skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This seems obvious, but sometimes I wonder...

If you are aiming for a truly pan-european market, that's... let's see: English, Portuguese, Spanish, maybe Catalan if you're picky, French, German, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finish, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Russian, Maltese(sp?), etc... etc...

That adds up really quickly. Also, if you are aiming for a comunity, breaking each little bit off into its own language group might make it take longer to attain critical mass. Also, most young people speak at least some English everywhere.

On the other hand, you're never going to be the player in a market if you don't do the language - oknotizie.alice.it came along far after the likes of reddit and digg, and is basically becoming the site for Italy.

Even limiting yourself to "important" languages, you have English, French, German followed by Italian and Spanish, which is a lot to chew on if you have lots of text to translate and keep up to date.
Sounds about right. I don't think it's done anything hugely evil yet; it just has niggling little evilisms that everybody notices because of the motto. It hasn't smooshed anybody by doing anything other than making a better product, I don't think.
That's not a new feature is it? I've had text message gCal updates for at least a year. Is there some other new thing I'm missing?
This is off-topic, but the eventual replacement of televisions by computers+broadband annoys me for one simple reason: I purposefully threw away my TV years ago, and now I find the medium encroaching upon my life again. Oh, well.
Thou shall not waste time trying to write mobile software apps". But, alas, every month, some people jump into it and some investors who should know better fund them.

twitter and jaiku are mobile startups, right?

and also:
http://paulgraham.com/fixrazr.html
How important is a woman's perspective for Web 2.0 startups?
On my server? Where else would it be stored? I'm going to provide an .iCal export of the calendar of course.
....And for the good of the poor schlubs who ask for nothing more than decent quality video and well performing, featurefull apps delivered to their computer or phone, I for one hope whoever can deliver an infrastructure capable of doing that thumps whoever can't. Standards are a nice way of encoding minimal required commonalities for a class of something, but should never be used to prevent anyone from going above and beyond.

I also suspect MSFT's ability to cram anything down the throat of subjects opposed is highly overrated. I personally bought my first windows machine a few months ago, having been (still am) a mac, sometime linux, user for years. If Silverlight (or flex/flash) gains huge penetration, it is likely because people prefer having it to not, not because of any 'cramming' by MS/Adobe.
"Take a look at VoIP and Wi-Fi equipped cell phones."

Oh, I have. Big problem with those is that WiFi is treated as just another carrier channel and you still have to figure out how to install your software on a closed-off cell phone. First of all, carier are very picky about what they allow on their networks. They will tell you that they do that to protect their networks from malicious software and to protect their consumers' phones from draining their batteries too quickly.

"The combination scares the HELL out of the carriers. But market pressures are leaving them no choice but to accept this is what users want."

They're not scared. They're just playing the embrace, extend and extinguish strategy. Recent announcement by T-Mobile and UMA support shows what game their playing: http://gigaom.com/2007/05/03/t-mobiles-wifi-cellular-summer/
MetroFi deployments have been a failure so far. Earthlink has stopped responding to RFCs from cities. They realized that no one is willing to pay for WiFi. That means that free wifi spots are going to be the norm in the future. Problem is that these wifi spots are not very reliable and the range is awful. Look at the popularity of EVDO as an example why (metro)WiFi has been a disappointment so far.

"Then there's WiMAX and the other "last mile" broadband initiatives. Carriers are no longer the only ones who hold the key."

You still need spectrum for WiMax. Which startup has $100mm to buy some spectrum for WiMax?

"Startups attacking these issues and their investors are not wasting their time."

I'm not saying it's an impossible problem but what I am saying is that your chances of success are very low indeed. You have a much higher chance of success by making your software work over open networks such as Internet than trying to crack a walled garden.
"Microsoft needs Wizards" (orig 1984 usenet posting)
Best Practices for Form Design (pdf)
Smugmug thoughts on silverlight
So far, I have asked three women whose opinions I trust and there was a marked difference in the response to the quality of the prototype, in comparison to the men's response.

