I got this pitched to me a couple of months back, but why not start a Yelp-like medical tourism service? Americans can save a ton of money going to S. Korea or anther country with similar healthcare standards at the fraction of the price. It would have to be elective surgery, but you can save a ton of money.

> Try upsetting a doctor by calling him/her "mister"/"miss" repeatedly.

I know a ton of CS PhDs, they never like to be called doctor or introduce themselves as Dr. So and So, are you talking about MDs?

"Dr." is a title; "doctor" is noun which only ever refers to an MD.

Or a D.O.! But in general, physicians prefer the noun "physician" to "doctor".

only in the United States

This sounds a lot like RapLeaf, what are the pros and cons of each service?

Rapleaf doesn't do social. They are great at demographics. FullContact provides publicly available social profile URLs. Depends on what you are looking for.

Rapleaf was crawling and providing information crawled from social networking sites (much more than just links to profiles) back in 2007. They were providing an API to access this data in 2008 or 2009 I think. They no longer do any of this I think and have pivoted towards offline data, but don't quote me on that.

There is no time or description of the hack, any more info?

or, you could have click on the original link to get there

Where does it say start time? just tells me when the campaign ends. What's the topic of the hackathon? This is all I'm seeing: http://snag.gy/YTPMO.jpg

Whoops.. it's supposed to say 4pm I believe..

The way we did it last time is just build what you want to.. either something you've been working on or not. You can work individually or find a couple partners.

Just mainly for fun, meeting other hackers etc.

I heard Ms. Rosenthal speak at a VLAB panel discussion @ Stanford, she didn't have anything interesting to say other than parrot the other panelist. She had a gimmicky concept with no tech background or demo to show off. I highly doubt the TV show will have real AR, it will just be super imposed post editing to make it look like people are using devices that have AR apps installed.

Huh, I got it wrong, and I didn't go to any of the schools mentioned in the article, maybe I just stupid?

Give them to someone's kid who's into computers. I'm sure they can get some use out of it.

I suppose a similar hang-up applies as with charity shops: do I really want to encourage a kid to learn old stuff?

Not in case of those books you listed, but if you have some books about basics of technology which does not age that fast.

Seriously some old security books for example are good reading.

What can you buy @ 4chan?

A 4chan Pass, which allows you to bypass the CAPTCHA for a year.

I'd skip the FB ads unless your product is not related to tech. Most tech savvy users have adblock and won't see the ads resulting in poor conversion rates.

For 20,000, I would spend it on a designer to make your product look great if you already have an MVP. If not, you should be working on getting an MVP and not worry about ads just yet.

An easy way for market validation would be to use a sign up page like launchrock and put in a elevator pitch. Ask friends to share on FB/Twitter and see the response.

Thank you for the suggestions, the site is live and the design looks fine, (using twitter bootrap), there's still 1 or two things (images) to tweak and I'm looking for a great designer to get them right, I've been a bit shy asking friends/people to share my stuff on facebook or twitter, maybe it's time to try it.

Not true, I ran a Facebook campaign targeting developers and my conversion rates were inline with what you would see with other groups.

What kind of of CTR were you getting?

(from memory so these figures aren't precise but right order of magnitude)

Between 0.01 - 0.1 depending on the target. Highest CTR was with Perl developers.

I was getting around .019% - .03%. Which I thought was awful. Around a dollar a click and targeting all the major programming languages.

Average for FB is around 0.04%. I was paying around 5-10 cents a click. Were you paying CPC ? - if you optimize for CTR I find buying CPM more effective.

Yeah CPC.

Highest CTR was with Perl developers? Are you sure you advertised on Facebook and not Usenet? ;).

So is this place to share tactics and network?