physcab

You presumably pay people for their skillsets. Screwing a light bulb in or doing your grocery shopping doesn't require a special skillset. There are some tasks that just aren't in the same ballpark as building homes, growing food, and cutting hair, and I think shopping is one of them.

I think Instacart is a fantastic concept / service but for me it doesn't come without some internal conflict. When I was in grad school and didn't have a car, it was a huge pain to go grocery shopping. I had to bike a mile to the nearest grocery store and I could only fit a few items in my backpack. On top of that, it would rain often (thank you Florida), making the whole experience absolutely miserable. I always wished there was some service that could do "maintenance shopping" for me and always deliver the weekly essentials. I thought the same about laundry as well.

Now that I have a job and live a few blocks from the nearest store and have a car, is it right to pay someone else to do my shopping for me? Am I really that lazy? Do I really value other's time less than my own? I have often pondered these questions ever since services like Taskrabbit started and I saw people (able-bodied 20-somethings) using TR to do things like screw new light bulbs in.

So I'm not saying services like this shouldn't exist, because there is clearly a need...but I worry about what it means for our culture.

I cringed when reading the HN comments to this article. Seriously folks, this article isn't about how to get to the fountain of youth. It's also not about quick fixes, so unfortunately if you want to get to the good stuff, you're actually going to have to read the entire 7 pages. Trust me, if you have an open mind, its worth the read.

It's enlightening for me to read accounts about how others live their lives and derive happiness from simple pleasures. Breathing fresh air, enjoying the company of others, eating food that you've grown. This is such a stark contrast to the lifestyle I have lived for the past 28 years. I've worked at software companies for the past 5 years and have spent most of my waking life in front of a computer screen. Even though I am happy, I do admit that I wonder if life is supposed to be more than this. And here we have incredible proof of someone who had broken out of their Comfort Zone, possibly had to give up many of their "luxuries", and changed their life completely.

The point of this story isn't that this man beat cancer and lived to be a centenarian, its that by changing his life he dramatically improved his happiness and began to take advantage of all the things we take for granted.

Startups in the valley seem almost by definition, segregated places to work. I don't think it is intentional (or maybe in the case of Kixeye it was), but the vast majority of companies seem to have straight white males in their 20's as employees. What this means is that people who do not have "critical mass", ie any few numbers of minorities, are going to count the number people just like them. It will also mean stereotypes will be at their worst. Do startups hire programmers in their 50's? Do startups that make products "for women" try to hire women to work on that product? Why is it that black engineers and non-native English speaking engineers are in positions like QA and testing, but not program management? These are just a few of the trends I've noticed.

This isn't exclusive or indicative to startups. I have friends who work at large companies (Apple in particular) who work 90 hour work weeks and are completely miserable.

Mobile is vital to Uber's business to function, but it isn't dependent on organic traffic through the App Store to succeed. They can exist with a relatively low number of installed users because their users have an absurdly high average revenue and retention rate compared to most mobile applications.

This has been brought up before [1].

I believe that currently, the biggest problem in mobile is discovery. I can't remember what problems were prevalent in 1999 but it could have been discovery on the web as well. If you're a startup, life is going to suck for you developing on mobile. You have a name recognition problem on top of developing on a platform where discovery is inherently broken. It will be tough to get those organic installs because on Apple, those are driven largely in part to your placement in the rankings, and there's less to do with SEO on the App Store as there is on Google. So I think success on mobile can be had in only a finite number of ways:

1) You buy your way to the top and hope your customer LTV > acquisition costs (See all mobile games)

2) You spam the hell out of your users on other distribution platforms (SocialCam)

3) You're lucky and you develop a truly great product that thrives on mobile (WhatsApp, Camera+)

4) You can succeed with mobile being a utility, but not the essence of your business (Uber).

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4172261

ViaCycle should sell its locking system then anyone with an unused bike can participate in the program!

I'm impressed with the accuracy of MobileWorks over mechanical Turk (or pure MT- not sure if MW just filters workers heavily). I tried a receipt transcription task where I fed the same instructions and same photo to both services. Out of the box, MW was 100% while MT was about 90% for the same cost.

