lien

i would never buy groupon stock. this is a doomed biz model because it's not based on any real technology...the entire company is mostly comprised of only salespeople, which is pretty scary.

also, when you have a business model that's not based on any real technology or a strong user base, it's hard to compete long term. Groupon could win in the short term only.

Back when Google was bidding on Groupon, a friend of mine is a finance exec at Google and he said even at $6B, Google thought Groupon was overpriced.

I totally agree with you. i personally would never want to spend all of my time adding people on G+. Why does google want me to add people on G+ in such intrusive way? gimme a break!!

OMG...I would never notify the ex-boss. First of all, it's not your position to do charity work. Notifying the ex-boss is. Then, you're putting your coworker in an unfavorable position because you don't know that he's truly going to accept your offer. If he accepts the offer and retracts it, how do you think it'd make him look to his employer? and it's not your position to tell his boss that!!

well, arduino can only take you so far and is limited in where you could go. I've known arduino as a prototyping platform only and there's very little you can go after that.

I'd start with the EVK because it has the temperature and light sensor on the board built in. GainSpan did a demo recently to control the board over an iPhone. This is something you can only do with Wi-Fi.

Well, once the prototype is done, you should be able to buy the module and look into the module datasheet to develop your own products. Also, note that GainSpan modules currently work with Freescale MCUs so you get access to their customer support team as well. (Basically you could turn on the ARM core in the GainSpan chip or use an external MCU.)

What do you want to build? It seems like you want to work with embedded systems. So there are two design considerations: wireless or non-wireless. dummy non-wireless things are that interesting, so i guess you're going to want to design a wireless device.

GainSpan designs Wi-Fi modules and the whole software ecosystem. You could prototype things pretty quickly as they already design the whole chip-level firmware and application-level software that goes into building a prototype.

what's really neat about GainSpan chips/systems/software is that they built everything from ground up, so their software is optimized for the embedded space. Sure you could take an ARM-core and design the whole circuit board, and etc, but why would you want to do that?

once you get started, you will then probably realize that to differentiate your prototype is the software and not the hardware. if your wireless device can't perform the correct provisioning mechanism to communicate with the router, you're going to have to spend a lot of time on that too.

well, anyway, I have to disclose that I used to work for a Wi-Fi chip company before we got acquired and I still sometimes do consulting at GainSpan. check out the website and get an evaluation kit to start tinkering. the EVK is fairly inexpensive and it'll help you understand the design process.

best lien

His doing a startup doesn't prevent you from doing it. An idea is just an idea - it's not a real product and it's not even a patent. There's a lot more to a startup than just an idea, and takes a lot of work.

If you're passionate enough about your idea, you'll find ways to win. Besides, no startup can succeed without competition, so in some ways, he's actually helping you to create or grow this market. Also, he cannot support all of his customers by himself so there will be other customers out there where you could serve.

I still think Wordpress is the best way to go.

You can use Woothemes with Wordpress so it takes very little customization. It's got everything and a pretty comprehensive framework and you don't have to download any Wordpress plugins to get a full site going!

wow! this is really cool! I have to test it out some more - does it come with all of the social sharing, etc?

OK. I will play the devil's advocate because I want women startups to succeed. I arrived at the site and I don't know what the site is about. Do you want me to do something? or read? It looks like a content site but i'm not sure what the content is about.

I saw that you also have a tag line "connect. communicate. change." I have no clue what that means because it is too general. "connect. communicate. change." isn't this something we all do when we get on the internet? I see this a lot, but a lot of startups try to be "marketing" and we come up with a tag line because we think it resonates with the user.

I honestly think those taglines only work when you're an established company and people already know what you do. instead of a tag line, you should maybe describe something that you want women to do when they're on your site.

because i don't understand it, those quotes with pics don't mean anything to me.

OK, now i try to click on it, and i'm directed to a form to sign up? OK, why should i sign up? what do I get for signing up?

in other words, as an user I don't know what your site does. you have to ask yourself what do you want people to do when they get to your site? that's when you create a whole marketing message that resonates with the user wrt that specific task.

hope that helps!!

these are good slides. just realized that buyosphere is the same as pinterest.

one succeeded and one didn't (or maybe hasn't yet?). my first observation about buyosphere is that the name itself drives users away. to the user, it kind of sounds like spam, a site where they have to buy stuff.

and..."pinterest" is resonates better with the user.

so give a choice, i'd probably choose pinterest, even though the two sites you could say are similar.

use ul/li/div will be better than tables. table is a bit of old school and I think I read somewhere that some newer browsers don't handle it well.

netflix users, you guys can thank me! looks like the email i sent to reed hastings positive effects now that they're backpedaling on the decision!

wow, when netflix first came out with the decision I thought it was a brilliant plan for a future business school case study of gross mismanagement of a formerly successful company.

Raising rates by 60% in a poor economy and making it hard for your customers to manage their movies? (not to mention throwing away brand equity of netflix in exchange for qwikster?) i wonder if the ceo has been on crack.

Hi PG, we submitted the application and included an idea for a business/enterprise application built on Twitter. While it is not the main idea with which we're applying to YC, it is something I've thought about for a long time.

This Twitter app is really something I wish I have. I have also seen other companies using Twitter in the context described in my application. I had even posted this idea on Facebook so that someone else could build it, but until now, it doesn't exist yet.

Please check out our application and let me know what you think.

ugh...Java...i took Java in college and found it to be a horrible language. loads so slow and not the best web dev language around.

