Yodlee's current frontend is nothing flashy, but it works extremely well and is very straightforward and stable. Of all the online services I use, Yodlee is among the very best. It saves me many hours of time every week and has dramatically increased my control over my personal finance information. (BTW, it is easy to export your Yodlee data in CSV format for local backup and further use in Excel.)
I have used Yodlee.com directly (and free) for two years; it has functioned extraordinarily well, and is invaluable--it saves hours of time dealing with personal finances, and provides very usable reports. I avoided Mint because I thought that Mint's very thin layer over Yodlee's services was apt to be an unstable business, and now we see that Mint users have been tossed to Intuit. I was also reluctant to expose all my financial details to Mint unnecessarily. Yodlee's own security credentials are high--good enough to convince just about all the large banks, brokerage houses, and credit issuers to trust them. Try a Yodlee account yourself, and you will see that Mint has been adding relatively little distinctive value over Yodlee's unique base.
The commercial products used widely in similar situations are called "senior medical alarms" (or "alerts"). There are a number of providers. It is hardware (e.g., waterproof button worn around the neck, communicating wirelessly to a base station which includes a specialized loud speaker phone) plus a data-rich monitoring service. When the button is pushed, the base station connects 24/7 to a service rep who can use the loud speaker phone to converse with the wearer. In case of emergency, the rep has a list of nearby friends and possibly distant family to notify, and also has prepared data on hand to summon the correct local emergency services and tell them how to gain access. Monitoring services offer other functions, including calling the senior's base station regularly just to check in and chat briefly, or calling to prompt and check on specific medication. Additional hardware is available, such as motion detectors which activate the base station in case of unusual or missing activity, and multiple units to cover larger living spaces. A lot of development has gone into solving this specific problem, so possibly specialized service would work better than just an intercom.
Isn't this an instance of the more general observation that people click less on links when loading is relatively slower (less bandwidth) and click more on links when loading is relatively faster (more bandwidth)?
> Transit oriented suburbs are structured much differently from highway oriented suburbs.
A critical insight. Look at the great Victorian suburbs around London, built along the railroads. These suburbs did not empty out central London, quite the contrary. And the rail connections resulted in dense walkable towns along the railroad lines, with often no car required at either end (in the nearer, denser suburbs).
Even today, people judge the price of homes in greater London by adding together the annual cost of rent or mortgage PLUS the cost of a railroad annual commuter pass into the London central zone.
"The Radio seems to have come out of nowhere--So far as I know, the iPhone/touch don't have them"
No, but the Zune player has long had FM radio, so best to dominate the Microsoft competitor in all dimensions.
BTW, FM is very convenient if you have a dedicated old computer streaming internet radio and connect it to a small-commercial-type FM transmitter; you can then get FM reception of internet radio over all of even a large property, automatically in time-sync, using existing audio equipment and "portable radios" including the new Nano. (This is legal in the US, but not in all countries.)
1 Reason I Was Forced to Overcome My Chrome Addiction:
It keeps freezing, requiring a power-off restart, with more than about twenty-five tabs. Sad to say, both FF and IE8 are much more stable with lots of tabs.
Good, cheap, reliable. You can use your own Amazon S3 account and key, and you need not give the key to JungleDisk; if you don't share your key, you can't use some features that involve JungleDisk's own servers, but backup and restore work just dandy with the encryption done once on your own computer. Very efficient and cost effective.
There's are other factors besides schools between American students and European students. For many Americans, the reality of ever needing to speak any language but English seems totally theoretical, whether for travel, business, or profession. For many Europeans, needing to speak a non-native language appears much more realistic. Further complicating this is that if one's native language is English, then it DOES work almost all the time, reinforcing the notion that foreign languages are merely decorative. By contrast, if you were a Dutch computer scientist like Dijkstra, you would understand very early that you could never hope to write professional papers in Dutch. (Brits have the advantage of seeing that other languages really are used, but share the disadvantage of already being fluent in what is nearly a world language.)
Inspiring, and also serves as a reference example of a presentation that explicitly says "These slides are meant for reading, rather than presenting". That's a very common document form, but seldom acknowledged.
This appears to be ongoing improvement; Wolfram Alpha was very poor on nutrition information at introduction, but seems much better now (although still with a long ways to go).
