I live in South Africa, and a load of people fly Cape Town <> Johannesburg once a week (according to your link, it's the 10th busiest route in the world). It's about a 2 hour flight.
I don't think the amazement has as much to do with the distance as it does the idea of living and working in two different countries.
In the same way as House of Cards isn't exclusive to Netflix, "Top Gear 2.0" will be sold to multiple broadcasters and distributors all over the world.
Top Gear was worth about $80m a year to the BBC in selling the series globally.
I love music startups (doing one myself). Is it similar to what Bop.fm are trying to do, but more around having a entire library of music (like a cloud-based iTunes)?
Drop me an email (in my profile) if you're keen to chat.
It looks like you've built your landing page in PHP, which is renowned for its scaling and security problems. I'd highly recommend looking into something like Scala or Lisp if you want your unlaunched product to have any chance in scaling to the millions of users you probably won't get.
I agree 100%, which is why I raised that in my post. I think it would add a lot to their credibility if they produced original websites for their startups..
I don't think any of them decided to do it for reasons of being practical. The entire reasoning behind it was that it was 'cool'. A pretty good reason, if you ask me...
You don't think it is a bit ridiculous that somebody, pretending to be Google, would go to the effort of running requests through Google App Engine, just in case somebody ran a trace against the logs in the hope of figuring out where the IP address was? All evidence points at Google and the likelihood that that's as a result of some serious planning by a paranoid scammer is unlikely.
I just applied and will be flying in from Cape Town, South Africa to attend if I make it. I've never even been to the States, but I've spent the last 5 years of my life dreaming about spending time in the Valley. This seems like the perfect excuse. No idea where I'm gonna stay, how I'm going to get around, or how I'm going to make it work, but I'm going to try anyway. Can't wait!