I feel similar. The reality of this example is that sexism tends to work in favor of prospective female secretaries, not against them. Attractive women would hold an edge over more qualified men simply by way of how superficial the position still is.
This guy has worked on all sorts of awesome shit that he gives completely free to the community. Heaven forbid he miscalculate time like 90% of Kickstarter. Yehuda clearly didn't take the money and spend it on beer and hookers so let's collectively get off his ass about sending a few postcards out late.
Well, I know every time I answer a question on Stack I make sure to check the gender of the OP first. On the off chance they are female I just respond: "Software is like sex; it's better when it's free - Linus Torvalds". /s
In all seriousness there is no partiality to StackExchange - as one can remain completely anonymous. The only questions that consistently aren't answered the the ones that have been asked hundreds of times. Code is ignorant of whether it's programmer has a Y chromosome. This is simply oversensitivity for oversensitivity's sake... and I'm glad I'm not the only one who finds it a bit annoying.
I think he's implying that marketing isn't much of a skill - that competent people with a good product should market themselves. I've heard this from engineers before though can't say I know enough about the intricacies of marketing to weigh in.
At the same time, I imagine he could make a lot of accurate guesses on where the industry is moving. People are not expecting him to be exact so, to me, his response reads like someone who just doesn't want to be wrong. Even if Brad doesn't invest in the short term, he is perfectly capable of giving generalized short term predictions. There are superior less evasive answers from other investors for anyone who is looking.
You're thinking only about the end user - what I'm talking about is more encompassing than that. Toothbrush companies want metrics around their product. Users are going to soon be faced with a choice to either purchase a smart product that measures these metrics or buy the old cheaper one that doesn't. The way I expect mass adoption to occur is from the possibility of selling this data and passing off a percentage to the users. Your toothbrush will reward you for brushing your teeth not just with a nice sound or trivial leaderboard but by real world products, discounts, etc. If you always brush your teeth, you get notified that you can get your next toothbrush 40% off. The company will be able to do that because you gave them far more money with the data you provided them which they could sell to toothpaste companies, dentists, researchers, candy companies, etc There's a lot of parties who might be interested and this is hardly the best example.
Arguably these features provide no value already though but only exist because on some level they are fueled by addiction. It always begins with very little effort and a shitton of perceived value. First time using a drug - little hit, big high. The first day in Farmville, WoW, etc all has this exactly the same. You gain multiple levels, achievements, etc. all in a few hours. This is fun you say. I don't need to do this, but if it's so easy, why wouldn't I? You begin doing it more and more. Just like physical drugs, you build up a tolerance. Those achievements that used to get you excited - don't anymore. 100g? Fuck that, you now want 100000g. You need that feeling of accomplishment but it's seldom found. For each higher tier you reach or better gear you find - there is always something better that is exponentially harder to get. Your addiction has changed your perception of what value is. What you once did recreationally for fun, is now an all day activity where you are mostly unhappy. People have been treated alongside drug addicts for game addiction. As we discover more compelling hooks - active gamification is only going to be more prevalent. The future of course is in passive metrics - sticking chips in things that don't normally have them.
That's like saying gambling is a fad. The novel implementations may change but integrating markers for performance will only come more common in time. Expect to be able to passively track how long you brushed your teeth in the near future.
His argument really seems to be that the relationship between the input and output is not obvious, not that you don't understand the words themselves. The blank button is a fitting analogy to the uncertainty of the arguments.
I can't stand downloading things through the App Store. The "do you want to open in" popup where I know I need to wait for a program to load, usually input credentials, and press download again. As I suspect this isn't a very big file, I'd really at least like the option to download straight from the site.
Twitter has almost twice the mobile revenue of Facebook while Facebook has more users on mobile than Twitter has on the entire platform. Best case scenario as an investor, you look at this as an area that needs serious improvement.
