skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of people had the idea behind Meebo. A friend and I were doing AIM bots back in 2000. Essentially we'd implemented SmarterChild before it became popular. Then when AJAX was all the rage in late 2004 and 2005, I said "Oh, wouldn't it be cool if you could put live chat up on a web page and update the display through AJAX?"

I was actually thinking in terms of the social-networking angle - you ever notice how many conversations on LiveJournal comments or FaceBook walls start out as asynchronous messages and then become conversations when both/all parties get online? There's room to make that interaction a lot more frictionless, and I have actually seen anyone go through with it. Maybe I'll be saying "Damn, I regret not implementing that idea" in another 2 years.

Anyway, it's not who thinks up the idea that matters, it's who actually goes and does it. Most successful ideas are pretty obvious, they're just overlooked because people think "If it were that easy, somebody would've done it already".
Inc.com | 30 Under 30: America's Coolest Young Entrepreneurs
Incredible Startups: Mizpee helps you easily detect public toilets
Here is very nice service available for No.1 requirement for a everyone. You can imagine that you are outside for some shopping or for some important work and area is not known to you and then you got emergency call for Bathroom.
"Third, always prototype and throw it away. I have seen too many prototypes become product. Just avoid the maintenance nightmare and toss it."

Much easier said than done. "But it WORKS, what do you mean you want to start writing it again from scratch? Can't you just finish what you have?" If anything, that's a warning to the dangers of prototyping... or to use prototyping tools rather than doing it in code.
You could contribute to the project to port GTK+ to MacOS natively. http://developer.imendio.com/projects/gtk-macosx

Edit: Looks like they already can run GIMP under MacOS natively.
I totally agree with you. However, "coopted" might be portraying it in a slightly differetn light than is warranted. There is a difference between being better at execution and walking away with the code that was being used to implement one idea, and implementing it yourself.
The complaint is not about Video, but about enhancements to the Wall made recently which were clearly based on 3rd party apps. I think that's evidence enough to make the statement. I just saw a Techcrunch write-up of Superwall the other day. I'm sure they're less than happy about being encroached upon.
What ideas have you implemented that have failed, and why?
In the "What ideas do you regret not implementing?" thread, Maurycy suggested turning it around and asking "What ideas have you implemented that have failed anyways?" After all, most of us are more worried about the risk that we'll work our asses off building something cool and then find nobody likes it rather than the risk that we'll never get started at all.

I agree with maurycy that this is a far more interesting question, so I took the liberty of submitting this as a discussion topic. Please be more specific than "Because there was no market for it" - that's obvious, why wasn't there a market for it (or turning it around, why'd you implement it if there was no market), and how does it differ from projects you've done that have succeeded.
How much weight should we assign to the decrease in cost to entry between '99 and '06 in calculating the point at which we're saturated with startups? How many local event (and share your plans with your friends!) evite competitors do I need to have access to? It's getting a little out of hand.

When Web 2.0's cycle increases to the point of a bubble and explodes in a rainbow-reflective-gradient shower of glossy logos, it won't be the VCs that get burned, it'll be the little guys hunting VC (or profitability) who rolled their own and failed or didn't succeed in a stellar way. It'll be much, much quieter than the dot-com bomb.

I'm actually pleased to see projects starting to end up in the TechCrunch deadpool, and I'm waiting to see if traffic to FuckedCompany.com starts increasing.
Gambling now banned in Second Life
Another case against building ones business model around somebody else's platform?
nope it dont work
YouTube filtering system coming this fall
Connecting food delivery services to the internet in pre-flarate 1997 (cheaply by using SMS notifications).
If by web apps you mean server-based apps that you
use through some local client, I think that has
decades to run.
Private Space Companies. It's time that we finally step into the next frontier.
Congrats Sam Altman!
Heck, with KLOC numbers like that, Google was lucky to avoid an all-out bidding war with IBM.
It's not so much what they planned. More like if there's no hope of a sale or IPO, it's not a startup.
I have ideas I executed on but didn't release due to copyright worries. They were niche but very good.

The thing that impresses me most about stuff like YouTube is not the tech (which is no mystery) but how they managed to keep going in the face of massive legal concerns. I never worry about the technical side, only the red tape.
Startup management has changed: The number one goal for a startup is now measured differently
Startup CEOs and their core teams need to agree on the Number One Goal for their startups so they all work to get to the same goal at the same time. That is often missing in startups lead by first-time entrepreneurs.
Yes. I work on King St, Canada.

