julianpye

Slightly OT, but If you haven't heard about it before Charles book 'Code' is one of the best computing books I have ever read. I gave it to my engineer father and my MBA brother for Xmas years ago, as it is such a great introduction for anyone to understand how computers work. You will also need a copy if you ever were trying to build a computer from scratch :)

Sorry, I wasn't precise. I meant talking to the individuals formerly in the acquired companies and finding out how their product and how they themselves fared.

1. If the company has a track record of acquihires, talk to one of these companies. If they have not got a track record of working with startups, it is very rare that they can get it right the first time.

2. Reduce the number of people on the other side interacting with you. In large companies too many people jump on these types of opportunities and will burn a lot of your time. Identify one senior person from the company that you have a good gut feeling about (preferably towards the end of their career) and make one of your team work on a plan closely together with them. Let the other two work ahead on your original plan.

3. You as a startup have one agenda - you want to make it big together - remember that in large corporations each individual comes with their own agenda, most often not aligned with each other. And also remember that large corporations, especially when struggling with innovative competitors, will try to belittle smaller companies and negotiate you down.

Just because there are research labs, it doesn't mean that they are doing truly free blue-sky research. Lots of the labs you mention have very antiquated IPR focus, especially Mitsubishi and IBM. And as an example, Almaden still feels closer to the lair of a a James Bond enemy in the 60s than a free spirited R&D lab.

My former boss (CTO of Panasonic) once told me that the only way to do real R&D is to have a monopoly that allows you to hide the margins in cutting edge R&D. Everyone else was doing just product development.

Google X is amazing in that it is about the only one left doing true bluesky R&D. Everyone else is just doing product development.

That was my first thought exactly.

YC/HN is global. You read the comments and you gain insight from people in Bangladesh, in Australia, in Japan, anywhere where idealistic techies are. The only country that realizes the potential is the US and the only region where you can live the lifestyle is the West-Coast and this is why it sometimes may feel like a bias.

Anyway, I fail to see the reason behind this. Especially since the startup scene in Berlin (and London) is mostly driven by business graduates and less by techies. If you want to find similar people, you can use meetup or similar.

We here on HN are mostly looking at Apple Watch as Android Wear vs. Apple Watch. This article is interesting since it shows that Apple is successful at completely ignoring these competitors and promoting Watch in a totally different market and environment, where all that matters is Brand, Design and Build. No matter if Android Wear is as good or even better, none of their manufacturers can compete in the luxury space as well as Apple may be able to.

Unfortunately it is only a passive tag for pairing. You can't to do anything else with it, so it cannot read other tags itself.

Thanks! Great insight into how watch marketing works...

Thanks! That sounds indeed as if they tried to optimize the experience. Watching people try finding the NFC sweetspot by swiping the bottom of their device around on a reader deviceis painful.

Can someone local find out where exactly the Antenna is? Nokia devices have been great at this with the touchpoint at the edges, which feels natural, while most Android devices have an awkward spot somewhere in the lower middle. Is it on the Apple logo? This may still make it feel awkward to use.

The main innovation I like is NFC in the Watch. This makes so much sense. What is the big advantage of pulling a phone from your bag instead of a wallet? Paying with a wrist, opening doors with your wrist, entering the metro with your wrist. Can't wait for the next Wear releases from Samsung to have it integrated :)

Apple Watch has NFC - now that is something none of the Android watches have. Don't pull your phone or wallet out, pay with your wrist. But by early 2015, Android Wear will catch up.

When they announced the feature of sharing your heartbeat with your partner via vibrate, both my girlfriend and I went 'eeeeew'. Some things shouldn't be done through technology, just like that Japanese remote kissing device :)

The crazy part is the Gold 'Edition' Version. It's not like a Swiss watch, which is sold to be passed on to new generations, since your children won't be happy to get such outdated tech. What will they do with old Gold versions? Smelt them?

As the article mentions this is about business interests and is largely driven by the old media with plenty of daily horror stories about Google, while the company has a massive market share.

