HN user
Australia has BPAY which works great for me.
From my online banking site I have all of my utility bills appear automatically and I can add any other bills that are still snail-mailed to me. (I have about 20 merchants listed - everything from medical insurance to toll road operators). Payments can be scheduled or manual.
In the past 3 years I think the only "mundane" bill that I haven't been able to BPAY was perhaps a parking fine.
I don't know about "next", but I can't wait for extremely intelligent personal software agents. I don't have the time to browse dozens of RSS feeds, check Facebook and other networks. An agent that can browse everything I'm connected to, learn what's really important to me and then only give me the digest would be wonderful.
Going further, I want to be able to say to it: "hmmm I should get to the dentist before I catch a movie with Brian on Tuesday" and let it and my dentist's agent and Brian's agent negotiate the appointments.
A personal assistant for everyone.
Perhaps I'm a little biased from studying computer science rather than something more vocational, but as you say there are already dedicated classes for the technologies that you suggested so I think the syllabus is still well-suited for a "web architecture 101" course.
Outdated? It seems pretty good to me. I would protest the teachings of API and framework-specific topics without having some fundamentals down first. E.g., Teaching someone jQuery without teaching them bare-bones JavaScript first would be a mistake IMHO.
I imagine the Basic Web Apps and AJAX topics may well use a framework you have suggested. Client Side Scripting may touch on jQuery etc.
Once a student has an understanding of the topics in that syllabus they'll be able to leap into Rails, Django or whatever they like. That sounds much better to me than having someone know how to use one tool only.
Do you mean a universal encoding format for any printable glyph?
Well, it's a helluva lot of language research to start with. I guess you could cheat by just copying the Unicode code pages, but then you haven't really accomplished much.
Or do you mean a new Unicode Transformation Format? That may well be a fun exercise, but you'd need to have a clear idea of the problem you're solving. 7-bit gateways? Fast compression? Fast decompression? Favors common glyphs at the expense of rare ones? Random access versus stream decoding?
Some additional comments on my survey submission:
I've begun rolling my own small leaderboard & badge/reward component for my (unlaunched) site and I'd be very interested to see what your API is like.
I'm a fan of the "serious game" element on consumer sites that suit it, though have little interest in seeing badges spring up on every second site I'm registered with (let alone virtual goods).
I checked $50-100/month as I've no good revenue projections yet and my site's market is relatively niche. Badges would be a nice flair, but I don't see a 3rd-party API pulling in >$100/month in value anytime soon. My site is already based on scoring so the leaderboard element is the one I'm focusing more on at the moment.
This is a startup? Your About page freely admits there's nothing special about it, so what are your plans?
With no focus/theme for the questions other than tagging, I can see the front page having a very low S/N ratio if this gained even a fraction of the number of questions Yahoo Answers and Stack Exchange sites get.
The Stack Exchange sites have shown that having domain knowledge bleed over into other areas can be very beneficial, so I think you'd be better off giving the site some sort of focus/theme. Easier to market and more interesting for the users. Good luck.
As a hobby only at the moment, ultimately to give it away free/cheap, but it consumes my head so much I do ponder about other potential for it. One of those is its K-12 educational potential (in an alternate non-game mode) but I currently know next-to-nothing about the educational software market.
It's cross-platform OpenGL (C++ & Lua) and is basically a "unit-less" RTS with a planetary sciences bent. I'm enjoying every second of developing it.