“Building on someone else’s platform is a good idea, if you have your eyes wide open,” investor Fred Wilson told a packed room of entrepreneurs on Monday night at an Internet Week event in New York City. He was answering a question about whether or not it’s a good idea for startups to build on another company’s platform, and we caught his response in the video above.

Wilson knows a lot about this subject. He sits on Twitter’s board and a year ago wrote a blog post warning startups in the Twitter ecosystem ti stop “filling holes.” Twitter then proceeded to fill those holes itself by buying or building various clients and other services, and is still filling them to this day (its new pictures feature is a case in point).

While this issue has created a lot of angst in the developer community, Wilson is very straightforward about it. “You should expect eventually the platforms you are building on to do something against your interest. One day you may wake up and discover that platform is competing with you, and that sucks.”

Kickstarter started as a way for bands to fund projects without asking for money from Grandma. Now it’s the go-to site for thousands self-funded projects and the company recently surpassed the facilitating of $60 million in funding of random music albums, films, and gadgets created by ordinary people.

At TechCrunch Disrupt NYC John Biggs sat down with Kickstarter’s Yancey Stickler along with several successful Kickstarter gadget makers: Dan Provost from Glif and Cosmonaut, Rafael Atijas of the Loog, and Sean Bonner from Safecast. It was through the magic of Kickstarter that all these gadgets were funded and later created. It’s rather scary to think of a world without the Glif, right?

Talk about sinking to a new low. It seems that Talk about sinking to a new low. It seems that Comcast and perhaps other ISPs are blocking access to the notorious torrent site, ThePirateBay.org. The word comes from TorrentFreak who also reached out to the TPB team who indicated that they can’t confirm if an ISP is blocking the site but “there’s a significant drop in visitors from the U.S.” All I know is I, a Comcast subscriber, cannot access the site.

Comcast isn’t exactly known to be friendly with the downloaders or streamers. In the past they’ve limited and even blocked seeding of torrent files. The term throttling was synonymous with Comcast a few years back. The company eventually entered into a partnership with BitTorrent, Inc and was later asked by the FCC to stop the practices, but perhaps the company just moved to block specific sites in an effort to kill the bandwidth-sucking practice of torrenting.

Update: Comcast responded.

When you think about ecommerce, you think about Amazon. But how did a company that started with online books come to dominate an estimated one third of ecommerce in the U.S.? In the 72 slides above, global consulting boutique faberNovel breaks down Amazon’s business and strategy. The keys to Amazon’s success are 1) the Internet imposes no limits on how much Amazon can sell; 2) its control of customer accounts and loyalty, and 3) and a growing ecosystem that is helping it cement its place in the world of digital goods as well.

It’s instructive to see how Amazon has expanded over the years and moved away from its reliance on books, music, and movies. You also forget that along the way, Amazon piled up $3 billion in losses between 1995 and 2003. Now it’s got $34 billion in annual revenue, and is spitting out $1 billion a year on profits. Who says you can’t spend your way to profitability?

Yelp’s international sites have been growing like crazy, with non-U.S. traffic doubling in the past year. Today, it is adding a fifth non-English international site, Spain, to its roster. (The other international Yelp sites are in France, Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands).

Yelp is now at 50 million unique visitors per month, mostly in the U.S., according to its internal stats. ComScore shows 87 percent growth in non-U.S. unique visitors over the past year (Yelp’s internal stats show more than 100 percent growth).

Mobile payments are coming, and there are many paths being beaten to get them to our phones. Google-backed mobile payments startup Corduro launches this week with a combined mobile wallet/payments processor for Android and the iPhone (which will be available in the respective app stores later this week).

Like Square, Corduro is primarily a way for merchants to take payments on mobile devices. But it has a few twists. One is pricing. In some cases, it can be up to 30 percent cheaper for merchants in processing fees than regular credit card transactions (and even beats Square slightly). If someone is paying with debit bank card with a Visa or Mastercard logo on it—these already make up more than half of all credit card transactions in the U.S.—Corduro then reroutes those payments over the cheaper debit networks similar to the ones that ATMs use.

Should founders innovate based upon customer feedback or is it better to develop from within and let consumer adapt. In this episode of Founder Stories with host Chris Dixon, Meebo’s Seth Sternberg discusses his philosophy: “Users tend to be very good at giving you incremental product suggestions.”  But they are not product visionaries. “They may be asking for something that would be revolutionary,” he says, “but they don’t realize they are asking for it.”

When receiving such incremental suggestions, Sternberg instinctively skips the baby steps and instead asks the question, “what if we could completely change the game?”

In the wake of today’s news that Microsoft is buying Skype for $8.5 billion, CEOs Steve Ballmer and Tony Bates just held a press conference to explain the deal and sell it to investors. The reaction has ben tepid, with Microsoft shares down about 1 percent so far today. As I’ve pointed out, Skype is a great company, but there are concerns that Microsoft paid too much.

In today’s press conference, Ballmer did a good job couching the deal in terms of Microsoft’s mission to bring people closer together through technology and make their lives better. “We will move beyond email and text to rich experiences. Talking to colleagues across the world will be as seamless as talking to them across the table,” he predicts.

When Foursquare upgraded its mobile app last March at SXSW, it added some excellent new features which made the popular geo app even more compelling. Among these is a revamped leaderboard which shows how many points you’ve earned in the past 7 days compared to just your friends (I know I check in a lot more now in the hopes that I can one day beat Fred Wilson). The other one is a new Explore feature that gives you recommendations of nearby places to eat, drink, and shop based on where you are and your friends’ past check-in behavior.

Now these two features, along with the information users get after they check-in, are available to outside developers via Foursquare’s API.

Microsoft may have overpaid for Skype with its $8.5 billion all-cash offer, but it was bidding against a sure IPO. While $8.5 billion may look expensive now, it is a pre-emptive strike to take Skyoe off the table before an IPO. Microsoft’s bid had to be high enough to convince the company and its investors they were better off taking the Microsoft offer now. From what I can gather, there were nibbles by other suitors such as Google, but no other serious offers. Microsoft was bidding against the IPO.

The investors, which include Silver Lake Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, and Joltid, look like geniuses now. Andreessen Horowitz, in particular, comes out smiling from this deal. Skype was one of its first investments. It was a big, risky play at the time, and now it’s paid off in spades. “It is so far our best and only exit,” quips Marc Andreessen, who spoke with me by phone this morning after the deal was formally announced.