From my personal experience I can confirm p. 1, totally disagree with p.2 (there are plenty of good and well payed jobs for IT specialists in xUSSR countries).
About p.3 - exploit-selling is not a respectable profession, but in recent 20 years people have seen too many examples of people becoming rich by illegal and dirty ways and this definitely did bad influence.
It's a cool project, but I wouldn't necessarily call it a start-up. How will you monetize while depending on FB? Is this currently a pain-point for people, to the point that they would pay money for it?
I was pretty excited about SocialCam when they first launched, and sad when I saw "OMG SEE THIS" type videos spreading via their app on FB.
Why can't we have an instagram of video? It sucks to see my friends tricked into clicking on racy videos on FB and sharing them accidentally, a group of folks as awesome as the SocialCam team shouldn't have to resort to this type of trickery.
That's an interesting reaction, and someone else said "This would be great were I a stalker."
It comes as a surprise to me though -- all of these photos are already public. Do people not expect this degree of discoverability with Instagram? Do you think FB will consider this potentially sensitive angle post-acquisition?
"3) ... There are plenty of parts of the country where you can earn a combined six figure income while spending less than $100/sqft for a home in a good neighborhood."
Where are these magical lands? I've lived in Atlanta and the SF Bay Area, and the salary difference between the two for engineers is around 30%, although house prices aren't much cheaper in the former - unless you want to live in the suburbs, and then you make up the difference in gas.
Medical specialists are tied to hospitals, some of which may be more affordable areas, but technologists (who this site arguably caters to) tend to be bound to tech hotspots, where house prices near $1MM don't raise eyebrows.
Hmm..I think we went to Tech around the same time.
Regardless, prices in Atlanta suburbs are less than 1/3rd of the prices in the bay area - and I am talking about suburbs just outside 285 - like Dunwoody that are <10 from Buckhead.
A $300K house in Dunwoody would easily cost more than $1MM in almost all of south bay.
There's no way you can make that difference up in gas - unless you go back and forth 5 times a day.
Having said that, your expected income in the bay area more than makes up for that difference if you are working in technology and entrepreneurial.
If you talk about Urban living, the costs are universally high, and only get worse once you have a family.
Suburbs get a bad rap, but they are way more economical once you have kids. And not everyone has to commute. Plenty of us work from home or work in nearby Suburban office parks.
I live in Dallas where costs are similar to Atlanta. Living in the Bay Area would mean four times the cost for family friendly housing at maybe a 40% increase in salary.
From what I read, Instagram faced major challenges scaling their service to meet the demand of their growing iPhone user base. My guess is that iPhone growth just now plateaued enough to allow them to release their android client.
I last used instagram with a second-hand iPhone 3G, and stopped using it when I upgraded to a Galaxy Nexus S. I never thought I downgraded myself into being a second-class mobile citizen in the process.
That's only an option if you're shuttering the product of your own will. If you're part of a talent acquisition (which is the case with Posterous and Milk), the purchasing company would have to make that call, so you should really address the blog post to them.
It's unlikely any of them would: they just paid a bunch of money and acquired the team plus source, and even if they don't use the acquired source, open-sourcing it is extra work and/or a liability. The team, on the other hand, may still have faint hopes that the company will do something with their product.
In the cases where it's clear that the team's energies will be focused elsewhere the team could try to include it in the terms of the acquisition, but were I in those shoes I'd probably not want to risk souring the upside or acquisition as a whole.
In a talent acquisition, disposition of source code assets would be up for negotiation among principals prior to closing the deal.
No reason founders couldn't specify this as a condition. Or make it an explicit term of their service agreement to customers/users well in advance of this eventuality. Something like:
"In the event COMPANY concludes business operations or discontinues SERVICE for any reason, including but not limited to sale or acquisition of COMPANY or relevant assets, COMPANY will license SOFTWARE under the terms of $FREE_SOFTWARE _LICENSE, in the preferred form of SOFTWARE for making modifications to it, inclusive of any build, deployment, operations, management, and documentation support."
Where the free software license would be specified, though generally I'd expect this would include a license meeting the FSF's Free Software Definition or the OSI's Open Source Definition and certification.
Quick explanation: In orthodox judaism, one is not supposed to operate a light-switch on the Sabbath.
I'm not jewish, but some of my friends are observant (but progressive) and use the Sabbath as a day of reflection. This seems to completely go against the spirit of the rule (to spend a day living simply with friends and family, without technology for maximum reflection, introspection, and rest).
I don't see how this gadget would catch on -- unless someone is bound is follow the rule to the letter, but doesn't really want to (but then at that point, they should just stop adhering IMHO)
So I can tell you that you are 100% right. I don't think this is really going to catch on for that very reason. Sabbath is a day set aside for family, religion, and not working.
I think what the main use is going to be is people will install it for emergencies. So I'm sure in Israel a lot of people will put it in their bomb shelters so if they need to spend Sabbath in the shelter and need to use the light, it won't be directly going against Sabbath.
That is true. If any ones life is in danger, your supposed to "forget" the Sabbath right away and do what's necessary. But, for example, if your wife is very very pregnant and can give birth over Sabbath, if she goes into labour on Sabbath, 100% you HAVE to driver her to the hospital. But it's better if before Sabbath you order a taxi.
+ a rigorous STEM curriculum
+ limited conventional job prospects
+ a social/business environment in which exploit-selling is a respectable profession