Shanti’s Dispatches

Wow, looks like YouTube has overtaken MySpace in terms of unique visitors.

I can’t wait for all the YouTube naysay’ers to eat their words when YouTube gets bought for over $1 billion.

Via: Video on the Web

I was on Digg this morning and saw a thing about Cambria House. Looks interesting.

I googled them and found this post on mashable about their launch.

Here’s my take:

I wish Cambrian House the best of luck.

I started something similar to this (it’s now defunct) that never gained much traction, called “Menlo Park 2.0.”

Our business model was going to be much more like typical angel investors, where we would take 1-2% of equity in the startups we got going and 1% of revenue (or 2.5% of profits), once the startups were rolling.

In exchange, people who started companies with us would also get stock in Menlo Park 2. It would’ve been kind of like a diversification play for startup entrepreneurs.

The problem was, as some commenters have pointed out re: The Business Experiment (which I also watched) was actually getting development time contributed by the community.

I actually don’t think the phrase “ideas are worth a dime a dozen” does the concept justice.

It should read: “ideas aren’t worth the lint in my pocket.” A little harsh, yes, but true, imho.

Everyone with even a moderate sprinking of creativity and intelligence could come up with 100 ideas in 15 minutes, if they sat down and thought about problems they faced and possible solutions. For startups — it’s 1% inspiration (the idea), 99% perspiration (execution).

Again though, best of luck to Cambrian House. All it would really take is 1 moderate success for something like this to take off and give the concept legitimacy.

Well, it was bound to happen eventually. RentMyChest.com has gone 2.0.

Note: It’s powered by the same software that Joel Comm used with 500words.com to make $35k in two days. Nice.

Normally Google is known for their usability, or at least vanilla-plain interfaces that are easy to figure out.

Googling GMail for domains login yielded this Slashdot result:

OMG M$ SUX THIS IS TERRIBLE I CAN’T EVEN FIGUrE OUT HOW TO LOGIN

Lol. I’m having the same problem with GMail for domains though. I’m sure we’ll figure it out eventually

Update: Google has a special lookup function that you can use here. Neat! Just enter your hosted email address in the box in the upper right corner and it’ll find your login page for ya.

Ours turned out to be here.

Based on a few comments from an earlier post, I know I have at least one or two mac readers who drop by every once in a while.

My Mac Mini is really dragging these days… I would go with the new PowerBook but I don’t really need the mobility at the moment, + its a bit pricey.

eBay only has two G5s listed for sale at the moment… it seems like Craiglist would be better for finding something like this but I’m kind of worried about all the Nigerian scam artists on there =)

Update: I wrote to about 10 guys who posted about used G5s on craigslist (Phoenix area) and none wrote back. Strange.

Any other ideas on sources for used G5s?