More than anything else, I observed that more importance was given to aesthetics in general by women.

Does this small sample space scale?
Can you share your experience?
Europe is a pretty big place with little consensus on anything. Perhaps you should ask, 'How should you market your Web 2.0 application in the UK?', 'How should you market your your Web 2.0 application in France?' etc etc. The answers may be mostly similar however the differences could be very compelling.
"Fix RAZR" still needs to be done. Mobile devices need a way to integrate and switch between multiple apps easily before they can progress much further. Copying the 'windows' concept from desktops wont work on such a small screen so there must be a solution. Tabs perhaps?
Apparently the real story was that 45% of European broadband users are using their computers to watch TV online:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6617013.stm

The TechCrunch headline exaggerates the statistic somewhat.
I know it's trendy to hate on MBAs, but the top schools do crank out some pretty bright talent.

I hear Google has some of these guys answering support email!
Well I think you are right too, in the sense that many of the points I mention probably don't overlap much with the challenges that corporate engineers in the industry face on a day-to-day basis. That being said, I think they are still important when considering things from the two guys in a garage perspective.
I can't, but I am definately going to get a woman's perspective on my demo.
I am not sure. I guess they are just making people aware of it. I wonder if Google is starting to play the PR Game?
Unless you're targeting a specific gender / race / etc I'd suggest getting advice and opinions from as many people of diverse backgrounds as possible.
Richard Branson talks alot about how his mother influenced him in his biograhy - "Loosing my Virginity"
They're both important. In my own experience, I discover good ideas by talking about them with other men, but I refine the idea and work out all the details by talking about them with the women in my life (mom and girlfriend). If I get the woman's approval, I know it's a good one ;)
I started getting technical when I realized that life was more fun when I can outsource the boring parts to a computer.

This isn't especially rare, either: Excel/VBA wasn't designed to be a financial modeling language, but it's one of the standards in quantitative finance because so many traders kept track of information in Excel, and ended up getting really good at it. As languages proliferate and integration between web apps gets more common, I think moving along the user-developer continuum will get easier.
Razr is old by now, though - in two years nobody will care about RAZR anymore?

With the right killer app, people will strive to buy the right phone.
Good point about the carriers controlling everything. But will they really be able to keep it up? Suppose an internet provider wanted to block certain services, for example, they could try to force you to use their house search engine instead of Google. It seems likely that people would avoid that internet provider.

The problem with mobile carriers is I think that people are not aware of what they should expect - they are not aware that they are denied the functionality "X", so they are not complaining to the carriers. But suppose one of the carriers would block for example Twitter, wouldn't people start to notice?
I think that post didn't explicitly mention IPTV, though? More likely, people download their favourite TV series via bittorrent. And that would be the less lazy people, who are motivated to find the TV show on the web, and watch it in original language.

Here in germany we see a lot of clones of successful concepts from the US. Today I saw an ad for a new phone which comes bundled with something called wubbler (or something like that, can't remember). I bet that's a Twitter clone...
I think ebay and Amazon are doing it by franchising?
Somebody needs to create a replacement for voicemail. They should be downloaded to your phone passively. You should be able to browse your voicemail like text messages, listen to them instantly or delete them. Is something like that even possible?
SIGGRAPH 2007 papers on the web
I'd like to think there is. How did the Palm Pilot homepage fare, anyway, they used to sell serious applications for Palm Pilots?

At least in Germany the established players seem to have a firm believe that the only ways to make serious money are through excessive TV advertising and abo schemes, or to be on the WAP pages of the actual carriers. There must be a huge untapped market out there, though - I don't know anybody who ever surfed their carriers WAP pages.

