jyothi

Thanks. I did land there too. I was hoping to see couple of more and a comparison. Have you used spreecommerce or any other?

My first thought was exactly the same - it would be for oil. It would also serve as a great investment for biofuel transportation.

I think it is back up. at least my server on hived.in is up.

Comparison ads is new - they are starting with mortgage, they will get into everything where you pick one out of many based on some criteria. With this google gets closer to the online PoS to say.

They tried a shot earlier with Google Products and now they are back with a more promising channel.

heh. It is actually fascinating how strong crowd sourcing can be. You would logically opt the manual root & surprisingly lot of times esp for cost and simplicity of solution

5-6 hrs of a good developer == 1 month of 3 ops in India or elsewhere. Except that getting ops to work itself can be painstaking.

An interesting app.

Airtel, a leading telecom provider in India had a SongCatcher service long back (3 yrs ago) http://www.techtree.com/India/News/Catch_a_Catchy_Song_with_... I never tried it - may this one worked for a predefined set of songs.

To note: "While it's not clear what Bezos did with his piece of Google, Swisher notes that his stock would be worth $1.6 billion today.

and guess there is opportunity here. FBI agents can be excellent trainers for issue tracking and documenting projects. One of them should start a blog.

And being more optimistic is the scary part especially when you don't have enough money. I wouldn't care much about how much money the guerilla's have got.

Have been through both positive and negative end result on two different products.

On a ecommerce product discovery site ReviewGist.com - we had a technically superior product, reviewed on TC and host of other big tech/startup blogs. But sustenance, financial muscle to extend reach matters a lot. Other VC funded companies marched past us long ago.

On a facebook book reading community "Books iRead/weread.com" we were new, small and of course used no budget. We bet the biggies in the market like goodreads, shelfari, librarythings who were there for long time on internet and well funded.

When it is consumer oriented business there can be wonders. But it is definitely a big red alert to watch for the biggie constantly. You get lucky if they don't do things right.

This is fantastic. And the initiative speaks volumes of why US is the hub of startups.

I would any day opt to move to US and build a company over there given US is relatively a superior matured market segment for online businesses and more than that for the excellent startup ecosystem.

In the past have built products predominantly for US audience including a book readers community on facebook (which was my baby) that eventually got acquired by lulu publishing. But now when I am on my own startup I am devoid of deeper & closer understanding into the market/customers, the US presence to promote my products and access to funds, mentors and product launchpad.

Recently got a B1 visa to visit US but I was so uncertain of even that given I am self employed, single, with not much assets and in all ways seem to fit a potential immigrant in the view of the consulate. I couldn't have thought of any way to explain the consulate "a regular job" doesn't interest me and I am not going to take away jobs.

I am sure a lot of entrepreneurs in this part of the world would be blessed and move to silicon valley following their dreams of building a business and fortune.

Agree the proposal is a bit too absurd on giving green cards right away and the mandate on funds/VC buy in.

There is a more viable proposal of offering B1s to start a company and extending it beyond 6 months based on evaluation of startup. http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2009/09/the-founders-visa-mo...

This sounds like a damn cool place to work. A startup with government and supreme security divisions as clients is definitely something thing different and impressive.

It also impressive to know that they took the plunge to take technology, data analysis to steer a field like this instead of a more chalked out field like finance sector.

Reminds me of PGs "Founders Visa" article - http://www.paulgraham.com/foundervisa.html

It is a win-win for America and hundreds of entrepreneurs in other countries where the startup ecosystem doesn't exist and ofcourse many would want to build businesses for developed economies than attempt to run something in their home economy which probably can't pay enough. They might go back and build something few yrs down the line or invest in their home countries nevertheless America would have benefited in the mean time.

And this is not even converting all H1-Bs at least the capable ones to start their own firms.

I must have missed a lot of your comments. I just went through all your threads. I must say they are tremendously useful. Thanks!

There was a time when HN first page would be more full of startup material (in which case you would have been able to educate us all lot more).

This is what necessitates tagging on HN - newmogul too could have been just one more section on HN filtered by economy and finance related threads. The community definitely has a huge overlap.

One notable observation from morning watching top searches of a client: A lot of websites which "were" high on SERP based on links are now gone.

This also connects well because of the recent change google announced in the way link juice is distributed (to avoid misuse of no-follow attribute and paid links) http://searchenginewatch.com/3633972

My account was once temporarily suspended. Reason was probably because I used to have 2 different gmail id one for personal and one for office adwords, adsense, analytics, webmaster etc.

Had a very similar experience of realizing how much we rely on google. I couldn't check my emails, could not IM anyone except for the ones on old ICQ account. Have no access to a report I was creating on google spreadsheets and fear of having lost all photographs on picasa, my reader list, calendar and more.

Google is already a pseudo-desktop/OS on the web. And if that crashes its as worse as a MS blue screen.

"The purpose is to award the most miserable employee in the world" Lets get creative - the cubicle need not be messy to be miserable.