This could actually be huge. All they need is a few high DAU accounts to help them market this device. I totally agree with their premise that current games are limited by the touch functionality. If they can bring the price down and just get to a medium-sized installed base, their free app will work wonders for small indie-sized devs. Current game devs are being priced out of the market for advertising, but if they can innovate on the discovery end, they could become a low-cost Xbox competitor with a much larger catalog of games.

If any Wattvision customers are here, or if the team is looking at this, I'm curious...what kinds of changes in behavior have you noticed?

I ask because my electrical consumption is relatively constant. I come home, turn on the TV, make dinner, surf the internet, pass out. I've noticed that its tough to influence my bill in any direction, except from when the weather changes from hot to cold and vice versa. But those are changes I'm conscious of and fully expect to be paying more during the extremes.

Safety isn't as much determined by your aspirations, as it is by your record. 37% failure is an acceptable milestone considering all the SpaceX has achieved in its short lifetime, but I doubt would satisfy NASA's safety regulations for human spaceflight.

This is a pretty important observation. I will applaud SpaceX for their efforts as well, but there is a massive difference between transporting cargo into space and human beings.

SpaceX claims their transport is cheaper but they have not claimed it is safer. If they are really aiming for the human transportation business I wonder if the true cost of their rocket ships will be much more on par with existing vehicles. I'm sure they have taken advantage of some optimizations and efficiencies in new technologies and materials. But I also believe one of the reasons the other rockets are so much more expensive is not because they are relying on old technology, but having to satisfy much more stringent government regulations regarding safety, testing, and quality control. The ATLAS V has had 100% Mission Success and that does not come cheaply.

I agree. The hackers will only be a small percentage of your user base (guessing <=5%), if you have a problem at all. This issue is more problematic if you track revenue metrics, and so JB users may inflate your numbers considerably, if you're not cognizant.

Awesome, in theory this is how it should work. I'm actually more curious as to how you handle it practically though. Because for us, validating the receipt from Apple takes time, so if you are first making a request to Parse and then Parse has to make a request to Apple, the added latency poses a real threat to the user cancelling the transaction, especially on a mobile device with a crappy connection. This is why I see server-side validation as non-ideal. But such is the state of mobile development.

Have you tested whether this is effective in eliminating jailbroken hacks? [1] In my experience, this has been the bulk of illegal transactions being made for in app purchases and its tough to validate server-side. I agree though that making the IAP process less complex is a win for developers.

[1] http://blog.off-by-one.mobi/2009/10/in-app-purchase-and-stat...

Its not the business model that will change. The business model works, thats why there is so much competition in the gaming industry and lots of money being made. What will change are the types of games themselves. Because as competition increases, acquiring a user becomes more expensive, so the games will have to have different mechanics and be of higher quality to differentiate themselves. Your smartphone is increasingly becoming your new console.

Sorry, my comment wasn't very well formulated. I actually was trying to be slightly sarcastic and over-dramatic to make a point. The point being, Apple seems to demand quite a bit from its employees, such that they are required to make sacrifices other companies do not usually require. For me, flying 14 hours to be away from friends and family and not allowed to go anywhere but the factory and the hotel in which you stay seems like suffering. To others, that could quite possibly be the best experience of their lives. To each his own I guess.

Its not a fact, obviously. I was semi-joking. I'm just saying I've heard anecdotal evidence of people's marriages falling apart while working at Apple for long periods of time.

Pretty interesting talk, though he paints Apple in a glamorous way. However, in the Q&A he does address the real culture of Apple. Apple is a culture of work. You put in long hours, you don't get very flexible vacation, you don't really have a work-life balance, and if you work on a major product you'll be sent to China to suffer in a factory for 3 weeks every other month. I've heard the burnout rate is high and the average number of divorces amongst its employees who have stayed longer than 5 years is 3. Also, Apple isn't an angel abroad. They put their vendors in tough positions and exert their power of scale and cash where it can benefit them most.

They are usually very accommodating to different dietary restrictions. And the food is usually very delicious (SF has some amazing restaurants!) But restaurant food just tastes...heavy? I loved when we had Osha one day and grilled brisket + mac n cheese the next, but I certainly couldn't have that style of food everyday.