I am currently setting up a dedicated homepage for my mobile phone application, hoping to tap some other channels. I guess I will report back to YC news in a few weeks about it's success or failure.
I may be incorrect, but I've been lead to believe pagerank is of minor importance (relative to it's supposed importance) in google's search algorithm.
I'd like to take this moment to thank my patient wife and her job at Oracle...
This was directed at me so I shall reply...

Twitter and Jaiku do not _run_ on cell phones. You do not have to install anything to use them. They use SMS gateway which anyone can setup (if you have $50K+ a month to pay for the traffic, that is). My post was about apps which you have to _install_ on a phone! There's a huge difference between the two approaches.
Mobiles lose their magic as calls fall for the first time
In Kawasaki's book, he says a critical thing is to let a woman read your business plan. They can tell if it's BS.
Damn. Now I do.
Portable Allegroserve Enhanced Version for SBCL (LISP)
"unless your hardware is specifically designed for lambda calculus (like one of those old lisp machines)"

No, I am talking about - at a deeper level, all computing can be reduced to a Turing machine. (Unless you are reading Roger Penrose on consciousness).

Maybe I am mistaken, I am out of touch.
Why does the fact the MBA grads want to work at Google take away from the company? There are a lot of very talented MBA graduates who are very good at specific things.

It's not like Google is letting MBA grads run engineering.
Has anyone used this version of Allegroserve? (If not, and you're interested, we'll post our progress with it)
an importer is not the same thing.

store the data locally.
Wow. It reads like a checklist of all the things that have gone wrong in MS - albeit things that go wrong in most (all?) large corps.
How-To migrate from RadRails to new Aptana Rails IDE beta
New York Times has new "small business" section
As a woman who is also a co-founder, I'm very curious about how different groups of people relate to what I'm building. The sites I've been involved in have been on the social network side of 2.0, so I'm very interested in seeing what people who tend to get obsessed about relationships can add to what I'm building. Often, but not exclusively, these people are women.

As a demographic, our lives differ from men's in subtle and surprising ways. Our motivations for getting on the web and our needs in general are different. You can find a lot of data online about these kinds of things.

I find it hard to generalize based on the people I know, who aren't typical of either gender. I hang out with geeks of both genders and tend to ask people what they think according their areas of expertise or the relationship I have with them.
We ended up paying $180, if you want to see the final result of that we got, we just made a post with it. If you look through the flickr pictures you can see some of the options we received.

http://blog.pretheory.com/arch/000565.php
Top 10 reasons your start up will fail
a business model that depends on people explicity breaking their wireless phone contracts, can only work if there is some negatiating edge, which force the telecoms to negotatiate with you. I.E. if your product somehow allows the telecoms to make money, and once the telecoms discover your product makes money, there has to be some reason its hard for the telecoms to indepandtly reproduce your product.
To every company, there are seasons. This stat just reminds me that autumn, or should I say September, comes to every sufficiently large company in time. I would be sad to see it come to Google, but some day it will. This is one of those things that points out how strong the forces of nature are.
Getting profitable in 14 months
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/graphics/CodedAperture/

gotta love any siggraph paper that uses 3 40's as the example image.

If anyone is going to siggraph this year, let me know, I'm still trying to decide if it's worth my time. I'm always a little disappointed.
eBay Launches New Services, Not The Ones We Want
TheFunded.com - review (and rant) anonymously about VCs
Works fine for me...
I wasn't really aware of what was going on at Microsoft in 1984, but if what is claimed in that is true then if helps contextualizes for me what is currently going on at Google because they've been making similar claims in recent years. If the beast that I know as Microsoft used to be a forward thinking awesome place to work then there's a lot of reason to people Google will eventually morph into a similar beast. Get enough people together and bureaucracy and mediocrity will carry the day. You can get creative and take longer to get to that point, but ultimately unless you halt employee growth or create something so loosely federated that it cannot really be thought of as a single company you're driving toward Microsoft.
YC.News Experiment: 630 Karma points in 31 Days - Lessons Learned
The Wisdom of Customer Crowds
- informal lounges for design/discussion/rap sessions

Maybe if they spent the time writing software instead of practicing rap music. Talk about wrong time, wrong place.
It works like this. Every startup company has programmers who actually create things and shape the world. Replacing any of such people is a bit hit. Switching from one person's vision to another is difficult if there were only two or three people in the company to begin with.