A year ago I started learning web development and found that you have to start with a framework. I used CodeIgniter (PHP) as the code is pretty clean. It's been around for a long time so there are a lot of communities where you can ask questions. There are also a lot of books based on it.

some popular php frameworks include Zend, CakePHP, CodeIgniter.

I looked at all 3 and tested it out. I went for CodeIgniter.

Hi, I just realized there's a question to our application that I didn't see until now. I just responded to it and also emailed Harj. Thanks lien

You have to ask yourself: Are you sure you want to do QA? Some people go into QA without really knowing what QA is. QA is really a support role and won't get you very far in your career. Most people in QA do have a heavy engineering background and have an extensive programming knowledge. However, most people who go into QA do it without realizing it's not a frontline role. Try to look for a role that are customer-facing while offering opportunities to test and find bugs. Customer-facing roles are frontline roles in any company.

If you would really like QA without the customer-facing aspect, the only industry where QA is a frontline role is really in healthcare. Medical devices have to go through extensive governmental regulations and this is where QA would actually be considered a frontline role.

entrepreneurs don't have $$ to hire you and most of the time they'd rather do everything themselves anyway. you should look into contracting at a startup. it allows you to work as much as you want, or as little as you want

this quote didn't even show up on your database, "That rug really tied the room together, did it not?" whereas it's fine on google

that is not to say that you can't make it work, but it's hard...just put your shoes in the consumer...they probably go to google if they need to search for quotes...same way if you were looking for lyrics you'd go to google..and most of the time it works pretty well.

ok..let me ask you this? why can't i use google search vs. yours. I mean no one will think about suzbin when it comes to "search". the average user would probably go to google...

dang...I didn't think i'd run into this again. I used to volunteer at middle schools years ago and used NetLogo to teach girls how to program...what are you using this for

icon and fitness manufacturers do make accessories to their standard equipments. also, the thing is that they already have an installed base at gyms. these companies have a large software team and they will be able to eliminate you over time if they decide that this is big enough of a market to enter.

there are industry alliances out there whose single task force is to standardize protocols of how to make it easy for devices to get online. the current model is using the iPhone/iPod as a remote control to get these devices online so it's not that hard. this means even if your app is better, it won't survive for now, but long term it might not if the only true innovation is using image processing to capture data.

Yes, there will be people who will not want to shell out the money to buy these expensive devices. but that means that you are targeting a population who "do not want to shell out the money". You don't really want to build a device where cost is one of your biggest value propositions.

the last idea - I actually really like the idea of targeting healthcare rather than fitness. I actually want to see family members of these patients pay money to track their progress and see what doctors are saying. Doctors are more likely to pay so that they can get access to their patients' data and monitor their patients' progress over time. and yes, partnership is a big thing here because you want to focus on software innovation. by partnering up with hardware companies, you could benefit a lot from them.

there is also a company called Dossia where they keep track of health records. definitely a good partnerhsip to have some time down the road when your product is ready. it's founded by andy grove from Intel, all of my friends who are Intel employees get them for free. I don't know what type of info they keep track here, but if you allow doctors to update info into these health records, then it'd be really useful...now this product sounds really exciting to me! good luck!!

Thanks, I'd rather be the one who's obsessed than being the one who doesn't care. FYI. social media is not synonymous to socializing.

If other people are able to produce with a graph of real time data with Wi-Fi, while yours is only capable of recording one data point, then it may not make the product indispensible enough for people to use, or pay for it. You are basically competing against all fitness companies out there who already have a large ecosystem of partnerships.

let's take this one question: Nike is a standard app that comes with the iPod/iPhone. what is it about your app that makes people want to use it, as a complete replacement or as an additional value to this app?

i think to approach this one problem, I would probably draw the focus of my app into an "analysis" piece, and steer away from solely being a "data recording" piece. By being an analysis piece of software, you could look into fitness devices out there, pull data from different types of fitness devices: from exercise equipments, to fitness accessories. this could potentially be a huge win if you could pull it off. it doesn't mean that you can't provide image recognition as an additional feature, it just means that's not where the core value of the app is.

Second question, there are already these fitness social networking communities who are already doing some of this already, how do you plan to compete with them? For example, from their front page, dailymile says that it works with garmin, nike...haven't read about what this means, but my guess is that they already have these devices plugged into their social community. what kind of values can you provide here? if your app allows people to record and analyze data no matter what social community they belong to, then it might be pretty valuable.

of course i haven't done much research so i am just pulling things out of my head without giving these things a whole lot of thought. if you start thinking about making a product that is "indispensible" then it will attract a lot of fans

there's no reason why you have to tell your current employer that your offer was retracted. tell them you've given the new job a second thought and that you feel that belong where you are.

you can't sue in this situation because i'm sure somewhere inside the offer letter it says the new job/company has the ability to terminate employment at will.

There's a huge market for this, and devices like this are already on the market based on Wi-Fi, rather than image recognition. I know ICON fitness made an accessory last year that interface to standard fitness equipments, and allows you to share data with your Facebook friends.

this would be a really useful app if it's based on image recognition, but the question here is does it work? to do this, you would have to take an image, send it back to your server for computation, and pass information back to the user. you'd have to periodically feed images to your server - would it be every second? or 5 seconds? it'll be quite a CPU-intensive task, so image recognition may not be the answer if fitness companies out there are already doing it Wi-Fi.

wrt to the use model alone, if you make the user hold the device while they're exercising, no one would do that. it'd be too awkward.

And i wouldn't think about allow users to entering data manually.

just wanted to point out that this is not a website but a tool to implement for your own website...