> mobile cell tower with its own satellite uplink to reduce costs of on-the-ground devices
There is growing suspicion that microwave radiation from cell phone towers is having negative biological effects on nearby wildlife. The sooner we have the option to cheaply put these things up in the air, the better.
> Servers are cheaper than you think, if you don't use the cloud
I'm confused why the cloud is viewed as expensive. For managed hosting on a big name provider perhaps, but there are dozens of virtualization providers who are capable of providing power and bandwidth for unbelievably small amounts of money.
Sure you don't get the uptime, reliability, and support of a big name host, but it's usually good enough. From what I've gathered, twitter's growth has not been severely hampered by the fail whale, especially in the beginning.
Once you've reached critical mass, you can move on to a larger host. I think it makes sense to rent rather than own, especially if you're just starting out.
It's hard to say. It's undesirable content may have played a role in its rise to fame. Definitely bad publicity, but still publicity. And while most would not admit it, it may have attracted female viewers to the site.
There was a post in IAMA months ago on Reddit where a chatroulette exhibitionist mentioned that a quarter of the women would watch him for up to 10 minutes, often encouraging him.
Sometimes success derives from the freedom that lets undesirable things happen. In the process of stopping those undesirable things, the freedom that brought success may be extinguished.
Success in the complicated social network of the internet is complicated, and it is too difficult at least for me to make a solid guess on what will happen.