For me the whole issue has become a problem lately, since my startup uses App-engine-J and I have lost two corporate clients because of this since their new IT guidelines insist on all data having to be stored on German soil. Added to this is the perception that any Google services, including Apps for Business and Cloud Storage are scanned by Google.

When announced at I/O, I was ready to buy it as a personal Android Wear device (already am developing for the Samsung Gear Live). With the announcement of the LGs and the black bar triggering what must be OCD, I will give it a pass. I wonder if they should have waited with an announcement until it was ready...

The average user does not know much about security. They trust Apple's brand more than they trust their friends (with secrets and health apps) and they will now likely stop using many services rather than step up security.

What is interesting is that the perception among normal people I heard speak about this is that all of iCloud has been breached, i.e. everyone's photos are in the hands of hackers and they only released the pics of celebs.

The reality is of course likely that an attacker was able to hack one phone which among photos hosted contacts and mail addresses of other celebs and from there on they got their hand on more accounts to directly target.

Anyway, my point is that to average consumers it does not mean that they need to use stronger security or that they would understand about targeted attacks. They will believe Apple has been breached and they will think more before creating private selfies or putting health data onto their until now so trusted companions.

People have become so close with their smartphones that they entrust it with more information than their friends know. In addition no brand is more loved than Apple, with many celebrities being ambassadors to the brand. The brand is planning to introduce new payment and health services next week.

For the average consumer two-factor-authentication means nothing, but they will start distrusting Apple more and will be more careful with data. This does not mean they will use more and better security. The average consumer will just stop using some of these services.

Apple working with 'INSERT ANY CC PROVIDER' on iPhone 6 Mobile Payments...

More interesting is the question which technology will be used. NFC has to play a role here, because the technology is in the market and scalable. My weirder and more riskier bet is that NFC on the Apple wearable will refit all older iPhones with mobile payments. Until now noone has put NFC on a wearable, even though it makes most sense to have it on a wrist.

The key question is what competitors have as technology. I don't know about the Japanese manufacturers, but in Germany Audi and VW have been heavily working on self-driving and assistive technology for the last decade and only incorporated communication technology at a later point (I was working at Vodafone R&D then and our team participated in joint tests starting six years ago). It is safe to assume that Google's approach was comms and data-first, car-physics secondary, while the manufacturers approach is the other way round with a focus on mechanics and physics.

Thank you, I was a bit perplexed by the downvote :)

I mainly think without IBM failing to launch OS/2 and lending their support to Java, it would be in a very different market position nowadays.

Maybe it makes sense to understand why Java is where it is today. It is not because programmers thought it was the best technology, but because of politics. At the time of introduction, Microsoft held a clear platform monopoly and the key skills in demand were C++/MFC and the like. Sun was the underdog and Java was positioned to become a counterweight to this monopoly and many companies supported it heavily just to provide a balance. From a developer standpoint Go is superior, but would the same political support happen for a Google-invented language?

Munich-based Extend3D also do something similar with moving objects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMGVCMucrsc

Their focus however is on using laserprojection for manufacturing.

Munich has one, too with a much smaller scale, with the sun central at the technology museum 'Deutsches Museum'

This is very significant for Panasonic's new direction. They now partner with a startup that takes on a IPR policy radically different from the Panasonic of the past. Panasonic's R&D engineers used to be measured internally by the amount of patents filed and the company had a large presence in every significant patent pool. In addition it means that one of Panasonic's key manufacturing expertise will be located overseas, which is also a radical departure to the mindset of keeping core manufacturing as 'black boxes' in Japan. However this may still apply to components that are integrated in the Gigafactory.

Congratulations to the team! Heard many good things about kontakt.io - we're about to testdrive various BLE vendors for an assistance platform for the elderly and will certainly give them a shot.

I have been working on a few horizontal products and the starting challenge with chicken and egg is always the same - you need to attract one vertical community and allow to fill it with content. What kind of strategies do other people use here? We tried automated import of existing content (e.g. from a publisher), paying people to generate content (with a set of rapid authoring tools). These strategies fill up content, but they don't engage a community and don't engage users to share content. Another strategy is to engage a lead user who already has a following, but this distorts the product into an individual one.

No Facebook in China. Facebook mostly faces political growth limits right now...