Are they into space technology? No joke, that was the very first thing that came to my mind when I saw the new logo.

Right. Our idea was to have a original name, easy to spell and that was also related to an exotic place which is the Mentawaii island.

I'm not sure, but probably i think we need a large user base to generate some revenue on this model, the initial idea is to test this ad-base model and see how it goes, other than that i didn't figure it out any other way to monetize it at least so far.

Inside Facebook we have 2. TripAdvisor and Where I've been. Both of them require you to manually add your places on the map which is little bit different than Mentaway where everything is automatic.

Well, to walk through some numbers..

Assume an eCPM of $8 (I think that is good performance, but still a "safe" number to work from). For perspective, I write about personal finance and tend to get a few more dollars than that.

Work backwards from there.

To make $100,000, at an eCPM of $8, you will need: 12,500 thousand impressions, OR 12,500,000 impressions. If each visitor has 10 pageviews, you need 1,250,000 visits. So, each month, you need to get 104,167 visitors.

Of that $100,000, how much goes towards costs?

Just a thought exercise!

This is important exercise. I was involved with startup that was ad based for revenue. On paper, you can make the numbers add up and everything looks good. Knowing what numbers you need to hit is important. The hard part is getting the 104,167 visitors. Saying 'all we need is 0.01% of facebook users and we are rich' is not addressing the situation.

How are you going to attract visitors?

That said, you've already made it this far which is a great firs step. Good luck.

Yeah, 104,167k visitors a month to make $100k/year.

To make a million/year, you now need more than a million visitors a month.

Ad based models (solely) are tough.

That's definitely not impossible to achieve in the long run. The costs right now are pretty low, just a cheap VPS but as soon we get traction the hosting and storage costs will go up.

The name was inspired on a island in Indonesia called Mentawaii, which is a surf paradise and place that i would love to visit.

We plan to make money selling Ads initially.

Probably some people would kill me for that answer but i would say you should learn PHP.

PHP is simple, good documentation and great community. Facebook is built on top of PHP so as Drupal and Wordpress.

But the main point about my recommendation is that PHP is installed everywhere, you don't have to spend much time configuring and doing sysadmin stuff to make it work.

I started with Qbasic and did my first more ambitious projects in PHP. I agree that it is really easy to get started, but the horrible security holes I created are the downside;-)

So is Python!

I don't feel that a newbie should be learning a web language as his first. It just seems like an unintuitive learning process to me.

Ruby/Python don't have that same "click and drag into FTP client then load up in browser" ease, though.

I'd definitely recommend PHP to anyone who wants to jump into web development.