It's exactly the same reason why I love GitHub. Got this moment when I forked three20 when it first published on github, and contributed a little patch to it for http auth.
As a paying user in China (just paid for my 1-year plan), I'll just continue to use Dropbox over my VPN. Such insane censorship will fall. Freedom will prevail. But I wish the Chinese government gets sued to hell over WTO violations.
Sequoia China is kind of a joke in China. Countless epic fails. But after all, the Chinese capital market could simply be too capricious and treacherous for foreign firms to explore. Or, more broadly, the VC model for the Internet is largely broken in China. There are effectively hardly any laws protecting venture business in China. Greedy partners could steal the money and disappear. The government could shut down your industry over night. i.e. the online video sharing business in China. And Sequoia China may have fallen into every pitfall possible out there.
Unfortunately these are by no means the modern web APIs as we know and very limited in uses due to their nature. A RESTful API to the imdb online database would be hugely popular.
Wow all these features will enable a whole new bunch of types of apps to be built on GAE.
The receiving emails part is an exciting surprise. I've just been prototyping an GAE idea involving receiving and parsing emails but got stuck in the conundrum of getting Python POP/IMAP libs to work around all the limitations of GAE (no socket communication allowed). I'm just about to give up and saw this news today. Woot!
I launched a personal project built with Grails a couple months ago. You might want to check it out at http://feedlr.com (which is a mashup inspired by twitterfeed)
IMHO Grails/Groovy is really good stuff that's worth checking out.
Groovy as a dynamic language on JVM is by all means fun to work with compared to Java itself. Also being a Python guy, I don't feel like Groovy is any less fun than Python, the former with more syntactic sugars. Once trying Groovy you won't want to go back to Java any more.
And Grails as a Rails-like framework for the JVM stack is like nothing else in the world of Java frameworks. It's a breeze to live with. And a perfect match for Groovy.
Having said all that, I think the biggest low point for Grails/Groovy now is its community. It's far less mature than the comparable others like Python or Ruby. The G's are like the minorities.
Edit: The framework/language themselves are also still their immature state. It's not uncommon that I find weird bugs caused by bugs of the framework itself.
And if you build your personal project using Grails, hosting is another problem to worry about. There are simply far less choices than Python, PHP, or even Ruby. You have to deploy to the Java stack and there are barely any cheap and usable Java hosting services out there. So I finally landed my project on a VPS at linode.
But the landscape seems to be slowing changing in favor of Grails though. Now mor.ph is providing easy hosting for Grails alongside with Rails.
There's also a blog post on LinkedIn posted yesterday which shares their experience with Grails. It's definitely worth checking out: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/typepad/linkedinblog/~3/31010...