It never ceases to amaze me how companies will spend months trying to find someone with skills that take weeks to learn.
631 karma · joined April 28, 2009
No kidding. What Montreal has going is pretty impressive, but Quebec has an abnormally high personal income tax rate and the language issue is always going to hang like a cloud over it. I know everyone in Montreal speaks english, but the default is French and all public signs are too. While some Canadians will put up with that because our country is founded on playing lip service to bi-lingualism, I can see it as a massive barrier to importing American talent in.
And what percentage of people do you "drop"? I imagine once you spend a week with someone you might get attached to them enough that it would be hard to let them go for something subjective unless they were a pretty big asshole.
I doubt RIM unintentionally let this slip through, the "RIM jobs" joke is as ubiquitous as "that's what she said" in Waterloo.
The rules are changing, its less annoying for American VCs to do business in Canada with the removal of the Section 116 stuff in the most recent budget.
While I appreciate there are a few hardcores who will want to answer questions on the go, I can't see that being a big priority.
Haven't gotten around to making workflow to add new ones automatically though, school and work take a toll.
Not sure if this is any more true, but it may not have been as impressive.
It also makes you stand out in a very basic way. In the stack of 30 resumes, you'll be the one person who could articulate in 1 page where everyone else took 2.
A lot of their marketing is focusing on how great BBM is and how buying a Blackberry gives you access to this exclusive network of people. BBM is also the source of all those issues in UAE and India where its so secure that governments were threatening to block Blackberry because they couldn't snoop on BBM messages. Basically, BBM is the killer app on Blackberry.
Kik would commoditize BBM across any platform allowing users to freely move between them. The literature for Kik itself describes it as a BBM for all platforms, and I can see how RIM would be concerned that they'd lose one of their few advantages in the smartphone market if Kik supplanted BBM. Again, not sure if this actually was the "behind the scenes" cause, but RIM would definitely have a motivation to kill Kik.
"The first generation works their fingers to the bone making things, the next generation goes to college, innovates things, the third generation...snowboards and takes improv classes".
Soon enough, there will be asian students who take improv classes who's parent's will bitch about their school spots being taken by super-students from Elbonia
"At one extreme is the sort of pork-barrel project where a town gets money from the state government to renovate a vacant building as a 'high-tech incubator'" -http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html
Seems like a local government committee was tasked with improving startup conditions and they fell back on the idea that every other local government has tried in order to make their own silicon valley.
I ask, not to be snarky, but out of actual curiosity, has any "incubator" or "tech park" kicked off a successful startup community, however small? Or do they all just end up being government subsidized office space?
Founders care about their companies the way parents care about their kids.
I've seen this asymmetry cause some issues where founders don't get why their employees aren't as enveloped in the company as they are. A respectable salary and less than a percent of the stock doesn't get the same commitment as a founder does.
Similar to an idea I showed earlier on HN (http://laughlitmus.feedladder.com), I'm basically trying to generalize this as a "Reddit for tweets" to create a collaboratively made twitter feeds. Idea being others could make a group-administered feed on a particular subject.
1 - Replacement for RSS. Follow the blogs you do on RSS and get push notifications of updates. Authors sometimes have smaller things to say than a blog post requires, so the feed acts as an added feature.
2 - Follow the doings of "niche celebrities" like Eric Reis and PG. They give advice and comment on recent events, but aren't really popular in the mainstream sense.
3 - Follow more general celebrities. It gives people you are a fan of a direct line to you independent of traditional media outlets. Think Conan when he was without a network, and Kevin Smith is doing some interesting things as well. Sure, Kim Kardashian has a huge following which she uses to hock products, but there is a massive audience who wants precisely that.
4 - Comedy feeds. I find when comedians have only 140 characters, the constraint makes the jokes more punchy. (plug: my traction deficient app http://laughlitmus.feedladder.com is trying to capitalize on this; viral loops are a bitch)
5 - Real time events. You'll hear about an earthquake on trending topics before any media outlet.
6 - Following privacy paranoid real life friends. Twitter has a dead simple privacy model. Either people can publicly see your feed, or they have to approve you. Some people I know got fed up with the Facebook privacy shell game and switch to Twitter for this.
7 - Connecting with a loosely coupled community. For those of us not in the valley, finding fellow hackers can be troublesome, and when you do, you don't really need a heavy connection, but following each other on twitter is a nice lightweight way to see if the local tech event is going to be hacker or muggle heavy.
8 - Location based chat for conferences. Hashtags allow for people to mark a discussion about anything, and a lot of meetups will tell you the recommended hashtag so you can see what people are discussing in a specific place.
I hate is the whole "Twitter is just people talking about what they had for breakfast" complaint, it really just meant you are following boring people. There actually exist a non-trivial set of people I know whom I am friends with on Facebook (and real life) but wouldn't follow on twitter because they're tweeting about stuff I have no interest in.
Also, get a retainer. Took my 18 months to get money from a friend's company once. Retainers get rid of so much BS.