julianpye

This kind of reminds me of the 'Better off Ted' episode, where the company's new motion detection system does not detect any of the African Americans in the office.

The reality is that any public company that does not file a patent related to a major service launch is foolish. The most important purpose is crosslicensing as well as using it as a licensing hook for compliance, i.e. ensuring compatibility. Aggressive litigation is usually a question of corporate culture, but patents need to be defended to remain valuable for licensing agreements.

Key is that the mentor is 'an experienced entrepreneur'. This is very important - everywhere I see nowadays are startup programs with 'mentors', most times they are just corporate employees with no entrepreneurial trackrecord.

What do experienced entrepreneurs know?

Their advice is initially ignored and they know that that's normal. Every first-time entrepreneur has wrong assumptions that they are advised against. But they just must test them out themselves. Non-experienced entrepreneur mentors want their advice followed and quickly give up mentoring if it isn't so.

That advice is still very important: the advantage is that you get to a point quick where you remember the advice initially ignored and pivot faster and learn much quicker.

While I agree with the conclusions of the other posters, I also think it is difficult for anyone to put themselves into the shoes of these people, traveling over, waiting for the opportunity. Pitches can go bad quickly. I think anyone knows the pitch that you enter well-prepared and in best spirits and you come out 10 minutes later and wonder what the hell just happened.

Anyway, I also think it's great that you posted this in this detail, since it also shows once more that the interview will give you VC type questions and not YC type (well-informed) questions. If you can't explain it to a VC who is not up to date with everyday tech changes, then you're not ready for YC.

Finally, you sum up the feelings nicely - that mix of a feeling for redemption and the highly illogical feeling of a need for 'revenge'. I have felt that and it is so much unlike my personality, that I was really startled by it. Put that negative energy into something positive, right now I think your first priority is to make a non-tech person understand what it is you're building.

I assume this will replace Appengine's Channel API?

What makes most sense in this space is for Google to build a global MVNO for M2M communication. This would allow them to create a network for devices without roaming restrictions and fully leverage IPV6 without legacy considerations. Right now M2M traffic on GPRS/UMTS legacy networks using IPV4 is a total pain to manage for the carriers and results in poor user experience.

What I want to know is where this leaves 'Identity', which was also a part of Google+. It took over the OAUTH activities and led to the company no longer promoting OpenID.

If this device works, it is the first tracking device application that i am quite impressed by. Basically it works like a sleep tracker alarm clock. These wake you up in the morning, when you are in a light phase sleep. But what it does instead is that it prevents your child from entering a deep phase sleep at the beginning of the night by disturbing its sleep. Adults sometimes experience something similar called the exploding head syndrome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_head_syndrome

The key thing to remember is that Tesla's battery competence has its foundation in their work with Matsushita/Panasonic - who are supplying the tech for the battery farm in Arizona. The main reason is that manufacturing and QA of the battery is critical. It will be interesting to see if Apple will work with Panasonic in this space.

That said, Apple of course may be able to sell at higher margin and be able to endure higher manufacturing cost.

Also techmatters, send us an email to service@touchables.io and we'll be happy to send you multiple medmanagers.

Thank you :) It works with multiple stickers of the same type. You can simply assign them nicknames.

Basically once a touchable is used for the first time, it is assigned to one person. If another person taps it, the first person then can add the other person as friend and they can jointly use it and see the status in their dashboard.

If a person has an iphone, they can also be added via an email address and get email infos about the status. All text is done in a sweet and humourous fashion.

The video was so much fun to create. Many companies in this space are big telcos, so we thought we have to do something that noone else can do :)

As tech we are using NFC, which we are not highlighting, because it will be ubiquituous like Bluetooth sooner than later and the name itself scares off many people. The interesting part is that non-geek people who have tried them, believe they are the same value as 'Tile', etc...

