You're looking at it way too absolutely. The author's point wasn't to say you need to spend every waking minute creating and all other time is wasted. They/we should consider the ratio of time spent creating(and doing -- not all doing is creating), vs passively consuming. In the modern technological world, there are more ways to fill your entire existence with consumption than ever before. The point was to be conscious of that and achieve a balance, because creation/doing tends to have more lasting personal value.
The title is literally "Consume less, create more," not "Consume none, create always".
The site design alone really is a superb lesson in simple effective good-looking usability. As someone else pointed out: one click ordering, brilliantly-worded concise text, good design, immediately understandable purpose and call to action. These things all instill confidence, and are no accident. Anyone who's ever tried should know how difficult it is to make something "simple"... so yes I'd say your years of hard work have paid off.
+1, Excellent post. You should have a blog or something...
I've noticed this too when examining what I view to be problem spaces. Often there is truly room for technical innovation alone - a better way to do something - but it is only when this technical innovation actually addresses a pain-point that you end up with something great.
For example I've been looking at some ideas in the personal debt-reduction space lately. It's easy to dream up technically better tools that could help people visualize and track how they can pay off their debts and build wealth, but that would require the assumption that the tools alone are people's only pain point. Paying down debt isn't fun. It takes a long commitment with no short term reward. It's not sexy. Work from these assumptions and somehow address them and you've helped solve a pain-point. Work from the assumption that we can build a better tool with feature x, and you ignore the real problem, and your real opportunity to address it.
If you're just looking to prove out a concept and see if there could be any interest/traction for it, I would feel comfortable going ahead and scraping (but be smart about it). To me that means: know your target (big corporate sites vs JimBob's autos), throttle your requests (both the frequency with which you scrape and how rapidly you fetch pages), and how obvious it will be where you got your data.
But from your Q's it seems like you're looking at whether or not this is a longer-term viable idea. Hopefully some smart people will comment with experiences/facts on the legal subject.
All that legality may not matter so much if you can position yourself as a clearinghouse where these other parties just have to have a presence to survive, instead of a competitor?
Google has a ton of decent into, search for "oracle vs mysql".
Both have their respected places, but Oracle is in general "more". More complicated, more difficult to install and configure, more flexible, more powerful, more money. If you don't need "more", then MySQL is quite capable.
This is one of those questions where people tend to reply with semi-snarky advice like "as much as you can get" or "it's relative". And they are right in a sense.
Still, based only on my own past experience (assuming your review is a positive one) I'd say 4%-5% is fair... more than that seems like a clear reward and message that "we need to keep this person", and less than that seems like "eh, here's something".
EDIT: As to your second q: knowing what similar people in your industry and area are being paid might be a good figure to know (and if you can do it tactfully, bring up) - but being able to point out some of your accomplishments in the past year that the reviewer may not remember or be aware of will probably get you farther.
I think you could have one sort of flowchart at the top of the graphic, using arrows to indicate how my servers and devices can be pushing out calls to your service etc.
I don't know the ins/outs of what you're doing, but think:
my server -> your awesome service -> oooh charts
Then underneath this main simple illustration, perhaps in grayscale, you could have an example of the "old" way to do something like this (and point out why it sucks).
Very strong idea, and it is apparent that a lot of thought and work has went into this already. Functionally, the reports and questions etc seem great! In general, it feels a little bit overwhelming at first (a lot of info on each page, but some of this feeling may just be minor design cues like font choice, size, colors, margins, padding, etc). It was difficult to know where to start or what to look at first on some pages.
Looks like a good MVP/start. It wasn't immediately clear what the service does, but it was pretty close. (I'm saying this is a good thing, but could be made great.)
I may be picking nits, but I think the word "innovative" in the leading sentence could be replaced with a more descriptive adjective that better defines what the service actually monitors. "innovative monitoring service" vs "____ monitoring service". Sorry, no suggestions off the top of my head.
I think the two sentences in the "REST API" section are good, but are just begging for a graphic to illustrate it.
Anything in particular that you are looking for a review on?
The tradeoff is control vs speed/efficiency. Generally, I agree with you (and prefer to just rely on my own function library), but for the most part this is for somewhat dogmatic reasons like "you know every character of code..." etc. While those things may be true, they don't necessarily make my code any more secure, bug-free, or well-written. Recognize that any popular framework has had a lot of eyes on it and any pain/problems with it will have been fixed. The idea that you know every character of code and therefor have more "control", is not entirely accurate and probably misses the point.
I understand why you may have framed your question the way you did, but isn't getting a domain before knowing what kind of business you're going to create a little backwards? If you're going to attempt to compete in the payment space, you'd need a great niche, or else do a bunch of things better/cheaper than the others. There may be more room in B2B, than C2B/C2C.
The .ly domains are attractive, especially considering so many great names under that TLD are still available. However, I'm personally a little wary (whether there is just cause to be or not) and I would be wary x10 for anything commercial/financial.
If I were you I would never use the description above ever again and just stick with "tymr is a social network where you can find, create, share and promote any type of events".
This is a very fragile (but interesting!) idea. I would focus hard on finding ways to line up a steady stream of interesting (hopefully viral) content... the fragility of the concept all hinges on that. You may literally want to create some pages yourself, or solicit freebies from clever folks, or even pay or otherwise encourage some great content.
As a user/visitor, I'm going to need a compelling reason to visit your site everyday, and "what would happen if the banner ad and the site content switched roles" isn't very enticing. Now, a cool piece of interactive art one day, a great 24-hour deal the next, followed by a free album/song download from a few artists, with a clever game the next day... these are some of the kinds of things that may give you traction. It's got to be "wow this site has cool stuff everyday" not "let's see what ad is up there today".
It's a chicken/egg horse/cart problem, but you're probably putting the cart before the horse if you're thinking monetization and advertising right away. I'd think of it more like "send in your cool stuff and we'll pick the best to display for 24 hours" and see if that works.
Again, great idea, but you have to prime the pump!
I'd argue that in an ideal world even 30 seconds is too generous. This is why the tagline is so prevalent: summarize what you're doing in as few words as possible. Less than 10 is okay, less than 5 is ideal.
The title is literally "Consume less, create more," not "Consume none, create always".