Ask HN (and YC Alumni): Please Review My W2010 Application
I've just submitted my application to W2010 Application. I think it's great that YC Alumni are pitching in to help. Here is my app for this funding cycle. Any comments, suggestions, jokes, will be warmly received.

What is your company going to make?

An auction service built atop Twitter that permits sellers to set (1) an asking price and (2) a minimum reserve price for a good or service which is then lowered until a prospective buyer is willing to accept the price or minimum reserve is met.

What's new about what you're doing? What are people forced to do now because what you plan to make doesn't exist yet?

Making auctions insanely simple by lowering 'search' costs (in the economic sense). The service will leverage the 'broadcast' benefits of Twitter through the Dutch auction mechanism.

What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don't get?

The essential ingredient, a critical mass of buyers and sellers, are already present on Twitter. What is absent is an effective mechanism to mediate the exchanges between them.

Who are your competitors, and who might become competitors? Who do you fear most?

eBay (potentially), TipJoy (clearly the scariest as they already came close with the Shaq thing; sadly, I just found out while filling out the application NOW at 11:37PM EST on Oct. 28 that they shutdown at the end of August. I should contact them and share the idea or see if they want to join up....).

How will you make money?

(a) Nominal flat fee for serving as intermediary or (b) By keeping the service free and selling pricing data on the goods and services sold to manufactures etc.

If you've already started working on it, how long have you been working and how many lines of code (if applicable) have you written?

Some mock up code (about 20-30 lines) in Mathematica, excluding a Twitter library already provided.

How long will it take before you have a prototype? A beta? A version you can charge for?

Prototype - one week. Beta - One Month. Charge Version - for the 'free' option, One Month. Unknown how long a nominal flat fee version would take to make.

If you had any other ideas you considered applying with, feel free to list them. One may be something we've been waiting for.

(a) Looking for Ramsey structures in social networks like twitter (b) Monetizing idle computing resources - a forum like News.YC in which questions are posed and answers can be obtained either by (1) donating your computing power or (2) purchasing the answer, thus deriving a pricing mechanism for idle resources (harder problem then it looks, at least to me)

Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered. (The answer need not be related to your project.)

This is embarrassing, but I only recently discovered that Fermant's Last Theorem was actually solved in 1995 by Andrew Wiles. I, like an idiot, thought it was an open problem until I was having dinner with my fiance and she laughed at me and explained how badly I missed the boat. But the mechanism by which it was proved was hideously complicated (at least it was to me). I tried working my way through the first page of the 100+ page proof. Still working on it in the very limited free time I do have...