It looks like the BoS finally approved AT&T to compete with Comcast on the low end. SF has areas unreachable by cable (such as major swaths of downtown), and my old office only alternative was 3MBps DSL, due to distance from the CO. The roll out will take years, but at least we'll start seeing the prices come down a bit - with higher speeds! Evil competition is better than no competition.
I'm in the same boat. Started a web design and development firm 12 years ago, became one of the first Rails shops, and now I'm (finally) doing a product company.
About 6 months ago, I had an idea for a product, designed it, and put together the final team in the last 6 weeks. I've leveraged old contacts for customer development, and getting the demo done. Now we're pitching some of the largest VCs and angels in the world. Exhilarating stuff.
Maybe I just needed to find out myself, but there's a whole new energy level for myself, and those around me. I think the feeling of satisfaction has less to do with dealing with insane clients, and more to do with creating something that is my baby, rather than someone else's, though.
I remember seeing a penny auction for an iMac sell for 236 dollars. At .60 a bid, that's $14,160 in revenue, or 12k profit. Absolute insanity. That being said, I think they've hit a critical mass. What will probably end up happening is that those that buy bids realize that they're buying overpriced lotto tickets, and bore of the game. But there will always be more fools to the fire.
Feels like I just tried getting beta 1 working yesterday. Oh yeah, that was yesterday. This would be a lot easier to do if LLVM decided to play nice. Update: Just installed,and worked like a charm! Kudos, guys!
This looks like a very convenient, cheap way of accelerating page loads in Rails. Now if I can hack this to work with nanoc or webgen, it would make my day.
Good luck on this! I first heard of you through Sean, and the idea itself seemed to definitely have some legs - enabling live site collaboration should print cash. I do wonder about how the product is defensible. If I have one piece of advice, perhaps in follow up postings, add some lessons learned, inner links, and all that goodness that brings you here.
If they do, they're not particularly clear about them. Every app developer would love for Apple to post a page that CLEARLY lists rules and guidelines for submission and reasons for rejection. 4 submissions delayed our app hitting the market by about 2 months.
Isn't the question really, that if Steve's gone, will there be another breakout hit, like the iPod / iPhone, or will you just see more evolutionary products, like Microsoft does?