rohi81

While I wish the team all the best - this site always has 501 gateway errors. Their service portal or website is terrible and constantly keeps crashing. While their supply and demand is ok and you get what you pay for.

Still amazed at the crappy technology that backs up this business and the money being raised by a team that has no interest on customer experience.

They don't allow late march filing on the site, some genius thought that instead of showing a pop-up or error message he just freezes the page. Same behavior noticed when we tried filing during off hours.

I fail to understand how they bubble up to be the top posts most of the time though?

As a first time entrepreneur hiring out interns I have had a very a telling experience. I did all the classic mistakes of basing the candidacy on certain parameters or keywords on the resume - though I believe its their work not what they claim matters. I did nt meet with much success. One of the most insightful things I learned in this process was to ask the candidate to contribute a sample piece e.g. a small piece of his work for a fictional project. This filters out many of the non-committed types. Some look bad on paper and even fail the screening questions bu their work again is revelation. We also upped the candidates commitment check by asking them to dial in and pick a screening date, fix up a deliverable (sample only) and meet a deadline. We filtered out all non-serious, non-committal candidates and those that came after this elimination by virtue have turned out to be very committed. They are far more passionate. My lessons were simple 1. Measure and value their commitment 2. Value their work and through that their passion and sincerity 3. Challenge them with adversity and discouragement - watch closely on their reactions.

After this you end up with great people. Btw - we were hiring creative interns for copy-writing job (nothing fashionable like programming). So there you go my experience on this and your article strikes a high resonance with me for this reason.

I love the visualization of Hipmunk, the problem is the leads never yield the price on the UI. It's always expensive, but I love the filters and their whole concept, wish they had better price accuracy.

I think this is a really strategic move for e-bay. They are now catering to the whole eco-system by providing a e-commerce platform (magento), payment integration (via paypal) and complete fulfillment back end via GSI commerce. If executed well they have a good chance at attracting a lot of customers. The biggest advantage is they have huge auction based commerce platform ebay itself to provide cross channel capabilities.

Thank you all for the suggestions, I think this is a good start. I am interested in Nosql suggestion, the question I would have there is how the cache would work in this cache considering object storage is going to be a little challenging.

Some pointers on programming language choices for technology would be great.

Kleinsch you have some very interesting thoughts, is there any other way I could reach you and talk in more detail?

I sincerely hope that the congress takes a good look at this in detail and pass the bill. This would help a lot of H1 Visa struggling with huge talent and obnoxious job fits, and their urge to start something in the states. Go Startup Visa!

From my perspective this is more structuring of data. If you look at the profile in the example its a very clear organization step.Advertisers will now have a better and easy targeting mechanism than the usual demographics info.This I think is more of user training where people enter the data on how facebook wants to see it; why would a friend of mine who has known me long enough need information in this structure?

Facebook is now going to be able to sell super targeting techniques to marketers. Google relied on machines to do this, Facebook just asked its users to do the same;needless to say its a master stroke :).

Truly awesome ideas; ad feedback is something that makes a lot of sense. Context based ads based on intelligence embedded on ads is also a great idea. This would change advertising from static to a dynamic in nature. Giving advertisers the control is something that would create a lot of value.

@pedalpete great suggestion about why not build the whole company around it rather than just the recommendation system. I will seriously consider this.

Thanks, Rohit

Not being a citizen of US and not being a follower of the religion of Islam (which I happen to respect like any other religion) I think this guy/ you did everything possible to freak out a customs officer. The reason I say this is you don't expect every custom official to have traveled the world and be aware of the actual culture. They only know what they have been told along with what they have heard, which is to say that they know nothing (unless each custom official has had a state department course on countries).

For a country that has been deeply scarred by a terrorist act all the officials know of is to look for some tell-tale sign of association. Those tell-tale signs as in your case may be completely bogus but they don't draw the distinction.

I agree the experience is bad and system doesn't see the difference.Let me point out that I don't support this behavior any more than you do but with the current situation I cannot blame them too.