Any serious company should learn as much about its competition as it can by operating within legal boundaries. You should absolutely use competing products -- deep understanding of the other options available to your potential customers allows you to differentiate your service.
With my current project, we've learned about every product out there that even touches on a portion of what it is that we're trying to do. We have and will continue to learn the competition. If the existence of a feature is a competitor's entire advantage, then they either will have IP protection or they'll be out of business soon.
Use the site according to their TOS and use your real name. If you aren't abusing their service, there's nothing to fear.
Information on the web is public. I see nothing immoral about using information that your grandma could find.
I interned at a defense contractor a couple of years ago. Their entry level position required either a bachelor's degree in Computer Science or four years of programming experience. Higher levels were similarly structured -- they considered four years of experience to be essentially equivalent to a degree.
While I don't agree that four years of programming == degree, for their business, it pretty much was (I would argue that the experience was more important in this case). Most of their programming team was made up of long-time engineers turned C++ coders. Come to think of it, out of a pool of four interns, three of four were CE people they were asking to do application development.
The nicest thing I see about having a degree is that it gives you an "objective" measure of your value relative to other applicants. Its considered safer to hire someone with a degree because, hey, some college has given them credentials! You can convince people you're smart by being sharp in an interview and having an impressive portfolio, but for a true programming job where innovative thought isn't really necessary (it wasn't at this place), I see a bias towards people with degrees because its seen as low risk.
I couldn't agree more with this post. Don't pay the money just to stroke your ego.
The cofounders at my current project were antsy about having the credibility that comes with becoming "official", so we incorporated very early. Currently, we're working R&D and looking for money -- not a single investor has asked if we're incorporated or been impressed by our business cards. They do, however, want to learn about the progress we've made with our product and the projected size of our market. Use the money for marketing and product development.
Another thing to keep in mind: we went the LLC route, and its likely that if/when investment comes, we'll have to amend the hell out of our Operating Agreement.
I'm a recent college graduate with a good theoretical and practical CS background. I have three years of experience with front- (HTML/Javascript/JQuery) and back-end (Django/Redis/MySQL) web development. I'm currently the technical cofounder at high-tech company using this setup for the consumer-facing part of our project. I also have extensive programming experience in C/C++ and some experience using Objective-C and XCode to write native OSX applications.
Since I'm new to the freelancing scene and looking to make a name for myself, I'm open to discussing rates and arrangements that will make you comfortable using a newbie (though I'm very confident you'll be pleased with the final results of our work together!).
I can help you with web applications or C/C++ programming. I'm looking for no more than 10-15 hours per week. Email address is in my profile. Get in touch at any time!
The method you've used is similar to ones that FOREX traders use to value traditional currencies, which would speak to its validity. A market-basket of goods is defined, and a relative exchange rate for two currencies is based on the price differences of the two market-baskets.
A potential issue with this analysis is that your market-basket only contains illegal items -- however, even if your final valuation isn't accurate, it suggests to me that there are likely other cross-market pricing inconsistencies. I assume those are what you're interested in finding.