One day your on a huge blog/well known publication and your traffic is going nuts. The next day its all gone.
One day your celebrating your investment/funding win. The next your struggling to find more money and or accept it's not going to happen.
One day your invited to demo your latest tech to one of the big tech firms thinking it's your big win you've worked years for. The next you realize/wonder damn did they just steal our hard work - why did they treat us like garbage?
So many ups and downs. Sometimes you just want to give up, but you don't because this what you love to do and if you stop/give up on one tech idea you'll get restless and do another!
One way to get onto the big tech sites is to reach out to 2nd, 3rd and 4th tier tech bloggers. A lot of the 1st tier tech journalists read and follow the 2nd and below tier tech blogs.
I'd love to find a service that shows me who reads or follows what. Also, a service that shows where the viral/press attention happened first and the press hits it received after. I was trying to do my own study last week on this in regards to the forgetify app. What started their press ball rolling? Was it here on Hacker News or Reddit? I wasn't able to scroll through the 1,000s and 1,000s of tweet to find it's first hit.
For many years I successfully defended our trademark in the app store(google play too), was even called a trademark troll. But hey we have owned said trademark for the past five years and if you don't defend it it's worthless. If you do defend it faithfully it could possibly be worth something you can sell.
Well that was my theory until one of the biggest celebrities on earth created a semi similar app and used our trademark. We tried to defend it but they didn't have any respect for our work and started to lawyer up. We had to back down!
The author who many here say he is a genius isn't much so when it comes to trying to convey his 1 percent problem. More so, with the tech elite current events being blogged about frequently.
Had he phrased it as you did above then it wouldn't have inflamed readers and the overall tech elite issue going on.
Us tech folks geniuses or not all have a lot to learn!
Quick Sam Biddle take a screenshot of this and write a hit piece on highlighting the disgusting arrogance/ignorance of yet another tech douche!
I am fortunate to get similar attention and I live on the opposite coast. I am very flattered/honored to receive constant job offers. I've worked hard to get to this point, but it could all go away tomorrow. Nothing is guaranteed.
Strange none of the big players are offering play & control audio in sync. There are a few native (seedio, tunemob) and web apps (speakerblast) that offer this already.
I think a degree is needed, but a computer science degree with today's academics is going to be lacking.
You would be better to get a degree in something you enjoy doing and find easy, while on the side build interesting projects on the Internet. Those projects can be used as your portfolio to get a job and you have a degree in something you didnt have to work too hard at. Rather you worked hard at teaching yourself how to design, code and creating cool things on the Internet!
Who cares about age overall, because it's nothing you can control and no doubt you are going to run into a lot of younger douchebags. Those douchebags will one day grow up to be nicer people, as well you'll grow up to the point of not letting other people's negativity affect you/make you lose focus of your goals!
From a 38 year old start-up guy who is still learning! Started my first idea at 31.
I use to use winamp to fill my house with audio. I had a few PCs throughout the house and had set up my own radio station. I would hit play on one of the PCs and all the computers would start playing throughout my home. I could even access and control my broadcast outside my home.
Back then I had a ton of curiosity but development skills. Tinkering as did with Winamp and other programs like edonkey and Bit torrent compelled me to create and then learn how to turn my web ideas into reality.
Start-up life keep it coming. I've rode your high and lows and will continue to do so til the end!