Can Someone Turn Me On? | Hacker News Reader

Can Someone Turn Me On?

tokbox.com

94 pointschangdizzle33 comments

I've been keeping an eye on Double and would really love to try this out. I wonder if could help solve an interesting problem... remote employees in companies that are otherwise not really remote.

I'm the only employee at my company not in SF (I'm in San Diego). We've got a fairly remote/asynchronous culture though.. there's one other engineer who works full time from his home even though he lives in SF.. but the culture is slowly shifting as we grow, especially now that we've got a real office :)

I'd be curious to see some case-studies like this one from teams that don't have skin in the game.

Hi Phil, thanks for the comment.

Companies are definitely buying this faster than we can make them, and that remote-working use case seems to be #1. I hear ya on case-studies .. stay tuned! :)

- jay@doublerobotics.com

Hi! This is the Market Economics Fairy! If people are buying your product faster than you can make it, it means your prices are currently set too low! There's no point in keeping the price low to stimulate demand when you can't yet increase your supply! Temporarily raise the price until you can gear up manufacturing! That way the people who need your product the most can get it right away! And you can invest more in manufacturing to satisfy more future customers! This will lead to a lovely Pareto optimal outcome with everyone living happily ever after!

(I write this with some reluctance, because this product sounds very cool and useful and yet the prices are probably set too high for the nonprofit I work for - but the more you charge now, the sooner you can scale your volume and lower your prices later, right?)

I dunno. Having seen the price, I've sent around an email to some folk at the office wondering aloud if we should get one. If the price had been twice as high, I wouldn't, and next time someone mentioned it, I'd have remembered it was too expensive ... even if the price had slipped back down due to market forces in the interim.

Is avoiding your reluctance to check the price next time worth $1,000 to them?

Maybe not. People are not that rational when it comes to the cost of something - we have an internal gauge of what is "fair", and violating that can be dangerous. Using an elastic price like this could kill their market before it's established. People are not rational - very few companies do this with their products, even ones that they can't keep on the shelves.

Understanding that if you're selling them faster than making them, generating new interest isn't your highest priority. That said, if that changes I think it'd be awesome to have some kind of loaner program. At our shop we'd be hesitant to plunk down the coin to buy one site unseen, but I could definitely see borrowing (or renting) one for a week or two to get a better understanding of what kind of value it creates for us first-hand.

I wish we could say we were entirely unbiased! The truth is we do love Double beyond the product itself because the team (David, Marc, Jay and Farhad) is awesome to work with. I mentioned that it was a bit challenging to use the first version we got, but they've iterated on improvements very quickly. (They've also been very patient and collaborative with problems on our side.) We can't wait to see what's coming next.

This is exactly the model that my team uses. We have ~40 folks on-site in SF, and about a half-dozen who work remotely. We got a Double a few weeks back, and after a slow start it's now in use most of the time.

The OP is not wrong about the qualitative difference between a 'bot and a normal video-conference setup. Things like this may seem minor (or even silly), but they go a long way to make it feel like our remote colleagues are actually present and part of the team:

https://twitter.com/thedeepg/status/337352680840257536 https://twitter.com/rcoder/status/336584756147916800

That's rad to hear! I can definitely see value in that. It probably only seems minor or silly if you're not the one who's remote. I had to fly back down to San Diego because of an emergency this winter and ended up attending the company holiday get-together via iPad. They propped me up in a chair and hooked a speaker up to me so that my voice had about the same volume as everyone else's. I couldn't believe how well it worked out. Just the short distinction of being at eye-level and not angled up 45 degrees from someone's laptop screen made the experience so much more immersive. The ability to turn my 'head' would be even better :)

Disclosure: Twitter, Inc. is a paying customer of Double.

Thanks Lennon! Would love to get any user-feedback from you too :) jay@doublerobotics.com

I can't say enough good things about Double. At one point we at MobileWorks were the world's heaviest users of Doubles – not sure if that's still the case or if someone's caught up.

Right now one of our partners operates full-time on the robot, and MobileWorkers come by to visit the office more regularly. Soon, we'll send our MobileWorkers to visit the customers they're working with as in-office remote staffers.

It's like having them in the office here with us.

It's exciting to think that people with physical disabilities might be able to use this technology to explore places and communicate.

Exactly. It’s why I hope people will see this not so much as a new frontier of telecommunication nor telecommuting, but “telepresence”.

It’s not a medium; it’s a physical proxy.

I hope people will see it as more than a convenience for working remotely.

Very interesting. We once had a similar discussion in an aesthetics class I once took. Is viewing something digitally the same as experiencing it?

I'd have some concerns about device that's designed to park in a rooms where private meetings are taking place and transmit audio and video to the internet...

So... you're worried about laptops?

The Double seems to be roughly a meter tall with a conspicuous screen and wheel, making it a poor fit for malicious surveillance. Show a little common sense.

Yes... I am... aren't you? Most companies I know exercise at least basic precautions against malware on their laptops, in large part to avoid exposing confidential information.

In this case, I'm not worried about someone hacking the Double and somehow sneaking it into a meeting. I'm worried about someone compromising Double's servers and listening in on the conversation. Is the AV feed secured end-to-end?

No, I'm not more worried about a Double than I am about a laptop, which is the reason the laptop was brought up in the first place.

To be fair, you're the one who brought up the laptop. JshWright's point was that he's concerned about the safety of an application whose sole purpose appears to be transmitting the contents of private meetings over the internet.

It sounds like a very easy target for getting access to the private details of many companies.

Thanks for clarifying -- to me, your original comment indicated that you were specifically concerned about the device itself. It's perfectly valid to be concerned about the security of service providers.

Just wanted to throw a comment in here that I've been using tokbox for a while and love it. Anyone who needs video chat in their app should check it out. {Not affiliated in any way}

Aw! Tokbox is only as good as the applications people build with it. Thanks for using us.

Thin, pale-grey font on a white background, so even though this looks like an interesting story it's going to be a strain for me to read it.

Guys, fire your designers when they tell you this is okay. Fire them out of a cannon into the SUN. Your content is why people are following links to your site, and if you make it hard to read your content, why bother having the site?

At least have DARK grey text on the white background, but better is black, with solid fonts for the main body.

Are these actually shipping yet? I know a few places that would be interested in trying them out but the "shipping soon we promise!" is a hard sell.

There is at least one similar company that is already shipping.

http://news.yahoo.com/telepresence-robots-let-employees-beam...

NB: I have may have a bias here.

$16k is also a harder sell than $2k, especially for a pilot that may not end up being useful.

Like Tokbox and am intrigued by Double. Would Google Glass be a similar paradigm change if applied in this manner?

if its cheaper, there could potentially be a service where you can hire someone to take your place remotely and everything that person sees will be live streamed via google glass to you.

If you haven't read David Brin's Existence, this kind of thing factors in quite significantly.

There might be a lot of internal things that you don't want this "proxy" person to see & hear.. In that case, the Double is a better bet.

http://arresteddevelopment.wikia.com/wiki/Larry_Middleman

I'm curious if the ability to pilot the device is that useful - it can't navigate crowds or do stairs anyway. So for the price, an iPad on a stick that has any always on VC would seem to be much cheaper and just as effective. Easy to move around if you need, and cheap enough to put in every room.

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