The entire world is now a rival to Silicon Valley. No country, state, region, nor city has a lock on innovation in technology anymore.

Certainly anything that is news or opinion needs to be free on the Web, because the Web is this very fluid medium that is very much driven by links and the flow of visitors through a discussion via links.

Don't try to solve the entire problem on day one.

The Internet is a computing platform built on top of core technology. Applied technology is what gets built on top of that: It's Web services.

Customers are a great way to finance a business for many reasons. First, customer financing is typically non dilutive. They want something from you other than equity in your business. Customers also help you fit your product to the market. And customers will help debug and improve the quality of the product.

It's not easy for an entrepreneur to find the time to blog. But for those who do it, it is a great tool to communicate with the various stakeholders in their business and build a reputation for thought leadership.

It's upsetting to me that you have to be a millionaire to invest in your friend's start-up.