kunle

We ARE working essentially 15 hour weeks (or trending towards that). But instead of each person working 15hour weeks, most people will just be unemployed. The average will end up around 15 hours.

> I don't think we'll get to a point where professional or enterprise level creation happens on an iPad

I agree with a caveat; professional/enterprise level creation looks the way it does today partly because of the tools we've had available (Word, Excel, etc). Where I disagree is that I think professional/enterprise level creation will look different in a way that benefits the iPad (this is really hard to quantify which is why its so vague) but, put another way; creation tools for the iPad will be developed, and their outputs will be some alternative (to word docs, powerpoints etc).

I tried this as well 2 weeks ago. The OP has a much more comprehensive breakdown of why it didnt work than I do (and a much more involved workload than i was intending).

Personally and in my conversation with folks, I find that as a productivity device, iPad users fall into 2 buckets.

Bucket 1: Creators: developers, designers, writers and such - folks who need to create documents and other work product. Broadly speaking, in terms of available apps, and interconnectivity with apps (eg leaving Photoshop to go research something in a browser and coming back, copy paste workflows etc) the iPad is simply not there yet. For stand alone workflows, it goes some of the way there (Eg if all you're doing is writing, you can probably get away with it), but if your role involves using several tools, the tools simply arent there yet.

Bucket 2: Decision makers. I know a few successful CEOs who only work on an iPad. For them, most of their workflow is digesting data and decision making - they arent writing code or making slide decks. They just process emails, do product review and look at data and conclusions. For them, the iPad is perfect because all those workflows are easily completed on an iPad.

I think the iPad will get there eventually - the type of creation that is done will shift somewhat, and the tools will get better, but for now, even the most dedicated folks have a hard time using an iPad exclusively.

Will definitely be the Windows Watch, made exclusively by swatch, rather than the xWatch.

Have worked with the Streak team for a little while - they're incredibly sharp (and have helped us improve our product a ton). Congrats guys!

Fair on #2 - I don't think the desktop tools have peaked though. Just that the quality on mobile/tablets is growing faster.

The studies you cite will also have the built in bias of comparing a 3 - 5 year old computing paradigm with one that's had a quarter century to mature . . .

Well said in general but I have 2 fundamental disagreements

re: #2 - this assumes that the quality of workflow/creation tools have peaked. Part of what drives the growth in tablets as a work device is simply that an office filled with tablets is an order of magnitude cheaper to supply than an office filled with workstations. I'll admit some category of activities (eg programming, architecture, anything precision related) will resist the shift to mobile/tablets harder than others, but many white collar jobs don't actually require desktop grade computing, it just happens to be the case that desktops/laptops were all that was available and that is where the tools were. (even this is being pushed - look at the Binary App for development and Plangrid for architecture)

Re: #3 - Marco argues this point re: HTML5 (and Android) really well. With the hardware accelerated graphics made possible by iOS 7 (and the better hardware coming with the next gen iOS devices), you're going to have to work REALLY hard to create HTML5 apps that "wow" like native ones can.

Draft is a product that helps you write better. I use it, and it's excellent. There are writers everywhere, and have been throughout history. I'd hardly call that

"problems faced by young single tech-savvy american college graduates with disposable income."

This is great. Someone obviously asked "What's our social media strategy" and got sold some "AI" by someone who said "It's just like SIRI, only better!" and this is what they bought. Sigh.

Still have Xobni installed, it's been very useful. Hope it gets better - congrats to these guys.

PG did start a founders first vc firm. It's called yc, and they have a nondescript office in mountain view and tell you yes or no after a 10 minute interview.

Some of the more forward thinking folks (Socialcam and HauteLook for example) have rolled in house versions of these, but Apptimize is one of the first end to end solutions I've seen. But A/B testing in mobile is definitely something a lot of folks are thinking about.

Hey HN - OP here. We've been running an interview series with folks scaling fast in mobile, about how they're adapting. We've more on the way and we're always on the lookout for interesting stories, so please reach out at ayo@hipmob if you have any thoughts. Thanks!

Probably the right answer is some combination of

- editorial (although this can be gamed in a different way - a bunch of PR/marketing folks with strong relationships with Apple employees would suffice),

- reviews/ratings (also gameable)

- some algo for how long users continue to own/open/use an app after they download it (almost impossible to game, because it's linked to fundamental use).

