pretty fascinating that a seed fund can also make money in very creative ways.

The hardware is so good in this case, I think it's far more useful to install ubuntu or windows 8 on this computer instead.

I'm not surprised that video playback is slow since native access to file is probably not perfected in the website environment that Chrome OS probably uses.

it's hard to maintain culture with remote workers. It's a trade off and not clear completely which pattern is better

I'm not sure if we should want to force a company culture on workers. And perhaps this idea of company culture doesn't fit these times anymore. People are much less inclined to stay within the same company for most of their lives anyway.

Personally I never cared too much for a company culture. I don't join a company because of a culture. I join it because the projects are interesting, the money is good, the benefits are nice, etc...

I do feel the approach Yahoo is taking is bad for the company. I'm sure for some work it's good to be at work in the company offices, but for some other work a home environment works much better. In most companies I've worked I always got bothered by other employees, making it much harder to concentrate on tasks. Since june last year I started working with a friend on our start-up and I thrive much better in this environment. Now I work from home and the silence and serenity helps me achieve much better results. I should note I have no wife or kids, just 2 cats, so very little distraction there.

A company like Yahoo should realise that some employees will deliver much better results when giving them more freedom. One example could be Bill Atkinson, who delivered great work for Apple, yet did most of his work at home:

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...

its much easier in start up environments generally to telecommute.

Once a business becomes huge there are other factors at play that may mean there are trade offs. For instance Bill Atkinson left apple in 1990, Similar to Woz. Great people for their time but not happy when it goes corporate.

This would make the best homepage header or even a epic Google Doodle

I don't know why people always use Paypal when it's had a history of screwing people over.

Use Google checkout for merchants, I've used it and it's really really easy to setup as well as safe.

Google Checkout closed our account because of suspicious attempted purchases of our JavaScript ebook, and kept our money.

So… nope.

How did they keep your money? Was it just a small amount that you couldn't be bothered with so you let them have it? (going by how well your products seem to be doing that's unlikely)

Otherwise I can't see any legal way that they (or PayPal for that matter) would be able to keep anything beyond their transaction fees.

Simple: they close the account without appeal and there is no way to contact a human.

http://slash7.com/articles/2009/3/26/google-is-evil-worse-th...

If the explosion micheal bay effect happened in real time it would be sick

The most common problem I see is technical outsourcing, there are a lot of MBA based teams who cannot convince a great technical person to join.

As a result, outsourcing to get the product done becomes a necessity and also easier than going around to find a good technical cofounder. It is also tempting since outsourcing seems cheaper and promises to get the product built.

The product just ends up not being good enough.

As a technical person in the startup industry, this is the #1 reason why I think startups fails.

A few years ago I did some pro bono work(not intentionally :-) for a couple of startups with domain experience but no software development experience. They had offshored their work to groups in India. The delivered products were marginally functional and not satisfactory. The had compounded the domain to developer communications problems with remote and cultural issues.

Fully agree with you - need to have strong product people as part of your founder team

I attended this hackathon.

The biggest problem in these hackathons is that it's more about the pitching than the product.

At this particular one, they even told us, worry about the UI and the pitch, don't worry about the backend.

I've been to 5 hackthons total, including 2 Techcrunch disrupts, 2 angelhacks, 1 startup weekends. What I realize is that the winners aren't the best hacks, they are the best pitches, some people only demo their hacks for 2-3 seconds and it's questionable that it even works.

If the business person pitches well, and you have a good designer, you probably win.

I've experienced that at other hackathons too. Fake click throughs using photoshop drawn screenshots beat out actual mobile applications with backends. I stopped going to hackathons after a powerpoint beat out my hack. It was a cool idea but the only execution was drawing some pictures. 24 hours to draw pictures. Yup.

This can be a problem with some, but I think it really depends on the goal of hackathon.

It sounds like the ones you attended were all startup and business focused, in which case the idea (and hence the pitch) does become more important.

But other hackathons I've seen are all about the tech, and they do give people time and space to set up a live demo at the end.

Putting an intermediary currency in between purchaser and product is always worse for the consumers.

1. There is the leftover phenomenon where you have currency leftover and you can't spend it anywhere else

2. Or everytime you need to make a purchase, you switch the exact amount out for your purchase which adds additional step of useless process

There's one added benefit, but its not clear who this accreted to: reduced credit card fees. Having one large charge is generally more efficient than many small charges, and if the savings are used to reduce fees or increase developer percentage then this is a good thing.

I would prefer the "wallet" method that steam uses. You require people put at least $5 in the wallet tied to their account. It's easy to remove the leftover balance because the first time you buy something over $5 it takes money from the wallet and charges you the rest leaving $0 in wallet.

wow, some of those copies were just blantant. Is there a way to embed a specific string in the website (either through html or css) so later you can somehow google search anyone is copying you?

Given that they might not have very good CSS skill, you might embed a CSS comment or CSS properties which look like they do something but don't -- a would-be stealer probably wouldn't delete something which they didn't understand.