81–90 of 437 posts
"Google used to give me a page of the right answers, fast, with no clutter. ... And the pages don't have the clean, sparse feel they used to." If you disable Javascript and cookies for *.google.(tld), you'll be greeted with Google circa a few years ago: http://imgur.com/LDBLk .
The cracks are starting to show with using Mac OSX as a primary machine for hacking. It's got unix under the hood, but every successive release has become more consumer focused and less hacker friendly. The proprietary nature of developing native apps also turns off a lot of the great OSS hackers.
If you could get an all star team together with someone like Rahul Sood to design the hardware and someone like Miguel De Icaza to design the OS and developer APIs, you'd be well on your way to tackling this problem and building the next Apple. And this time, it could be a lot more open source friendly.
"GMail is slow because Google can't afford to spend a lot on it. But people will pay for this. I'd have no problem paying $50 a month." Ok. Number of Paul Grahams in the world times $600/year = ? Most people on the web are ridiculously stingy. "I would pay for this" is a terrible way to think for an entrepreneur. Believing that what we think represents the masses is a rookie mistake.
"Would I pay for this?" is a great question for founders to ask, because it combines two of the most powerful techniques for generating startup ideas: solving problems you yourself have, and using payment as a test of how much people want something. One of my techniques for helping founders to come up with ideas is to ask them what they need so much that they'd pay for it.
In my experience, Sand Hill Road does not want "frighteningly ambitious" startup ideas if substantial capital expenditure is involved. (In fairness, they are willing to hear those pitches – I guess that's something.) > Now Steve is gone there's a vacuum we can all feel. Pixar got funded only because Steve Jobs (Steve Jobs!) paid for it of pocket to the tune of $50 million total. It's Pixar that made him a billionaire…
(In any case you can trick them by only telling them about the initial few steps.)
Man finds a black kind of rock that burns; discovers that you can get a lot of this rock if you dig deeper, but deep mines have water. In order to successfully mine this rock, man devises a steam powered engine (neatly enough powered by this same rock) to pump out the water. No, not the steam engines you're familiar with. This is the Newcomen Steam Engine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_engine The Newcomen Eng…
Man finds a black kind of rock that burns; discovers that you can get a lot of this rock if you dig deeper, but deep mines have water. In order to successfully mine this rock, man devises a steam powered engine (neatly enough powered by this same rock) to pump out the water. No, not the steam engines you're familiar with. This is the Newcomen Steam Engine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_engine The Newcomen Eng…
Parlay. Courier. Pigeon. Mail. Telegraph. Telephone. Transatlantic Comms. Fax. Early Internet. Email. Text Messaging. Live Chat. Voip. Twitter. Facebook Messages. Video Chat.
It's a naîve summary of communications history, but look at the persistence of some of the early players. Many have not been replaced to this day - snailmail, POTS, Fax, Email, Chat, VOIP, Videochat - there are fundamental reasons to stick with certain technologies (Fax, POTS, FB and Twitter excepted). There is disruption to be had, but there is still massive value in some of the oldest methods, with some evolutionary shifts.
The services need to adapt, and incumbents do restrict progress, but the 'email killer' notion is not well conceived. Most people don't use email as a 'todo' - that's an extension, not a replacement. This is why Rapportive has a market, but is not _the_ market.
Many startup ideas are about extracting a few more dollars from the end user - what kind of annoyance can we solve today? - but I think it's important to think beyond the scope of consumer products to get to the real game changers. A lot of the value being created in the digital sphere right now revolves around collecting information about people and providing it to third parties, who in turn use it to solve problems…
This comment shocks me. I'm not sure what to say. Are you being sarcastic?
An apt metaphor for people becoming accustomed to surveillance is slowly boiling frogs to death. And what is your definition of safe? If it were up to me, nobody could wear the color black at night -- too dangerous! Also, drinking too much at the club is not acceptable in my society!
I'm being silly, but where do you draw the line? It's a slippery slope...
There's a definite opportunity to build a competitor to Apple and reach the hackers first: building a better PC for hackers to create new software built on Open Source and Web technologies. The cracks are starting to show with using Mac OSX as a primary machine for hacking. It's got unix under the hood, but every successive release has become more consumer focused and less hacker friendly. The proprietary nature of d…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So if I wanted to do PixActing like I wanted to breathe, my five year plan would be a) get VC funded for anything, b) achieve a modestly successful exit, and then c) recruit one similarly situated person and just shake the money tree. Without making disparaging comments about identifiable businesses, it is not a controversial observation that proven entrepreneurs with existing networks have vastly superior access to…
I'm basically doing that, actually. Fohr has ridiculous technology, and I'm parting it out (feels like chopping a car) as you describe. I can do Fohr without the capital, it'll just takes me longer as hardware gets cheaper and my own net worth goes up. 18 month ago, it would have cost over $100 million to operate Fohr, so time is on my side.
“Our dream of building a Pixar for films that are
photographed is just weeks away from being realized.”
(Posted 4 months ago)I wonder if it bothered pg that two consecutive paragraphs in the Tactics section started with "Empirically,". I wouldn't let that slide, because it triggers pattern matching not relevant to the subject at hand.