wavesplash

Palm Pre is .19 of an inch thicker than the iphone, and over half an inch shorter. Great size for an average hand or a pocket. Here are the numbers:

http://palmpre.org/palm-pre-vs-iphone-storm-g1

One lame excuse laden rant by an author too insecure to let people post detracting comments (Hi Armin - love the selective deletion). Bitbucket copied GitHub. Copying external structure is flattery. Can we all move on?

You're an Apple fanboy :) 5 million devices sold isn't a dominant market position in the mobile market. It's a drop in the ocean. The market is still wide open and Palm may just have invented the best crossover device for casual users (small form factor) and business users (real keyboard).

The app store issue is moot. There isn't a killer must have app that would keep people on the Apple platform. Facebook is the killer app for the under 35 crowd and it's integrated into the Palm. The iPhone could take note.

It won't be better? I find the iPhone annoying, large and clunky. I'd buy a Pre today if it was out.

I'm with Halo, I haven't bought an iPhone because of the lack of keyboard, didn't buy a blackberry because the apps blew and the UI was annoying, and was waiting for Android v2 phones before taking Android seriously. The Pre is near ideal - keyboard, touch, beautiful layout, time tested base apps, and a great size for the pocket. And frankly the marketing is pretty slick - perhaps not geek slick, but it has total business appeal and a well trusted name. Now if only they'd ship sooner.

If you're in a startup, check out Microsoft's BizSpark program for startups: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark

Basically it's the full MSDN for 3 years. It also includes hosting deals for the server products. At the _end_ of the 3 years you have to pay $100. Overall pretty sweet if you're using the MSFT stack or need the OS's for testing.

If you're a Stirr member they can connect you - there are also other partners you can find on the bizspark site.

Do you want hacker groups or entrepreneur groups? They're different beasts but also useful. Perhaps a different page for the entrepreneur groups.

Github + Lighthouse works pretty seamlessly for us. I wouldn't go back to self-hosted system. Why are the team members concerned? Lighthouse+github really beats the pants off of Trac IMHO.

1) I dug up the following table - it doesn't appear that SOX killed the IPO. There were over 150 IPOs each year from 2004-2007:

http://bear.cba.ufl.edu/ritter/IPOs2008VC.pdf

(The question is what the heck is going on in 2008?)

2) Yes, we are getting better quality. If you were around for the fluff IPOs of the late 90s you'd agree. For every Kana Communications there were at least 9 other immature flops like pets.com, etoys.com, flooz.com that died within 3 years.

3) Companies get to choose their own destiny. If they're ready to IPO they'll swallow the $5million overhead of SOX and head out to the market. Those that can't swallow the cost or time will either have to wait or find alternate means.

That said, SOX is still a beast born of a knee-jerk reaction and I'd love to see it streamlined. But there's some good in there.

Not a graph, but here's a table of IPO data:

http://bear.cba.ufl.edu/ritter/IPOs2008VC.pdf

Here's an IPO table covering 1980-2008:

http://bear.cba.ufl.edu/ritter/IPOs2008VC.pdf

Interesting to see that 2004-2007 there were over 150 IPOs. 2008 has just 20, roughly half venture backed.

correlation != causation.

Pure subterfuge. A thinly veiled attempt to justify tax cuts and deregulation. AIG was killed by accounting? Try again. SOX hasn't killed the IPO, it's just made the hurdle higher and that's ok. IPOs are about consistent revenue generation - most of the firms of Web 1.0 didn't have it and didn't deserve to IPO. The WSJ has truly been compromised by Murdoch. NYTimes editorial on the death of the WSJ: http://tinyurl.com/6f879h

It must be the weekend. Nothing but drama on TC again.

You can tell a conference was boring if the most exciting bit of news is meta news about Silicon Valley's drama queen.

Corollary: apply basic sales pipeline management techniques to everything (fundraising, customer acquisition, pr, market discovery, etc). The only place this gets dicey is in product development. Products are like girls you're starting to get serious with. For any significant product with a small team, you can only really devote detailed attention to one. On the bright side, your customers will help you decide which girl you should be spending the most time with.

The exact opposite of that statement is true. It's easier to pitch investors with an innovative service with a solid business plan that looks like 100x growth in 5 years. It's much easier to raise your valuation with real user/subscriber/customer growth and a well defined sales cycle. The A tier investors see the good deals long before they ever break on TC/Om/Cnet/etc.

Getting a meeting on Sand Hill Road isn't hard. If you're relying on a blog to get your investment, you're doing it wrong.

Why do you care about TC/GigaOm? Neither of those sites will drive significant traffic. Concentrate on SEO, real/traditional press, and smaller blogs. If your site handles free calls internationally, hit the blogs that target large groups of overseas callers. If you're trying to compete with Jajah, you may wish to study their marketing.

I'm not sure New York is going to be a great help unless you're targeting news shows / talk shows. Los Angeles is the main post production hub.

Brilliant, thanks. Prawnto rocks as well, y'all might make the links to both projects bigger.

Are they still trying to claim the bs 5% of your company?

Translation: we got $40k and some second tier press. For free that isn't bad, but I'd still pay for DEMO if I was launching a consumer product - they get real press (magazines, newspapers, etc) for the cost of 1 month of a PR firm. Now if that was free, that would be sweet.

While you're still young and solo Kaiser Perminante has some cheap plans to check out. Some folks hate Kaiser, but if anything serious goes wrong, Kaiser has one of the best operation records of any HMO. When you guys have some cash consider a PEO like Gevity or TriNet. They can get you bigco benefit plans for your startup at reasonable cost.

Wow, TC is getting you to do free PR for them. Pay no mind. I doubt TechCrunch would have written about the site to start with, If you want users then then target publications in your service's niche (user numbers count, everything else is fluff). TechCrunch desperately wants to be 'the place' to launch, but the dirty secret is that the traffic they drive isn't sticky.

Classic. The guy behind Omnidrive's inability to stay functional is claiming to have a clue about twitter's scaling issues without interviewing anyone on the team? Isn't that like asking George W. Bush to write the handbook on Mideast Diplomacy?

"Everytime you say Web 3.0 a startup dies" http://hubber.blogspot.com/2006/06/web-30-kills-startups.htm...

Download a copy of Bruce Eckel's Thinking in C++. He's superb at bringing to light the quirks of each language he writes about.

http://www.mindview.net/Books/DownloadSites

You can send one of 'em my way.

DevHouse FTW

Paul has created exactly the opposite effect he was hoping for, talk about giving Valleywag free PR.

I'm sure Owen and crew are plotting a year's worth of articles just to ruffle Paul's feathers now.

I guess there's a hidden PR lesson here:

If you don't like someone or something, just ignore them. Or better yet, create a system so the group can collectively tune them out.

Corollary:

If you want to get someone attention, create drama.

Paul, Leave Valleywag alone. They're just a symptom of a bigger challenge. Let's fix the moderation system so we can squash any obvious linkbait.