I can see this working out once this goes beyond the "initial critical mass of users" hump. Some high-level comments:
* There are several organizations, agencies and committees with similar goals _inside_ each institution (university / high school). Given that your goals are aligned, it would be nice to see a way to onboard entire organizations (i.e. groups of students / mentors) -- even if it is not from the general frontpage. That way, you can think of Meritful as a SaaS provider for each of these orgs, and it also solves your critical mass problem.
* Student orgs (High Schools, etc) come in with well-articulated reasons as to _why_ I (a potential mentor) should work with them. This helps me make a decision along the lines of "I am looking for a group of 10 students at grade level 8 who are interested in astronomy and are free on Thursday evenings for all of Fall 2012. Can your group match that?" Note how this is different from scouting talent -- mentors just have more constraints.
I think what he's trying to get across here is that there is a significant amount of overhead that is getting in the way of Google's own culture. Breaking it up into a conglomerate of smaller pieces would typically _increase_ this cruft -- Microsoft even in its current state is a good example of this. At Google however, this would _optimize_ the system instead, making it leaner, meaner, and as passionate as the employees it is losing.
(The blog post doesn't mention it clearly, but the author is an ex-Googler)
MSR Asia is based in Beijing and is one of the fastest growing research outfits in the world. They're slowly showing up all over the place in the CS world, and this is just one of the examples.
Consider Microsoft Academic Search. It BLOWS AWAY Google Scholar, Citeseer etc. in terms of features. Once they attain coverage parity, there is reason to use anything else.
Academic Search, Trinity, and similar projects out of MSR Asia seem to be directly having impact in Bing. In a matter of a short few years, you're looking at a barebones search engine (Live.com) building an R&D infrastructure, with prototypes, and production modules feeding into what is now a pretty rocking search engine. [Example of Academic search integration with Bing: http://www.bing.com/search?q=donald+knuth , scroll to bottom -- page also shows Freebase integration in middle]
Ironically, Microsoft is playing David in the David vs Goliath story here, and the passion is showing in terms of the ecosystem of computing projects and products that are making it into Bing.
If you want to look outside of Bing, consider the Kinect effort. Did you know that the _hardware_ ships with mathemetical models built at MSR, trained using Dryad? (Dryad is an MapReduce competitor out of MSR) The training is the "secret sauce" and why you don't have to spend days calibrating the Kinect.
None of this is privileged information -- you just have to follow the hyperlinks :) The open source world is built on collaboration and sharing, and hence the "story" is the backbone of most work. But that doesn't mean other people don't have stories and passion!
* Catastrophic failures: You fail so bad that you have no option but to trash everything and start again
* Detectable / Manageable failures: You fail, but this failure is not central to your existence, so you simply try again
While there are some cases where you have no option but to risk catastrophic failures, manageable failures are something people completely miss.
Fitness / Weight training has all sorts of examples of this, the goal is to identify the limits of your abilities and to push this limit, without risking permanent damage.
Consider this: Blogger (Pyra Collab tools), Flickr (GNE), Twitter (Odeo), Nokia Phones (losses for first 15 yrs), Google (initial focus was Enterprise Search until Adwords / Adsense acquisition) were all pushing the limits, and failing, but not so spectacularly that they didn't have resources left to pivot.
Identifying the difference, and the ability to contain possibly-catastrophic errors into manageable pieces is the true art of the startup.
Every employee has a right (and in some ways, a duty) to criticize his / her employer. This is how a company improves.
I am just surprised that given the vibrant startup environment, TechCrunch hasn't been replaced by a decent news source in that format (e.g. a more blog-like version of HN with some sort of an editorial voice).
I think Ooyala is beautiful. It's a bunch of ex-googlers, I like to think the "oo" carries that. And it's an abstract name, which is ok given their business (not end-user). According to their materials, "Ooyala means cradle in Telugu, a Southern Indian language."
[i don't know anyone at Ooyala, I just found them on the web]
Personally, I feel this is the Achilles' heel of an otherwise splendid website. Their NIH syndrome forces them to implement everything in C++ ( http://www.okcupid.com/faq : 200K lines of C++ ). I don't know how to be agile with a system like that, and it probably explains the rate of feature growth compared to other social networks (FB, Friendfeed, Quora)
Neat! I was looking for something very much like this!!
Two feature requests:
1) Discrete values: I want to track things say on a scale of 1 to 5, or 1 to 10. It shouldn't be too hard to implement this without cluttering the UI; you can have a check box that says
[x] on a scale of ___
and use the icon of the log as a rating slider.
2) I would like push notifications / alerts prompting me to enter things. E.g. Insulin every 3 hours, or mood every 5 hours.
I would totally pay 5$ for an app that does these 2 things reliably.
[edit: wow dude, this app is buggy :) 2 minutes and I already found one bug: +/- doesnt show up unless you first switch to keyboard and then back to +/-!! Hire a programmer / tester to fix these things and concentrate on the product, it's a better use of your time!]
"Peepli Live" ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1447508/ , available on Netflix Streaming) is a satire about the state of farmers in debt in India, and is worth a watch.
