I can see this working out once this goes beyond the "initial critical mass of users" hump. Some high-level comments:
* There are several organizations, agencies and committees with similar goals _inside_ each institution (university / high school). Given that your goals are aligned, it would be nice to see a way to onboard entire organizations (i.e. groups of students / mentors) -- even if it is not from the general frontpage. That way, you can think of Meritful as a SaaS provider for each of these orgs, and it also solves your critical mass problem.
* Student orgs (High Schools, etc) come in with well-articulated reasons as to _why_ I (a potential mentor) should work with them. This helps me make a decision along the lines of "I am looking for a group of 10 students at grade level 8 who are interested in astronomy and are free on Thursday evenings for all of Fall 2012. Can your group match that?" Note how this is different from scouting talent -- mentors just have more constraints.
SaaS is a very good way to go about it, and we have got inquiries for 'mass signups' from a couple schools we talked to. We were hesitant because we thought it would result in a bunch of phantom accounts, but like you say, I think many organizations already try to achieve something similar.
You're spot on the mentor/recruiter difference...and on the road map is support for groups and orgs. Thank you so much for your feedback.
Considering how quickly it took someone to write a script to download them all (It is "Hacker" News, after all), I don't know why they didn't just release them all in one Zip file anyway.
Or maybe someone could put a torrent together, given how much they are getting hammered. (2 hours for a 15.6 MB file, yikes!)
The download links of the page seem irregular, so I was trying to make a list. It looks like he kept all issues ordered on the server under another name though, one that fits this format.
I think what he's trying to get across here is that there is a significant amount of overhead that is getting in the way of Google's own culture. Breaking it up into a conglomerate of smaller pieces would typically _increase_ this cruft -- Microsoft even in its current state is a good example of this. At Google however, this would _optimize_ the system instead, making it leaner, meaner, and as passionate as the employees it is losing.
(The blog post doesn't mention it clearly, but the author is an ex-Googler)
MSR Asia is based in Beijing and is one of the fastest growing research outfits in the world. They're slowly showing up all over the place in the CS world, and this is just one of the examples.
Consider Microsoft Academic Search. It BLOWS AWAY Google Scholar, Citeseer etc. in terms of features. Once they attain coverage parity, there is reason to use anything else.
Academic Search, Trinity, and similar projects out of MSR Asia seem to be directly having impact in Bing. In a matter of a short few years, you're looking at a barebones search engine (Live.com) building an R&D infrastructure, with prototypes, and production modules feeding into what is now a pretty rocking search engine. [Example of Academic search integration with Bing: http://www.bing.com/search?q=donald+knuth , scroll to bottom -- page also shows Freebase integration in middle]
Ironically, Microsoft is playing David in the David vs Goliath story here, and the passion is showing in terms of the ecosystem of computing projects and products that are making it into Bing.
If you want to look outside of Bing, consider the Kinect effort. Did you know that the _hardware_ ships with mathemetical models built at MSR, trained using Dryad? (Dryad is an MapReduce competitor out of MSR) The training is the "secret sauce" and why you don't have to spend days calibrating the Kinect.
None of this is privileged information -- you just have to follow the hyperlinks :) The open source world is built on collaboration and sharing, and hence the "story" is the backbone of most work. But that doesn't mean other people don't have stories and passion!
Side note: If you go back to the Bill and Steve interview from D5, listen to Mr. Gates mention the tech of kinect years before the product. It is interesting how much MSR jives with that talk.
Searching http://www.bing.com/search?q=donald+knuth, I see the freebase integration, but I don't see anything other than search results and ads at the bottom of the page. What am I looking for?
I would say that's Powerset's technology merged into Bing, not direct Freebase.
If you want a more practical application for Trinity look at http://research.microsoft.com/probase/ (linked at the bottom of the page). Also to quote the page:
Microsoft Bing’s AEther project now uses Trinity for managing AEther’s experimental data,
which consists of large number of workflows, and the evolutions among the workflows.
Trinity is the backend graph storage engine of AEther's workflow management system.
We are adding more functionalities, in particular,
subgraph matching and frequent subgraph mining, to support the project.
* Catastrophic failures: You fail so bad that you have no option but to trash everything and start again
* Detectable / Manageable failures: You fail, but this failure is not central to your existence, so you simply try again
While there are some cases where you have no option but to risk catastrophic failures, manageable failures are something people completely miss.
Fitness / Weight training has all sorts of examples of this, the goal is to identify the limits of your abilities and to push this limit, without risking permanent damage.
Consider this: Blogger (Pyra Collab tools), Flickr (GNE), Twitter (Odeo), Nokia Phones (losses for first 15 yrs), Google (initial focus was Enterprise Search until Adwords / Adsense acquisition) were all pushing the limits, and failing, but not so spectacularly that they didn't have resources left to pivot.
Identifying the difference, and the ability to contain possibly-catastrophic errors into manageable pieces is the true art of the startup.