Wait - there are other cities in Canada?
ec2 and mysql (or memcached for that matter) don't yet play well together. we were going to deploy a big database across several EC2 instances but the lack of static IPs and internal routing quirks makes configuration and automated failover extremely complex. sadly, the ability to deploy lots of instances != the ability to scale effectively, at least for mysql/memcached.
A financial bubble means that people are buying something less for its inherent value and more b/c they think that other people will buy it for more. Look at real estate prices. They should always be determined by people's salaries. The amount a person can pay for a mortgage is directly proportional to their salary. Salaries haven't been increasing much lately, but in the last few years real estate prices have gone through the roof. So home owners accept that they will be over-stretched in the short term in the hopes that they can "flip it" for more. Since people have become falsely convinced that "you can't loose in real estate" they are happy buying overvalued houses b/c they "know" that the price will only go up. The problem is you eventually run out of suckers. Eventually people say, this one bedroom condo is not worth a million dollars. After the notion that real estate prices "only go up" is disproved, the bubble quickly pops.

This is all to say that financial bubbles require lots of "transactions" for the positive feedback loop to take hold. People have to see the price going up up up up up up up enough to get hypnotized. Since there are very few public web 2.0 companies I don't see how this can happen. The transactions in Web 2.0 come from angels, VC's and big companies making acquisitions. Since there are very few transactions in the cycle there is little opportunity to pump the price up and pass it on to suckers. Also the suckers in question are professional investors and big software companies. While they may make amazingly stupid decisions from time to time, they are not nearly as stupid as the hordes of unwashed E-traders.

I think the real question is, "is Web 2.0 oversaturated?" That's a very different dynamic than a bubble.
Yes where are all the "Minority Report"-inspired Y Combinator startups? =)
In case you missed it, check the comments in this link [http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CommentView.aspx?guid=f8e6...], discussed here [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33093].

The suggestion is to constantly write db logs from EC2 to S3 instead of nightly backup, so that in the event of a crash you're only likely to lose minutes worth of data.

Also note that you can restart instances with no loss of data. Its only in failures that you would lose data.
Cisco and Click.tv?
13 ways to live well on less - MSN Money
My previous (failed) startup had the following plan: Identify (university-level) lectures given all across the world, for many different areas of study, that doesn't change much over the years. Example: statistics.

Now build a live computer-based lecture with a software architecture to live-test what you know with questions, including skipping ahead once you 'grok' something, and working your way through more examples if you are struggling. Get this right with a sizable budget. Don't just get academic experience on board, but also didactic experience.

The amount of value created is staggering; lectures are very boring and relatively ineffective, professors generally want to do research instead of lecturing anyway, and they cost a bundle. Every year, how many professors around the world are lecturing statistics? Thousands, easily.

The reason it failed: Video stuff is very expensive, and universities move at glacial speeds. We just couldn't get the universities to commit actual money to the project in time - and we all despised bureaucracy.

I'd like to return to this idea when there I have more money and more experience some day.
Microsoft's Gates Plans Leave Amid Great Change
You know what I would do if I had a million dollars? I would invest half of it in low risk mutual funds and then take the other half over to my friend Asadulah who works in securities...
Sure enough. And because most wont change their job, there is your opportunity to do something revolutionary.
BuddyTV Takes $2.8 million Series A
Seattle based BuddyTV (Advanced Media Research Group Inc.) has taken $2.8 million in Series A funding in a round led by Gemstar-TV Guide International.
How would you know why a startup failed? The main reason may simply be that you are not living in a good place for startups.
Before Viaweb we had a startup to put art galleries online. But galleries didn't (and mostly still don't) want to have their inventories online. Galleries want you to come in in person so they can impress you with their fancy space and make a big production out of bringing stuff out of their mysterious back room.

Since we were too poor then to have bought any art from galleries, we didn't realize this was how they worked. Lesson: don't build things for users so unlike you that you don't understand what they want.
I think this subject is ripe for a reality tv series.

People (men and women) would love to see awkward rich guys falling on their face while trying to pick up women.
Just buy a real VPS server somewhere and avoid all the issues with data persistence and EC2. Use EC2 for heavy processing and use S3 for backup/storage/static file server.

Going down the path you described will be full of pain.
I had better hopes for Apache Rivet. But it has had lots of upsides just the same, and I've learned a tremendous amount from watching Tcl itself gurgle down the drain, even if it still pisses me off.
Do you think like an entrepreneur?
Online backup solutions: a review
1 The first was a mobile game distribution network. Developers upload their games and tag them. Publishers get a widget they embed on their site and displays games relevant to their website content. If their audience like a game, then they simply input their phone number in the widget and hit SEND to my phone. It didn't work because I kept changing my direction and I wanted to wait until everything was perfect to launch. Big mistake. Several months of development out the window.

