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Similarly, one of the most important words I was taught never to use was "guarantee".

Meh... who cares?

Bubble, recession, natural disaster, war, whatever... there is never a "perfect" time to start a business.

If you have a good idea and a repeatable model with an output that costs less to produce then to sell... start the business right now.

Forget about mysterious bubbles that other people are telling you about, get off of your couch and do it. Now.

This article is very interesting. However, while reading, it sounded like a late night infomercial. There may be real value in this style of teaching Math, but as my first introduction, this Times article feels like the sponsored hooks used for products such as those baby reading flash cards and acne medication.

I hope that the Jump system is real and that it solves the problems outlined in the article.

Here's an "Elevator Pitch Builder" from the Harvard Business School: http://www.alumni.hbs.edu/careers/pitch/

In addition to Mark's presentation grader, these things can really help.

Really? We're surprised by this?

Camera phones with video recording capabilities are almost ubiquitous. More then that, they're cheaper and solve the primary usage case better then the portable Flip cameras do. Flip cameras provided better quality portable video and now that embedded mobile technology has caught up to that quality, justifying the price to carry around another device is difficult.

Thanks for releasing the invite codes here on Hacker News, Dave.

Hmm... yeah, after about a half hour clicking the buttons, I don't think that I'll use your app more then once.

It really is a nice way to cull my followers. I'm trying really hard to keep my Twitter account topical and interesting. However, spending the time to go through each and every user more then once doesn't sound like a lot of fun.

I like this - a lot.

Please give me the option to see a long list containing all of the people that I follow.

Showing me the users follow to followers ratio as a percentage would be useful data. If I could sort the long list based on this number, it would be even better.

I'm not sure about the current Twitter TOS, but having the option to bulk unfollow with a checkbox would make things fast and friendly.

The rate of people who would visit your new product and then immediately leave would be high. Generally, this is called bounce rate.

A few people might see your product and stick around, but I think that the brand confusion (and potential law suit) might be strong enough con's to negate these few users.

Google Trends monitors search terms, not traffic. The Google Trends graph is relative to the total search volume for the keyword Quora.

Web traffic is a very different thing. It's how many people actually visit a site. Here's an estimate of Quora's traffic: http://www.quantcast.com/Quora.com

You can see that while they've experienced a significant peak in traffic that has resulted in a recent decrease, they're doing very well.

The argument presented in the article blames MySpace's decline on "staff, architecture, and business plan".

While I agree that these things are contributing to the decline in MySpace's influence and traffic, the underlying problem is the engagement of the community. MySpace is a Social Networking site that rely on a community of users.

People want to be at "the coolest party". They want to talk to the coolest people and engage in the coolest party games. In a separate, but similar example, musicians need to reinvent themselves in order to maintain their mass-market appeal.

MySpace's failure is that it hasn't re-invented itself to stay cool. Their recent design change was too little, too late and relied far too much on the past. The redesign was like "the old guy at the party" trying to make conversation - everyone feels a bit odd that he's there.

Facebook will suffer the same fate unless they eventually reinvent themselves or truly transition into becoming a Social Network Platform. Something new will come along that has slightly cooler tech but more importantly, draws the coolest collection of people.

Something I learned from business and retail:

Groupon and their clones only need to pull these types of shenanigans to scale.

If they refine the model to compete largely with themselves, in the end, the company will win.

In order to do this, Groupon (or likely a smart clone) needs to break itself apart into niches and dominate the smaller markets that they are engaged in.

"we're only 2 devs and one business guy!"

You're in Waterloo? I'm local. If you'd like to chat x@y where: x = rob.brown and y = gmail.com

You need to get rid of this error: https://img.skitch.com/20110209-rtu2pqwq6kqjqrdeuf34y6p2ep.j...

I like the idea. The execution was well done. Clean, simple, easy. Your initial landing / signup page needs some work. You did a good job of instilling trust, but I didn't know what your service did. This will have a negative impact on signups.

1) Make a video introduction. Do some grass roots stuff like sponsoring a rose exchange at a few local schools (might be a bit late for Valentines day now). Write a press release today - this is newsworthy with the proximity to Valentines day and newsies are struggling for feelgood stories. Get some testimonials. Find out when someone gets married after using your service and do something huge. Take out some Facebook ads. Do some in-game sponsorships with facebook games.

