FB search as it is not capable to become kickass end-user-oriented product yet, it's more like a set of technologies that could be used by app developers to create cool dating\hiring\recommendation services and widgets using real-time api requests. The best apps will be acquired by Fb or just copied :)
Problem with MVP is the loss aversion bias + limited resources that entrepreneurs have - often 'lean' founders choose idea that is close to existing business process \ customer habits or investment trends (this decreases risk to lose) and then 'pivot' changing small things - one thing at a time trying to get the new service. It works well for theatretical improvisation and business improvements, but will not put product away from existing trends. For the same reason, Silicon Valley is sometimes too trendy and short-sighted. Many big ideas emerged outside of the Valley and then came here to 'pivot'
Vagina rocks! This topic would never get so much attention if this would be 'Hacking my ... nose, knee, hand etc..'.
Some star topics are easy to predict.
This will have marginal impact on Fb revenue for 2 reasons:
1. What people share on Facebook <> what people really want to buy\consume\order
People are trying to look nice on Facebook. Facebook has to come up with some non-trivial statistics. What those guy who liked SF Giants and Obama is willing to buy. This requires 'Hunch-like' insights. And we know that Hunch business model was not a big success. Google's exercise is much easier, becuase Google knows what user's looking for, privacy of search request helps a lot.
This could be fixed in only one way - through introduction of search engine within Facebook. Facebook could acquire Blekko or hire bunch of people from Google\Bing.
2. Site owners will get higher CPM with Google than Facebook. And will prefer using Google ads in most cases, not Facebook ad.
This will happen for the same reason as N1, Google has higher advertising relevancy and offered price than Facebook. Facebook will be sucessful at niche sites only - like Zynga, junk sites that are blocked by Google, etc. This could work for brand advertising, with pay-per-view model.
It does not matter if site already has any Fb services (likes, recommends, sharing)- Facebook callback could be easily added to any site together with advertisment module. It means that Facebook will deliver to ad module that ad that is most likely will be clicked according to site's user fb profile, likes, etc.
My perception is that this is zero sum game. For big companies like Apple their capitalization makret is driven mostly by institutional and megafunds money. Those guys are very inertial in their invetsment strategies, and their ammount of funds is stable.
Decrease in Apple demand should mean that those guys realocated their funding to other IT companies, or moved money to another industry (this is less probable and takes more time).
Because, it was overpriced. Too many people believed that this gonna be the first 1 Trillion company in market cap.
Problems started before launch of IPhone 5 when it became obvious that IPhone maps are not good - market did not like this Apple vs. Google war. Then there was not very successful launch Ipad mini - it was way too expensive to become killer-product. Apple fired few top managers becaus of this drawback - also not a good sign. Finally, Microsoft 'cope' Apple format for retail stores and launched Windows 8 with more revolutional design then Apple products have.
I was personally disappointed with absence of NFC chip in IPhone 5. Apple mossed good opportunity to enter NFC payments market, while Android is already there.
YC became a very good brand that attracts best startups all over the world. I believe, you could make good make good portfolio from rejected companies. It could be good market for crowdfunding.
Problem is that not many investors have sellection skill and experience that YC or some other industry leaders have. That's why investors prefer to follow, 'lemming role' is safer and psychologically more comfortable. Difficult to fing reason to be the first investor in the pool.
What would help for everybody in ecosystem - more transparency in YCombinator selection process. Min Scoretable - team score, market score, product score, stage.
Startups could opt-out from public scoretable while applying.
This will become point of reference for other investors and crowdfunding platforms and valuable feedback for entrepreneurs.
YC as industry leader could bring this public good to the table.
You could make huge fund money on hurricane preditions - it matters for commodity market. I know guys who made 300M because predicted Katrina. Approach this market!
When the applet is first opened, the initial dataset consists of the most recent 1,500 feelings collected by our system. The applet's panel can then be used to arbitrarily specify different populations, constrained by any combination of:
At the core of We Feel Fine is a data collection engine that automatically scours the Internet every ten minutes, harvesting human feelings from a large number of blogs. Blog data comes from a variety of online sources, including LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, and Google.
We Feel Fine scans blog posts for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling".
Once a sentence containing "I feel" or "I am feeling" is found, the system looks backward to the beginning of the sentence, and forward to the end of the sentence, and then saves the full sentence in a database.
Once saved, the sentence is scanned to see if it includes one of about 5,000 pre-identified "feelings". This list of valid feelings was constructed by hand, but basically consists of adjectives and some adverbs. The full list of valid feelings, along with the total count of each feeling, and the color assigned to each feeling, is here.
If a valid feeling is found, the sentence is said to represent one person who feels that way.
If an image is found in the post, the image is saved along with the sentence, and the image is said to represent one person who feels the feeling expressed in the sentence.
Because a high percentage of all blogs are hosted by one of several large blogging companies (Blogger, MySpace, MSN Spaces, LiveJournal, etc), the URL format of many blog posts can be used to extract the username of the post's author. Given the author's username, we can automatically traverse the given blogging site to find that user's profile page. From the profile page, we can often extract the age, gender, country, state, and city of the blog's owner. Given the country, state, and city, we can then retrieve the local weather conditions for that city at the time the post was written. We extract and save as much of this information as we can, along with the post.
This process is repeated automatically every ten minutes, generally identifying and saving between 15,000 and 20,000 feelings per day.
Would be glad to join - I live in Menlo Park, office in Palo Alto. Coupa or Nola are good places to meet. I also like smoking shisha - there's one place in PA, and a good place in Sunnyvale. Igor