Thank you for the feedback. I need to check my localisation with a proxy. It's a bit tricky with Appengine. It is live and ready to ship, but we have made the touchables mostly for some company trials, but wanted to try out if we can convince some consumers :)

This all started as the winner of a Google and Allianz insurance sponsored hackathon in Munich and won us flights and tickets to San Fran and I/O.

At the time it was a solution for elderly's people safety, but it kind of pivoted a few times towards becoming a more gadgety solution. It's all bootstrapped, we have had lots of fun with things such as the video and now we really want to know what people think about it. The biggest lesson we have is that the hardest thing is to communicate it without getting too complicated. When people try it out, they get it right away.

Everyone knows the whole email/password concept is broken. I believe that overall OAUTH is needed, but it needs a much stronger consumer facing view.

The way how I do this is by having written a code-generator that takes a simple YAML like file with a data model description and generates SQL models/NOSQL models for backend storage, POJO access code to that and POJO access for a rest API; then an angular backend that accesses the api and locally stores it and directives to display it; then an android sqlite local database wrapped in a content provider to access it, async task helpers to retrieve the content via sync providers and adapters to display them. I haven't yet started with iOS.

Any wellfunctioning code that I have written I pack into my content generator and give access to via the YAML. The whole thing has gotten really ugly and desperately needs refactoring (it's in Perl and I am rewriting it in Stringtemplate) but it does help me with:

- the changes in the model that cascade down the frontends

- fixing a bug in one application that needs fixing in several others

- the fact that multi-platform model really is stressful since the brain needs to switch rapidly between different languages and platform APIs and this allows me to write code once and perpetuate data model changes on to all platforms.

So I think, take code of yours that works and wrap a codegenerator around it. It's better than using a framework where you don't know what's underneath. All the code is something you know and built.

Scott Galloway talked about this at last week's DLD. You can hear his points and arguments at 6:50 -very insightful video on why Amazon has reached a point where they must make a brick and mortar acquisition https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCvwCcEP74Q

The emergence of blogging allowed individual voices outside of control of the larger media to reach their own audiences. Because of this 10 years ago noone wanted to have AOL as their walled garden. Everyone wanted to search and discover themselves. Google brought an algorithm that allowed voices to emerge, but it also spawned the SEO industry to manipulate that distribution channel and make it more difficult. Today most people never leave Facebook and FB's new feed rules will make sure that you have to pay to be heard. So maybe Facebook has become like AOL, has become like the print magnates even prior to that. Time for disruption again?

Why Xiaomi uses its own Android flavour for the Chinese market is clear. But I don't believe they will push their own Android flavour to the US and EU markets, but rather use Playstore-enabled versions. Their first goal is to compete against Samsung in handset price. And Samsung has shown that it is very hard for an Asian manufacturer to introduce their own OS flavours and apps into a Western market.

I think it is clear that Google Maps is taking over the role of Google Earth. There has also been a recent Maps API refresh with Play Services 6.5, that greatly simplifies Google Maps on mobile.

NFC would be a great intermediate solution to address this problem. Here's hoping that at the next WWDC, Apple will open up their NXP chip to everyone.

Google have a very good track record in security and that's the reason why GAE-J is my system of choice. I am ignorant on their bounty offerings though, but I would have assumed Google are state of the art there. Can someone fill me in on the background and intentions of Security Explorations?

What Skype has and what any of the newcomer will struggle to get is my extended family. My mum and dad, lots of uncles and aunts, some of which over 80 year old all use Skype every day.

It is a big challenge to move any of these people to new technology, even if it would offer a real advantage for them, which no real newcomer does at the moment.

Ideally, when I wake up at 5am and my head is racing with ideas, I head to my whiteboard in my home office. I write and sketch it all down and three hours later I fall asleep again, waking up at 10 refreshed. Most of such work has really been my best, with proposals that were refined and made it straight to top-management. In some interviews when the question came 'what do you need to work effectively' I have tentatively asked about this - no early meetings, etc... but there was always pushback. My last company, a standalone Vodafone Group R&D lab allowed all of us researchers these luxuries, but was later consolidated and streamlined.

