andrewescott

Nice to be reminded of this piece. However, it sparked a thought when he mentioned micropayments as a market that was guaranteed to doom start-ups that were trying to launch product in that space. Is the current crop of mobile payments startups set for the same fate? For example, Square couldn't get Square Wallet to a winning position. And if it is the market that is the fault, is it specifically the market in the United States, e.g. will mobile payments succeed in Europe before it succeeds in the US because it's a more fertile market for this sort of stuff?

  startups would struggle to compete against those who were
  able to afford paying for a fast lane--or an exclusive
  fast lane. Even the slightest discrimination or paid
  prioritization significantly affects startups, as 
  microseconds matter with both webpage-loading and 
  real-time content.

This suggests that startups struggle to compete against those who are able to pay to use CDNs to improve their webpage-loading times. However, this is clearly not the case, and undermines the argument.

If a "fast lane" cost as much as using a CDN, then presumably most startups wouldn't have a problem with it.

I am increasingly of the view that we need publications for a lay audience that focus on debate between experts. While an opinion piece can seem reasonable on its own, it may be full of errors that are easily highlighted by an expert. However, popular publications today focus on publishing the opinions of well-known figures, and if there is scrutiny of their views it typically appears in a different publication. While this approach gives the non-expert reader a warm and fuzzy feeling of being informed, they may worse off than if they had read nothing at all.

There seems to be an assumption in the original argument that not every company will be able to get access to sponsored data, e.g.

> Well since Spotify, Beats, and Apple have paid all

> the telcos so that their services are free on the mobile

> networks, we are concerned that new music services like

> yours will have a hard time getting new users to use them

> because the data plan is so expensive

If a new music service could make a deal with telcos so that their service is free too, wouldn't this problem go away? In other words, if sponsored data was open to all, does this address the concern described?

The real concern seems to be that the cost base of a new service will go up because it will be forced to pay for sponsored data in order to compete, and VCs aren't happy about having to cover increased costs of their portfolio companies.

A similar argument could have been made about CDNs. Because the big services use CDNs to provide a better service, startups have to pay to use CDNs also in order to compete, and hence their costs are higher.

Is there any easy way to do native iOS application development with Objective-C if you don't run OSX?

From the title, I had expected an article on start-up communities that were themselves spread across many countries around the globe. However, it turned out to be about city-centric startup communities that can be in any city.

Are we still at the stage where a community needs to be based in the same physical place? Why don't the currently available collaboration tools enable start-ups and the communities around them to be independent of location?

Does it come down to: most VCs won't invest outside their own cities?

Perhaps Glass should be compared with the Sony Walkman (which may be a bit before the time of some of those on HN). When Sony introduced the Walkman, they also invented portable headphones. Because no-one wore headphones around in public before, there was a huge stigma relating to doing so. In particular, in Japan, ear-wear was associated with deafness and hence old people. So, Sony embarked on a mass media campaign to change the perception of wearing headphones, by showing attractive models wearing them, roller-skating with them, etc. They made them cool for youth to wear, rather than dorky.

If Google can also change the idea of electronic eye-wear from Borg-like to babe-magnet, then they may be onto a winner.

- for both male and female babes.

This doesn't appear to be the case in question. Based on my reading of the article, it seems that the network link between Free and YouTube is becoming congested at peak times. Free doesn't want to pay to make it any larger, and neither does Google. Hence the escalation. It's not to do with network links between end customers and Free.

This just gave me a big blast of nostalgia. Great work! Does it also support colour?

If all electronic devices were dangerous, airlines would be asking passengers to remove the batteries from their wristwatches for the duration of the flight.