Ask YC: What are you working on these days?

other blogging sites with location services might be helpful as well.

linkedin.com (groups - I'm just as surprised as you)

Any other ideas, besides taking out the obvious ad on google? I really don't want to screw with trying to get high keyword ranking via the SEO black-magic route.

My main brokerage is thinkorswim and that's the platform I do screencasts from.

Hopefully (crossing fingers) when I get some good traffic going I can get some advertising contracts with some financial service companies.

I find links between artists and recommend based upon that. These links include: being recommended by a human, being on the same record label, being mutual admirers, playing gigs together, being posted to the same mp3 blog, being on the same mixtapes and so on.

I wrote a post on my blog that gives a comprehensive account of how the recommendation system works: http://www.maryrosecook.com/post/show/130

And, yes, I know the UI is horrible.

However, I am desperately in need of someone who can work with me to make things both more functional and more attractive.

Thanks very much for the feedback.

I'm trying to skew the site towards unusualness and away from genres. Thus, the ways I link artists can produce some weirdness like the above. However, users can give feedback to help reduce the insanity quotient.

Thanks very much for the feedback.

First we'll build the equivalent of an online mountable disk so it'll be a natural fit for online storage/backup and sharing.

Building applications on top of this storage layer such as photo sharing and syncing will be next.

As for how to compete, the magic sauce is openness on two fronts. Bandwidth and storage are commodities, and we want this storage tier to be a commodity marketplace as well. The storage providers will compete for end users while cooperating to store and serve up data. A user can switch providers and retain the same data in the system (cloud).

Along with an "open" system, most (if not all) of the software will be open source. We envision a small hub of centralized services (identity and such), a storage provider ring, and the end users.

So basically we'll beat the big guys by creating an open system with open software. Our company, then, will be taking a small slice of a big pie, rather than on these players head-on.

Rather, Stitcho lets you send notifications from server side code that are delivered to your users via the Stitcho widget. The Stitcho server sits in the middle to route and deliver the notifications.

Also, Stitcho provides widgets for Mac and Windows. (The Mac version can use Growl if it's available.)

Does that answer your question? If not, please clarify.

1. Attend a top liberal-arts college (CS, Amherst)

2. Get master's degree from top research university (HCI, Carnegie Mellon)

3. Work for General Dynamics

4. Stick around long enough to get promoted, kick butt, etc.

5. Profit!!!

BTW, he said that chances are, whatever the next big thing is will come out of DARPA. His bet was on pervasive computing - DARPA's apparently doing a lot with computers in clothes, computers in canteens, computers in backpacks, computers in visors, basically computers everywhere. The logic being that most of their troops are getting deployed to inhospitable environments (Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) and if they can monitor environmental conditions for things like excessive heat, sandstorms, laser sniper sights, explosive residues, they can save lots of soldiers' lives. And of course, if it trickles down to consumer uses it could completely change how people use computers.

1) A lot of large research companies get DARPA research grants. General Dynamics (like nostrademons said), HRL, Boeing, etc. etc. You can get a job with them, and if the environment doesn't feel soul-crushing to you, you are golden.

2) A lot of CS research at Universities is funded by DARPA. If you are still in school, or if you are out but still have close relationships with your professors, you can always find out what kind of projects they have. DARPA projects are especially nice because they are large in scope and there's always a need for extra people. Don't expect to be paid much though.

I chose route 2 - after my startup failed I wanted to do something that paid, was not as intense, and had nothing to do with Web 2.0 and Social Networking and all that, so I just e-mailed a professor.

In my experience, that makes it difficult to get anything too interesting done as people (due to budgetary constraints, particularly at the industrial research labs) focusing on getting the minimum deliverables done, instead of trying new things. The downside here is pretty obvious: if a DARPA program manager could specify 3 years in advance what should be achieved, then it isn't really research, more like engineering.

I guess that's why most savvy researchers only write DARPA/NSF proposals for things they've already done (but not published on); gives them money to work on the _next_ big thing :-)