2 An location based SMS coupons. User registers for offers they are interested in and add zip code. Advertisers choose a radius to distribute their ad and send it to all users within the perimeter. Too easy to copy and SMS business is costly. Still got some interest from some VIP in the mobile field. The real reason was I got bored with it.

3. A RSS to SMS/IM content distribution. It failed because i just kept changing direction. On top of that the idea was not unique at all.

PS> Now i am working on something truly unique. Well at least it hasn't worked so far although a few carriers and handset manufacturers have tried it.If I do not get a call from PG after launching this one, then I will be xtremly surprised.
Million bucks in 4 months - Alex Tew of MillionDollarHomepage.com
Does S3DFS solve that for you though? What I got from S3DFS's description was that you fire up your instances and it mounts a shared filesystem. Then you could start MySQL from that, in theory.
Shucks, it sounds like you're right. From the looks of it, EC2 doesn't have enough of a reliable database solution to justify putting a full production server on it. If I use the untested methods, I feel like I'm either going to always wonder if I'm going to wake up with my data gone, or if it will die from performance problems.
Thanks, great resources. Do you, or anyone know of someone that has deployed a full production website on entirely S3 + EC2?
The technology exists already, small devices like that are used for example for tagging migrating birds and rare animals and tracking their paths. I'm more curious about the social/usability issues, whether people would voluntarily give up their privacy for something like that. Anyway, I'm not going to implement it tommorrow, I'm just kicking around different ideas.
agreed but for different reasons. in terms of bang for the buck EC2 is awful if you want it up 24/7. And then you get other problems with EC2 too, the biggest one being it's non-persistent storage (but that's something everyone already knows and is happy to ignore).

Yes, it's possible to design an application to either not use a database at all, by storing _all_ your data on S3, or to implement some workarounds that deal with DB master-slave replication, store commit logs on S3, etc etc etc. Question is: is it worth it? In my opinion, no.

S3 is great if you want to store images, movies, etc and aren't very popular worldwide. EC2 is great if you need extra processing power to deal with extra traffic coming from those Digg/Slashdot stories, or doing batch processing like converting movie formats, but going 24/7 on simple EC2 or EC2+S3 (using S3 as a database and not just for storing media files) is more of a hassle than a "good enough" solution. VPS is definitely the way to go if you cannot afford to lease a couple of servers or some rackspace for the cheap 1u boxes you can buy at ebay.
As someone pointed out in comments, geotracing.com does a similar thing. And of course companies have done that for fleet tracking for a long time too.
Would you mind pointing me in the direction of some cheap hardware, or something to Google for? I'm totally clueless in that respect, and am doing research, but any help would be greatly appreciated.

I don't really need a monstrosity, just something small and reliable.
It's not just galleries that don't want inventory online, it's the artists too. Pro artists have special deals worked out with each gallery, some deals are supposed to be exclusive but artists cheat and put their work into other galeries too.
Oooh, that's interesting. What is the name and what do they do (if you can tell any of this information)?
Prezentit.com - Show and share your presentations
I've been trying different things on the Internet since about 1995. Back then I was trying to create online storage, which turned out to host more adult files then anything else. Finally gave that one up due to bandwidth costs.

After that I tried my hand at web-based email which extended into a calendar, time and billing and eventually forums that I hosted and other people could use their own domain name with. Turned into a semi-successful business, but the management of the system ended up eating up too much of my time and it wasn't making enough to let me quit my day job.

I wrote an anti-spam service that was efficient and quite good at filtering spam, but the resource required to take it to the next level were not around and I couldn't generate interest in the product. This came down to a not enough hardware to get the full working prototype finished problem.

Some of the largest problem I had were the 800 pound gorillas that seemed to appear just before my product was ready and I wasn't agile enough at the time to compete.

I don't regret implementing any of the project I did, even the map server that I've tried to create about 6 times. For me half the fun is the creation and until recently I haven't been dedicated to creating a large business out of it.

Plus the experience and the amazing tools that have come out of the whole journey are worth more then the the time I spent on all of this.

Another big lesson I've learned it that I can't do the whole thing alone. Just like you need the right tool for the right job, the right person for each job is important as well.
Introducing Rephoria - Where Everyone Wins, formerly known as PromoterForce
Ask Steve #3 - Content & Community Makes Money for Resource/Hobby Sites
Incredible?! lol
How about another question. Which companies were furthest from your expectations, e.g. failed when you expected them to succeed. I suppose you just don't fund companies you don't expect to succeed, so every failure disappoints.
"The whole field (ed: IT) rewards novices and punishes experts."
how would you categorize something like craigslist, or 37signals?

Craigslist clearly didn't intend to be huge at first (it wasn't even sure it wanted to be a web app), and Craig has made it pretty clear that he doesn't intend to IPO or sell (though a big chunk was purchased, by EBay, I think). Aside from that, it does have the profile of many startups - small, technically oriented, programmer-driven, massive growth.

