Babson College is hosting an open business plan/idea competition. I'd be right up there with my plan - but my prototype (sadly) isn't ready yet. So I'm hoping that one of the Hacker News teams can come in and claim some glory. Right now the competition is very light on technical teams, I think a HN team could have a very good chance with a good prototype.

Here's the dirty deets: 23 companies/plans right now, $75 entry fee (it's a legit contest, legit school: http://www3.babson.edu/Newsroom/Releases/BabsonForumthis-yea...), $30k award: $20k cash, $10 services (I presume this means with Highland Capital, which is helping judge), US residents 21 and older.

THIS IS WHAT YOU NEED: a good prototype (not necessary, but after checking out the competitors, you'll need it to get into the top 3 for the free flight + presentation in front of VCs), a very short, basic business plan (executive summary, business model description, competitive advantage, management bio).

Good luck!

I use to agree until I started to enjoy cooking... (cheaper, healthier, and all that.)

Eating can bring a lot of joy to your life, preparing meals and enjoying with someone seems (imho) to contribute to a better, more well rounded lifestyle (equaling more productive hacking session.)

... food for thought (ducks).

Maybe for you, but some people can pull it off.

Jeff Immelt, CEO of GEO (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_04/b3767079....) boasted that he worked 100 hour weeks for two decades.

I've heard plenty of stories of people working crazy hours (the Mint.com guy built his prototype doing 100 hour weeks I believe) and then pulling back to something more reasonable (or not.) Sure, it might not be sustainable in the long run - but hell, life in general isn't sustainable in the long run. Sometimes you gotta chase those dreams, regardless of the cost.

I never made any serious money with AllAdvantage (less than 40 or 50 dollars total) - but I was in pretty active on a message board with people that were earning serious cash. The people with several thousand referalls were sometimes pulling in several thousands of dollars in monthly checks (albeit, only about 6 months maybe.)

Say what you will, that's a hell of a return for basically putting an affliate link up on a busy website (one guy was running a basic wallpaper website.) AllAdvantage might have gone bankrupt, but it paid out $49 mil to a lot of small site owners in one year. That's pretty cool.

(Business model never had a prayer, though.)

5000 hours just to get the thing in the air - kind of ruins the whole thing from a purely cost advantage perspective. Just imagine what you could build in 5000 hours...

Not to take any credit from this guy at all. He deserves mad props (heh heh) for this project. Truly a hacker in every sense of the word.

You don't need to imagine - I'll tell you what you could build: you could build an airplane!

that's actually pretty cool, and IMO definitely worth the time. I mean, how many people can say they've build planes?

> Truly a hacker in every sense of the word.

Except the ones that involve computers.

Which _is_ the newest form of hacker.

Why wait for the users to come to your site?

If you let me import my last.fm profile - and scrap all of my friend's profiles (they're linked from my profile) - you should have all the data you need to start recommending music or generating some interesting charts.

Overall, it's a great start. I think there's a lot of places you can go with it - definitely places to improve upon Last.FM and such.