John212

The majority of projects created by people here on HN have been impacted in some way by the work of Steve Jobs.

Give us all a few hours.

I agree that their search engine and ad platform could be classified as monopoly. However I disagree that their actions have been anti-competitive in any manner.

They have a huge chunk of the search market but you can still use very good search engines like bing, yahoo, ask, aol or the awesome duckduckgo.

Google is continually tweaking and improving the design, speed, results and features of their search engine in an effort to stay ahead of the competition.

The reasons that people don't use the other engines are not because of google being "anti-competitive" but rather due to them offering a superior service.

> If your startup is involved with search aimed at the consumer market, watch out...Google is coming.

Possibly... However sites like hipmunk will be used as a comparison in so many press articles and blog posts when google starts pushing this.

Many start ups have won against google. Google Notepad & Evernote, Google Wave & Twitter, Google Ride Finder & Uber etc...

.. but I still wouldn't want to be in this space right now.

I'm not sure what you mean by a WIFI SIM card. A SIM card is designed to run on a GSM network.

Outside of a wifi area you would need to use some sort of network to transmit your data.. there really is no option other than a GSM/CDMA carrier.

Also, we have the problem of distribution now. Microsoft doesn't have the same retail presence that Apple has. Google proved that selling handsets direct to consumers doesn't work that well. Nokia closed down their stores in NYC, Chicago and London. Think of the retail stores that T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint etc have across the country... there is no way to compete with that.

The GSM protocol is design to handle voice data and is well optimized and uses surprisingly little bandwidth. Skype is much heavier on bandwidth in comparison. The skype protocol wasn't designed to be used as you walk through areas of low signal or for 1,000 users going through one cell phone tower at once. For simple voice data... the GSM protocol wins hands down.

If you want to imagine any Microsoft/Skype/Nokia/Windows 7 mash up.. what if they adapted the Skype p2p technology for use on handsets to allow you to connect through other handsets to get to a base station? This will allow you to route around network congestion, prevent dropped calls, reduce network infrastructure and increase network coverage.

Nokia makes the cell tower infrastructure through Nokia Siemens... If anyone could do this, it is Nokia. Imagine how hard carriers would push a p2p handset. </dream>

Yup, flippa.com. It is more for sites than startups.

> first thing should definitely be hiring a lawyer, though

I guess this depends on how much money you lost, if you are willing to throw good money after bad, if you had any sort of agreement that you can show your lawyer and if this bloke has any assets.

You may spend a lot more time and money than you lost pursuing this...

Not at all. The timing on this was perfect.

Today is a holiday, so there is no trading... but it is a weekday so the press will have this thing over and done by the end of today. Tomorrow it is old news.

Tomorrow is also their earnings announcement. That will have a bigger impact on the stock than Steve taking time off.

Tomorrow they will talk about Mac App store results, 10 billion apps sold, Verizon estimates and drop hints about revenue from their new products in 2011 (iPad 2 etc).

This was well planned.

Well.. you could but you would need the IP address also.

You just need to check if the request is coming from a T-Mobile IP, or any other GSM carrier in the USA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_wireless_...).

This wouldn't work outside the USA (unless you want to research the carriers) and most people would be connected to wifi.

So, this wouldn't really work. It would be much easier with a BlackBerry as they transmit the vendorID (a type of carrierID) in the UA. You could easily check this with the IP.

Nope, we have this too. I know Chase & BoA both do it online.

This could be fun. I'm in for Nov 28th.

Could we arrange to start voting for the best apps on Dec 1st?

Re: "Not as Described" - You will still get those customers that have buyers remorse or just simply don't want to be charged for the item they received. You will find the customer service reps that make the decision on these cases spend a few minutes on each. Unless you have an awesome case the buyer will win.

The fact that this item is part of a service should hugely reduce fraud.

In all honesty you should be fine. I would start out with some pretty solid rules; only ship to the US, Canada & Western Europe, only ship to paypal verified addresses and IP location should match the billing address (< 150 miles). Once you find your feet I'd start relaxing these rules and plug any holes in the system if they appear.

If a paypal dispute arises, call the customer.

I have dealt with fraud prevention for non-physical goods both with PayPal and a merchant account. It's a small start-up, annual web orders of $1m, average purchase price of $16.50.

We were hit pretty hard with fraud (when we first started, Aug/Sept 09) but we now have it down around 0.5%.

I know you don't want a commercial offering but we had great success with maxmind (http://www.maxmind.com/app/ccfd_features) it costs about $0.015 per order.

Here is how we did it... We tested every order through maxmind and using the fraud score we divided them in to three groups, low, medium and high risk.

* Low risk orders were fulfilled as normal. * Medium risk orders had to do an automated telephone verification (we used twillo for the calls, we mapped distances from area code to billing address and rejected voip numbers). * High risk orders required one of our support staff to call and confirm the order.

Recommended reading: http://www.detectmalice.com/

However, I don't think stolen cards will be your main issue. Unless you have tracking numbers for all your shipped orders people are going to open claims with PayPal. PayPal always favor buyer and you will find people abusing the system. Be prepared for a lot of "Not as Described" claims because the item didn't match the users expectations. This isn't a one off, this happens often.

The software wouldn't need to be touch, they could have a separate section for desktop apps.

Can you imagine the revenue stream for Apple if you could get desktop apps on iTunes?

I'm not at all concerned about it as they couldn't make it exclusive, people would run to windows... but they would still achieve a huge market share.

Maybe OS X 10.7?

They state the complaint was from a contractor. This line would suggest that he may have been giving business to them, possibly unfairly.

Focus as much time as you can on the start up over the next two years and try to get it profitable but most importantly keep the job.

If you hold on for two years, you will end up with a solid start up, a green card and in addition to your salary you'll have another revenue stream.

That's a very nice way to enter your thirties.

Hang in there!

Yup, but it is still very much in its in infancy as far as features are concerned.

IANAL...

You could get an E2 visa and be self employed. You need to have funds invested in the start-up usually more than $50,000.

However, with Walsh and Pollard, (20 I. & N. Dec. 60, 63 (BIA 1988)), the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) held that substantial investment of $15,000 was sufficient.

An E2 visa has no route to a green card and usually needs renewed every two years.

You best bet would be to find employment in the US and have them sponsor your visa/GC.

Following on from that..

On the homepage: * I would limit your popular cities to the top 4 or 5 as some only have 1 or 2 items listed. * I'd limit the recent activities also, you have some from two days ago.

Freemium may work if the free package has your logo/name and and a link back to your site on the users FAQ page.

If you get any reasonable volume on your free product, this could work well for your SEO & brand.

It would be helpful if you could create a CSS file with only the used CSSed and allow the user to download and save it.

Maybe even optimize the file by removing all spaces, tabs, line breaks.

Well done Gabriel. I'd love to read an article on how you created this, the problems you faced and your thoughts on the future of search.

I think it would be fascinating!

Bought a copy.. good luck =)