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Why do you think developers should proceed with caution? They don't seem malevolent to me. Perhaps you question their methods, which is legitimate, but if you have any other information apart from that, I would like to hear it. Additionally, I don't know if I can criticise their model. Yes, it's not very innovative, but on the other hand you can think of it as a outsourced European development team for US-based startups. They know the market, the language(s), the problems. They do the development work and then if the original startup wants to buy the product, they can. Who knows, perhaps it might even end up being not much more expensive than setting up the infrastructure and acquiring the knowledge required to operate in the EU. It might also serve as a test case: "is service X really going to work in the EU?". They take the risk that something might not work. As an EU-based developer (who never used any of their products. yet?), I also think it's valuable for us (EU-based developers). Instead of waiting for startup X to get their act together, they offer us an alternative, which then later might be merged with the original product. As a side note, there is a bit of a unintentional Schadenfreude to be found in this article as well. Since it's 6 - 7 months old, their investments in Facebook, Zynga and Groupon doesn't look so hot anymore as it did back then. Maybe they should avoid the investment side of things. Edit: grammar |