I’ve lead a couple of small financing rounds in my day, so I know more than I would like to about the various “exemptions from registration” that can be applied, either in Canada or in the US. And I’ve worked in and around the valley for long enough to have heard a variety of first-hand reports about how things can go with stock options - both the good, and the bad. An interesting story was the fact that both Red Hat and VALinux issued “friends and family” class stock options to members of the linux development community, prior to their IPOs. And it got me thinking…

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It’s so clear, so obvious to me that it practically burns in my brain. It keeps me awake at night. It distracts me from food, even from coffee. And yet, it’s so damn elusively difficult to put into words.

Explanation by Example: Ebay is for buying, but there’s only one winner. Craigslist is for selling, when you know what it’s worth. BountyUp is for buying, selling, gift-giving, contests, or charity - when it’s worth sharing. Share the costs - many pledges, one achievement. Share the rewards - pledges can be prepayment for something that wouldn’t otherwise happen (organize your own concert by your favorite band, at your favorite venue.)

All of which comes across as either too verbose, or too vague. In the words of Babak, “I put myself in the position of not knowing anything about the concept and found it to be slightly too ‘mysterious’ to spend any time on or to buy-in to when glancing at the home page.”

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I’ve done something really cool, and I think you’ll like it - global filters for the bountyup.com website. Try going to http://software.bountyup.com and see what you think. Notice the tag cloud - it only shows the tags that have been used WITH the tag ’software’. (more…)

Finally ordered a dedicated server from the great folks over at ServerBeach. As we’ve been working to wrap up active development and get on towards testing, promotion, and launch, it’s become more and more obvious that a shared virtual server wasn’t really going to cut it - no GD meant that I couldn’t use captcha’s properly for registration, security worries were getting worse, and we couldn’t get as flexible as we wanted to be with email management.

Still looking for a good DNS host out there - I’ve been using XName for years, and I’m reasonably happy with it, but I’d like to have a fallback. Let me know if you’ve got suggestions.