With regards to the third, I've seen this gripe before, but I feel its misplaced.
This author has personally noticed a parallel between the reaction of his friends to wood-burning and religion. Something he though was interesting and decided to write about. Expecting him to fit that realization in to an analogy that would cater to the entire world, will water down the effectiveness of his point.
Additionally, he may not have any inkling about what will cater to the world audience. When I write something, I write from my own experiences, I have no idea if a reader in the U.K. will relate to my problem or my thoughts.
Funded vs. Bootstrapped is a false dichotomy. Not every business model will succeed as a funded company and the opposite is true too.
While the author claims there is a charm to the "37 Signals" profitability approach vs. the "Twitter" growth approach. There's a reason those companies operate on completely different models and on completely different products.
In hindsight, would you have believed Apple could have existed without capital infusion? It is, arguably, a very profitable tech company.
I think there is a reason for both types of companies to exist. Generalizing the problem in to a pseudo duel between the two are the beginnings of a flawed decision.
It isn't that they raised $41 million, that was the issue. It was the fact that they raised that amount without any real metrics to back the team or the product.
Someone gave me this analogy that I thought was quite well put. Michael Jordan kicked ass at basketball, but it would have been a foolish manager who gave him a $41 million contract when he decided to try baseball.
Hindsight-20:20 here - Color might have been an incredible story on paper, and it might even have warranted a stratospheric valuation. But nothing besides cold, hard numbers warrants cash of $41MM for a web/app startup.
This might just be my conspiracy radar turned to 11, however, it seems very suspect that a blog with only 1 post ever, is using that post to rave about AirBnB right in the middle of their storm.
I want to supplement this by saying I really admire AirBnB and have no doubt that they will over come this security lapse with the killer product and marketplace they've built. However, this suspicious orphan blog post has my BS antennae throwing out sparks.
In the same vein, this applies to demographics outside the 'Tech' world too. We build several products for a film festival market. Our support for IE is very product specific even within this niche domain and not something you would risk generalizing without testing the hypothesis out yourself.
For example, two of our products are (i) A film submission form field and (ii) A schedule for the screenings at the festival.
With basic IE support for both, we noticed <3% of the traffic using IE for the "Submission forms" and ~40% of our traffic to the "Schedules" use IE for a festival in Phoenix.
In hindsight this makes sense. Most people submitting films are the filmmakers or their crew- think Apple's primary target market, hence Safari and FF is what we see a lot of. We've stopped incremental updates for IE on the submission form as long as it remains functional.
However, people looking at schedules are at their enterprise jobs possibly in Phoenix during the day and trying to figure out what films to catch after work. That might explain the high prevalence of IE.
While it is obvious in hindsight, these are not assumptions I would be willing to make without looking at hard data specific to my product. Regardless of whether it's Tech or Filmmaker centric.
"Understanding those concepts is not easy. It takes lots of practice, and lots of patience, and lots of learning."
I think that's an important precis of the article. Google's engineers are used to designing and doing what's "right". They inherited the concept of search and have built a sophisticated algorithm around that established notion same with mail and their more successful products.
Social on the other hand is a fuzzy science, it's hard to know what works and why ahead of time. It's much easier to do it in hindsight, but by then it's too late.
Gruber has chosen to ignore the side of Apple that sometimes has flops (TV, Mac Mini, Hi-Fi) but Apple is quite prudent about not marketing these to death when they see luke-warm response.
In addition to incremental advances for their blockbusters, Apple is very prudent at reading market adoption and tuning the marketing to be in step.
There is some level of Bradley Effect to take in to account here. As http://madepublishing.com/wp/2010/04/psychology_of_free/ pointed out a few days back on HN, it's very unlikely that people will make the effort of thinking about the transaction and pulling out their wallets for a micropayment when a free, and equally good option is available another click away.
That's breaking a cardinal rule of artists - maintain mysticism. It's the reason the inspiration for American Pie will never be known. Collective human imagination can come up with a far more interesting opinion than any individual can, regardless of how talented they might be.
Mr. Adams, with due respect, I don't know what the Tibetan Monk explanation is but it sounds way more interesting than your garden.
I would have guessed the number would be lower in India, as I figure a large proportion of the people using browsers and having access to the web work in IT, who in turn are more likely to use FF and Chrome.
"...any registrant of a new .cn domain name to provide a color head shot and other business identification, including a Chinese business registration number and physical signed registration forms."
Question: Can't ICANN postulate what can and cannot be relevant information that is gathered?
Essentially, this requires that you prove Employer-Employee distinction. (Harder to do as a Founder). Something that you can support in the meanwhile is http://startupvisa.com
It won't solve your immediate need however.
I'd agree with most of the other comments here with your best bet is to consult with an attorney.