skowmunk

agree.... I hope the wireless careers can give some stiff competition to the wired incumbents like comcast, road runner and their ilk.... that did be nice!!!!!!!

There are a lot of areas which need critical breakthroughs to solve the increasingly critical circumstances casued by increasing population, increasing buying power and limited resourcs. The list would be a very very long.

But the single area that can accelerate developments in almost all areas is easy availability of massive, cheap computation and probably automated - impying AI, and the ability to use that.

Thank you all for the suggestions. Its given me a lot of food for thought.

I am not sure if this is a direct answer, but I think it can be indicative of possibilities. I worked with a contractor on Odesk, he was based in India. This is what used to happen - I used to pay him through Odesk, he had a paypal and XOOM account, and a bank account in an Indian bank in India.

He used to transfer money from his Odesk account to his Indian bank account using Paypal and/or XOOM.

Btw, fyi, I am based in the US.

A question you may have to answer yourself might be:

1) Are you looking to have a safe job type career?

or

2) Are you trying to build something that you have in mind?

That was very funny!

That was good advice. Thanks.

I guess thats true, at the end its like any other relationship.

Like the ref to "I love you, Man", watched that movie. I see what you mean.

quite often, in such company sales as well as in stocks/real estate and many other forms of investments, the sale price is a function of future earning potential. Of course, the future earning potential is not often the sole factor, but probably the single most dominant factor in the equation.

Even current profits/revenues are seen as an indicator of future health (along with being an indicator of current health) of the company.

$3 bil might not be much in the not too distant future. New markets that were not practically existent before or are far from being mature, are coming up online - read, india, china, brazil, south east asia and what not. Their online advertising industries have hardly developed, not that those in US or Europe have really matured. There's lot more to come.....

New models like twitter have shown quite a good capability in penetrating not only the developed markets, but also the developing markets. Of course, it still has a long way to go.

Nice reply, also gives a good idea on the complexities/challenges involved in scaling up a startup to global markets.

Around 5 years ago, I read an interview given by Bill Gates. In that, the inteviewer remarked about Gates' reputation for having in-depth knowledge on diverse subjects. And the interviewer asked, if Gates could just understand anything and everything.

I don't recall the exact wording of it, but this is the gist of it as I recall:

"I read a lot, on very diverse subjects. There are a lot of things that I do not understand at first read. But irrespective of whether I understand it or not, I complete reading them. Then I re-read them. I re-read to the extent that I want to understand them in depth."

Also, he claimed in the interview that he completely avoids watching TV, that he instead spends time reading.

May be that is the secret to his smartness.

Couldn't help adding this on:

Don't go on in the fear of another burnout. It will severely curtail your pushing yourself to your limits. Its only by pushing your limits and breaking them that you expand your limits. And it's by expanding your limits that you expand your capabilities.

Use the knowledge that you gained from your previous burnout to backoff when you are approaching another burnout. And if you did go through another burnout, use your experience from your last burnout to learn how to recover from this burnout. And then, keep pushing yourself on further.

Let the fact that you recovered from one burnout be a source of confidence. Thats one way to see it. The other way would be to keep going on in fear of another burnout and fail to try expanding your limits and capabilities.

It would depend on what I am tuning my life for at a particular period fo time.

Earlier, I used to tune my life with the purpose of filling two of my biggest bottlnecks to reaching my dreams, experience(/knowledge) and money.

I used to work long hours at my regular job to learn as fast and as much as I could. Then I used to go to another city on the weekends to do weekend work and make more money as future capital.

My way of living also used to be dead cheap (it still is, but with a different focus though). For a year earlier, I used to live in a 10' by 8' bedroom with just an airbed and the rest of the room filled with the all the rest of my belongings.

I also stopped cooking and became dependent on cheap, lean frozen foods from walmart and ethnic stores. In my view, when doing two jobs, the cooking and cleaning is an utter waste of life and time that can be better spent acquiring knowledge, including how to make money.

Later, I started a company while working fulltime. Then I started tuning my life to let me do that. Cut down social life and other thigns to a bare minimum, still lived cheap provided it didn't cut my ability to what I had to do, cut down the earlier weekend job.

Now I spend time learning stuff that would enable me to run my company better, execute ideas better, reaching out to my friends who might be insterested in joining what I am doing.

i still dont' cook and clean, waste of time especially when you know how to eat cheap. The airbed burst a few years ago, now I sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor - good way to remind I haven't reached my dreams yet and not oversleep too!

"....BioNectar4534.... " of Merc - that is so funny. Where do they come up with names like these?

The energy density of batteries is probably going to be the single most critical deciding factor for future car weights. The day the battery densities reach 10 times the current ones... the possibilities would be very, very interesting...

got a thought I had to unload:

What if there were a site where non-profit orgs, non-government orgs or charity orgs can post 'jobs' (unpaid) on a website and people can volunteer themselves to particular jobs?

I believe there are sites for it. But, how about points being given for each job actually done?

What if people can compete for max points in a time? and the winner gets a prize from a company which wants to 'encourage' good stuff for their own marketing purposes or whatever? (the prize gotta be a 'bonus' not the main attraction, otherwise it may not fly in the long run, hmm.. or who knows)

Would that result in more people doing more volunteering stuff?

