Stanleyc23

well this also alludes to a classic scaling issue. I have family who worked in restaurants for years and one of the few things that would really drive revenue were banquets and other large catering events. From what I observed, it was almost like you play the daily nickel and dime game to put you in the running for those bigger opportunities as they come up.

I think ppl are downvoting you because referring to Theranos' situation using a product/market fit model presupposes you have a product for the market to accept or reject. The product that they promised to the market certainly had high demand/fit, that's why got so much investment. Theranos simply didn't have anything close to what they were promising, hence the fraud.

I dabble in computer vision. (e.g. http://git.io/fluidAR) If you share some example photos I could give it a try.

for the majority of would-be shareholders is non-voting shares really that big of a problem, genuinely curious? Even if the votes:shares were 1:1 wouldn't you need a huge percentage (like > 10%) to be an influencer? If I as an 'average Joe' were to personally put down a comparatively minuscule $25k on SNAP would those votes count for much when push comes to shove?

I tried using slingtv and on top of the stream qustream issues, I realized that if I pay for a video service my tolerance for ads becomes super low. Too low to ever switch back to the traditional tv ad model

The problem is that most people rarely want just raw data.

Given any particular topic, people typically want is to know what to do about something, or at least (it's lazier cousin) how to feel about it. Ideally, we would all individually start at raw data and end on drawing our own conclusions about how to feel about issues. The vast majority of us rely on some type of 'packaging' stage where raw facts get bundled in an easier to understand manner i.e. news orgs.

This is the mechanism that modern media has really thrown a wrench into. We've achieved a level where we can go from start to finish, turn that firehose of data directly into emotions without any need for thought. The old speed bumps: rational discourse, verification have not been able to scale in the same way.

I'd take stand up comedians as an example. I remember watching interviews of now well recognized comedians recount how they started out doing terribly. but through persistence, learned the craft and became professional storytellers.

Speaking of leverage, if UBI money can be used towards credit cards, we might expect to see even more people get hooked in perpetual credit card debt. Always just enough cash to swipe the plastic, never enough to wipe away the debt.

I've been thinking about this and it's bad for active entertainment, but maybe it would be fine for futuristic productivity uses where you have factory workers remotely controlling heavy machinery that still can't be fully automated through a VR interface.

I started playing with computer vision toolkits like OpenCV in the late summer, took a couple months to play with different tutorials, then it took another couple months to launch a simple iOS game with face and mouth detecting. As an MVP, I avoided any features that might turn into a time sink and didn't even include in-app purchases.

Working with the libraries was unexpectedly easy since I looked at a lot of sample code and tutorials.

The challenges are to come when I have to dig deeper into combining different image processing techniques to boost my particular tracking needs. Additionally, I'll have to learn about 3D graphics from scratch if I want to make the game more immersive and dynamic. Lastly if I want to add stuff like an in-game economy, that will take time away from experimenting on the computer vision stuff.

Check it out and send me feedback! https://appsto.re/us/hhcxfb.i

i used a combination of opencv and dlib.

opencv for the face detection and dlib for the landmark detection. but technically dlib actually does the face detection too so opencv is strictly necessary.

i made this app in my spare time; would love feedback and critiques. definitely plan on iterating on the game. ask me anything!

--stan

PL-SVO is also a very new and interesting approach to watch out for. They open sourced the stereo slam version and claim the monocular one is on the way.

http://mapir.isa.uma.es/mapirwebsite/index.php/people/164-ru...

ah thanks. really appreciate the lead. do you yourself happen to have much experience in the space of machine learning or compression?

Very cool! if anyone who comes across this particular thread knows about papers/research being written about this topic, I'd be very interested to learn more.

Oh what I was imagining was more like if I was watching a news broadcast and so all I care about was the news anchor person, and the main on screen grapic/text. If you Compress down other things like the table or the background or wrote an algorithm to selectively stream resolutions tied to the object streamed instead of the frame streamed. Is that a viable form of "compression" using existing computer vision tech?

Just a random idea: could machine learning algorithms that do object recognition help to improve the compression of images or videos? Maybe a lossy algorithm could compress away "irrelevant" things. This way a high resolution frame might have lower resolution objects inside but it would he ok because the important part of the content is preserved.

>>our product is designed in a way that can easily adapt to varying needs of different businesses.

Can you elaborate on how you'd do this with a fast enough go to market strategy? Fragmentation is one of the biggest barriers to entry for anyone doing a restaurant related start up.

You mentioned "hotel-branded". So is adoption dependent on getting interest from hotels first?

Im still a bit confused. I've been on both the building side and the hiring side so I'd be in your target market. Can you contrast this model from hiring a typical dev shop or freelancer to fill a project spec for me? The business saves money, but pays royalties? The dev team gets a monthly wage but have to live together?

Isn't a $13.5mn total market opportunity a bit small?

That's funny because i got used to the force touch application switching gesture of swiping from the left side. When I got handed an ipad, I found myself making the gesture and then remembering that I need the double press on the home button.

This really resonated with the product related challenges I have to deal with at my current startup job. Prior to me joining, they were operating off a Trojan Horse strategy, but all it does is it trick you into a false sense of thinking you achieved market fit.

Developing strategy, relies on understanding the patterns evident in the mechanics of doing business, (startups and mature corps alike).

To that end, I strongly recommend Michael Porter, who literally wrote the book on modern "Competitive Strategy". There is no other single source of strategic theory that is better than this. Anybody that has taken a b-school class on strategy worth their tuition will recall concepts like Porter's 5-forces.

Other answers seem to offer more recently offered books and some might dare to argue his frameworks are dated but really it's in a robust, tried-and-true-kind of way. Other books that try to cover defining strategy, value chain, industry analysis are often derivative of his work.

If you don't end up reading it at least get a list of his key concepts and google the shit out of them. They all seem like a "duh, i knew that" on paper, but you should have these theories in your back pocket whenever you need to formulate a battleplan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_generic_strategies

http://www.amazon.com/Competitive-Strategy-Techniques-Indust...