Ah I see. I really like the personal style. I'll try to rally others to my cause! Its nice to see where your food comes from and who makes it. I feel privileged that we get food in the first place, but always prefer the lunch that comes served by chefs over the stuff that comes dumped out of plastic containers.

So I work for GREE (the company pictured in the article), and while I do like ZeroCater, I actually think Munchery is way better. Just a personal opinion. ZeroCater's service is awesome and their food selection is good, but I always feel kinda sick after eating. I think because they source their meals from restaurants.

Why do I like Munchery more? Because its made by chefs who typically use healthy ingredients. They change it up alot and I've even heard stories of some employees calling the chefs to see what's on the menu for the evening. Pretty cool! And after dinner, I feel great!

This post says just as much about Kickstarter as a platform as it does about Ouya. It looks like the time required to raise $1m for a worthy cause is quickly approaching zero now, which is simply astounding. If I were a VC, I'd think long and hard about what value proposition I can offer to entrepreneurs over just raw capital. Because in the (near) future, it doesn't look like money will be the differentiating factor.

I don't know about you, but a bunch of my friends go to Youtube precisely because they can listen to pirated music. In fact, sometimes when I'm at parties, people pull up their own youtube playlists that are exactly the same content Grooveshark would have.

I also think Grooveshark's service has become less of a place for popular music consumption than indie/ self-made content because there are, quite frankly, much better options (ITunes, Spotify, Rdio) if you want to listen to your Billboard Top 100. And I think indie artists actually love having their content on Grooveshark. Grooveshark runs site-wide campaigns for new bands, they have a sweet bus that goes to concerts and records artists unplugged, and their radio service is very niche focused.

Except I hate bundled services because I feel like I'm getting ripped off. I don't have a subscription to Rdio because I think "wow, I can listen to my favorite bands and have access to all this other content". No. I have a subscription because the price I pay to listen to my favorite bands is cheaper than what I would have paid if I were to buy the album on ITunes and more convenient than pirating.

If all my favorite shows were available on ITunes, I'd kiss cable goodbye in an instant.

Oh, I assure you, I know the importance of measurement. I'm an analyst for a large social game company :)

My point is, it doesn't help you to measure something that isn't actionable. And my list above was just the four that I can think of where gender, age, and location details actually helped across many of the applications I've studied.

I agree with you that the goal of analytics is the help improve your products, but its easy to be misled to the wrong conclusions. Sometimes, too much data may actually be harmful to your business.

User privacy concerns aside (yes, I realize that is a big aside), I feel like there are only a handful of use cases where knowing this user data is actually helpful in analytics scenarios, and anything beyond just feels creepy to know.

1) More intelligent marketing spend. If you know you have a higher LTV for females for your app between the ages of 18-34 and you do a portion of your advertising on Facebook, it would be good to target just those users.

2) Insights into broad customer engagement. Let's say your 18-34 female users return to your application more often than male users in the same demographic, it'd be helpful to know what friction points cause these users to drop off.

3) Insights into spending users. Being able to segment all your user actions by those who are free and those who spend money would help you optimize your paying funnel.

4) Bug reporting. Knowing where your users are located can help illuminate whether you have server and localization problems.

I can't think of any reasons why you'd use this information to voluntarily contact users other than support-related issues. If Netflix sent me an email that said "We think you'd like these movies because other males liked these movies" I'd probably de-activate immediately.

Many different ways. For organic traffic theres links, search results, facebook posts and other social media. For the app store theres added friction bc users have to install the app on their phone and there will be a dropoff between viewing a listing and downloading (and also from downloading to launching). For paid traffic, its much easier to build a sustainable business on the web because the costs are, for the most part, cheaper.

I agree with the author, but not for the same reason they mentioned. Currently, the biggest problem in mobile is discovery. If you're not in the top 25 for your category, its difficult to gain enough organic traffic to build a sustainable business on. Companies much larger than you are buying out all the paid inventory. As a startup, you'll be doubly hurt because no one will know who you are. So you have all the problems of sustaining as a brand on the web plus the added disadvantage of surviving on a platform where discovery is inherently broken.

So unless you think long and hard about how to solve distribution and come up with some interesting hacks, you're at a large disadvantage from day 0.