wavesplash

FYI - my sources say this isn't going to be released until next year.

The problem isn't TechCrunch as a whole. It's just that Mike has stopped caring so he's constantly gaming the system just to create drama. In effect he's personally become the new Valleywag.

Arrington is the master of the weekend drama.

Haven't seen anything yet either.

FYI for outsiders the main startup hubs in the area are San Francisco proper, then the area around Palo Alto (Sunnyvale up to Menlo Park). San Mateo is a lovely place, but you're not going to walk down the street and bump into your startup friends like you can in South Beach or Univ Ave in Palo Alto.

Seems like they're missing the forest for the trees. The Firefox logo could use a re-branding to be more recognizable, not have an animal showing you its back, and also to overcome negative bias in Asia (Foxes are considered Tricky - not clever).

Social anthropologist my arse. Mark's inspiration was Ryze, Friendster and Myspace (the initial feature lists are near identical). The brilliant insight was making each network 'private' by email domain and maintaining that ability to remain mostly walled off when they opened up the network to outsiders. The author seems to be confusing the origin of the name with the origin of the feature set.

re: Program mode by default

I disagree. If you have good lenses, leave your SLR in Av and use Depth of Field as a dynamic. For most sport you want to leave your lens wide open anyhow.

Jeff, sorry to hear the news. I'll always remember you pitching Devjavu back in 2006 in the stairwell at STIRR in SF.

Ruby on Wails. If only they put half this energy into improving the framework.

I can understand disk I/O limits, but I'm not buying the metadata argument on a read-mostly workload.

More detail about WAFL (netapp's filesystem) features and design in this preso: http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~ohadrode/slides/WAFL.pdf

Great for corporate documents. Overkill for photo storage.

Yea, Dr. Drama is back in top form. It was getting quiet without him.

I have no idea if it'll keep me intrigued long term, but the game blew my mind for an evening just thinking about game mechanics. The slow moving 'time waves'/windows are such an elegant solution.

Depends on who your target audience is. As of last year, DEMO had the most traditional press walking the floor (NYT, Businessweek, etc). That gets you customer penetration outside of the Valley echo-chamber. If your audience is just early adopters, TC might be the way to go.

Is the product already sold to a client/validated or are you still testing the market?

A VP Eng is responsible for providing a human API to engineering the CEO can understand. Its all about creating predicability out of uncertainty, and if the CEO doesn't feel predicability coming out of engineering, that puts his job on the line.

Some CEO's just get it, some need Gnatt charts and resource allocations on slides, some just need to to speak with confidence and act like an alpha male, etc. In short, if you can figure out how he communicates, then you're likely to get along. If not, it's unlikely you're going to make a great API/interface - and that's ok. Better to let someone else take on the role than to be frustrated.

Although I hate to advocate this, having a CTO role is a nice way to vest for another 6-12months, relax a bit and start looking for new opportunities.

Help them find a good VP, if you like the person then maybe they can help run interference with the CEO and let you focus on the things you like. If you don't like the new VP, then it's really time to move on to a new company.

Never ever pay to pitch. Not in the tech world at least.

Angelsoft is trying to monetize the introduction business from exactly the wrong direction. If they add value to Angels, let them pay.

The good Angels (and VCs) will always talk to you for free.

There isn't an 'audio right' in copyright law. The author is trying to justify the loss of an established contractual norm for a sold derivative work (a professionally produced reading) by expanding the notion of copyright. The author is confusing contract rights with copyright. http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/scope.html

Sorry chap. Mike was the kid who was picking on you in school.

pj is a good guy. Kudos and good luck mate.

Don't waste time on partnerships with potential competitors unless you just want to get hired by them. At best you're giving them a roadmap to make you irrelevant. Until you have users/revenue you really have nothing to offer but ideas to steal.

If you do make it over, here's a great resource for cheap short-term housing: http://www.airbnb.com/

May be a great group and a terrific location, but what an awful name.

The man is a PR genius when it comes to creating drama.

An alternate option is to give up some ownership of the patent for reduced cost and labor. Have you guys talked with IMSciences? They cut you a deal for a portion of the patent ownership and depending on the deal you cut can write most of it for you. (I don't work for them, nor have I filed anything with them but I have heard good things about one of the partners).

Same as you would anyone else. You tell the VC that you can't discuss the details. If they want details they have to sign the NDA for the 3rd party company. You can always talk about the commitment in general terms (revenue vs. time spent) and if it's strategic to the growth of the company. The rest of the details don't matter much unless the 3rd party is in their portfolio or a competing portfolio.

Stowe Boyd is showing his lack of a tech background here. The recycle symbol is 1 byte longer in UTF8 encoding and nobody on Windows can read it. I call Fail.

I'm running Win7 from MSDN here. Honestly if you're on Vista SP2 (pre-release) then there not enough difference in Win7 to waste the upgrade time. (Vista SP2 seems to be pretty stable memory wise - no more swapping/disk grinding for me).

Also note, if you have an older ATI video card you may need to boot into safe mode and remove the old drivers to make the screen readable. I had to run the 2nd half of the install blind (it really is beta).

Final note: watch your MP3's - check the release notes. Seems the install damages them.

"not many people" are the writers/reviewers. Scoble has a good point. The Zune network assumed you were within proximity of another Zune user. That would be cool if everyone had a Zune, sort of. If you're under 35 most of your friends have Facebook accounts and the network doesn't partition when you move 30 feet ;)