From this information, you see your end point. Your goal should be to make your company look like the one (or ones) you think would be attractive to potential acquirers. How can you find that out? By examining the acquisitions already made! By looking at past acquisitions, you can learn

* The technology areas that interest acquirers
* The level of development required to attract acquirers’ interest
* Other factors that acquirers consider when examining a purchase

Once you know these things, figuring out your business plan is simple.

Wow... and I thought Michael Blake was just comic relief on startup lounge! :D Oustanding post about creating your business plan by working backwards from Form 8-K filings of your potential acquirers.

"Dood, google will acquire us within 5 years." Oh yeah? What would you have to do and what would you have to achieve for them to consider that, based on their history of acquisitions? Working backwards from the 8-Ks, you can figure that out.

A Roadmap Doesn’t Help You if You Don’t Know Your Destination | Mike Blake is Unblakeable

TableTools sorts, filters or copies any HTML table. Two filtering modes supported: select filtering (each column has one drop down menu allowing you to select a certain value); search filtering (each column has one search box allowing you to...

Now if only someone would make 'Center It' which generates the CSS to center any div you click on...

TableTools :: Firefox Add-ons

Spore's Intelligent Design Leads to Plethora of Phallic Speciesnullnull

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-MnJtLIdlI

SPORE Penis creature - Video - YouTube

Today, 1,500 people at Yahoo are losing their jobs, as layoffs across the tech landscape approaches 100,000. But for startups lucky enough to have cash to hire, 1,500 soon-to-be-unemployed Yahoos is a recruiting opportunity.

Video chat startup TokBox (which raised $10 million in August) will be parking a taco truck outside of Yahoo headquarters today, handing out free tacos and job applications. TokBox only has five jobs to fill, so maybe they can make room in the truck for other hiring startups.

Just Got Fired From Yahoo? Have A Taco.

The reason startups no longer depend so much on VCs is one that everyone in the startup business knows by now: it has gotten much cheaper to start a startup. There are four main reasons: Moore's law has made hardware cheap; open source has made software free; the web has made marketing and distribution free; and more powerful programming languages mean development teams can be smaller. These changes have pushed the cost of starting a startup down into the noise. In a lot of startups—probaby most startups funded by Y Combinator—the biggest expense is simply the founders' living expenses. We've had startups that were profitable on revenues of $3000 a month.

Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession?

I got a shock yesterday.

An interview with a "local" tech company turned out to be one with a company 3,000 miles away. Appcelerator CEO Jeff Hainey, a veteran Atlanta entrepreneur, told me straight-out he found himself getting more done in a single Mountain View afternoon than he could do in a month from Buckhead.

For me this was the last straw. I have spent nearly my entire journalism career covering Atlanta technology. The state has long claimed the most active tech-development operation in the nation, with an incubator called the ATDC, an active software trade group, and a host of VCs and angel investors, not to mention the "economic development engine" of Georgia Tech.

Check the comments, yet another Atlanta startup cat fight!

Dana Blankenhorn: Georgia Tech Scandal

What makes CloudFront so great is that it is, in my opinion, the first consumer-friendly CDN service. That is to say that it is cheap for its low-latency CDN offerings, easy to sign up for and start using. It also holds its own against professional CDN services like CacheFly. There are small downsides to CloudFront compared to expensive CDN solutions. For one, it takes some time (up to 24 hours) for file changes and updates to be pushed out to CloudFront edge servers. Regardless, I was eager to test it out for myself.nullnullnull

How To: Getting Started with Amazon CloudFront - PaulStamatiou.com

Comment from External User:

Following is a related post by another developer seeking this functionality:
http://www.kirupa.com/forum/showthread.php?t=274183

Regarding priority, I realize that likely there are scant few use cases for embedding FLV/H.264 vs loading dynamically at runtime. With the Flash IDE, embedding video is a longstanding feature and the use cases do exist.

Adobe sucks, and Flex is a piece of shit. I for one welcome our new Microsoft Silverlight web overlords.

[#SDK-259] support FLV embedding - Adobe Bug System

At first, it sounded like Williams was a bit lost on the revenue front. "We will make money, and I can't say exactly how because...we can't predict how the businesses we're in will work." As he has before, he hinted at generating fees from sales-related Twitter content and from corporate users.

But as the conversation went on, one got the impression that Williams actually has a plan. He revealed that the company is in talks with large consumer packaged good companies, and whether that's to sell the company internal services or to help the company monetize its own Twitter feeds, it's promising.

Williams said, "We're looking at Q1 for revenues." This is a change from the original, pre-economic meltdown plan. "The original plan was to focus on revenues in 2010. That's no longer the case, since I don't want to raise money in 2009."

The revenue plans aren't just ads or sponsorships. "We want revenues to be product-based. Google built something that can really scale, and that's our intention as well."

Twitter CEO: The revenue's coming soon, but I won't tell you how | Webware - CNET

This weekend I decided to play around a bit with genetic programming and put evolution to the test, the test of fine art :-)

I created a small program that keeps a string of DNA for polygon rendering.
The procedure of the program is quite simple:

0) Setup a random DNA string (application start)

1) Copy the current DNA sequence and mutate it slightly
2) Use the new DNA to render polygons onto a canvas
3) Compare the canvas to the source image
4) If the new painting looks more like the source image than the previous painting did, then overwrite the current DNA with the new DNA
5) repeat from 1

Now to the interesting part :-)

Could you paint a replica of the Mona Lisa using only 50 semi transparent polygons?

Yes. Yes you can.

Genetic Programming: Evolution of Mona Lisa « Roger Alsing Weblog