skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that this purchase was about the server technology to create and edit PowerPoint presentations as well to convert them to plaintext or PDF. Finally, they have their own stand-alone PowerPoint viewer that works on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

From their web site circa 2004 via archive.org
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Tonic's unique and patent pending PowerPoint® library provides an enterprise-ready API for you to programatically work with PowerPoint® documents, taking slide presentations to the next level of sophistication.

The library provides a 100% Java API to read, create and manipulate PowerPoint® presentations. Use the library to generate new slides, populate presentation templates or extract data from existing presentations. The library supports the standard PowerPoint file format that is used by PowerPoint 97, 98, 2000, XP, etc.

The library works directly with PowerPoint® files. This means you don't need the PowerPoint® application to use the library, only to view generated presentations.

Turn Slide Presentations into Powerful Business Tools
Here are just some of the ways to use Tonic's PowerPoint® library:

Convert PowerPoint® presentation into other formats e.g. PDF, HTML
Extract data from PowerPoint® templates
Auto-generate entire presentations from existing data sources e.g. a database or spreadsheet
Manage collections of presentations
Extract slides or data from existing presentations to create new ones
For examples of what Tonic Systems' PowerPoint® library can do for your business, see our Case Studies.

Availability and Pricing
The library is currently shipping. A license to use the library is priced at US $5000, where the envisaged usage is a single instance running inside a web application, serving unlimited users. For other usage models or inclusion in a product, we are happy to discuss different pricing options. Site and global licenses are also available.
I was thinking more in terms of them remaining an available source of early-stage funding even if other investors are panicking (in the event that a bubble bursts). I know people have made good money this way in the past...
You can't win on brand name alone.

Zenter has some tough competition ahead of it but I'm sure they expected it.
Marketplace For Creative Expression
Realistically, you probably can't.

If you go to the founders and threaten, they'll probably fire you. They got funding now so you're replaceable with somebody who will accept post-funding equity.

If you go to the founders and beg, they'll probably talk you out of it. They won't increase your compensation unless they see an increase in value.

If you go to the founders and say, "Tell me what I can do to really help the company" and then work like a dog to become an out-and-out performer, they may (repeat, may) appreciate your outperformance of the rest of the team and want to give you a big equity boost. It's hard to hate a total coding monster and you have to be a bad person to want to cheat somebody who will kamikaze himself for your company. Still, you have to do that for several years and really become the guy that they say, "If we only had three more guys exactly like him!" And, in the end, expect it to take years to build up a decent equity position and realize that they don't have to give you anything. And, of course, you've got to be a total coding monster.
If you're not a hacker and you're trying to start a business that requires a lot of hacking from the outset (such as anything computer-related), you're going to have to let go of the idea that this is going to be "your" startup. The beginning or a company's existence is the most risk-laden period, and it's also the period where the value you can provide is far less than the value the people actually writing the code will provide. You have to convince hackers to come on as co-founders (not employees), and compensate them accordingly.

The other option, as others have suggested, is to learn to code yourself. I doubt that you'd be able to do a good job of coding something up yourself without anyone with formal computer science training backing you up, but learning never hurts. If you know that starting a tech business is something you want to do someday, I'd say you should start learning how to code now. Personally, whenever a non-hacker tells me about something they want to start, I can't really see what value they're bringing to the table. Most ideas aren't that original (and don't necessarily have to be to be successful), so if they can't actually make the product, what good does working under them do for me? Business-types are definitely useful, but not until there's at least some sort of prototype.

I've never actually done a startup myself, so this is really just my personal intuition of the way things should work.
Zenter isn't even in private beta yet.
Slide and Zenter have nothing to do with each other, or Tonic.
Weinberg was confrontational. He seems only out to argue. Paul handled it well.
If Zenter can be as cool as KeyNote is on OS X, they have nothing to fear from Google.
Made in USA logo a differentiator? (49 comments)
Does anyone know what Sequoia Capital Funded stealth mode startup Fotoroll is up to?
So you just create a contact form and expect feedback to come in without any effort?

Buy lunch for 5 local users and brainstorm. Get your friends to try the app, have a dinner party and brainstorm. Go to survey monkey and add a short survey to your app.

You need to seek out feedback from a broad spectrum of your users and ask specific questions (hopefully based on the voluntary feedback that you've received to date).
I think Zenter may need to come up with a new idea.

Google has marketing clout and web presence like no other (this is obvious). They also have incredible staying power, so if I am investing time into using an application, and I have 2 alternatives that are similar functionally, I would take the one with the best chance of future survival, and that is clearly Google. I guess the option they have is to create some amazing functionality that Google doesn't have in their version, and sell it to Google if Google's app is any good.

