I like building startups. Sure, I could make a blog about my dog’s favorite chew toy. Sure, I could make another url-shortening service. Sure, I could make a mashup of something that involves CraigsList, eBay, Google maps, Hulu and flickr.

However, that crap is boring and I prefer to think bigger. I always like to dream about putting something together that will really make a difference. I would love to take on the big guys and beat them at their own game. However, there are more and more stumbling blocks to do this as I try more and more different things out of my basement with my shoestring budget:

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<li> ISP bandwidth caps - I can get 7Mbps downstream from my Comcast ISP, but I can't crawl any large sites due to Comcast's 200GB/mo bandwidth cap, and don't even get me started with the upstream bandwidth ...
<li> Storage/indexing - I can buy a few 1TB hard drives every once in a while and stay within my startup shoestring budget, but getting mysql or lucene to index terabytes of content is not a simple solution anymore.  I've got a basement with 8 old-ish computers of varying capacities that are pretty busy on a regular basis with miscellaneous things to do.  Keeping on top of a mountain-sized chunk of data is not an easy task anymore.
<li> Google is huge.  I can't compete with Google at crawling/indexing/search.  Nobody really can.  However, I could choose a subset of Google's empire and focus on it and build a better mousetrap and win, just choosing an interesting nitch to hack on is a difficult task in itself.  To me, Google's adsense/adwords system seems the most profitable and interesting target that I'd love to build a competitor to.  Troy and I built http://bidboxr.com in an effort to experiment with the online ad space and we learned a lot in the process, but we didn't go the extra distance and take on the big-G at their own game.  One of our other ideas http://mediawombat.com a flash search engine proved to be a valuable experiment, but again, my shoestring budget kept me from really hitting this one home.
<li> People/Time - I'm a husband and father of two wonderful children.  I find it difficult to go to the bathroom without being interrupted by someone or something nowadays.  Finding spare time is becoming a difficult thing to do in itself.  Most of my development time is done in the wee hours of the night when I'm low on energy, but finally have some free time to myself.  I tend to try to work out the details in my head over a series of days or weeks.  Take notes about possible solutions and new directions, then think about that.  When I think that my brain has slept on the problem enough nights, I can usually whip out a solution in code-form in an hour or two.  This is my current way of building things.  The actual work has been delayed a lot longer than it was when I was single or in college and could just pound on the keyboard for 24 hours in a row until it worked.  I'm not sure if this new way is better or worse, but it fits in with my lifestyle a little bit more.
<li> I'm trying to learn about SEO.  It seems to me that SEO is an always-changing and challenging market that is profitable and un-tapped on several fronts.  I've got a few experiments going with an SEO twist mostly so I can learn about the whole SEO world, but SEO takes a long time - search engines take a long time to index your content, so changes are only reflected after a long period of time.  My SEO experiment is http://xis.cc and is doing well with Yahoo, but Google doesn't like it very much.
</ul>

Anyway, that’s all I have for now. More later. :)

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