wsr

Photos and videos are harder to spy on.

However, this might be changing too...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-stopchat-censors-can-now...

Thanks for sharing madcaptenor! Very interesting to know this!

I have friends who have gone through this experience. I was pretty surprised too that the company was willing to pay so much to defend their patents. Granted... my friend's rate was fairly reasonable... I think between $500-$1000/hour in probably the early 2000s.

It really depends on the patent in the end of the day. If a company can potentially lose tens or hundreds of millions over a lost lawsuit, spending a million on legal defense would be very reasonable.

I have not talked to my employer about this. I wanted to get some collective wisdom from the HN community before approaching them. But yeah, I'll definitely give it a shot. It doesn't hurt to ask.

Thanks for the long reply patio11.

I can see where you are coming from, and I wouldn't be surprised if the same argument is used by the company. If that is the case. O well, I wish them well but I would never be this naive again.

There is just one point that you might have missed.

The patent work doesn't stop the moment you finish filing. In fact, almost all valuable patents will be challenged in court, which can cost a LOT of money. In those cases, the company would have to hire back the original inventors to defend them in court, for which the original inventors can charge almost an arbitrary amount of money for.

In my personal opinion, it would not be wise for the company to argue over pocket change amount of money if it risks destroying the relationship between the company and the inventor. If that is really the case, when the day comes that the company needs help, the inventor would not hesitate to charge exorbitant fee just to spite the company. I honestly believe this is why @smoyer in the other comment is still getting paid by his company even though he is no longer employed.

Last but not least, on a human level, I feel it is a bit unfair given how much extra I worked for these patents, above and beyond my call of duty. I'm not going to cry over it but it will leave me in a pretty bad mood. If I end up getting screwed over, well... let my experience serve as a lesson for rest of the aspiring inventors in similar situation in the future.

Interesting! At least there is one case that the company is doing the right thing. Thanks for sharing smoyer!

Good point! I'll check to see if any of my friends can get me a copy of the patent policy.

I wonder how legal it is in the state of California to bar the people from getting their reward simply because they are no longer with the company. Patent approval has nothing to do with the employment status. This seems a bit unfair to be honest.

Further, they specifically asked me for help AFTER I left the company. I agreed to help as a good-will gesture. I wish I could've clarified the reward policy back then.

As these hacks are becoming more common place, I'd love to hear fellow HN reader's take on their password strategy/management. Many thanks in advance!

Can you please elaborate on what you mean?

According to Alexa Voice Service page (https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-vo...)

Amazon is starting a $100M fund for anyone building voice related services. This is very interesting. Has any company been funded via this fund?

This is a very good question. I really hope someone with domain knowledge answers it.

This might be a silly question, but why was there a fork in the first place? The article wasn't as clear on explaining that part. Can someone else elaborate on that part?

As a fellow serial entrepreneur, it seems to me that between success, sleep, and living the life, you can only pick 2 out of the three.

This is awesome! Thanks for sharing!

Can someone explain to me the rationale behind this valuation? It seems a bit high.

As far as I know, their biggest distribution has been on Youtube. Maybe I'm wrong here, but assuming this is the case...

Some rough math: - On Youtube, they have ~5m fans. - 1287 videos

Assuming 100k per video. We're talking about ~100M - 200M aggregate views. That's minimal.

So what's so valuable about this media?

Looks like it is fixed now. Did anyone else just experience it as well?

Dear All -

World Startup Report team here. There have been many repeated questions in this thread, so we compiled all them into a single long answer for everyone.

At World Startup Report, our goal was to show the world how big of an internet company you can build in each country. We have partnered with Startup Genome, as well as worked closely with Startup Digest and Hackers/Founders network to collect all this data.

As we proceeded, we lowered our goal of covering 100 countries to covering 50 since we aimed to find the most reliable (as well as interesting) data. Our methodology included looking at publicly available data (stock market), online publications from sources like Financial Times, TechCrunch, The Next Web, etc. or sometimes even personal conversations with those companies. The definition of internet companies was: no ISPs, no software development houses (unless they have online products they are selling), no hardware companies. If a company is diversified (as was usually the case) we looked at the revenue breakdown and searched for the highest internet-related revenue streams.

