jorde

It doesn't really matter if a small player holds a patent as they won't have enough resources to start fighting against big guys. Patents don't protect products, good products and brands do.

Absolutely agree with OP, Spotify has a serious problem in product quality. Few examples:

* Totally inconsistent design - I think they are now rolling out a complete redesign to address this

* The current website was absolutely clueless of states when first released (i.e. showing signup buttons for logged in users)

* HTML views in the app shows/loads incorrect data

...and the list goes on. I started using Spotify when it was still invite-only in Northern Europe and converted into paying customer when the Android app came out (2009 fall I think?) but switched to Rdio recently due to all the problems with the service. The underlying streaming tech is rock solid but everything else seemed to go down hill release after a release.

Much easier path would probably to create several small SAAS product aside from your day job which create enough monthly revenue to sustain your lifestyle. While getting there might take longer, it would be definitely more stress free than running a startup.

I'm 100% Mikko knows this and he is just being sarcastic.

Here's another take on the subject: double opt-in introduction by Fred Wilson: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/11/the-double-optin-introductio...

This is what is commonly known as Two Year Rule or 212(e) which is applicable to few different situations, e.g. if you get a grant from your government for your training or your profession is on your home country's skill list. It's also pretty random and I for example was stamped with the rule but many countries issues "no objection" letters which allow you to waive the requirement. Two year rule does only affect some visa types, such as H1b but not O1 or J1 visas.

Here's more information: http://www.isso.cornell.edu/academicstaff/jwaiver.php

I founded my own company after leaving my internship position and after my J1 ended. I'm on another visa now.

To my knowledge there's no limit to how many J1 visas one can have so you could do another one in the future. The process isn't complicated but a small startup probably doesn't have experience of it so you need to do the heavy lifting there.

Added a note about this. I think there's quite a lot of these but not sure how startup friendly most of them are.

J1 visa holders are instructed to get SSN, it's not limited to citizens at all.

This was a mistake from my part, corrected.

Thanks, I'll add some of these notes later. I was also pinged about UWaterloo's unofficial guide earlier today and it's listed in links, overall good stuff about living and practicalities.

I know that J1 process is relatively simple compared to other visa types but it still takes a lot of time. I originally wrote this guide as I couldn't find a good resource and I was the first student from my school to get the J1 for a startup internship.

Two Year Rule actually applies to all applicants if they are getting money from their government (e.g. a grant from school) but it seems pretty random who gets it or not. I got hit by it but at least my home country (Finland) gives waivers for it in case I ever need to apply for a H1b.

I'm aware of the Trainee program but little short on details as nobody I know has done it. Do you know if the requirements differ much or if there's any restrictions? Happy to update the article, I'm also adding a mention about Two Year Rule (212e) as it can affect future visas.

Time magazine had another good one earlier this year: Bitter Pill http://livingwithmcl.com/BitterPill.pdf (pdf)

Tickets for the Hackathon were $99 a head but they quickly started giving them out for free. I also heard stories that people got reimbursed fro the ticket price if they had payed.

People also complaining that their apps didn't get any hits during the evaluation period [1]. If this is true, which it seems like to be, it is pretty shameful business from Salesforce given that people clearly used a decent part of their week in order to participate. I feel bad for Heroku employees who promoted this.

Edit: According to one of the judges [2], they only saw and evaluated the 5 Salesforce selected apps. Also the app gallery only shows the five winners [3]. No matter how the finalists were chosen, this is not how you run a hackathon.

[1]: http://salesforce1million.challengepost.com/forum_topics/264... [2]: https://twitter.com/alexwilliams/status/403723331007832064 [3]: http://salesforce1million.challengepost.com/submissions

Or working on their small startups which might not have time to open source components. It's easier when you have more scale, time and freedom.

I have had a debit VISA card for the last 8mo in SF with "SEE ID" in the signature part and I have been asked to show my ID probably 6 times so far.

With the background of coming from Finland and now living in San Francisco, I have to say that I'm a supporter of the "Default Employee Rules" section when it comes to working hours and fixed vacation time. While unlimited vacation policy is common among SF/SV startups it drives people to work all the time and not actually take holidays (or you're working on your holiday). No matter how much time you spend at the office people need rest.

The second author of the model is Michael Widenius, a Finn and co-founder of MySQL.

Bee seems awesome and while Basil might not get marketing, he gets it now: after a week of resultless marketing efforts he writes a blog post about it, posts to HN and scores the #1 position. Kudos.

We are but it will still need South or other app to actually command the migrations if I have understood correctly.

Django-annoying is freaking awesome, I have been using it for couple years now (get_object_or_None and render_to <3). Didn't know that you had taken it over from offline, great job.

This seems pretty excessive and I'm not even a purist (does one really need to graph models?). Only Django specific plugins that I rely on are South, django-annoying [1] and djorm-ext-expressions [2] but I couldn't see myself building anything larger without Celery anymore.

[1]: https://bitbucket.org/offline/django-annoying [2]: https://github.com/niwibe/djorm-ext-expressions

While the Phonebloks concept got a lot of hype, I haven't seen any mention of Modu, an Israel based phone manufacturer (startup). They introduced the first modular phone but it wasn't never a success and the company went bankrupt in 2011. Interestingly enough, Google bought their patents and now we have a modular phone concept from Google owned Motorola.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modu

Text sixe is controlled on the system level and you can adjust it in the settings: General / Font Size

You are true, it was our one day hack for that contest. It's weird how things have evolved in three years

Thanks! This is actually very interesting comparison which we haven't thought about earlier

We have a lot of companies using Inc to share links which are more for inspiration and not as urgent so Inc is the place to store them. It's more like a bridge between email and wikis; both communication but also a repository of useful information

Mozilla does the same thing for Firefox extensions but the experience is much worse thanks to volunteer reviewers. This is of course not consistent and your extension can get rejected based on whatever obscure reason they might have: I once got hate as I used spin.js instead of a GIF loader animation. Believe me, Opera has it good.

I think this isn't what Seth meant: there's a lot of consultancies turned into product companies but it's different to start running a startup and then to work with your clients to find product market fit etc.

I would also be interested of examples