Tag Info

Most startups have someone else think about it. It's very common to host your application in an environment where adding additional servers is a 1 minute task, and can be done on an on-demand basis. A small VPS, even with only 512MB of RAM is often enough for an application that is in testing. If you're not building something where performance is going to ...

Patents are not really the main issue. The problem with hardware products is that they require a lot of upfront investment (money) to make, they take time to design and manufacture (so you can't iterate quickly). Combined, these two mean that it's easy to fail big in hardware. Web 2.0 startups don't have that problem. That being said, the upside of ...

No, it's not just you. The barriers to entry in hardware are much higher than in software. Over the last year or so I've been watching the struggles of WakeMate, a Y-Combinator company, trying to build a fairly simple hardware product from scratch. It took a year longer than they expected, and when they finally started shipping the software, they discovered ...

This is a very typical mistake that founders, usually technical founders make. I went through this myself, so I know how hard it is to realize and accept this, but its true: It doesn't matter at all what hosting environment you prototype on! At first I also took this very seriously, but in the end, guess what our first test server was: an ancient laptop ...

They get someone who knows what they are doing, and then they go do it. They normally start with either a VPS (I hear a lot of people use Linode) or a VM that the developers run, and then when they go public, they generally look into moving to Rackspace or Amazon Web Services. However, there are a lot of tools that can be be used to make it a lot simpler, ...

There are thousands, perhaps millions of different kinds of integrated circuits currently being manufactured that all have detailed datasheets. It's been a long time since the last time I used an IC that didn't have a detailed datasheet freely downloadable from the manufacturer's website. It's been a long time since the last time I wanted to contact an IC ...

Either use a cloud computer provider like AWS or a VPS like Linode. It's crazy to buy and maintain equipment these days unless you have a specific reason to. Also, I wouldn't use facebook and twitter as examples that mean anything to you, I am guessing your business is a lot different to theirs.

In general it's simply a matter of scaling at a reasonable rate. Typically when I have a client who has an ambitious project, we'll usually have a long private beta where we'll issue x licenses and then as the project progresses we issue more accounts until we have a public launch. For prototyping, usually a VPS is an affordable alternative to a dedicated ...

What kind of "appliance"? Is it basically just a PC (if so, Dell and Intel are two of the largest OEM hardware providers), or is it like a specialized PC (eg: home theater PC that might have purpose-specific I/O device combinations), in which case there are several large custom-builders (http://www.suntroncorp.com/ http://www.nei.com/), or is it a very ...

Say I want to create a simple mobile phone with touch capabilities. What are obstacles in terms of the laws and patents that I would run into? For a specific answer, I worked in the mobile phone world until a little over a year ago, and still have friends working on phones for Motorola, Nokia, and Google. Yes, there are a lot of patent issues you ...