Andy Singleton

Google and Amazon Vie for Start-Up Help Domination

I'm interested in deploying the "closed loop" development and deployment system. Assembla handles code, distributed project management, and developer recruiting. We're working on basically the same thing for Rails - a package consisting of a preconfigured development workspaces, a set of Rails developers (individual and full-service), and a hosting "tool" that deploys to Amazon EC2. We call it a Foundry. I'd like to do a Google Apps foundry. However, we didn't get one of the Google Apps beta accounts, so let me know if someone at Google is interested in throwing one over.

Hitting the Reset Button On Home Mortgages

To motivate anyone to participate in this scheme, the government has to pick up some part of the losses. Almost certainly, the process will be "captured" by either the homeowners or the banks and milked for additional subsidies. Personally, I think this is a bad idea. However, from a political point of view, as a nation, we don't have a problem subsidizing either of those two groups. The problem that I see is the cross-regional subsidies. Most of the subprime problem is in inflated California and Florida markets. A huge amount of money will be transferred from "responsible" buyers in the midwest living in $200K homes to Californians living in $600K homes. This is obviously unfair, in a way that even politicians can see, because there are politicians that actually live in the Midwest.