moral foundation you'll need to be successful on the corporate ladder."

I dont recall PG ever bringing this up in his essays. But I think this is why a lot of hackers gravitate towards startups. They cant get themselves to follow the advice in that book.

Well written. As someone who works for a major IPS vendor - I can point out one more area in which Gartner was way off. Namely, the market sizing for the IPS industry. We are #1/#2 in the industry in terms of market share and by extrapolating from sales graphs and such it seems that IPS is nowhere close to the billion dollar market that Gartner said it would be. Another distinction that is obvious to an engineer but not to an analyst/VC type is that IPS is just a marketing buzzword. IPS = IDS with the option to drop packets and block flows. As for your comments on ncircle, I agree that they are limping. But I am not so sure they're addressing a niche any longer. The vulnerability assessment people (worked for one of those as well) are busy going after the compliance market -- which doesnt seem like so much of a niche given the kind of $$ enterprises are spending on SOX.

I suspect that an economic downturn if it does come will be good news for online advertising. Why? Only because there is nothing quite like a downturn to accelerate efficiency. Last time round, the recession was great news for Indian IT companies -- simply because it became efficient for American companies to outsource certain things that they do. Though I dont have figures to back it up, there are quite a few articles out there that point out that the following 2 ratios are not the same (which by implication points to an inefficiency in the allocation of advertising dollars):

Time spent by people online:Time spent by people on old school media Dollars spent on online advertising:Dollars spent on advertising in old school media

The 1st ratio is of course larger than the second.

"It found that the interests of users was markedly different to that of traditional editors."

By saying this the author makes a couple of assumptions:

1) By users, the author seems to imply the same people who use mainstream media. But really, in this case, "users" are dedicated communities built around digg, reddit and delicious -- which explains the propensity for technology related news items.

2) It could be that users dont prefer to promote mainstream news stories simply because old school media is an existing reliable source of such stories. For example, you could rely on BBC and CNN to report the latest natural disaster -- digg and reddit dont have to do this for their users.

I was at Defcon this year. I must say that technical content in all but a handful of talks was non-existent. From what I hear, it wasnt always like this. It has degenerated into a sad reflection of the conference that it once was.

I did not say that. But they will need a 3rd party auditor to certify that Gmail is "secure" -- whatever that means. SOX has caused more pain than transparency..

Another trend in memory technology that I have not seen the mainstream media talk about is the "memory-bandwidth gap." Memory technology has kept pace with Moore's law (in the case of SRAM) or has failed to do so (in the case of DRAM) whereas fiberoptic technology has outpaced Moore's law. The result has been routers (which need lots of memory to buffer packets) that are slower than the pipes that feed into them. So far, these observations have been restricted to the networking research crowd. It would be interesting to see a blog/mainstream media article that talks about the commercial impact of this trend in the face of the Youtube fueled streaming media explosion.

The choice of desktop vs web for email boils down to whether you are an individual user or an Enterprise. I suspect that Xobni is targeting the enterprise. Otherwise, I dont see the point of an outlook plugin. Software as a service has been and will continue to be a hardsell for enterprises due to the security considerations of having a third party handle your proprietary information. Its not just about paranoid IT admins. Companies will probably need dedicated mail servers to be in line with Sarbanes Oxley and other regulatory laws.

Interesting observations -- esp the one about Google being an active participant and influencing the direction in which the Web is headed by interacting with other players like the SEOs. This is very similar to George Soros' notion of reflexivity. A brief intro may be found in the 1st few pages of this book:

http://tinyurl.com/3828qf

Very impressive! Its good to see YC having grown from an experiment to something thats represents a 1st step towards marquee VC funding. Khosla does not invest in a whole lot of web based ideas these days (mostly focused on alternative energy type of stuff) and the fact that xobni is one of a handful of exceptions speaks for itself I think.

Adobe is one company that has made all the right moves in recent times (acquiring Macromedia being the prime example). This elephant can dance. Every product they have to offer is a de-facto industry standard. It comes as no surprise that they sense the threat Web 2.0 poses to their business and are moving to squash it by embracing it.

Factors working against a merger are largely cultural. M$ is run by geeks. Yahoo until recently was being run by an ex-Hollywood exec. However, the fact he Jerry Yang has now returned to the helm might change things a bit.