A platform like facebook can easily implement such stuff, probably. and get some 'good' rub off too

good question.

a compact answer to that question could be either

"yeah, the market is limited to those who have already discovered the gains in productivity by using multiple screens and are addicted to screen space"

or

"Well there is research that supports that increased screen space increases productivity and reduces fatigue, now its a matter of people discovering it because of an affordable and light enough as a magazine solution"

if the same miniaturization technologies as Ipad were used, wouldn't the 15" have a lesser weight/unit screen area, when the computing electronics/battery components are removed?

Or for that matter another pure screen gadget the same size as Ipad, it would be lot lighter than the ipad itself. wouldn't it be?

so true and in some completely different areas too - the vhs-betamax wars, the HD/Bluray.

Probably one is going to be brewed up between bluetooth/wifi direct or mebbe its already won, before it even started.

that indeed would be a problem.

I wonder how much power the Ipad screen uses.

hmm... mebbe a regular power cord would be required.

wouldn't a permanently attached second monitor increase the form factor of the laptop itself?

That did be a great idea by itself.

Still, when wanting to carry a really small laptop, an ipad is quit an additional weight.

I am not very surprised......I like to use a combination of physical and digital copy of a book. Sometimes I just like to write down notes, hell lot of them while learning something new from a book, makes it lot more interesting and engaging.

Once I do some basic learning, its great convenience to be able to search for exactly what I want to refer by using search in the soft copy.

Features-wise, two things would be critical for me to switch completely to e-books:

1) Abitlity to take notes or jot down thoughts on the sides of the pages or markup/underline important sections - can't do without it, it would be too boring to even try reading without being able to do that.

2) Ability to look at multiple pages at the same time - can't do without that too. sometimes its just important for me to be able to look at different pages without having to scroll through the whole lot of pages in between

Coming to think of it, these are not impossible for a dedicated developer to do - probably the pages of interest could be tagged that would allow toggling and can be looked at in multiple windows within the same app window, like looking at multiple files in excel.

somebody gotta try it!

Its a great idea. It might even boost the already good cooperation that I think exists amoung the start ups.

Somehow, the idea that having this cross equity holding is going to be damper on one's motivation to build their own start-ups seems moot. Who wouldn't want to make more money if their idea seems good enough?

I would pay with a very significant part of my life and current resources to get my dream job - running a profitable business that would make enough money for me to experiment with more ideas that would in turn help me make more money :) (Gosh, I must sound greedy! got to keep it self-sustaining, right?)

Somebody out there who can get me my dream job? :)

Dunno abt poor people gambling more, but they sure can get educated more - so that they can at least calculate their odds better.

very good article.. some incredibly powerful (yet simple) statements...

somehow... I think the nature of engagement with religion of the very intelligent 'believers in religion' is probably very different from the type of engagement of the typical beliver (in religion), baring the inevitable exceptions.

For a person who can distinguish between the 'good' and the 'bad' within the teachings of a religion, for one who likes to have some guidance(or examples) in how to behave 'morally' in different situations in life, there is a quite some good stuff in the teachings of most religions of the world. (I am most definitely not referring to the 'faith' part of the religion, here)

Moreover.. in spite of the many horrible things that religion has caused over ages, in the society, I think it can do more damage if 'religion' was completely removed from many socieities of the current age. Not all.. the more advanced and legally stably societies/civilizations can probably deal with its removal lot better than some on the other side of the spectrum.

I like to think, that it is becuase of recogonizing this, that some of the most intelligent people, capable of some of the most brilliant logic and strategies (read the biggest of business tycoons or the past and the best scientists) did a lot to promote religion.... I had to find a possible reason to why the heck such intelligent people would support religion.

>> They, somehow, managed to successfully maintain both these ways of thinking

Quite some time ago I read somewhere.... that the mark of intelligence of a person is how well he can function while simultaneously holding conflicting viewpoints on an issue..... I would have to agree with it.... it probably goes towards explaining some of the somehow in your statement.

Most people are capable of behaving inconsistently very true..

Its just that, I doubt it is limited to just religion and politics... When dug deeper and when looked across a person's behavior across different aspects, most people seem very inconsistent.

true consistency in idea/ideal and action...hmm...I would say that is an incredibly tough thing to achieve and probably impractical from many perspectives.

A bit more, if you don't mind:

Having a simple 'about' page would help, though the site is very self explanatory.

A menu at the top, even a simple one, can probably be useful.

How about making the names of celebrities (or other keywords) into links, wherein clicking on them would load a list of articles related to them?

Got a bit more, but you didn't want it to be brutal :).

Nah, just joking. Its a good idea.

Containing the content in some div tags giving it some left and right margins, could be good.

Since this is a 'fun' site, it could be probably do well with some more color and jazz.

Based on the type of crowd it is likely to attract, it would be better to have 'cool' colors than sober colors.

Pictures always help.

How about a search?

Good luck.

Having done the 10 day basic vipassana course just after high school (had to find a way to control my restless mind), can't say if it helped with any of those 4 points mentioned in the article. But, gosh, it helped me get some sleep. Finally, I could sleep in the nights instead of just staring at the fan. I could sleep wherever and whenever I wanted.

Of course, its different now, that I consider sleep a necessary evil - such a waste of life. If only I could do away with it....