Not true, they're playing hard to get. They're not open for everybody, although, sure, the limit isn't geographical

If Pinterest wouldn't be so slow (like most US startups) to open up to the whole world. I signed up a few months ago and still haven't got my access.

This wouldn't solve the problem but for sure the effectiveness of these German guys "creations" would be reduced.

I think Unity is useless because these kind of inexperienced users almost don't exist anymore. Everybody got used to the "ugly" interface made of contextual menu and "hard" to adjust settings and those who didn't could live with sensible defaults that could always be overridden.

But with Unity it's like if they went out there to replace QWERTY keyboards with friendlier layouts without paying attention that none of the current users already got so used to the on-purpose-unfriendly layout you're actually slowing them down now.

There's no VC or even VC mentality, especially in Italy. Partly it's due to the fact that it's more difficult to make it in a market that is segmented by language barriers, whereas in US you have a critical mass of customers that speak the same language. On the other hand you'll have more competition in US: but that's probably because VC there throw money at anything that moves.

Agree, but maybe we should just outsource it to normal people: the kind of people that haven't got their tentacles around everything that happened in the last 50 years! Like these http://www.beppegrillo.it/movimento/ although the outsourcing idea isn't half bad as long as they're not all former bankers! :)

Only the President can send him home...

I'd like to see the Scandinavian countries dealing with the mafia... no, not the one you see in movies that cuts horses' heads, but the one that blows up motorways.

Another boring, silly "jumping the shark" post

If I was Yahoo I'd think twice before adopting something like Node.js, but if you're a little guy that wants to scale on the cheap and is willing to take risks because the alternative simply won't work for what you're trying to do, then just use Node.js. Django, PHP, Rails with Apache in front of them aren't designed to handle thousands of persistent connections and it would be far more expensive to scale the traditional web-stacks to handle them.

As some Joyent guy was saying there's real resources behind Node.js, it isn't just a cool hack made by some promising Jedi but it needs to fit your use-case. If you're designing a real-time web app and you have a limited budget then go for it, I don't think there's anything better out there now (except for Tornado, Twisted, which is just a matter of taste) unless you're Yahoo, Google, etc...