It could be of a MS employee with a PC with a blue screen on it.

If you disagree please tell me why. not blindly down vote.

I avoided being rude for a "suggestion" which was not solicited nor rational let alone appropriate.

My problem is the misuse of facilities that is happening in the country where I live.

agree. but it is definitely not for political power. If he wanted to I think he probably had a good chance to win standing for MP elections in Bangalore.

I guess getting the political power was more of necessity here because without that authority things might not move among bureaucrats & probably also to be commanding to ensure there is no infiltration of evil influences of other ministers in the system.

And you have quoted Nilekani, what more would do you expect. You need to appreciate he is taking this up giving up a definitely more profitable & less frustrating job of heading an IT major.

Given this is not a no-brainer job and involves utilizing technology efficiently whoever would fit the bill would have some past associations which might conflict. And real business people know how to keep them separate.

And for the meta issues I would believe the team responsible are more informed & concerned of it than any of us would be.

Media in India is wrongly influencing us to doubt everything and vehemently debate every issue as if we are the experts in that area. I agree to some extent it is necessary to question to control corruption and such. Doing it just for the sake of TRP is bad for the country than the question being raised.

Knowing what Indian Media is like I would rather not want this to be debated. Given Nilekani is heading it and the fact that the government is actively working to bring in any relevant person or advise I would assume they would do a good job of analysis the pros and cons and the feasibility of it in a country like India.

Things have to start - we cannot keep debating. I understand revising or doing it again is costly in India. But whatever the current investment into this pays of in just one use of this - ensuring the facilities are not misused. I bet there is more money people are shelling out in bribes as a whole to misuse than what is required to prevent it. One investment of govt I would not complain about even if I have to pay a nominal fee for it or raise funds.

Actually we would need 2 set of numbers from PG.

[1] ycombinator visitor OS breakdown

[2] ycombinator visitor OS breakdown of people who actively contribute by voting/comments. (note intentionally avoiding the ones who post)

Given what user ratsbane reports (above) - windows 46% & mac 38% the gap is not big. So it could be like among visitors the breakdown win-(mac+linux) is like 60-30, then among ones who check out articles 45-50 and among ones who contribute it is 30-60.

Additionally it might be the case looking at comments people vote on both mac & linux as they use both and at same capacities.

I live in India & I agree - there is horrendous amount of corruption. And the unique identification number project might not change anything when it comes to illegal immigrants, terrorists.

However as the article highlights this would give me one power for which I am okay to bear the grunt of privacy issues: I can (at least proactively) ensure my identity is not misused & if it is, I can at least be aware of it - stop it & probably dig in more.

Right now I have a ration card which is particularly necessary to get a cooking gas connection (which btw is of scarce availability - again corruption). There might be a person living at my native or hometown who is aware I am not availing the facility and probably using a duplicate card or something. There is no system to quickly check if this is happening. With the new initiative I hope it would be difficult to duplicate & easy to track. At the least these processes will get digitized the right way, given Nilekani is heading it & not yet another uneducated/ corrupt politician.

Edit: phrase correction.

I think its more of a change in the thought process. A lot of times identifying the problem you are trying to solve (lets say u did start thinking of that as an idea) - provides you the solutions for the market, positioning, pricing and more. So the author's point is if you don't have a real problem you are solving - you are probably not headed anywhere. Eventually even if u call it an idea - you still got to figure out the problem to tell the user why to adopt it.

The way I see it the take away is more about the way you think about your product than about where or how you started or what terminology you give.

And also as edw519 there would be very few outliers and of course they are a gamble. Every invention is. As you mention google and twitter you should also note that figuring out how to build a business out of these ideas is hard. All search engines faced the problem - advertising made it a huge success but did come very late. Twitter for a long time now has been on the same Q.

So it does make sense to think of your product as an idea to create something ground breaking but for most part, figuring out the problem you solve simplifies a lot.

The title itself is a ton of advice. So simple and so profound.

I think 'start with a problem' - creates a clear definition of success (solve the problem), demands focus and makes everything so simple to figure out.

There is no mention of security in the PR article.

Wondering how easy or difficult it would be for someone to hack into my local opera web server? Possibly the answer is as much as they can hack into your normal web server.

I would guess a bulk of internet users would fear to use this service. They would continue to upload than share local directories online.

The most disturbing part is the number of 'Stay safe Ehsan' messages in the comments. Scary!

Stay safe Ehsan.

Think of it as any of the basic DB gui tool + visualization features: plots/graphs. You can create tables, import data from excel/csv, modify, view, visualize.

The one visualization feature I like is the intensity map - it plots it by geography. Something I always wanted to view on several data.

Slightly off-topic. An alternate idea for tailrecursion.com: how about creating a service which would provide 'unlimited' tail keywords. - the 'unlimited' part is just for the pitch to go with recursion.

This is of great interest/need to marketers and does involve recursion in a way that you use a seed to generate few keywords and then in turn use them to generate more. People would pay for it.