why not just choose a different time of the year to run your program? You wouldn't have to convince the top companies to choose Shotput in Atlanta over Y Combinator and Techstars (a battle which you'll lose until you develop brand). The reality is that there are enough entrepreneurs who desperately need money at all times of the year. These companies may not want to wait until the summer application process and could be convinced to do shotput instead.
There are some benefits of having a 8-10 week "accelerator" program. As you mentioned, there's the feeling of camaraderie between the startups but also its easier to line up speakers, have a Demo day, and get good office space when its a 10 week program.
More consumers are using kayak, bing/travel, and other flight aggregators. Airlines are competing on the price of tickets so they tack on extra charges at checkout. Southwest doesn't play in the aggregation game so they can factor the price of storing luggage into the price of the ticket. Southwest doesn't want to commoditize their product by making their flights available to aggregators and part of that is offering a differentiated consumer experience.
This isn't the point that the author makes but could explain Southwest's strategy with luggage....
Its ridiculous to assume that a popular newsletter and site which had been running for 15 years would be "left with no alternative but to shut down" because one search engine won't index their content. I don't buy that for a second. Does ALL their traffic comes from organic search?
Also, as someone else pointed out this company's meta tag structure is awful. They've clearly invested no time in trying to optimize their site for search engines.
This is a ploy to get media attention. Why am I contributing to the probelm?
Agreed...reminds me of the story of Kayak. Apparently, when Kayak launched the airlines had no affiliate plans and did not plan on paying Kayak (which they viewed as a threat). Eventually, Kayak started dumping serious numbers of users at their door and the airlines woke up and realized that they would have to pay Kayak. Milo is in an even better position because its more difficult for a competitor to establish relationships with mom and pops stores AND gain a customer base.
I find it hardest to be passionate about my work when I'm doing mundane, uninteresting work. No job involves doing something interesting and challenging at all times. If I was 10x better at my job, it wouldn't improve how I felt about doing mundane work. In fact, I might detest it more because I would feel like my time could be spent doing higher-level work.
A couple thoughts
1). I usually love Dustin's work but am acutally underwhelmed by the design. I hate the black on white. It hurts my eyes
2.) Snail mail is meaningful becasue it shows that the person took time to WRITE and then send a letter. Its not nearly as meaningful if its typed up.
People don't bookmark pages because search engines make it so easy to find content. So rather than bookmark the php manual page on date formatting, I'll just type php dates into Google knowing that it will pop up in the first ten results. However, I also notice that I regularly have trouble locating content this way when I go back for it. This is usually when I am looking for something very specific and forget the exact query string that generated that result.
On the other hand, there are times when I'm searching for a datapoint and am frustrated that Google keeps throwing the same links at me. I have to constantly hit "next" to get the results that I want.
I wonder if there is an opportunity for a search engine to heavily invest in either providing people with completely fresh info every time they query for something or provide them just the results they've seen before.
This is probably not relevant to Duck Duck Go but thought I'd throw it out there.
Fred's response example of Google Maps really bothered me. I hate when Internet companies say "but if we wanted to make money we could advertise" Google Maps is not a recent product. Why aren't they advertising if its so easy for them to do? Wouldn't it be illogical for them to pass up revenue? the answer is that Google worries sticking ads throughout Google Maps may diminish the user experience -- which is why they can't decide to monetize on a whim.
I would expect VCs hear pitches all the time where entrepreneurs say that they haven't tried monetizing but easily can. And I imagine most of the time those pitches go in the garbage. So its interesting that Fred uses Google Maps as an example of how Internet companies can make money.
I don't think that this system necessarily would require a strict yes / no vote. I would imagine interesting commentary and feedback springing up around each idea. This system would give the entrepreneur a chance to defend his/her idea or iterate on some of the shortcomings others address. PG et al are betting on this iterative process occurring during YC anyway, why not accelerate it by making it part of the application process?
I also want to dispute the notion that life today is so incredibly busy and challenging. Sure, we work 8-10 hours a day but for the most part its doing higher level thinking and interesting work (at least for people on this board). On the other hand, jobs at other times in history required probably the same number of hours but in more labor-intensive pursuits (farming, construction, etc..).
Whether we want to believe this or not, all of us could leave our job and find something easier. We might have to downgrade our lifestyle a little but we would survive. So not only do we work jobs that really aren't that tough but we have the flexibility to leave at any time. In short, we need to stop being whiners.
Yeah I find this article meaningless as well. An exceedingly wealthy person lost half of his wealth and in relative terms to everyone else is still incredibly wealthy. I'm sure that billionaries in Russia, USA, and Middle East had similar experiences last year--who cares if the billionaires were from India?
Sorry reading that post again, it was a little elitist. We've had a lot of trouble using services like Craigslist and I thought that the same type of people would be on Mechanical Turk
Interesting...I assumed that since Mechanical Turk is pitched as a cheap solution for baseline intelligent labor, the quality of people who are part of the network is very low. As a bit of context, we need users who are willing to write reviews of online authors and bloggers. Do you think the people at Mechanical Turk can write intelligent reviews of David Brooks or Steven Levitt?
Say you are a programmer, how any opportunities do you have to get rejected 100 times