Is there any company that allows people to work this way? What are the best flexibilities that people have encountered? I'd be curious to know....

In most Hackathons I have encountered, client/server interactions have become increasingly essential to woo a jury. The best way to quickly get a result over a weekend is to use Parse or Firebase. And hobbyists with some base knowledge can use it to build prototypes quickly.

Want to achieve the same result with Cloud Endpoints and an Android Client? You will need a couple of hours just to get the dev environment and skeleton code up and working to get started. Google has so many clever engineers, but the barrier of entry to their solutions isn't as low. I think this is where the Firebase acquisition comes into play. It's a much lower barrier to entry to use the Google Cloud environment and is probably mostly a play against Facebook's acquisition of Parse than against Amazon.

This is purely speculative, but for me it looks like Larry Page may be preparing Google towards becoming a more privacy-aware company that you can entrust with information.

Why do I think this?

Trend: I think that 2014 has led to consumers becoming more actively aware of privacy. Google will be aware of consumer behaviour changing in this space. I have noticed in my general non-techie personal circle that people are far more protective of personal data and changing their online behaviour compared to two years ago. I think this is Google's current Achilles heel.

Tech: Google has so far got the best track record of security implementations which are open to anyone using their end-to-end platforms. They could seriously leverage this capability as a differentiator if it wasn't for the perception that they 'snoop' on its users.

Mission: In contrast to this Trend Larry Page has always been enthusiastic about a big vision of how consumers can benefit from sharing information to the right people, for example in the health space. At I/O 2013 this was a big topic for him: so many people's health could be improved if they would be able to comfortably share their personal data with the right people. The true value of this has massive potential.

Indications for a Pivot: Eric Schmidt is currently touring Europe, stating that Google doesn't 'read' email and does not make its money from analyzing your personal data. In the end Google's best bet may be to try to transform itself into a personal, trusted data company.

Basically Germany has their own set of consumer protection laws (Bundesdatenschutzgesetz) that are more stringent than the EU laws. There is an ongoing struggle if these laws should be regulated at EU level or at national level since some countries vastly differ in their attitudes in this space and common ground is difficult to establish.

In my personal experience the 'requirement' of some companies that data must be hosted in Germany is their own internal policy rather than something that is prescribed by their reading of the law. However there have been some court rulings where servers hosted in Germany are applied additional restrictions over servers hosted in Ireland.

A lot of this may also have to do with own interests. In the 80s and 90s every EU country wanted US silicon fabs in their underdeveloped regions. Now every country wants hosting farms.

This is pretty significant, because in Germany many corporations do require their data being hosted on German soil and protected under German consumer protection laws.

As a result the Cloud provider market is currently split into three categories: German corporations (e.g. Telekom) promoting themselves as truly compliant, US corporations with German hosting (Microsoft and Oracle) that self-promote themselves as compliant and US corporations such as AWS and Google that are aggressively attacked by German Cloud providers as violating German consumer protection law.

In the past I personally have lost customers in Germany because my services use App-engine and CloudSQL in Ireland. Thus, I hope Google follows with a German server for their cloud services.

Germany = Bizarro World

I am sure they will exchange it, but the key problem is the support system which requires me to speak to them in person to initiate the exchange process. The waiting time is never less than 35 minutes. I have a few dev devices and always have to go through this. There is no alternative system in place. And I always have to go through a lengthy process to even get the phone number. On Amazon I can do everything online in a number of ways and get called by their customer rep.

What keeps me off buying another Playstore device is Google's terrible customer support, especially before they can command such a premium price. I have an unresponsive Nexus 4. I cannot just send it in for warranty repair. In order to return it, I have to go through a list of steps on their website, then get on a phoneline on which they state I have to wait for 45 minute to get a customer rep. Often the line is interrupted. I haven't been able to get my number for two weeks now.

Eric Schmidt recently said in Germany that Amazon is their biggest competitor. For that to be true, they need to seriously up their support.