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Boost by Mercedes-Benz

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56 pointsprotomyth54 comments

I guess this is disrupting KidCab[1] :-) It seems like it should be a giant warning sign if you can't facilitate taking your kids to activities, either you, or they, are over scheduling :-) For the occasional pick up from a football game or a play or something, I think its great though.

I can imagine a birthday invitation that asks for RSVP's so that the van could come by and pick up your child (the guest), that is when it gets weird for me.

[1] http://kidskab.com/

I'm so sick of the "disruption" meme. Back in the day this used to be plain, old-fashioned competition. Gmail disrupted webmail. AirBnB attempts to disrupt hotels.

There is no paradigm shift here that threatens the status quo of the market for transportation for first world kids in wealthy neighbourhoods. The only thing being "disrupted" is probably KidsCab's bottom line.

"Disruption" is just another MBA buzzword with little to no meaning.

> The only thing being "disrupted" is probably KidsCab's bottom line.

That's exactly the origin of the word "disruption." It was industry lingo for a dominant player facing fundamental changes to the market (and their balance sheets) from innovative competitors.

Those aren't the same things. A competitor eating into your profits isn't necessarily making fundamental changes to anything.

WestJet no doubt eats into Air Canada's profits. Have either of them distrupted anything?

Your smiley face notwithstanding, suggesting that kids and or families are over scheduling is passing an unnecessary judgement. There are many, many deadlocks in scheduling children that cannot be easily resolved.

If anything, the deadlocks are resolved by "over" scheduling. By placing the child in a supervised activity, the parental units are freeing up time to allocate into other needs. The simplest example is kids in different schools.

By placing the child in a supervised activity, the parental units are freeing up time to allocate into other needs.

this is really the key to the gordian knot here

Or you could just, you know, let them do what they want at home/in the neighborhood and trust them not to spontaneously combust if they're alone for 5 minutes.

I wonder how they picked the term "concierge". It brings to mind a functionary at an upscale hotel, a gentleman of a certain age, dispensing discerning advice about the local bars and call girls.

It sounds a bit off for a service designed for kids.

Okay, judgmental 20- and 30-somethings, 40-year-old here with 2 kids. My wife and I both work full time; doing so allows us to do things like go on vacations with our kids, live in an expensive city, and pay tuition. If our kids are going to have afternoon activities even occasionally during the week, we have two choices - shift to part-time employment, or arrange for transportation. I find it ironic, given the number of 'live your dream' and 'go for it' startup posts on HN (oh, the humanity!), that the assumption is that working parents should just pack it in to provide high-quality transportation for our youngsters. It smacks of hypocrisy. And, for what it's worth, kids who live in the city can't exactly go play in the creek and ride their bikes. I wish they could, but they can't. It's not 20 or 30 years ago.

"And, for what it's worth, kids who live in the city can't exactly go play in the creek and ride their bikes. I wish they could, but they can't. It's not 20 or 30 years ago."

That's what I'm lamenting. What is this all for.

Almost all my friends' Moms were stay-at-home Moms, and I used to live in middle to upper-middle class neighborhood.

They can. Fear is the only deterrent.

You are correct. I believe child kidnappings are at an all time low. Fear of child kidnappings due to sensationalized news is at an all time high.

Ironic that their solution to reduced quality time with family is to put them on a bus with a Mercedes employee instead of driving them to x practice.

I don't know what to think about this app in general. They've identified the problem that parents don't have time to drive their kids to all of their activities. However I think they are missing the other problem that kids don't have time to take a "school bus" to all of their activities.

I imagine once you hop on that you will make many stops along the way picking up other kids and dropping some off. So instead of a 15 minute drive to the soccer field, it is now a 35 minute ride. I think that if kids have so many activities that parents can't drive them around, that the kids themselves may not be able to squeeze in these extended trips either.

The need and achievability of quality time lies on a logarithmic scale which goes downward from infancy to adolescence. When a kid is eight or ten years old, they want the bus ride and you want the train ride. Why go out of your way when you can both arrive at home at the same time refreshed? Driving is good for no one. Either through services or robots we should try to eliminate all driving that is not for enjoyment. Daily driving is common, mundane and does nothing to increase quality of life for those that have to do it. Riding is great. Driving is a chore.

