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"It's an understatement to say that building a thriving marketplace is tough. Getting both sides of a transaction at the same place at the same time for the same thing can feel like it's an order of magnitude more difficult than a more traditional one-sided commerce business. But when the magic happens, it happens, and all of a sudden you've got Kickstarter."

"The biggest problem we see with early stage companies coming out of YC, or really any program, is that they'll approach a year or two after they've graduated to raise a seed round. It's exciting to see they're still alive and pursuing their vision, but then we ask about the growth of the team and the ways they've been capturing the opportunity of the business in the time they've had… and discover everything is the same. The same 2 or 3 people, the exact same idea, very little growth around key metrics like engagement or revenue. So why should try raise a series A? What have they proved?"

, ZenPayroll is taking on the enormous and incredibly complicated challenge of bringing payroll services into the modern era with an automated cloud solution

"Build a website using Google Drive You are already using Google Drive to store your stuff. Why not use it to create your website? How do to it? Keep reading. First, create a folder as a top folder. Then place all your assets (css, images, etc.) into the newly created folder. In the example below, the top folder is called "the insync webpage" with css, images and js folders. You will also need an index.html. If you do not start with an index.html file, then visitors to your site will see a directory listing of all of the files in that folder, rather than your home page. Once all your folders and files are synced, right click your webpage folder and select Insync → Copy public link. Insync "publishes" your content using the Google Drive publish API. Paste the public URL to a browser and you're done! Here's the one we did: http://bit.ly/127SJMY To recap: Prepare your assets. Upload your assets on Drive via Insync. Copy public link. Don't expect any more steps. You're done. If your registrar supports URL forwarding, you can forward your domain to the public URL. Would be nice to add DNS redirecting so you can add custom domains in the future. "

via VentureBeat http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/02/deep-big-data-funding/ "Big data" startup Deep Information Sciences has raised $10 million in its first round of funding to help its customers with a "new approach" to database architectures. Dee...

interesting that rocket just sold half of their LATAM and Africa operations for $400M, with an option for Millicom to buy the other half within the next 4 years at FMV

Paymill is a clone of Stripe, successful payment start-up in the US

"from instructors with distinguished academic pedigrees. For more mundane pursuits, like learning how to paddleboard or build a planter box for the garden, there is an inexhaustible supply of free how-to videos on YouTube, eHow and other sites."

Acquisition after 1 month of "launching". Lesson: Build a queueing system for your app.