2) Users. Your product is built around users. Your product balances on trust and if you monetize too early, you won't stand a chance of being trusted. Switch when marketing is no longer a problem and something you do to continue to push the product.

3) In order: Trust, scaling technology, competing services from people with money, the "one off" usage case.

4) The design is well done. You start building trust on the first page. Inside of the app, your product is easy to understand. It's fun. I didn't like the error message above. The number of modal popups got annoying fast. There was nothing to do "after" I sent my note.

In a similar vein to what Fred is saying...

Free software, paid support, amass users, then...

Watch and listen to what features are missing and what solutions the software isn't providing... and charge for those.

I wondered about this exact same thing and wrote in length about it this morning: http://robisit.com/mahalo-version-4/

"If you remove the video revenue sharing scheme from Mahalo 4, you’re left with a ballooning group of in-house staff members that are creating content. Mahalo version 1 started exactly the same way. Large groups of people were hired in-house to generate written articles and cull popular hyperlinks. Shortly thereafter, Mahalo 2 relied on offshore outsourcing and then inexpensive remote American labor to mill content.

When thought of in this light with a view of Mahalo’s history, it starts to become clear that Mahalo 4 is an iteration that has already occurred. Mahalo is iterating over itself. Partly due to the fact that they have enough money to do so, partly because the revolving door of staff members hasn’t experienced previous iterations and partly because online video is simply making money for content companies at the moment."

I wonder how many people who run WordPress think it's pretty simple to check for malicious Javascript or PHP code in a theme?

Wordpress themes aren't the only ones guilty of this. Shady plugins also contain hidden code.

http://www.themelab.com/2009/12/08/stop-downloading-wordpres...

TAC (Theme Authenticity Checker) isn't a bad place to start searching for malicious code: http://builtbackwards.com/projects/tac/

However, the only real solution to this problem is to run a limited set of extremely trustworthy plugins and build your own themes.

I haven't had this problem and I've owned Blackberry's since they were blue.

Charged thousands of times - MicroUSB is an easy connection.

That being said, I really like the magnetization of the macbook power connector and would happily trade microUSB for something with a magnet rather than a push.

There is a good amount of demand for software jobs in T.O. Between the GTA, Waterloo and Ottawa, we're seeing a good surge of tech in Ontario centered around Toronto. It's got to the point in the past few months where finding available, good folks is touch-and-go.

However, I wouldn't limit your scope to development jobs. This sort of "chat roulette" for pre-screening is a very powerful idea.

Personally, I'd be focusing on the restaurant industry if this was my baby. They spend countless dollars on HR and if there was a way for an assistant manager to sit in an office to pre-screen for real interviews... it would be on fire. Restaurant chain owners are also very willing to spend money on technology like this. I don't think that you'd have a hard time finding low rate, non-intrusive funding from a small group of them to get the entire whitelabel thing off the ground in a hurry.

I'm not a huge Rose fan. However, I think that this is a really good idea.

I would much rather pay $4 per month for exclusive content, so I'll likely wait until it's free.

However, this resurgence of e-mail newsletters (of sorts) is timely and valuable.

Someone should build a mailchimp clone that makes it easy to distribute and charge for audio and video in addition to text.

Whitelabel - do it now.

This would be an easy sale to large companies, HR SaaS apps and especially the gambit of job search sites (Monster, etc). The job search sites can instantly turn this into an up sell.

I want this. I'm in Toronto. If you don't whitelabel, I may never be able to use this :)

I've thought that Groupon is important because it has created a new online sales niche. Creating new niches is extremely rare.

This seems almost too simple to be correct. However, Groupon has created a niche / vertical / category that enables local deals to be promoted to the masses in a new and interesting way online.

I was at a Toronto event in November that revolved around this exact topic.

http://www.aspectgraphics.com/ACCTO/A_TO_invite.html

Basically, it was a room full of startup folks, a couple of people with money talking and a few lawyers. It was more informative than it sounds.

In short, the question being asked was "what's wrong with Canadian Startup Capital?"

After the lectures and a lot of conversation about the topic with other Toronto based startup folks in addition to a few VC people, I boiled the problem down to these points:

1) We don't value our own work. To hit a product out of the park, we sort of assume (like the rest of North America) that we need to be in the valley. I don't think that this is unique of Canada though - I've talked to a lot of U.S. based startups outside of California that feel the same way.

