c3o

True. I guess you could just do the conversion at some later date when the computer is online -- that would still free the couple from the burden of having to do any video editing themselves, but I suppose it would be a little tricky to build.

Regarding the Animoto proposal: You should look into the Stupeflix API (http://www.stupeflix.com/api), which could easily automatically stitch the videos together into something that looks impressive. Let me know if you would like a personal intro to the Stupeflix guys.

This seems like an appropriate place to post this: Another YCombinator founder, Florian Hufsky (Claimspotting, S'08, never launched), committed suicide in December.

He could add my implementation at http://canvaspaint.org -- just a few bugfixes and style changes to do :)

I heard him speak at a media arts festival here in Vienna a few months ago.

I'm pretty sure he won't be trolling TED or throwing around in-joke references: He actually seemed pretty sick of all the mindless repetition of memes (and how could he not be?).

He's a smart and thoughtful guy, was very humble, self-deprecating and sarcastic, and had a bunch of interesting anecdotes to tell -- although it did appear that he fairly randomly stumbled into the situation and doesn't have many deep, original insights on online communities/social software/the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

Then again, I believe he same may be said of Jimmy Wales, for example...

In an ideal world the extension would only be making HEAD requests and the analytics system would only count GETs, right?

But that looks like someone's trying to protect something valuable, which could make it more tempting.

So health insurance was the only thing keeping you from doing that so far?

I agree that the invite process is all wrong, but for a different reason. Google should be encouraging users to invite others for a practical purpose, ie working on a project together. Having a specific purpose in mind when being invited to Wave would greatly help people understand and evaluate the usefulness for collaboration. Instead, people just clamor for invites to try out the hyped new thing by Google rather than to fulfill any real need they have, and then click around randomly, use Wave like a chat, and get annoyed when "nobody's online". They're setting people up for disillusionment and disappointment this way.

Probably not quite what you mean (focused more on tinkering than startups), but I can't not link to http://hackerspaces.org when I read "a whole network of hackerspaces".

I thought this might help explain what kind of value teams can derive from the events Seedcamp puts on before even picking any winners to fund, which are an important part of its model and a distinction to other micro seed programs.

For more context, some confusion but definitely also some valid criticism see the recent thread at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=844105

Why would you say "whoever puts up 50k Euros"? Seedcamp Investments LLP does.

Most medium-size supermarkets in the UK do that (Tesco Express, Sainsbury's, M&S Simply Food). I've never seen it in a large one though.

Saul Klein: "Y Combinator, by virtue of being in the valley, has a built-in network, a built-in infrastructure. In Europe, we got none of that ... We have a real problem of fragmentation, so Seedcamp was really trying to solve for that issue as much as anything else, bringing people together in a cohesive network." http://tr.im/zLzH

That's why there are lots of networking and mentoring events (local Mini-Seedcamps, Seedcamp week) up front that many dozens of teams profit from, even though only 5-7 receive an investment.

I'm sure the selected teams aren't actually legally obliged to take whatever deal is offered, at least it wasn't at all that way for us last year.

The Seedcamp fund is obviously where the money for the EUR 50k investments comes from. It seems logical to me that the people contributing the money are the audience of the final pitching round, upon which they then decide who to fund.

There are multiple other pitches (at the start of Seedcamp week, at investor day in December, etc) that are meant for a more public audience.

The Mini-Seedcamp events all over Europe and the multi-stage application/interview process offer loads of chances to get to know the people involved before participating in Seedcamp week proper.

That's exactly what I feel hacker spaces do. http://hackerspaces.org

Just in case anyone from Vienna, Austria is reading this: There's a talk on exactly this topic at local hacker space Metalab tonight: http://metalab.at/wiki/Metaday_25 [german]

Thanks in advance for reporting back here whether it lives up to these promises once you've tried it :P

Why is the data on all the traffic stats sites so far off for them? I know those sites are hardly accurate, but my own startup with significantly less than 1M uniques shows at least as equal to dailybooth.com (and more often than not towers above them) on all of Compete/Alexa/Google Trends/Quantcast, even though their graph published on TC claims >3M. Is there maybe something about the Twitter integration that those sites can't track?

That's http://streem.us actually -- you might be mixing it up with Soup.io (which is my startup) there, since the products have similarities :)

But I agree: His work is top notch.

But wasn't the requirement that a tweet fit into an SMS? How relevant the SMS medium still is to Twitter is another question...

There are "Capture the flag" contests at DEFCON and other hacker conferences where teams each need to defend a machine and attack those of other players: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_the_flag#Computer_secur...

Programs:

http://www.iventures10.com in Champaign, IL

http://iaccelerator.org in Ahmenabad, India

YEurope did provide office space.

Seedcamp: Basekit (Eden Ventures, NESTA), Toksta (TAG) and UberVu (Eden Ventures) have received follow-on funding.

But why design your life based on how happy you estimate you'll be on your very last day(s) alive? Isn't it more effective to maximize current happiness?

You can also just go hang out in the lobby for free at most of them -- if you don't care for the talks, that's just as good.

You wouldn't say Pownce tried competing with them head-on?

At Soup.io (tumblelogging/lifestreaming) we initially had content creation buttons right on the front page. We figured that the best first action for new users would be to actually post something, not filling out a sign-up form.

But we had exactly the problem you're describing: People are so used to scanning for "register"/"sign up" that some even assumed we were in invite-only beta.

We eventually changed that to a "Try it now -- no sign up required" button, which works better. The wording and UI is still tricky though: "Try it now", "trial account" etc. carry the connotation that it'll cost something later.

We've been meaning to A/B test a straightforward sign-up form for a while and measure effects on both conversion & retention, but unfortunately haven't gotten around to it yet.

This company does the software: http://www.fusiongarage.com/blog/

A problem with using the original domain as a subdomain might be that for people not familiar with your service, these URLs look more like a phishing scam than a shortened URL, quite the opposite of the intended effect ("transparency"): Would you like to go to "http://paypal.twi.bz/c"?