Disclaimer: I'm not a parent. But is driving kids around really quality time?

It's all what you make of it. A ton of life is spent doing relatively mundane tasks, and I think there's a great opportunity to redeem that time. It all adds up.

I think the main difference is that driving is a dangerous activity. You won't be playing with your kid while driving, you won't look at the wonderful drawing he/she did in class, and you can't engage any discussion that make you think or feel too much.

It's not like you're doing the dishes.

I would disagree. If you can have a discussion with your adult passenger, you can have a conversation with your kid. Ask them how their day was, do they have homework, are they excited for soccer tonight? It all goes a long way to making your kid feel special, developing communication skills etc.

>If you can have a discussion with your adult passenger

To give a frame of reference, I don't believe that driving is so easy that most people can do it competently on a daily basis.

I find the experience extremely broken, and it seems difficult for a lot of people to drive 100% correctly; signalling before turning would be an obvious one: It should be simple, but the fact that otherwise competent people don't do it hints at a problem with the system itself. People commute and don't scratch their car everyday, but I think for the majority it's more a combination of luck and tolerance of the system than pure skill and mastery of the art.

In this respect, I think most drivers are not OK having a discussion with their passengers. They can, because they don't devote 100% of their brain power to driving (it's more of a chore than anything else, and no one wants to focus on chores), but personally I think they shouldn't. Eventually we should find a driving system more centered about user safety, better designed and less taxing for the driver, but I'm not holding my breath.

I guess it's obvious now, but I think most people should live in urbanised areas with good public transports, and/or high tolerance to walking/biking/kick boarding. Walking my kid to school is a nice experience, like you describe it; Driving my kid would be stressing at best, I'd be more focused on the brake light of the car in front of me than the soccer match tonight.

When do you think I learned to do math in my head? or played tic-tac-toe without a board? or learned many word games?

The only time I was bored enough to pay attention ;)

I think the point is that it could be pooled in a way to minimize dropoffs (by knowing the pickups and destinations beforehand).

I wish as a child I had activities that filled my days and parents too busy to take to them.

Sucks to be a child these days. I played with neighborhood kids doing hide & seek, soccer, baseball, ditch digging, crayfish-fishing, arcade, nintendo, bookstore, etc.

Generations of kids grew up that way and they all turned out fine.

What's the point of all these stupid activities we put our kids through these days. I find the very existence of this kind of service very depressing given how rich we are as society.

Fewer kids are dying now the than they did back then, so I feel saying "Generations of kids grew up that way and they all turned out fine" is misleading.

http://www.hrsa.gov/healthit/images/mchb_child_mortality_pub...

I guess it depends on what you consider normal. I could easily see myself enrolling my kids in, say, martial arts (3 sessions per week), music (1), and swimming lessons (1). That's less than one activity per day, making it very reasonable by my standards.

If there are no overlaps in times and nothing is within walking distance and the local buses aren't an option, that would be 5 trips per kid per week, so 10 or 15. I'd be looking to organize some sort of car pools with the other parents, at a minimum.

I know parents do these things with hope of raising well-rounded children, but I do wonder about their value when all parents are doing the same thing.

There used to be more leeway to do other things before, but now many upper-middle class families are basically prepping their young kids for college admission, some without even realizing it.

I wish we hadn't come to a point as a society where we try and eliminate any amount of unstructured time for children.

I'm not sure any of us know what the point of all these "activities" are.

New venture from Mercedes Benz: Put your kids in our van. Schedule 3 days in advance. What's an uber?

I'm sure it will be a hit.

Q: would you trust your family to mercedes or some random [company X]?

That't the business mercedes is in.[1,2]

Not bad work if you can get it.

__________________

[1] Backed by the best of Mercedes-Benz, certified drivers and trained concierges provide white-glove service aboard eco-friendly Mercedes-Benz Sprinter vans, giving youngsters a safe and friendly ride.

[2] http://www.cnet.com/news/how-risky-is-your-uber-ride-maybe-m...