Once you have thousands of employees, each one is now given a role that is replaceable. Do this specific task, every day. If you quit, we find somebody else. The job becomes boring, just so the company can easily replace you.

In other words, startups just care about the product. But big companies have the same mentality towards their own employees. They no longer limit a system to product development, but systemize employees as well. Employees are no longer there to innovate, but to be a cog.

That's why the same companies that start out being created by visionaries, suck to work at when they are huge, because now they are looking for cogs. Hiring is just part of a system to replace some previous cogs.
I already keep hearing of Googlers jumping ship because the company is now a "big company" with the associated bureaucracy and overhead. They still have the nifty perks and all, but apparently the culture isn't what it once was, and this is probably unavoidable as a company grows.
How Did We Come Up With Silverlight?
Well I think my MBA-google submission was pretty good. Sure it's short, but there's a lot being said in that sentence... and coupled with the 1984 MSFT article, I think there's lots of information that only this community has with both near the top at the same time.
So are you getting a lot of traffic to your blog via YC news now that you are ranked #1?
He he, sorry - didn't mean that example as a dig against you at all. I was just pointing out the contrast in what I think would be popular (given my own limited experience and interests) versus what the community values.
Any idea if there is any audio available for this presentation?
I'm just messing. I've been marveling at your blast up the leaderboard the past 2 weeks, I almost posted a discussion titled "WTF is up w/ nanobeep's massive rise in karma"
Someone explain to me how RSS helps a content provider(blogs, digg, etc..) make money as they are turning traffic away from their site?
I don't have enough stats from this post to really tell yet. But when I posted the notes for PG's investor talk in april it was #1 for awhile and the spike in traffic looked like this:

4/11 - 300 sessions (581 pageviews)

4/12 - 1,991 sessions (5,660 pageviews)

4/13 - 1,345 sessions (3,609 pageviews)

4/14 - 404 sessions (931 pageviews)

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=12282
All good ;) Yeah, the karma blast was just an experiment, now that it's over, you should see my momentum slow down quite a bit and me get passed by other guys on the leader board :)
I mean do many more people now visit your blog because you are at the top of the leaders ranking -- even at times when you have not posted something that made it to the front page in a while?
It's not just RAZRs. Many handsets have a poor UI, even the nokia s60s which are meant to have the best mobile OS. It's like using windows 3.1 and it's crying out to be fixed. Perhaps the iPhone will make handset manufacturers pay attention to UI finally.

Also mobile don't have another 'killer app' to come. Everyone wants something different from the phone, just like everyone uses the web for different things. It's about choice. Some want news, others want myspace or funny videos of cats. What mobile needs is to be easy to develop for and easy to find the apps that are right for a particular user. We need a yahoo or AOL that will guide the new users and show them what its possible to do on their phone.

(I can't find the reports that show the japanese usage of data currently. From what I remember most used voice and sms. Photos and email were also popular. After that usage for any function drops off into a 'long tail' distribution. The japanese users were all heavily using their handsets for different purposes. I'll see if I can dig up the report in the morning but it makes for fascinating reading)
Just to further explain myself, if I use a free rss reader like google reader and no longer visit a site such as digg, what is the incentive here. Why isn't google sharing their revenue ? I understand with stuff like feedburner you are more than happy to see those subscriptions go up, but what does google reader to for you or the other free ones.
Oh, sorry, I thought you meant the #1 post. Doh!