37signals fits to some extent as well - bootstrapped by consulting, but product oriented, technically oriented, programmer driven, substantial growth.

Neither companies seem to want a sale or IPO - they're happy to settle into a role as profitable businesses. At that point, I suppose they are no longer startups.

While these companies are the exception, the approach they advocate does seem to be growing. So maybe you call them startups and say that there are many paths - and the IPO/sale exit is more typical.
Don't tell me that meeting chicks was not a side goal of this endeavor!
Three years with Ruby on Rails
Anyone else have to archive & install after updating Quicktime?
Just checking, cost me a day worth of productivity.

MacBook Pro user
I think that investors are jumping on facebook apps like they did on regular websites in the first bubble.
I'm looking forward to location based social networking. In the loopt trials, it was said that friends with loopt discovered that they were within a couple blocks of many of their friends even when they didn't expect it. I think if all my friends were running loopt or something similar it could change behavior in a positive way.
Super-fast, ubiquitous (beyond mobile) network computing: the internet thoroughly integrated into the world. Access to all your data, all the time. Query-like access to the worlds data. Distributed, fragmented, interconnected web apps, APIs and aggregations. Simpler, higher-level development tools. Deeper, subtler collaboration tools. Distributed reputation, trust and identification tools. Micropayments. A network economy: entrepreneurial individuals, shifts in business organisation. Commonplace persistent virtual reality (no, really). Mind-computer interfacing.

Is that the sort of thing you meant?
Will Google Launch a Cell Phone? - TvByDemand | Forums | General
I can't speak about EC2, because we haven't used that. (But from what I've heard, it's not quite right for a web hosting service. We rate hosting your app yourself.)

But ... we've found S3 to be very good for hosting big stuff, and static files. Very simple. And use the S3Fox Firefox plugin for testing and getting statics on there in the debugging phase.
7 Tips for viral marketing
Thomas Baekdal lists 7 tipps for successful viral marketing.
Oh, definitely. I'm using Rails' attachment_fu plugin to store all my images using S3. It's drop-dead simple.
www.remi-vespa.com, on outsourcing for SMBs
Sex is the killer app of the internet.
As someone who's not very familiar with EC2 and S3... what's the advantage of going this route over the traditional app server(s)/web server(s)/database(s) model?
Hackers find serious problems in California voting machines
Come on now, link to the original: http://www.baekdal.com/articles/Branding/viral-marketing-tri...
Skype also affected by supposed "Firefox vulnerabiility
Believe it or not, it wasn't. It was the business part that was new, not the art part. I'd just come from art school.
From one perspective, juwo my product, has failed. No investors, No cofounders, No Users (apart from me). Yet - I plan to reimplement and hopefully, turn things around.

juwo is not a failure until I give up.

I won't give up while my convictions about it remain.
"... I was a member of the community that would eventually be using the software, and I basically just built something I would use myself ..."

Do you think this is a variation of "make what users want"?

Initially being in a community gives you insight into what they want. But you don't always have to be part of a community to do this. You could just as easily extend this to "making tools for yourself" solving those annoying problems. In the process develop something that others might find useful.

"... "Operacy" and the skills of doing. The notion that it is enough to "know" is both absurd and dangerous. Research has shown that youngsters who pursued hobbies did much better in life - because they has some experience of operacy ..." ~ http://www.edwdebono.com/debono/msg02r.htm

Insight comes also from operacy or doing. Rather than just knowing, watching, reading. You gain more from doing.
S3 is storage- it is mostly used to save money (and some people have saved a lot of money). E3 is for computing and is attractive because of its easy scalibility, but people are still trying to figure out how to best use it with webapps.
The real innovation here is going to be through the conversion of things into computers, instead of changes with computers themselves.

Instead of a different monitor shape, your stereo, your television, your car, your phone, your home systems, etc will all just become computers with the same natural interfaces they always had.
Before answering this let me tell you that I cannot endorse any of the services because I've never used them so I don't know how good or bad a service they provide. You'll have to check this for yourself (google for opinions, etc.).

Slicehost and other similar services (VPS') are about as cheap as it can get but bear in mind that you're sharing hardware with other people so don't assume you'll be the only one using the server.

If you want real hardware, google for "managed hosting". Alternatively, if you already have a 1u server lying around or can get hold to one (or more) it may be cheaper to search for "colocation services" which should show you some companies that will provide rackspace for your servers.

Renting hardware may be cheaper but if you buy a couple of servers on ebay and go for colocation, in the event of your business going belly up you can sell the hardware and maybe get enough money to last you for a couple of months while you search for a job or make new plans for world domination.