If you want your app to run on majority of cell phones out there J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition) is currently your best bet. It may not be as feature rich as IPhone SDK or Google Android but it is probably the most ubiquitous platform for cell phones today. You can download a free WTK (Wireless Tool Kit) from java.sun.com and there are good tutorials on the same site for J2ME beginers.
One thing to remember is if you make use of any of the even a little bit fancy functionality of the cell phone through J2ME (SMS send/receive, Phone book integration or location based services) your app probably won't work on real handset outside the emulator - at least in US. All cell phone carriers here are control freaks and they have turned off all those permissions for any "not officially blessed" third party app. This is the main reason for the lack of any worthwhile mobile applications in the first place!
In theory J2ME has wide distribution, but in reality, the platform is highly fragmented.
I agree that the platform is pretty tightly locked down, and both of these issues make the platform useless for real development. If you want to write anything other than a Tetris clone, stick with an open platform.
true, many great people worked hard throughout their lives and still never achieved success in their lifetime. But on the other hand I can't think of a single great personality who made it WITHOUT real hardwork.
Well, "great personality" is perhaps demanding a bit much. But a lot of people have "made it" without hard work. They get by on their looks, or their parents' connections, or ride someone else's coattails. How much work did Paul Allen put in relative to his net worth? Or YouTube's third founder? Or most investors -- their money does the work, which can return disproportionate rewards.
Sure, Steve Jobs was instrumental in starting Apple, but the amount of work he did to get that first hundred million was tiny by comparison. A lot of salespeople hustle and work just as hard -- just in less effective directions. Lots of middle-aged maids from Guatemala work harder.
Not to mention the sheer luck of knowing Woz in the first place. Or the fact that Jobs did it because he was interested in computers at just the right time and place. A lot of people follow their interests but the industry isn't some gigantic wave.
Plus some things come naturally to people and it isn't "hard". Woz designed the Apple II mostly at night while he was working at HP. Hard for him would have been doing all the stuff Jobs did -- like talking to people! Some people not only socialize easily, it's hard for them NOT to socialize.
A lot of the successes just do what they WANT do, they don't "try hard" to make themselves do something. Bill Gates just loved running his own software company. He could have retired years and years ago, but he wasn't in it to make money in order to do something else. He'd rather run Microsoft than sit on a beach sipping umbrella drinks!
I would venture to guess that most well-known successes just did what came naturally. They didn't have to push themselves, in the way that when you're angry you don't have to push yourself to shout. You just feel a certain way and it's hard not to go along with it.
Probably most of the confusion and inertia here is because people know what they don't want to do (work some sucky job for 30 years), but not what they do want to do.
I think the question isn't "what would you do if you ALREADY HAD millions of dollars", but what would you do if you didn't have to worry about being broke. If all the basics were covered, but no luxuries (like having your own swell bachelor pad), and you were free to pursue whatever type of enterprise you wanted.
Maybe (I am not a historian). But it is a trivial statement that working harder is the road to success. Also, perhaps as a 30 year old you should hang out in bars at times nevertheless. What is he supposed to write about?
Still - this work harder thing is like the dieting tips in women's magazines. We've all heard it about 1000 times before, but somehow we still need to be reminded of it from time to time.
Yes, I definitely intend do give some sort of "Browse" navigation in future - maybe with a tag cloud? It's currently not on the site because I have not much content right now as I just launched it a few days ago. If I had top categories they will all be empty :) I will put them on once I have some sizable content.
Other people on your email may also be interested in the answers you get - may be now or in future. It happens all the time on the mailing list I use. People request others to consolidated answers they has received for the questions they asked in past. That's what gave me this idea. This way they get to see them easily at one place without any extra effort of manually consolidating every now and then. I hope overtime it will build into a community knowledge base of common questions and answers.
Thanks for your feedback. To answer your questions,
1. Benefit for the person asking the question: The person gets answer from the people he knows. When I needed CPA to file my taxes this year I found myself sending email to my office colleagues although there are many CPA reviews available on web. May be it's just me but sometimes suggestions from the people you know matter more than generic review site.
2. Benefit for the people who answer: These are people who are friends with the person asking the question. If they see email in their Inbox from a friend asking a specific question I think at least few of them will help.
I did think about providing the email interface. The only reason I ended up not implementing it was because I was afraid people would not be comfortable sharing their email ids with a new site. Plus, many people have auto email signatures (especially for office email account) that are appended automatically at the end of the email message. Sometimes these signatures contain personally identifiable information like title, extension number etc. I did not want this information accidentally disclosed on the site. I found these auto email signatures very difficult to parse out reliably across different formats and systems.
Thanks for your suggestion. I'm not too worried about monetization right now.
Do you mean I should create some sort of Facebook widget to link to my site or just try to get the word out on the facebook?
I was suggesting you create a facebook application so that way you can get users faster, cause then they only have to click instead of enter a form and sign up for yet another internet application.
> I'm not too worried about monetization right now.
You might want to be. As Joe Kraus said, if you don't put your business plan into beta when you put your site into beta then you haven't really gone into beta or launched yet.
One thing to remember is if you make use of any of the even a little bit fancy functionality of the cell phone through J2ME (SMS send/receive, Phone book integration or location based services) your app probably won't work on real handset outside the emulator - at least in US. All cell phone carriers here are control freaks and they have turned off all those permissions for any "not officially blessed" third party app. This is the main reason for the lack of any worthwhile mobile applications in the first place!