However, we do accept the fact that this information is constantly changing (we had to replace a few companies due to various reasons (even bankruptcy) over the course of our month-long research). At the same time, we are aware that there could have been a few omissions and this is the price we are willing to pay to show the public the best available data there is on the web right now.

One last thing, we've put up our raw data on Silk, so you could play around with it as it is easier to visualize it.

http://internet-hall-of-fame.silk.co/explore/table/collectio...

If you'd like to help us make it better, or contribute with information about your country, please contact us at hello@worldstartupreport.com

-- The World Startup Report Team

Svip -

The country location for a company in this research was determined by where the bulk of the employees are currently. The intent of this definition is to show which countries are most capable of building big internet companies, not where the founders are coming from.

Yahoo!Japan is actually an independent company from Yahoo. It is roughly 30% owned by Softbank and 30% owned by Yahoo. It is listed as it is the top 3 internet company in Japan.

Yahoo is not listed, because it is not the top 3 company in the US.

Grexi -

As mentioned in another thread, The World Startup Report team aimed for 100 countries for this research, but realistically we were able to only get good data for 50 countries for this research.

If your country is not on the list, and you would like to join us for the next World Startup Report research as a representative for your country, please email us: hello@worldstartupreport.com

We'd love for your help to participate in this community research!

Hi all -

The World Startup Report team aimed for 100 countries for this research, but we settled for 50 as we didn't have enough local support from the smaller countries.

If your country is not on the list, and you would like to join us for the next World Startup Report research as a representative for your country, please email us: hello@worldstartupreport.com

We'd love for your help to participate in this community research!

Unicorn club = companies over $1b in valuation.

We've been tracking all of the billion dollar (unicorn) companies around the world. Here is our internal list of all 212 unicorns that we've found:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhQqM-Mu96XQdDN...

Please note, we stopped updating this list since January 2014 because the list got too long. If anyone wants to lead this community effort moving forward, we'd love to speak to you!

email us: hello@worldstartupreport.com

unicorn club = companies over $1b in valuation.

World Startup Report team here. It's awesome to see our data on HN!

One interesting point to note is that out of the top 7 countries, none of them are from Europe. To put into context, the biggest internet company in Europe is merely 1/40th of the size of Google.

HOWEVER, Europe dominates the unicorn club (companies over $1b in valuation). Nearly half of 30 countries on the unicorn club list are European.

This prompts the question, is European market big enough but fragmented in such way that you can easily build mini-billion dollar companies, but never anything truly massive?

We'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on this.

Also, AndriusWSR (lead researcher behind this research) will be joining us shortly to answer a few questions. Please feel free to ask away.

Incorporation is the easy part. Paying taxes is the much tougher thing to do in Brazil.

But! Brazil it's the land of opportunity in Latam, so that's why foreigners like to go to Brazil.

Absolutely agree. I especially enjoyed my short stay at Belo Horizonte, go check it out if you have a chance!

telecuda, everything you said is right on point. The tax is Brazil is beyond crazy. If I recall correctly, even Amazon had problems bringing servers into the country because of the taxes and import duty. That's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of taxes and regulations in this country, it is not at all a startup friendly country.

In the end of the day, none of this really matter, because people will still go to Brazil to do business. It is the center of Latam economy, if you can win Brazil, you are destined to win Latam. The Brazil opportunity > obstacles, hence why people are flooding Brazil despite the challenges involved.

Bowei from the World Startup Report team here. Thanks for reading the report.

If anyone has any question regarding Brazil startup ecosystem, I'd be happy to help answer it!

It's very impressive that they are able to keep the entire car under 450kg.

As a comparison, SMART, one of the smallest car we have on the road today is 750kg. This is the car that people make fun of, and tip over for fun: http://jalopnik.com/vandals-are-flipping-over-smart-cars-in-...

Thanks ishener & snaky!

It looks like the company is founded by an Israeli founder but the company is incorporated in Cypress. Other than that, the crunchbase page is pretty empty:

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/viber-media

Does anyone know where their engineering team is? How much funding have they raised to date? I'm very curious about their story.

Can someone help me estimate the valuation of Outfit7? I can't seem to find it anywhere. Many thanks in advance!