I guess we won't know until Google launches what they have. Zenter - Launch First and soon!! Very soon.

Btw: At Startup school, a guy from Google asked us about our startup and what we were doing, etc. It was clear they were looking for ideas there.
It's a little different when searching for technical experts, however, because it's often not possible to tell a technical expert from a technical nincompoop without a solid background in the subject. There are a lot of folks out there who can play buzzword bingo with the best of them, but can't actually sit down and code something.
Here's how I try to think of it. There are going to be some features that you realize are crucial to add. They'll be so obvious you won't even need to write them down. The point of getting user feedback is not to get requests for random little things, but rather to find out how they are using the site, and discover with them those crucial features that are obviously needed.
Seeksift looks cool. I was a little frusterated though when I clicked on the blog and then couldn't find a way to click back to seeksift easily.
I'm inclined to say it makes no difference, but it might. Some may have small partiality to US (or western) software, but more for support and documentation reasons. Where or from whom the code was from is opaque to most users anyway. The topic reminds me of this particular essay, which is fitting: http://paulgraham.com/usa.html
What makes you say they're funded by Sequoia? I don't think they are. (And having the word sequoia in a linked subdomain doesn't count.)
Compatibility with MS Office is a big deal for business users - at least in the beginning. But the staying power will come from how well the app works on the web.
I don't think emulating Keynote is the right play. Any online presentation app should be designed to exploit the inherent advantages that web applications have, i.e. collaboration, information retrieval, etc..

I don't think the goal is to replace Keynote or Powerpoint but rather provide software the lets people easily develop bring presentations for a web audience.

As a former iWork engineer, I think some of the stuff Keynote has can't be replicated effectively in a web application.
Never mind, another article shows that they replace text passwords with images. It makes it more interesting, though its practicality is yet to be seen.
Our actual product is different than our original idea when we formed the LLC although it uses technology from the original. What do you think of the idea of forming a C corp for the new application that is then owned initially by the LLC? (Our idea is to have core technology provided by the original LLC to a series of applications)
The big reason why C corps are preferable is because S corporation shareholders can only be people -- not other businesses, like VC firms. (S corps also can't issue preferred stock.) An S corporation can't take venture capital without first reverting back to C corp status. But an S corporation can save a lot of money on taxes.

But although many of our businesses want venture capital, most are unlikely to get it. In fact, I'd hazard a guess that more tech startups will have income than will have external corporate funders. (This usually happens when the founders need some money, so they put their original idea on hold and do some consulting for a while. Eventually they're doing exclusively consulting, because it pays well, or at least it pays off quickly.) By that point, you're probably unlikely to remember the tax consequences and switch to an S corp.

Why not start out as an S corp, and switch to a C corp iff you acquire VC or sell preferred stock?
Help.  Google is lost.
Do you believe (like me) that Google has lost its way ( in anything other than search ) and is going into acquisition just in Hopes to find the company that will put it back into the road?
"Btw: At Startup school, a guy from Google asked us about our startup and what we were doing, etc. It was clear they were looking for ideas there."

That sounds more like an interested hacker from Google who was genuinely curious about your project (like everyone else there), rather than a planted corporate development spy itching to report his scoops to home base.
Oh I didn't mean that it shouldn't try and exploit the advantages of web apps, I just meant that it should make presentations look better, by default, than those awful PowerPoint presentations we always see.
Vald,

Zenter is an web based presentation app that promises to really take advantage of being online. Users will have the regular functionality of PowerPoint, but with the ability to directly add content from the web (Google Images). Each public slide show will also be put into a public library, for other users to remix or just drop into their show.

Slide has more to do with photos, I agree.
Funny how they sing the same song all the time. ie. We have the biggest data center in the world, now you can use it. We don't make money now, but we will make shit loads in the future. Sounds like web 2.0..
From what I understand the google presentation software has been in development for quite some time and Tonic was aquired to help fill gaps in their software.
Snap Launches Snap Shots
Dude,

Here's another way you might be able to justify a re-negotiation.

Think of what value your company will have five years from now if it gets sold/goes public, etc. Let's say it's $100M; your options are worth $500K.

Now think of how much you'd be making if you weren't at a startup. Let's say it's $95K.

If you took your $20K and put it in the stock market and earned 7% a year on it (that's almost a sure thing as that's the historical yield on the market), you'd have $115K.

Now how likely is it that your startup is going to be worth $100M. Let's say it's 20%. Then your $500K is worth 0.2500= $100K.

From that perspective you'd be better off working somewhere else under your current employment contract.

I have no idea if these numbers are legitimate in your case, but it could be another way of you getting a better deal.

