The article made it seem as though sponsored product search results unique to just amazon and the other big players. Walmart does it - although not as well. Criteo has a product thats used by a lot of large online retailers that offers this as a service.
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- Engineering led team (everyone on the founding team commits code)
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Your product will probably still suck. But launching early and getting feedback from stakeholders will help you craft the product into something that doesn't.
A few points from my experience building a startup for the enterprise (these examples are based entirely on my experience in the financial services industry, although from what I understand they should be easy to extrapolate across other fields):
The sales cycle can be/is excruciatingly long. Certain companies that signed on took 1-2 years to get on board after initial engagement.
You need to partner up/find someone who has the deep contacts/relationships in the big cos that would be your clients.
You need to prove to them that it will be cheaper (including the cost of switching, training, etc...), Reduce Risk, and allow them to "reallocate resources."
Inertia is very strong at large organizations. Building a product that directly competes with an entrenched competitor sounds like a very risky endeavor.
There are other reasons why "binge drinking" appears to be higher in anglo countries (US, Britain, Canada, etc...). Especially among the upper middle class. Longer work weeks than the rest of the industrialized world, less vacation days, etc... Drinking age may play a role in our propensity towards binge drinking, but I think it also has a lot to do with our "work hard, play hard" mentality.
The size and scale of Meebo is always a suprise, but they have massive distribution. See the Meebo bar - http://www.meebo.com/websites/. They are on some heavily trafficked sites (tmz etc...) where they sell quite a few ads.
DealBurner has been my project for the last few weeks. Aggregates instant deals such as scoutmob, LivingSocial instant, Groupon Now, etc...
Sign up is super simple, just connect foursquare or facebook places. Then when you check into a place that has a deal you will get an SMS with redemption information.
That argument doesn't hold much water anymore. I have friends who work at some of the top investment banks - JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank are two of which I know are offering the iPhone as a choice instead of the blackberry.
Also, a lawyer friend at a top tier law firm was offered the iPhone as an alternative as well - granted he didn't take it. A decision he regrets.
It's only a matter of time - no one wants to carry 2 devices and their employers are keen to it.
I think this a big mistake by rim. It's one of the few reasons that users are still on their platform. They also just gave all of their users that won't leave for bbm a reason. Also, from the wording in the article it seems that it will be vastly crippled (messaging only), cost money, and won't be out for many months.
Full disclosure: launching a mobile messaging app called freespeech at SXSW.
9-5 at an investment bank - Sure it's 4x the money (or was)- but it's 100+ hours of weekly work that in my personal opinion is nowhere near as exciting as creating new technologies.
I would love to see the specific patent(s) Kik is infringing upon. It's a pretty standard IM client, if as the article says it is for: "sent, delivered, read, and even when a user is typing a message." then RIM has a lot of apps to go after.
Could be something more than that, as the CEO was a RIM employee at one point.
I used drop.io on occasion - although their free size limit was a little too small. Having unlimited, or as the terms of service say 2gb makes this way more useful.