1) Provide an api (or release a dataset) and let people experiment with new ranking schemes.
2) The influence of your votes on ranking could be correlated to your relative importance in the community. You could do this with a simple PageRank where nodes are users and edges are votes.
Ebay is a deceptive example; auctions inherently have powerful network effects. I think Amazon might be a slightly better example: tons of competition but still a lot of money to be made. There can be many winners in this market, and Groupon will probably be the biggest winner.
As your first sentence indicates, in this scenario you have specific, attainable goals. Just getting to that point goes a long way towards beating procrastination.
Bill Gates (44.2%) , Pierre Omidyar (32.5%), and Larry Ellison (30.6%) are the top three in terms of Pre-IPO ownership. I wonder how they managed that.
Also, Microsoft only had 5.4% VC ownership pre-IPO.
If you live in California there's an annual minimum franchise tax of $800, plus whatever annual fees are charged by the state you incorporate your LLC in.
In terms of actual solutions, I think programs like KIPP are promising. If someone can demonstrate the right way to run a school system on a small scale, we can learn from it and encourage adoption of those changes nationally.
Sarah specifically notes "This is not a zero-sum game. Both waves will find funding," so she agrees with you (despite the headline).
I think this is worth talking about though, since Thiel has signaled that Founder's Fund is transitioning to "hard tech" like space/robotics/ai/biotech. I agree with Thiel's assertion that the internet is no longer a contrarian investment.
Jacques, I'm curious as to where you put your effort in terms of marketing (contacting people to get backlinks, SEO optimization, etc) and in the end, what were the main sources of that steady growth in the second graph? Or did you just ignore marketing and work on your product?
Yahoo's goal with BOSS is to fragment the search market; Google is so far ahead that Yahoo knows they can't compete head-on.
Google doesn't want the search market to be fragmented; they want to dominate the market. I think that's why Google doesn't have a good search API offering.
At first I thought the numbers were number of searches, but they're not. For example, according to AdWords, "how can i be on made" is searched less than 10 times a month globally. The numbers shown are number of results.
The decision to do bootcamp on Mac was strategic because there was a ton of software that was windows-only, and for many people a windows pc was necessary even if their primary computer was a mac.
In the case of mobile phones, Apple is way ahead in terms of third party software, so I think in their eyes allowing double-booting will not improve the iphone substantially.
It's possible to do it that way, but it adds some annoying constraints. If you're accessing data locally, it would have to go through a remote server, which causes latency and privacy concerns.
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc