Considering how many unemployed lawyers there are these days, I don't know why any startup wouldn't automatically bring in an attorney as part of the founding team; such a person may not be able to handle all the legal challenges a startup faces, but they'll be able to spot them coming and will know when and how to engage outside counsel. At least in the US, we live in a very legalistic and litigous society: law is not something that gets in the way, it's our society's operating system and a company's legal officer works to ensure the business operates smoothly in that environment, just like the CIO works to keep the business accessible and operable via the internet.
Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding
41–50 of 82 posts
Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
My suggestion was for Blekko, where he works. It just occurred to me that there are interesting possibilities in connecting a search engine with a word processor. Anyway, even though your table/index thingy would work, it's availability and/or accuracy might suffer from whatever manual intervention which would be necessary for maintenance, but mostly, it would not have the advantage of constant updates from crawling…
> There is more to English than the OED. A while back, I saw an estimate of there being something like more than one million words in English... I can see the advantage of a cloud-hosted solution here. It's getting pretty compute/memory intensive. Still, "spell/grammar" check is something that we'll probably never get completely right. We'll just peck away and approach asymptotically. Desert/dessert and their ilk are…
"We'll just peck away and approach asymptotically."
My pigeons like to peck at things, and they seem to have success with that approach. We could probably learn something from them.
Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding
#43IANAL, but if the "mentor" is acting in as bad of faith as it appears, there may be grounds for a counter-claim of "tortious interference."
Well, as of now, we've only heard one side of the story. If I were a judge, I'd have to hear both sides of a story to make a decision.
Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding
#44How can they still respect their "mentor" when he sued them and ruined their entire Kickstarter project?
Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding
#45I don't understand why a company with such a fan base doesn't just add a "Donate" widget to their page and directly solicit donations rather than go through Kickstarter and give up 5-10%? The power of Kickstarter is attracting fans you couldn't otherwise, but they take a nice big chunk. I always wonder why companies with a great story and fan base just don't solicit their fans directly instead of going through Kickst…
And how will they take payments?
Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding
#46It feels like there's got to be more to this story than is actually included in this post with regards to the mentor suddenly opposing the startup.
More likely - "Mentor" was training (grooming) these interns so that they would eventually work at his company. Interns decided to move out on their own (nothing wrong there), Interns signed some kind of overly general internship / employment contract that included some form of non-compete which he's leveraging to strengthen his lawsuit. If I'm mistaken and the mentor's lawsuit really is as weak as the founders excla…
I am curious how much of the employment contract would be enforceable considering that the internships were unpaid.
To go off on a moralistic tangent; if the "Mentor" didn't want to create competitors he should have paid the people doing work for him.
Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding
#47It's worth noting that their campaign page has been reduced to a simple "Sorry, this project is no longer available" message.
This, despite Kickstarter's claim that projects are kept on their site forever. Their FAQ states that "Projects are not closed or taken down, they remain on site for reference and transparency.
I blogged more about this here:
http://misener.org/despite-claiming-otherwise-kickstarter-qu...
Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding
#48I don't understand why a company with such a fan base doesn't just add a "Donate" widget to their page and directly solicit donations rather than go through Kickstarter and give up 5-10%? The power of Kickstarter is attracting fans you couldn't otherwise, but they take a nice big chunk. I always wonder why companies with a great story and fan base just don't solicit their fans directly instead of going through Kickst…
I think the "pledge drive" kind of mechanics that Kickstarter uses can encourage people to donate more than they otherwise would. Sure, you can replicate this yourself (see app.net), but it's not free. Also, the Kickstarter brand.
Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding
#49The headline is misleading. It's not really Kickstarters fault. If they get legal threats concerning one of the people using their site it's quite normal to take it down, at least until everything is settled.
Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding
#50Kickstarter should rather simply put projects on 'hold' and have a dispute ticket of sorts similar to that of ebay for people to sort it out and figure it out.
In the end of the day it has to be black and white however.. one or the other... the question now is who that side will be? The kickstarter raiser or an outside third party?
It is a great shame to see such a project go down like this and I hope kickstarter is taking notice and not let something slip like this.