[13ren]

Thanks for explaining the slow-burn/patent correlation.

I'm looking at Justin.tv, and I've never seen smooth live video online before. It's consistently smooth (though minor freeze-frames every so often). Your implementation is a better method for live video.

Is this because your implementation is coded better - tighter, more efficient, cleverer - or is there a fundamental new insight behind it, that makes it faster?

[emmett]

It's just better coded, for the most part. It was actually better before we started growing a lot; now we have scaling problems. We're working on smoothing everything out now.

Of course, there have also been insights that I think may be fundamental, but they aren't patentable as far as we know.

[13ren]

Whenever clever people work on new problem-spaces (ie. not yet mined-out), they have good chances of being the ones to have the fundamentally new insights; so your odds are good.

But the two kinds of technology-based businesses make me think of Google's technology: server implementation (fast results) and pagerank (relevant results).