Well, I have seen that my user-sessions on the blog are pretty consistently about 200-300 per day. It actually hasn't changed noticeably as I've moved up the leaders list. I only got a big spike when one of my posts was popular on YC.News. Other than that, my traffic has looked pretty much the same. I also have to factor in that since my free time was working on YC.News, I was no longer writing my own articles - which of course is detrimental to growing blog traffic ;)
I'm counting SMS/MMS/ivr apps (82ask, twitter, radar, 411 free), mobile apps(jaiku,gmail) and mobile web (cant think of any :S) all as mobile startups.

I've noticed that most of the popular, succesful mobile startups use just sms/mms and a counterpart web site currently. Perhaps we shall see them 'evolve' as the years pass as mobile apps and then mobile web become familiar to 'regular' mobile users. Users will look back at the day you had to remember text commands and shortcodes just like we now look back at the command prompt.

For now I agree, apps are a pain and you should stick to the most well know interface of sms when you can. The 'fun' stuff needs apps but the chance of success is a lot lower currently.
Having lived in China, I agree that it's definitely not a center for creativity. From my perspective you really can't beat the amazing ecosystem and startup culture that exists in Silicon Valley.

It was, however, very interesting to operate from China for some time. I'd be happy to speak with you about what it was like, if you'd like to open up a dialogue on my blog.

As for the other points, my new venture has absolutely nothing to do with "squatting". Please reserve your speculation and judgment on my "ethics" until we launch. We're actually creating a practical solution to the very problem which seems to anger you.
http://www.spinvox.com/ may be what you're after: "Service that converts voicemails into mobile phone SMS text messages and emails"
I was showing the templates that my graphics designer created for my web site to a female colleague:

she: I like this one.

me: the one with the orange background?!!

she: yes, it looks nice.

me: well...it's colorful; but for everyday use, you'd prefer the blue shade of course.

she: no, I like the orange.

me: are you serious?

she: yes.

me: you would want to see this page every day?!!!

she: yes.

me: hmmmmm

That's when I realized that it's important to add theme customization.
Talk is great but I know many here in the UK who don't use the phone for talk, just SMS. I used to be one of them! As a teenager on a PAYG phone voice seemed too pricey. The per message charging for SMS was preferred than the per minute for voice. You knew exactly what a text was going to cost as opposed to a phone call that could drag on. Usually we would spend more on texting back and forth than the phone call would have cost but we still did it because of the consistency.

There are plenty of places to innovate even with voice. Theres no mobile white pages (those great big hulking phone books that contain all of the phone numbers of people living nearby) for example. Voicemail and other forms of asyncronus voice are ripe for improvement. Possibly even a 'voice twitter' that would let you record 60 second snippets of audio and broadcast them over website, skype, MMS etc. Micro-podcasting as it were!

Like you, I'm sure voice phone calls will remain the predominant use for a phone but that doesnt stop us innovating with mobile!
Absolutely.

My mom opened a furniture store when I was about 10, and gave me my first paying job. Seeing her work for herself, successfully, for years, gave me the stubborn will to be an entrepreneur I have today. (She's not the only entrepreneur in my family...my dad had an electronics shop, my dads mom owned a thrift store, and my moms dad owned an auto body shop.)

Entrepreneurialism is seemingly either genetic or picked up from parents, because my sister also owns her own business, and I'm on my second (or third, if you count my computer repair business when I was in middle and high school).

I think it was my dads idea to make me earn half of any major purchase (like bikes, guitars, computers, etc.), which I suspect was also instrumental in my becoming an entrepreneur.
I agree. Another issue is that if you do a local version as an outsider, people will be able to tell that something's just not right, and you'll have a hard time competing with home-grown apps, that understand the local culture much better.

There must be some reason that in most of the countries you listed, millions of people still use crappy 10MB e-mail services and social networking sites that are local to the country, and got the cultural factor right. Gmail and Yahoo all try to localize, but most people I know who use them are just annoyed by the translations, and quickly switch back to English.
Five fresh, new, and far-out innovative ideas for Google