2) Canadian investors have different investments. We like resources, land, oil, that sort of stuff. Investing in tech somehow seems un-natural to a lot of the folks with the Brewsters Millions type of money.

3) A lot of Canadian tech startups are founded in revenue. Shopify is a good example - they're making money. They need some money so they took funding, but they didn't start the company needing funding to survive.

Talking to a large number of Canadian startups over the last few years, I think that the previous point is the biggest problem with the Canadian VC industry. We simply don't ask for the money early and often enough to constantly remind people outside of the tech industry how much money it usually costs to get to revenue. A lot of the products grown in Canada are not erroneous in the least - the strong majority of them have customers and revenue in proportion to the costs they incur.

4) Last, many Canadian tech companies aren't solving big enough problems. Similar to the point above, we're focused on revenue. VC is a game best played when the players are ALL swinging for the fences. A lot of the problems that our current products solve are focused on those that have a limited number of customers so that we can quickly build and sell them a solution. VC's want to fund solutions that will impact very large groups of people, if not all 6.8 billion of us.

In the end, it's only a matter of time really. We'll have a few more Shopifies under our belt and then Film Industry won't be the only folks coming up North for a good deal :)

Deals like this are a double edged sword.

They really are great for people who have been sitting on the fence.

But new customers who recently signed up... those new customers all feel shunned and wish that they had of waited.

For me, one of your points seems to be on the money:

"Do you require them to register each application with you?"

For quite a while, Governments have wanted to accurately classify and throttle traffic / consumption for certain services. For example, in Canada, we're not allowed to watch U.S. streaming video feeds other than U.S. video advertising. There are of course stronger international examples, but in the U.S. it may seem attractive to build a registration system on top of anything built for the web so that it could be shaped, monitored and shut down.

First and foremost, we like to tell people that we have 500 million active users using our webapps. Thinking about things such as active users compared to raw signups is negative and we naturally try to avoid negative reports. Expiring passwords would be a very easy way to measure how many active, engaged members a site has. If we start expiring passwords, it will become very clear how effective our leadgen efforts are as well as how strong our communities actually are.

Generally, users come and go. We accept them as engaged, contributing users when they preform an action once every x number of days. Expiring passwords is one more hurdle that must be crossed when a user returns. Any hurdle, even an "email me a login link" will force a percentage of users to re-evaluate their desire to contribute.

People will learn that using one password multiple times has serious repercussions. Already, we're seeing the proliferation of standalone password managers and easy to use bookmarklettes such as SuperGenPass.

I think that the solution to this problem is: Any time that a user requests a new or renewed password, e-mail them a link to a trustworthy, cross platform password manager. Explain that you have no affiliation with the company you're mentioning, but in a short sentence or two, convey that using a strong, unique password is important for their security across the web.

"I think that we’ll continue to see more companies like [Groupon] who will put us to shame a couple years from now with their rate of growth."

I firmly believe that this is correct. A lot of product pitches from current or previous Google employees start with the words, "there are 6.8 billion people in the world and this product solves a problem the majority of them have".

I think that in developing new products, we get so wrapped up in current trends and crazy valuations that we loose sight of just how quickly the majority of people continue to jump on the Internet bandwaggon.

A good number of folks will complete their first purchases online this holiday season, this realization alone makes me confident that the web is far from over and that there is room for a lot of bands beside 'N Sync and The Beatles.

While I may be tired of hearing about Groupon and their clones, I know that there are more companies just around the corner that will blow 6 Billion dollar valuations out of the water.

Just to be sure that I haven't misspoken: I'm not using the word evil to say that Jason is in some way similar to the devil. He's a smart guy who I'm sure has done some really nice things. I'm using evil in the context described above.

As for the turnstile of staff at Mahalo... I don't necessarily think that this is a bad thing either. I bet that without planning, groups of staff have naturally come and gone as the product has iterated. If you're in a long iteration right now, that's great news! Maybe this is the one that will "hit". The problem with turnover like this is that eventually, products start to evolve in circles. I think that Mahalo itself is a good example of this.

You're definitely a talented guy. I don't believe in luck.

It would be time well spent for everyone who wants to be successful to take a page out of your book.