I'm going to venture a guess that hosting controversial clients is more trouble (in cease and desists) than its worth.
I don't think Rackspace is hurting itself by not servicing the controversial/illegal content market.
TL;DR: Worked at Metaweb which was acquired by Google to develop for Google+. Left within a year because of a disagreement over policy against pseudonymity and the affect it has on victims of harassment. Received email from Google years later offering job.
I'm incredibly skeptical of the weak term sheets that would come out of this process. It looks like the crowd gets dilutable stock with no option for next round priority investing. Best of luck on their success - I hope my initial take is wrong, because this would be exciting at scale.
What's alarming about establishing communication best practices from the top? Having everybody use the same lingo for talking about product development is essential. This decision will help the engineering culture become inherently more empathetic to towards their end users.
Ebay isn't ignoring innovations in eccomerce. I'd point you to their x.com (xcommerce) platform - it's pretty impressive what they're doing.
check out: https://www.x.com/products
I hear you on that - but that survey monkey panel is going to cost $3-$8 a response depending on the audience you want to reach (i.e. 50 year old working men tend to be expensive), and the results just aren't that pretty looking like googles. I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook comes out with a similar product - they seem to be in a better position to give users rewards to perform MR activities, and have more data on users for additional cross tabs;' Google only has approximate age, gender, location.
This type of market research was previously only accessible to companies that could drop 10k or more on these surveys. This tool will help entrepreneurs validate ideas they were unable to test because it was cost prohibitive.
That's more of a caricature of what you go through - going through an accelerator just means you have that buffet of support if you choose to dip into it. You still spend every waking hour working on your product - sometimes you take one of those hours to meet the C-level exec from a company you admire. (i went through an accelerator in LA and that was my experience)
This article actually demonstrates Zuckerbergs savvy in being the one who took the social network to market. Mark played everyone extremely well and deserves credit for implementing an idea that everyone had. THis story isn't about coming up with new ideas, it's about shipping something people want.