"Trying to solve the issues for the millions of small and medium sized enterprises out there that have real problems in a time of economic upheaval is smart, very smart.
But will these produce the big exits which VCs tend to demand? The jury is out"
In fact, I was wondering if someone who needs to talk out loud has a different approach of solving problems or if he has even has some shortcomings given that he is not able to keep things in his mind.
When children learn reading at school, the first step is to read loud, then to understand what they read out loud. It takes considerably more efforts until a child is able to understand a text she is reading silently.
This article may create a wrong attitude towards customers and business imo. I believe it is indispensable to go out and talk and listen to people instead relying only on online-tools (by the way, that's what 37signals always have done, too). A company that is happy to pass the sleep-test, is very likely to start drifting off...
How long would it have taken until such content had been removed at Hacker News? I guess not more than 30 minutes. Two months = #fail. A simple flag-feature would probably already do it... I hope Google draws the right conclusion from this failure.
I don't understand why Google was not able to remove the video - which was one of the most seen on the site - in time (means within few days instead of 2 months).
I totally agree that this device could replace the PC for many many people. I see the iPad as the universal remote-commander for all kind of media and entertainment. Imagine you could buy a film on iTunes and beam it into your television screen...
I wonder if it isn't a waste of energy to integrate with 10 different providers and to keep up with all API changes and being forced to find the best way to abstract all the different features of the providers into one interface...
Is this really a myth? Being the first means confronting different challenges than being niche or disrupting an existing market - like creating and educating the market. The most important point in this discussion is to be aware of the impact of being the first (if it is really true) and developing the appropriate marketing strategy.
Making money definitely doesn't take the same amount of practice as piano playing. You won't find a single world-class piano player who started playing when he was 20 years old. But you will find many successful entrepreneurs that started to get interest in making money in their twenties or even later.
The main reason is that luck alone can make you rich, but will never transform you into a good piano player.
It may help you in creating a business if money is your primary interest (e.g. Friedrich Flick), but it will even help you more when you do something that's fun (e.g. Steve Jobs).
I am really impressed by all those nifty moves Amazon has made in the last three years to become the major cloud infrastructure provider (I would have expected it from Google). Every step makes completely sense.
They were able to reinvent themselves, something very rare for economic giants...
A friend of mine trained himself to be able of lucid dreaming, but stopped with it when he began to have "nested" dreams - he thought that he woke up, but found himself in another dream (and that multiple times). That made him frightening.
But will these produce the big exits which VCs tend to demand? The jury is out"