Uber is on-demand, and costs more because of that (convenience tax). Spending 15min on a Sunday evening to book your kids activities for the week isn't awful, and it gives MB a chance to pick optimal routes.

Convenience has a cost, planning ahead reduces it.

According to their "About" page, a one-way ride costs $22. Even if you buy 50 rides at once, the price is still $17.6 per one-way ride. That's comparable to what a typical UberX ride around Palo Alto costs, in my experience.

Neat concept, Uber for kids. But what happens when a kid with a bad attitude creates problem for the driver? What happens when the kids start fighting?

Finally, what happens when nefarious individuals realize it's super easy to pick up rich people's children by pretending to be a Boost driver?

This is going to be a fun liability experience.

The video says that each Boost van has a driver and a concierge. So I assume the concierge is responsible for keeping kids in line.

It pretty standard to expect at least two adults, ideally one of each sex, to be present when alone with children.

All of what you said applies to school buses.

Well, except that I'm pretty sure it's very difficult, very suspicious, and possibly illegal for a random person to own a school bus, but anyone with enough money can own a Mercedes.

>Finally, what happens when nefarious individuals realize it's super easy to pick up rich people's children by pretending to be a Boost driver?

This is where my company's app, Mooble, comes in.

Mooble is a breakthrough anti-molestation app built for modern, on the go kids. By simply pressing a button or speaking a programmable safety word, Mooble broadcasts an emergency alert through all of the child's linked social networks.

Brief product video below:

http://youtu.be/2svVkkNuSq0

Given that abusers are most frequently family members, that sounds like something with potentially severe unexpected consequences. Have you run this by any reputable child abuse organizations first?

Not sure why I'm being downvoted; yes it's self promotion, but highly relevant to the discussion

I don't think the link you posted is correct.

Another startup in this space is https://shuddle.us

And another... http://snapridesapp.com

(These all seem to be "Uber for the 'burbs" basically)

> Please note that rides must be scheduled 48 hours in advance.

I'd say this right here is a killer.

for kids activities? they're all scheduled more than 48hrs in advance anyways.

Not if its recurring.

Disrupting busses!

LOL yes, the poor poor kids and parents in PALO ALTO really could benefit from this!!!

If services like this become more broadly adopted and accepted, they could become cheaper or subsidised. But sometimes you won't have a widely accepted idea until it is put out to early-adopters or a richer audience first.

Cars were once restricted to only those who could afford or justify them. Now they're far more accessible, even too accessible.

Here comes the down vote brigade.

Seriously, tell me why the most privileged people in the bay area need this service.

I can think of a couple: the bus service in the area is very poor, the students have quite a few of extra-curricular activities that are not located at their schools, their parents can afford to pay for the high cost of a prototype service, and (I am guessing here) that this project is being spearheaded by a Mercedes R&D group that is located in Sunnyvale. [1]

1 - http://www.mbrdna.com/about.php

It's easy to see that they may need this service. I'm wondering more why the rest of us proles need to be told about it. Sorry to go off ToS a bit but the concept is grating.

More on the subject, this relates to the common discussion on benefits of scheduled vs. free time for kids. Many lament how the up and coming generation has no free time to be creative etc. Any parents with older kids care to chime in how things turned out? Having a two year old, I have a vested interest :-)

On one hand I can see the overscheduled approach being kind of soulless, maybe lead to loss of creativity etc. But on the other hand, it's not the 50's any more, and it seems like it's not practical to leave kids alone these days. There is also a bit of a network effect at play; if all the neighborhood kids are off learning piano / playing soccer, leaving your kid home alone is no use if the neighborhood is deserted and there aren't any others to play with.

So you can spend more time at work! Duh!

the privileged people in the Bay Area are the ones who can pay for this service. that's what privilege means.

Nobody is claiming this is a charity, or something for the public good. It's a money-making service one step below chauffeurs for rich kids. Why is it something to get angry about?

I like that mercedes is trying something new with this, but I feel really bad for the kids who's parents sign up for this regularly. You demonstrate what you care about by how you spend your time and money. This is just one more way for parents to ignore their children.

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