Can someone who advocates utilizing these color functions have any intuitive use cases for them? As a less user who tends to forget their existence, this demo has really only reaffirmed my original belief that statements are far more longwinded than necessary and tools like this must be employed to predict output. Nothing against the tool, it does exactly what it's supposed to, I'm just trying to learn a reason to use it...
You feel there are there are enough crowd-sourced hardware startup failures to warrant any action? I know the interest from this site is primarily tech products but it seems to have grown in proportion to the site which is still heavily arts/crafts saturated. I don't believe the sample size is really close to large enough to be come to the conclusion that that vaporware is as big a issue as the article claims. Providing failsafes for investors ruins the unique accessibility that Kickstartr provides for aspiring project managers.
Of course people want to see their projects realized but I believe that far more good will come from disappointing projects. The horror stories will serve to remind people that these are still investments and as such: it would be best to consider funding these projects with non-profit-esque expectations rather than some hipster product marketplace.
I don't think anyone has ever proposed that Android couldn't be beautiful but rather great design comes secondary to iOS. As far as innovative products go, I'd argue that this is still very much the case.
Flipboard set a standard for beautiful news applications. Path reimagined what social could be on mobile and made numerous UI innovations. Instagram took a novel concept and made photosharing exciting to a new audience. Square showed off the increasing real business viability by making payments accessible to anyone with a phone. All these apps weren't available on Android for some time. Sure they are now but this far more a matter of increasing market share than a change of opinions and it continues to hold true as we see well-designed apps like Paper start iOS only. Android is by no means the epicenter of creativity on mobile and though beautiful, the ports largely still have substandard experiences than their iOS counterparts.
In my opinion this is a result of equal parts hardware and audience. Android may be on more devices as a whole but many of the devices are not even remotely competitive with top-tier smartphones. They are sold with the intention of being budget friendly and thus it becomes a hassle to acquire the additional devices, adapt interfaces to the numerous screen sizes on them, and adjust for performance limitations. I also believe that the design of the iPhone naturally attracts great designers. Android has a reputation of throwing good hardware into poorly designed phones with cheap materials and inferior build quality - the future is just not as cool when you need to interact with plastic buttons. Lastly, I believe the iPhone audience is naturally more in tune to seek out great designed products. The openness that appeals to Android customers creates an expectation that applications should be free. There is a decreased interest in browsing the marketplace and many of the most popular apps are just free copycats of popular iPhone applications.
I disagree. Google had a monopoly on the maps market and was taking advantage of it. Apple's Maps app used vector images, brought 3d buildings to more cities, used higher quality textures, etc. They may have problems with it but I feel like the added enough innovation to force Google Maps to be better.
This was an good explanation and it made me consider some things that hadn't occurred to me so thanks :)
I figured the probability isn't handled by the car wash itself but instead essential to derive the price of the quote. Surely they must give an insurer the volume of cars coming through, yes? What seemed unlikely to me is that the car wash must also show the types of cars getting washed. This would be something handled by the insurance company after making certain assumptions that factor into the risk.
Assuming that each car wash did pay damages (which as you mentioned they don't), do you think they would charge premiums for washing all luxury cars? The price to insure against damages seems like it should be fixed per car (even if based off volume). One month might be oversaturated with $30,000 cars and another month might have more $20,000 cars. Will the cost to insure the car wash against potential damages these months not be the same even when a higher saturation of more expensive cars incurs more risk for the insurer?
My answer to this forms my basis of why I didn't like the example, even artificially, which is that the price to insure every car is the same based on the likelihood of all cars getting damaged and the price to fix them (monthly insurance cost/amount of cars). The insurance cost has no respect to which cars go through the wash - probably because it's too much of a hassle for the insurer to police which cars are actually visiting and making a more accurate calculation of risk. Instead, they assume every wash has a certain amount of luxury cars - even if they don't. Obviously this wouldn't hurt margins if they accepted the cars that are covered but it doesn't stop them from raising margins, which they still might do.