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viennacoder

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I don't think it's really possible for a market to be "too crowded" or "too competitive" if you can create a unique and superior product.

Joining a commodity market with a me-too clone, however, would be ill advised. But it doesn't seem like that is the case here.

I do think that the education market is tough. There's so much out there that's free.

I recently installed linux mint 15. It has been a bit problematic.

One problem is that it wouldn't shut down. I had to edit the grub2 config to get it to shut down.

Also, at one point the sound randomly stopped working. Would only see the dummy output. Had to reboot to get the sound back. So I don't think I fully fixed that issue.

I was using xubuntu before, and it's really hard to resize the windows. There's a weirdly small area to click on, which is frustrating. There was also a problem with the right mouse click which needed to be fixed with a config change.

It's just buggy, where I would expect things to work.

I would think you use a combination of IP address, browser fingerprint, and machine fingerprint.

Much better than cookies, because the user can't delete anything. Plus the fingerprints would still work across browsers (I think).

Thank you! You are making the community a better place.

I am sorry you are getting death threats for standing up for us. That's horrible :(

I would do a mobile app that focused on privacy and photo rights. Kind of similar to apple's photo stream, but something that works on android too.

If you can include some sort of messaging functionality (like whatsapp) that would be good. The integration of photos and messages would need to be elegant though.

Mobile is facebook's Achilles heel.

It's a really hard space to break into. The odds are against you.

I am afraid that the assumptions made in the article (regarding the distribution) are invalid.

One very long (say 2 days) visit will skew the average. And you can't infer the standard deviation from the average.

For an easy alternative, you could calculate the median time on site ex ante -- let's say it's 1 minute. Then for your ab test, see what percent leave within the first minute. Use that percent and determine if difference is statistically significant.

If you are spying on people with their phones, that sounds creepy. It may not be really different from online tracking, but there's a public backlash against offline tracking that doesn't exist for online tracking.

So I think you gotta address that issue somehow.

Sure, as long as you can deliver a quality product within the timeframe expected of the client. That's the way you learn.

It would also help to build up a network of devs with a variety of expertise, so that you can ask for help/tips/review as you take on new stuff.

I think it also depends on how big a step the new project is for you. Wordpress sites, fine. Build me a new operating system? Probably not :)

I would suggest that, even if someone copies your front end code, don't worry about it. Run your own race. A business who just copies (instead of innovating) wont last long.

I would worry about a google penalty for duplicate content across the two sites. If they are really copying your code wholesale you can screw them over by defining the canonical urls for various pages (as your own domains).

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't really see what's wrong with this.

The angel paid for his shares with cash. If he's also working for the business -- and driving significant value, it sounds like -- he has a right to ask for compensation for his work. And the founders have a right to say no.

Now if he's threatening to torpedo the current deal, that's just childish and stupid.

If you're going to learn digitally, there are a lot of great free resources out there.

Check out Startup Engineering on coursera. There is a session going on now.

But, to answer the question, yes you can learn in 12 weeks from your couch.