Let me know if you want any more ideas.
I'm using Python: Essential Reference by David M. Beazley(Third Edition) to learn Python. It's got a no-nonsense tutorial that plows through all the basics first, then has a large reference for the Standard Library. The reference is very similar (almost word for word in some cases) to the online library reference.

I haven't found anything yet, though, on advanced techniques or how to write "pythonic" code. I decided to start reading "On Lisp," instead.

http://safari.oreilly.com/0672328623 (Beazley's Python reference)
I guess you haven't read this yet

http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html
Ideally IF google really wanted to send someone to spy, it would be someone who is SEEMINGLY a hacker:D

Not that I think google is out of ideas. They probably have too many ideas.
On a side note, time for a bury feature;)
I realize this doesn't quite apply to your post, but I'd just like to point out that the "hard to hate a kamikaze" mentality doesn't always apply in a corporate environment. The people you'd be negotiating with may be too preoccupied with political maneuvering to even notice.

Just a warning to anyone who might take that logic and apply it somewhere other than a startup.
FreshBooks Launches Report Cards
I have. Same for all his posts ( still did not get me to YC ), Still it seems tome that most of us are buying into this google thing.
When In Doubt, Make It Public
I agree. I doubt anyone will be surprised to find out Google's working on something that would compete with Wufoo as well.
Make New Friends, But Keep The Old
I added this because it's n-gram [0] data is useful for spell checking (among other things) as highlighted in the post on writing a word processor in 20 lines of python. [1]

Reference

[0] wikipedia, 'n-gram: sub-sequence of n items from a given sequence'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-gram

[1] chandrab, news.yc, 'From Google (Norvig): How to write a spelling check in 20 lines (very cool) '

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=10967
You really have to understand the bubble of '99. Such a bubble isn't even possible today. Yes there are few odd investments here and there but that is vastly different from having deadbeat IPOs of '99 era that were based on pure hype.

Closest bubble bursting we might see this time around may be IF adsense/adwords collapse. Even then it will be on a much smaller scale than before. And to be honest, knowing the smart folks behind google, I don't see such a thing happening overnight. At the helm of '99 bubble were young grads and hype filled underwriters; at the helm of the bubble today(if you can even call it a bubble) are a buncha PhDs and a very smart CEO(Eric Schmidt).
Yahoo Fails to Click, As Google Double Clicks
Point taken. If that's the case then I guess there is nothing broken here and I'm assuming folks behind the site did their homework when creating the logo.

I do love the overall site design.
I had this same idea about 6 months ago (right around the time I got engaged ;). What is going to set you apart from theknot.com? I don't disagree that you could do it better than the knot but competing what that marketing machine is right up there with fighting Google.
Exactly.

That is why I have a tough time recommending even people on campus that know little about website design to goto RAC or elance to find a designer or a coder. I've seen it from both perspectives. From the lowball bidding most people on such sites do, as a designer I don't really expect a $100 website to take me a month and for me to think about it all day. So if you don't know exactly what you want you'll get some very average work.
VCs want to invest into a C-corp because it allows them to have a flexible share structure so if you're seeking VC money, C-corp will be a must. But, in the mean time, you CAN use S-corp since it is easy to set up and gives you some protections. S-corp can be easily converted into a C-corp (a single supplemental form!). LLC is not as easy to convert to a C-corp and paperwork is fairly complex and will cost you several K.

Thing to note about S-corps is that all founders _MUST_ be American citizens.
a. Learn to hack.

or

b. Learn to find good hackers (this not easy), then:
1. Pay them lots of money, or -
2. Learn from Steve Jobs and be a walking RDF.
Paul - re common/preferred issue - as an entrepreneur, it's a huge deal to me and my co-founders.

Here's a relevant excerpt from Venturebeat:

"...VentureBeat thus believes Y Combinator's approach offers an advantage to entrepreneurs because they are not held hostage by the often onerous privileged rights that preferred shareholders often demand, such as minimum payouts upon acquisition or dissolution, rights to receive compensation before common, or anti-dilution rights. Common stock aligns the interests of Y Combinator with the interests of the founders and employees, who also hold common."
Like a lot of others have said here, it depends on where you define your threshold for having "learned" a language. To get reasonably productive in a language to the point where you can (eventually) build most things shouldn't take more than week if you have a few under your belt.

Then there is the long process learning the right idioms, keeping up with the latest changes in newer languages, familiarizing yourself with the universe of libraries, etc, etc - I think all of these things are required to really claim fluency in a language. So I would answer "a long, long ass time."
don't forget to check out ihavehundredsofmyspacefriends.fotoroll.com
Get a hacker cofounder.
Try just asking.