With this combo - the rich will still get richer, but at least they will continue to be quality.

Have used Draft for several weeks now. It's simply awesome and has replaced my flow of drafting up posts in all sorts of random places (email, evernote etc) and sharing them for editing in random other places (google docs, hackpad etc).

And Nate is incredibly responsive - always a good feature in a founder. Hope they crush it.

Hope he joins SpaceX

Hi Ben - thanks for the feedback (also responded to you on twitter). We've disabled the feature as of now and we'll only roll it out again once we can give visitors clear and easy options to know what's being seen, and opt out as well.

Thanks for the suggestion - we'll include an indicator telling you when this happens, with an opt-out enabling you to prevent it from happening.

EDIT: "You" = any visitor to a site enabled with Hipmob.

The opt out (for accounts where this is enabled) will be placed right into the chat window where the user is typing. Definitely easy to find.

Thanks for spotting. Will take a look - appreciate it.

The goal is to give customers tools they can use responsibly, and allow them exercise judgement. This is obviously the leading edge and we thought long and hard before enabling the functionality. One idea we have towards making visitors more comfortable with this would be to create a notification that enables visitors to see that what they're typing can be seen? Hopefully customer feedback helps us figure out which direction to go here.

EDIT: After getting feedback from some customers, we're building in an optout so that users

a. know that what they're typing can be seen, and b. can opt out of their typing being seen at all.

Hey HN - OP here (ayo at Hipmob). We've been working on tools to give our customers more insight on what's happening with their users. We started by just giving a typing indicator, and thought we could give our customers a hand by letting them look a little deeper. Would love your thoughts/comments here, or just email me at ayo@hipmob.com.

Seeing that US patients pay 20x for Lipitor as New Zealand is a pretty troubling stat. Even though it's clearly optimized for shock value, paying $124/unit can mean a patient is choosing between solvency and health. Pretty sad.

"In 2011, Hulu’s owners put the company up for sale and were looking for a bid of at least $2 billion; in exchange, they would offer content licenses that would run for two to three years."

Given that Hulu is now owned by the folks who license its content, any new buyer/owner can expect to pay astronomically more (think of what happens to Netflix every few years as they license content) or lose access to content every few years. Essentially, the owners would sell you the company and retain the option to put you out of business. It's a really bad deal.

That's the plan. We want to make sure you can see the exact actions a user takes (and the user can also see the exact actions the agent is taking).

We also plan to add an overlay so there's no confusion as to when your screen is being viewed.

Hey HN, Ayo from Hipmob here. We've been getting a lot of feedback from mobile devs (some who are our customers and some not), expressing frustration at the constant back and forth they have to engage in to get a good handle on whats going on in their apps. The web has awesome tools for screensharing like Firefly, Screenleap, Screenhero, Join.me and more. We decided to make one for iOS and Android apps, that any developer could use to see what their customers are doing (with permission of course).

Will be out in a few short weeks - would love any feedback in the comments, or directly to me at ayo@hipmob.com.

Solid read. This is one of my favorite blogs about Saas businesses/services.

Point about the wind power industry is entirely correct - my goal was simply to put it in context. Many companies (including GE as you mention) are only so profitable by taking advantage of a multitude of tax credits/subsidies and the like.

Reference: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/business/economy/25tax.htm...

Several of GE's businesses are propped up by government subsidies. All I'm saying is that GE is not really different - Tesla simply happens to be in a sector that's particularly high profile and politically charged, and its claiming of those things are out in the open.

Tesla takes advantage of a lot of these things, but that sort of rent-seeking is so par for the course, that choosing to NOT take advantage of it would put any company of scale at a massive disadvantage relative to their peers. A short laundry list of the industries that do this very well: financial firms, energy firms (both production and delivery), car companies (who can forget GM and Chrysler in 08/09), sports teams/leagues (particularly when building stadiums/facilities, and others. The subsidies/tax breaks etc that they take advantage of are at the Federal, State, and Local level, sometimes international, and oftentimes playing different government entities against each other to get better deals.

The New York Times had a fantastic article on this: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/us/how-local-taxpayers-ban...

And a visualization here with some data: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/12/01/us/government-...

Re-reading it, makes you wonder how profitable all these industries would be without all these subsidies/tax breaks etc baked in.

I've used the Caltrain/Bart and NYC versions of Embark for a while - its really irreplaceable. Jazzed to try this.