whosKen

Sounds like most people are jumping on the "it's not the idea, it's the execution" bandwagon. However, there is a link between popularity and execution. The more popularity you have, the more resource you have; the more resources you have, the more options of execution you can choose from. When the OP mentioned network, exposure, money, etc that's all part of the resources which Caterina has. Even if the coffeeshopers have a wonderful idea and a great game plan of execution, the lack of resource may not permit that game plan to be played out. It's similar to the Jeremy Lin conundrum -- despite all his talent, it wasn't until Knicks got desperate and took a gamble that Jeremy had a chance to shine (translation: Knicks and Jeremy both got lucky). It's true that idea and celebrity status is not the answer to all problems. However, to say that it doesn't give you a giant upper hand would be lying to oneself, and that's probably the worst thing an entrepreneur can do.

It's well known to any UK resident that the bank system here is broken, made for and run by the large corporate companies. They are not used to dealing with startups, and I have a feeling that they don't want to either..

I do agree that majority of these lessons have also been mentioned by other blogs.

However, to know them and to learn them are two different things. Since human, especially me, has a tendency of falling back into old habits (such as hoarding possessions), posts such as this now-and-again to serve as reminders should always be welcome.

On an another note, I have a feeling that the term "life lesson" is being thrown about way too much. Can you say you have learned a life lesson without living through most of your life (ie. < ~50)?

We at Skyscanner did a 24 hour hackathon a few months ago for our FlyScan product. It was quite hectic but did a great job highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of our release process from conception to release to marketing. It's definitely an enlightening experience.

I don't believe templates would work very well. The variations of sentences are too great such that you will result in very low recall.

An alternative solution is to attack the problem backward, training on terms (words or phrase) from sex-related conversations (such as adult chatroom transcripts). Then, from general corpus (Twitter or generic chats) identify terms that highly cooccur with those sex-terms. I would still use a Bayesian classifier, with strong prior against labelling something as a TWSS.

Agree. Even though I haven't tried to publish anything in print media format, but I suspect that, at worst case scenario, this is no different from a writer submitting his work and getting turned down with some comments.

This is great! I for one have always been writing scripts as a hobby. Film-making business has always been a closed circle, even in foreign and indie markets. An additional channel into the circle for people outside of Hollywood couldn't hurt.

we would appreciate any feedback on our effort to redefine digital magazines. key features to come will include: +category-free personalization doesn't separate user into predefined bins +localization to show users where to find the style they just read/saw +video and audio contents as part of the magazine

actually this sort of "advertising" isn't rare in Japanese entertainment industry. a lot of fresh actors, idols, and singers are required by their agency to update their personal blog daily and interact with their fans.

what's interesting is seeing how effective it is when applied to a market that is not expecting such attention from those in the spotlight. for the western world, twitter is a providing similar service, but perhaps we can do better..

i can't say that i am very familiar with tobi. but upon some inspection, i can draw a few differences between us:

we are not presenting a catalogue but a magazine of web contents (text and media) that are relevant to the users. furthermore, we are looking to avoid competing with large fashion designers and retailers. instead, we hope to promote local, hard to find boutiques to allow users to assemble their own unique style.

thanks for the feedback!