newy

drop me a line - euwyn at opzi.com

Opzi - Engineer - Palo Alto, CA https://www.opzi.com/jobs

This is crazy cool, congrats jiggity.

Singapore is run very much like a company. Despite being a democracy, power very much lies in the hands of the government elite. Lee Hsein Long, the curent prime minister, is the son of Lee Kuang Yew. Together, the Lees have been in power for 37 out of the 51 years of the country's existence. The People's Action Party has ruled since, well, the country started become self-governing in 1959.

The government owns much of "private" enterprise. The current prime minister is married to the CEO of Temasek Holdings, a $100 billion sovereign wealth fund that is owned by the Ministry of Finance. It owns the largest companies it Singapore, including telecon, bank, Singapore Airlines, the media, electric. For good measure, they also own the zoo and 49% of Virgin Atlantic.

The government also does a great job of recruiting talent. Males are required to complete military service - a way to build loyalty to the country and create disincentives for moving away. The government also hands out "scholarships" for US college education, but really these are loans that require one to return and work for the government for X years (5+? anyone at Stanford or Cornell + maybe others would know what I'm talking about).

All this ends up in a country thats focused, prime and nimble for economic growth. Not sure if its a good or bad thing, but certainly interesting.

Totally recommended for any college student. Anyone who has lived with roommates knows the pain of fronting a bill and having to collect later.

Congrats again to Dan + David. We're excited about their product - a real game changer.

Interesting. I would scrap the "save links for later" part of the pitch. That's not very interesting to me as a user. Yes, your product is a subset of Facebook, but you should start thinking about how to differentiate it. One good company you should look at is Plancast. They do events (which Facebook does), but it's a different use case than Facebook events. Feel free to ping if you want to bounce ideas, good luck!

Didn't we go down this path with email? We had ISPs running SMTP servers, until consumers voted with their clicks (Hotmail, Gmail) that they'd much prefer a centralized solution and were happy to trade in privacy for a free almost-always-up, for-the-foreseeable-future permanent solution. Isn't that Facebook?

This is pretty standard in SV (the #'s mentioned by Mint are market).

Creating this "repeat player" effect is awesome. Sometimes the best-drafted legal provisions can have loopholes. This kind of leverage makes everything much simpler.

what are you guys building? would be cool to check it out.

Yup, totally agree. Just a marketing thing I guess, the "App Bus" wouldn't have sounded quite as good, and I just wanted to go along with the naming. There's a real business model in this, though.

Me and Brandon have been working tirelessly since Tuesday aboard a bus with spotty wifi to create Pairwise. It's an app that lets you broadcast and receive a short message in a very small area (say, conference center). We solve the problem of not knowing who to connect with at a conference, party or gathering, or not having the right introduction to make that connection. Users can use Pairwise to meet customers, fill hiring needs, connect with others in the same space, etc. Eventually, the goal is to turn downtime into business networking opportunity, maybe say, at airport waiting areas. We still have lots to iterate on the product (like switch to LinkedIn instead of Facebook), but have been learning lots from talking to people here. It's be really great to meet and get feedback from readers of HN here at SxSW, you can connect with me through @euwyn. Any tweets to help spread the word to enable us to learn more about our proudct would be huge: "@pairwisemobi launches location-based networking for new business connections, created in 72 hrs aboard the startupbus: http://pairwise.mobi Phew, it's been a crazy week, any words of encourage are certainly appreciated.

This looks neat, really dig the approach. Confused about one thing. It states that it filtered out some relevant tweets for me - where are these displayed? Are they simply the ones that are shown at the top of my timeline?

Congrats on the launch guys! Getting everyone on the meeting team to buy into using this tool is key. I had pretty good success with using Etherpad for this purpose - found less resistance to using it since it was dead simple.

What a pain. Speaking as a former attorney, these situations piss me off. English prose really isn't equipped to handle long conditions, exceptions and such. What's important in a contract is that it unambiguously captures the intent of both parties. Formulas, diagrams really should be used more often. We're not on typewriters anymore - Word can handle graphics. If you've ever seen a complex mathematical formula written out in legal prose, you'll know what I'm talking about. End rant.

Afraid.org - freedns.

http://www.optask.com - outsourcing (research and admin assistance) at the drop of an email. We're working to open up the world of task-based work, just helped some customers with file conversion and compiling a spreadsheet of apartments on the Upper East Side. Just linked up with our first socially-responsible BPO. Really sweet that we can create fair-paying digital work for folks around the world.

Currently also interested in live video streaming (how will this space be impacted by the iSlate? Is there room to innovate beyond Justin?), mobile surveys, eBook readers (Kindle's way too expensive. I want a cheaper, more open product).

Will be @ CES, let's link up if you're around.

Head about this startup for a while. Seems like they've done a few "pivots" in their time.

Thanks for sharing this tool. Turns out I had a free account already, must have come up across it before. I'm particularly excited about Randal, which solves a (relatively) simple problem (keyword monitoring) that I haven't seen done well yet. The Voltmeter report took quite a while to complete, but other than that the UI seems intuitive. Look forward to getting a chance to play with it more, I'm working on the SEO efforts at Optask (http://www.optask.com).

College buddies - now working on Optask (http://www.optask.com)

@optask @euwyn

http://optask.com - Outsourcing on a micro level, give us a ping on twitter (@optask) for some free minutes to try out the service. Get help with marketing grunt work, simple Photoshop work, web research.

Yes, crazy either way. Happy that HN was able to provide a sanity check.

3% pre-funding or fully-diluted? 3% before a seed or angel round is minuscule.

For this to work out well the company should have a set project that's realistic in terms of the skills of the intern and the length of the internship.

Happy to chat more and see if there's a fit - euwyn@optask.com

Be very careful with these type of opportunities, especially if a lot of time has been wasted on stuff that adds very little value in terms of getting the company traction. If the company has customers already that's one thing. If the company has just some standard incorporation stuff, an idea, some failed prototypes, a bunch of sketches, etc, think long and hard before jumping on board because the other "original" founders will always hold this over your head and in one way or another you'd be second-class. A smaller percentage is one thing, but look out for any vesting or other provisions they try to bring up that may severely impact your leverage and position within the company.

Will be missing out, a little sad.

SF is definitely where the social scene in, through there are lots of hackathons etc in the Peninsula. Check out the Hacker Dojo in Mountain view, for example. I personally settled in San Mateo just to be in between SF and Mountain View / Palo Alto, trade-off between location, rent, quality of life, etc. Feel free to ping when you settle.

I'm a little puzzled by this piece. From the title I was expecting to read a proposal for a crowdsourced venture firm - a firm that made collective investment decisions and was funded my a large pool of people. There are big legal and practical hurdles, of course, to such an arrangement.

Upon a second read it sounds like the author is actually suggesting a large pool of people getting together and being some sort of LP at a VC. That's even more far fetched.

Anyone think of a way something along these lines could work?

"Guanxi" is a huge factor in dealings involving the Chinese government, and even in day to day Chinese business. One difference between the Chinese and American system of connections and favors may be that Chinese put a heavy emphasis on family relations, which doesn't seem overly prevalent here. Well, save for certain notable exceptions.

On another note, the problem of "guanxi" extends to the microlending arena. China's lending capital for microloans is small, and even then, the funds are generally directed to those with connections to the government. I'm working with a nonprofit called Wokai (http://www.wokai.org), and we're working to raise loan capital from people around the world for microloans to Chinese farmers. We operate pretty similarly to Kiva, except that due to Chinese regulations we can't return money to lenders - therefore, we solicit contributions that turn into perpetual loan capital.