I really feel for you situation, and I would love to help by chatting. I've been involved in many different startups, from working with friends on no salary, to our current $12 mm series-A endeavor. I've seen tons of startups rise and fall, all sorts, and I think I may be able to lend some advice or just be a sounding board.
Microsoft owns the .NET ecosystem; they probably are looking to expand/protect their rights on C# et al. more than they want to make a direct attack on Android... (though it is a nice bonus for them.)
Basic idea is this: You put all your real-time stuff in a message queue (MQ) which communicates directly with the browser. For authentication / authorization and various other forms of permission / logging, you have the MQ communicate with the web framework via http callbacks (Webhooks) and a standard REST API. So the architecture is:
User <--Websocket--> MQ :: publish/subscribe
MQ --Webhooks--> PHP/Django/Servlets/etc. :: user signed on, user joined a channel, etc.
PHP --REST--> MQ :: publish(msg), remove(user, channel), etc.
The key is to include cookie information in the callbacks from MQ -> PHP so the callback happens in the context of the user session. Suddenly you can do things like write a chat app in 30 lines of php + js, or a persistent time series in 20, and it really feels magical.
I actually started Hookbox almost as a statement of irony, because I was really frustrated about the major pushback I was getting to sockets in web browsers at the time. I'd just finished writing/submitting the initial proposal for Websocket, and I wrote this tongue-incheeck piece about the mismatch between typical web development and network server programming: http://svwebbuilder.wordpress.com/2008/10/20/html5-websocket...
So Hookbox started as a 2-3 day project that took on a life of its own for a while and ended up being really useful. This project was one of my smaller open source codebases and to this day I receive tons of interest and requests for maintenance, though I've abandoned it for years due to time.
I'm sure there's a huge market for this sort of thing. It's great to see Pushpin, I'll definitely check it out!
I would never publicly post opinions that could put me or my current or future employer/company into legal jeopardy with respect to discrimination against protected classes.
Yet, there seems to be quite a bit of this on here.
Entrepreneurship isn't about having a magical nose for value, and unerringly finding chests of gold at every turn.
Rather, it's about the optimistic spirit, the emotional strength, and ultimately the endurance to keep going even when it's so hard you don't want to get up out of bed.
If you figure this part of entrepreneurship out, as Eric has, you can probably build something amazing.
There is so much noise out there that mediocre companies manage to position themselves as the best of the best, or at least manage to make the best companies look foolish at this point.
The problem is that it's a lot easier to imitate the talking points of successful startup than it is to actually imitate the success.
I feel like there's a lot of room for another kritik at the point when the 'quals' of this card are called suspect: Opp questions 'quals' of famous blogger, thus marginalizing independent authors in favor of institutionalized analysis... which limits free speech... leading to tyranny and nuclear war.
The Stanford Accelerator program is particularly interesting in that they 1) Have great connections, but 2) take no equity. The only catch is that you have to be affiliated with Stanford.
I was curious about the potential for returns so I considered a scenario: the successful YC companies take series A investment at an average $10 mm pre-money valuation (which is reasonable for a YC company starting off with $150k), and no series B is ever needed before exit. This gives the original investors a 1.5% stake at the time of exit.
In order to return the $6 mm there needs to be $400 mm of exits.
But I don't think it's reasonable to assume that the successful companies wouldn't take additional funding past series A. More likely, any successful company would also take series B funding. Then we'd need to see ~$500 mm - $800 mm to break even.
My guess is that these investments aren't really intended to be profitable. I would guess that they're instead a gateway into future deals that will be profitable.
I prefer Costco to Best buy any day. What matters far more is reputation and the quality of the product than the barrier to entry to join/utilize the product.
Facebook could add a ten page signup form and I doubt it'd substantially impact their legitimate signup rate.
I think you may have missed the point of the Web Store, which, like Apple & the iPhone, is predicated on the idea of selling applications that are compatible with the platform -- in this case Chrome. There will obviously be some applications that are easy to port to other platforms, depending on the specific APIs used, and some that will be more difficult. (For instance, you can't actually use an application that depends on the WebSocket rev76 API in Firefox 3.5/4, Opera, or Safari 6.0 or less.)
If a developer has an application that works in other browsers, then hey, they should go distribute those apps in more places than just the Web Store. But it only really makes sense to position the Web Store as a Chrome-specific application repository b/c Google is only really guaranteeing that these apps work in Chrome.
Google isn't lying, much in the same way that Apple isn't "basically, lying" when they fail to point out that you can play Angry Bird on Android just as easily as you can play it on an iPhone.
Its almost as if you don't realize that Twilio makes money on service usage -- that you don't understand that they're probably thrilled to see their half-formed example code encourage someone to create a real business on top of their for-pay developer APIs.
(Assuming Patrick is even using Twilio and that the code is in any way relevant.)
Please send me an email if you're interested: [email protected].