Present yourself in a reasonable light, have coffee with one of the people in charge, and just mention that you feel you're getting something of a raw deal on equity. If they're decent, they'll fix it, and if not, you don't want to be there anyway.
wantrepreneurs? they desperately want to see themselves as entrepreneurs, but bring nothing to the table other than self-promotion skills :) I worked for one of those once... these guys sound positively sane compared to that guy.
Ask someone you do trust to recommend someone to...

Build a chain of trust to someone with technical knowledge, and use them to assess possible technical people.
edit: you are correct.
Wow. Yes, this is a scary development. This could easily be built by a couple of hackers with a few thousand dollars. I wrote about taking unnecessary money like this a few weeks ago at:

Outside Money and Irritable Bowel Syndrome

http://blog.nanobeepers.com/2007/02/20/outside-money-and-irritable-bowel-syndrome/
There seems to be stereotype that high performance geeks rely on caffeine drinks to stay alive. In reality only regular sleep cycles and adequate exercises can keep you at your peak performance over the long term. Meditations can help you to control your focus and weed out distractions, so you waste less of your time when the environment doesn't fit you.

If you really need to pull a few all-nighters, consider taking something on a measurable dosage, so when you decide to rehabilitate, you can adjust your intake on a decay curve.
These multi-company organizations are almost always a bad plan. And even if they weren't, all investors think they are, so this sort of thing is a big red flag.
Thanks for the info about Zenter.

Vlad
I saw the original Bubble, and that was still a bubble.
They could also deal with learning that if top hackers wanted to work for mostly equity, they'd be doing their own thing and taking 100%

I'm not saying that equity compensation isn't worth considering, just that for every startup that flips and pays out a nice chunk, there are plenty that don't.
What are the most confusing 'top' websites you've seen?
I'm looking for what the exit is if you're offering equity, or what the path to profitability is if this is going to be a salaried job.

If you can't sell me on your idea and business case, there's no point in talking about 1-4 above.
As I've been looking at some of these heavily funded startups, I am often left asking myself - what do they do? Even after five minutes of poking around, it's often such a mess that I still can't figure out how I would explain it to someone else.

37Signals discussed this about Virb.com at the bottom of this post:

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/374-designcopy-ups-and-downs-at-virb

Virb's 'About' page:

http://www.virb.com/is

What other sites have you come across where it takes more than a reasonable amount of time to figure out what they do?
I agree. This post isn't relevant.
Getting the message in - (37signals)
I think the biggest question is how much does the company need you. If it wouldn't hurt much to lose you, you don't have much room to negotiate and pretty much have to rely on generosity.
see also: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=6139
I think Virb and our start-up have very similar goals. Except from the beginning we knew we wanted to do few things and do it well; seems like Virb is committing the trademark mistake of packaging in too many functions too quickly.
And a limiter on spam from self promoting blogs. And a filter for web 2.0 gossip blogs.
I have a proposed unifying theory that covers the beauty of both simplicity and excess.

Humans appreciate intelligence. Showing how much you can do with so little is one way to show intelligence. For example, if you can create a brilliant artistic masterpiece with only a single line then this is clearly a work of amazing intelligence. The other easy way to demonstrate intelligence is by doing the absolute most that you can with every resource you have available to you. This explains the beauty of things like H2G2, where the beauty comes from incorporating all of these random plot elements and linguistic tropes into these beautiful sentences and descriptions.
I'm interested that you'd even consider a salary-only job. Why would you ever work for a startup if it was only salary? (Honestly-I'd like to hear your opinion) Wouldn't you want equity?

Also, let me ask you why I'd ever want to hire you on as salary-only; you'd have no incentive to stay (I'm a big fan of splitting the equity pie to make sure everyone shares in the upside and have incentives aligned).

Thoughts?
Maybe I'm wrong, but I read the page above differently from you. The $200 fee applies to LLCs, Limited Partnerships or General Partnerships.

You're a C-Class Corp right? Therefore you pay the corporate franchise tax. If you go to the link on the page entitled "Franchise Taxes Here":
http://corp.delaware.gov/frtaxcalc.shtml

it tells you what it should be. Your fee will vary depending upon how many shares you have outstanding, but I'm guessing you have less than 3,000 therefore it will be $35.
I was part of Google SoC in 2005, and it was Miguel de Icaza of the Mono Project who reviewed and decided to accept my application. NOT Google. Google just gives each project a certain number of slots to fill. So at least in 2005, it was the Open Source project that picked which applicants to fill their slots with.

How would Google be able to judge the worth and merits of each proposal to the OS project anyway? :)

I also did not mean that being an established Open Source project meant that the project automatically gets SoC slots. But it does seem to me like established Open Source projects can pretty easily get slots for SoC. In other words, Google isn't too picky, nor are they only looking for contributors to the projects that Google finds useful.