jaredstenquist

I was really hoping this startup was actually giving the developers a cow - not donating to an organization that donates livestock (including cows) to hunger stricken areas of the world.

I have donated to the Heifer project before, but never saw "my cow". Regardless of that, it's a great organization. Amicus on the other hand is great at getting news sites to write misleading titles about them.

Even though the Google Jquery libraries are used by a large number of top 100 sites, I prefer to serve my own files. 100k or 200k for the foundation of functionality that jquery provides isn't going to severely affect your visitors in any way.

Of course I'm assuming you're using common best practices with cache-control/expires headers.

AllThingsD needs a lesson in basic grammar. -------- "Fatdoor founder Raj Abhyanker on Thursday filed a complaint with against Benchmark Capital for interference"

with against?

--------

..."agreed at least informally to advice Fatdoor."

advise?

------

Besides the poor grammar, this case will be difficult to win without some strong evidence. I'm not sure he'll have access to the discussions between Benchmark and the current company called NextDoor.

Most of the time I have received poor results when measuring on a CPA basis, compared to conversion through other channels (cost per registration in my situation). I have had a few great successes of bringing CPA under $2 for a very targeted key words. For example a recent advertisement for a campaign we were running on the artist "Ray LaMontagne" worked superbly, probably because the keywords weren't extremely popular and we happened to be giving away VIP tickets to his show the same weekend. So it was very low friction.

As with any advertising channel, your mileage will greatly vary depending on what you're marketing, what you expect in return (branding, sales, site registrations?).

Oh any their support is second to none IMHO. I've called at any hour of the day and had a tech diagnosing my issues on the phone with no wait.

Agreed. Call Softlayer and name your price. All my servers are 50% cost of retail.

This gets more difficult the older you get - corporate job, kids, mortgage, etc...

I dropped out of college during my last year because I couldn't handle the thought of not putting 100% of my chips down on my idea. After all, the university will always be there to collect tuition.

It has taken me over 3 years of blood, sweat, tears, missed payroll, busted relationships and credit card debt to get to the awesome place I am now: great salary, 13 employees, two awesome VCs backing me and the team.

It's been one hell of an experience, but i encourage anyone able to take the risk to do it. I've learned 10x what any MBA student would in just a few years.

Good find. Ironically, I've never seen that before. Unfortunately not the first idea i've had that was already created :)

Not that I've seen before, though I admittedly didn't spend a lot of time researching this.

Great point. I think that would be a good addition. For now you can adjust the slider in real time.

Thanks! Let's get some ideas for V2. I'm considering showing things you could have bought with the money you spent. I.E., once the bill hits $1,500 it shows a Macbook burning up.

I've been planning my move of a 25gb MySQL db over to RDS.

I decided to have a downtime window in the middle of the night, versus doing a live move. I am moving from a dedicated datacenter to AWS all at once, so I'm in a different situation than those moving from an EC2 mysql instance to RDS, which should be a lot easier.

I followed the instructions from the RDS instructions, which tell you to break up mysqldump files great than 1GB and use mysqlimport to send them over.

I did some benchmarking and found the import time wasn't linear on file size. This may have to do with the fact that I was using the 1.7GB instance (which i'm upgrading to 15gb for the live site).

Interesting idea. It would be a lot more valuable with a domain name that a potential user could spell after hearing it mentioned to them.

Also - A caption for each submission would be huge.

I'm a founder of a (now) VC backed Boston startup who participated in MassChallenge. My team though it would be worth the time to pitch and get some no-strings cash in the bank. Even paying for our $5k/month office would have been awesome.

We made it to the first round (got enough votes online and whatnot). The tough part is you can get stuck with judges completely out of your industry that are clueless. Our judges were 2 lawyers and someone with a similar idea to ours ten years ago who thought his was superior. We didn't make it to the second round. I hope this year they make some changes based on everyone's feedback.

A couple friends of mine won $50K from this competition. Important to note that it's not $1M awarded to one person/team, it's split however the judges/board like.

1) Use Wordpress 2) Make posts "Private" until you are finished with them 3) $$$

25 steps? The conversion on this funnel must be < 0.00000001%

Experts Exchange was the first site I blocked with the new Chrome plugin from Google. Spam.

All is a loss. Entrepreneurs are not help personally liable for the debt in this case.

I would seek out 2-3 angels who can provide the $300k investment. It's going to be (near) impossible to get a $300k loan on $20k/month gross revenue. Definitely not something any reputable bank will put forth in these times.

You'll likely need to part with 10-20% equity in the business, but the value of the $300k to take you to the next level should make sense. Think of it as - can we get to $200k/m by 2012 if we have $300k/$600k/$1mm. If you can 10x your revenue in a year and give up 20%, you're in a good place.

CEO's who aren't responsible enough to use email and represent their team appropriately are easily replaced with a board vote.

Running into an issue:

Error: Cannot find module 'helpful/login'

Any ideas?

Much Thanks, especially from my eyes. PG's CSS coder needs to use something bigger than 10px!

Props for not letting Microsoft write the letter accompanying the phone. Candor will bring you a long way.

Odd that they didn't include codeigniter in the test

I see. I didn't look through the JS, nor have I used Quplo so I just figured i'd have to trade correct syntax for ease of prototyping using this.

I asked myself a couple of times why you'd wrap <html> in <page> lol.

license information is on the download page http://code.google.com/p/scatterjs/

but agreed, it should be in the js file itself

I downloading the js file, followed the instructions and it didn't work

A suggestion - when you post code, it's nice to have: 1) a working demo page 2) the example source code not in an image so it has to be re-typed to try

Good basic outline. It's too bad the difficult part of incorporating is the upkeep of accounting, taxes and everything else that goes with it. I too spent a couple hundred to incorporate, but thousands for the CPA, bookeeper, lawyers, etc.. to keep you in check. My startup is up to 11 employees though.

If it's just you or you and a friend starting something basic, a local business attorney should be able to keep you in check for $100-$150 an hour a few times a year. Early on I actually found some local contests for startups and won $4,000 in attorneys fees once, and once I got bigger applied for another one and received $10,000 in fee credit.

Look around, there are lots of people willing to help young startups. Offer to use an attorney on deferred payment status until you close at least a $1MM series A or have $1MM in revenue. From my personal experience many will do this for the chance at having you as a longtime client when you make it big.

Good luck!

I loved it. My only suggestion is making the non-focused images slightly opaque. I was left wondering if the severely blurred images were loading.

http://www.wakemate.com/tour/ is broken FYI - tried in Chrome and Firefox. There is no ability to move through the slides.

Besides that this looks like a great product.