Some of these points have pros and cons, actually.
The T400 appears to have five buttons around the trackpad because it has an exta "trackpoint" red nub in the keyboard, so you can handle cursor, scrolling, and typing without moving either hand from the keyboard--indispensable to all the people who have learned to use it.
The T400 has an LED to illuminate keyboard and slightly more so you can turn it on or off when you need to, rather than when an ambient light sensor thinks best, and you can hold anything under the light to see it. (Think airplanes.) Very useful.
The T400 has a physical switch to turn off wireless hardware so you can do it when the machine is off, quickly, without booting up and using a menu, and so you can physically verify its status.
The T400 has connectors for devices most often found in its environment. ThinkPad evolves its connectors, but a little more conservatively than Apple. Which plan is best depends on what particular users need to connect. You also get some complaints that a new Mac can't connect to existing peripherals.
Design is vital, Apple has some great design points, but ThinkPad has some different but equally great design points. Read David Hill's blog (http://lenovoblogs.com/designmatters/) for insight into the meticulous design thinking behind ThinkPad.
If academics will just insist on not assigning copyright, they may get further; publications need authors, and to demand copyright assignment will become a competitive disadvantage.
"The ACM copyright form now explicitly says that authors can post a copy on their personal websites" --scott_s
Actually, ACM can be pushed further than that. When ACM solicited an article from me for their Communications magazine, I (nicely) refused to execute their copyright assignment, even with the personal website permission. So ACM proposed instead a simple licence to publish (royalty-free, worldwide, non-expiring, any medium, non-exclusive) which I was happy to sign while preserving my copyright ownership, and which gave them everything they need. But recently IEEE has refused a similar licence arrangement, insisting on a copyright assignment or no publication (which was what I chose). I expect ACM to prosper over IEEE.
I successfully registered a 5-character name within 10 seconds of the launch, so if there were a bug it wasn't simply refusing strings of 5 characters.
Can't tell whether BBC stations are available--no way to search the radio stations. The site hardly works at all in Google Chrome, have to reload the home page frequently to get out of being wedged. I see it's "unlimited" except for about a yard of footnotes qualifying that and giving limits. And, like everyone else, I'd never fill out all that personal data just to try a site that doesn't obviously do anything new.
I was a Mac app startup in the days of Mac-128, OS/2 and Windows 1.0. Far from evangelizing OS/2, Microsoft sent Tandy Trower (a very important development manager, still at Microsoft) down to the Valley to visit us and urge us to develop our Mac app for Windows. He told us then that Microsoft was working on Windows versions of its Mac apps. And we were surely not the only Mac startup that Tandy had on his list of visits to make in the Valley. It has always seemed to me that developers who prioritized OS/2 over Windows were fooling themselves (easy to do, since IBM was so important then and backing OS/2), not being fooled by Microsoft.
One thing to consider is to what extent the user will be depending upon the quality and comprehensiveness of your specific product. A product used for recreation or convenience may be very partial and/or may fail frequently without causing much disappointment, and users may be happy to have it early. In contrast, my startup made a product that many users considered vital to their professional and business success, that required substantial initial investment of effort, and that users often used under considerable time pressure. Anyone starting to use the product who became wedged by incomplete features would be extremely unhappy. For this product, it was necessary to get it over a fairly high threshold before offering it (apart from a demo or alpha with no expectation that it could be depended upon). Most products aren't in this category, and profit from early release. But even so, for your specific example, I tried Pandora on its release day and was disappointed, and wrote to Tim Westergren to tell him so; he answered within minutes promising future improvements, which should have been impressive enough, but it took me two or three years before I tried Pandora again (I'm now an enthusiastic paying subscriber).
Having lived in both the US and the UK, I'd observe that the prestige of one's university counts for MUCH more in the UK. To an American it is unbelieveable how much Brits focus on where they went to school (at all levels) rather than their abilities--and they are correct to do so, because other Brits use schools and universities as vital credentials. It's an aspect of the class system in the UK which doesn't exist in the same way in the US (note also the discussion of "working class background" versus "upper middle class culture"--not at all the same in the US). Someone from the UK might well obsess about a degree from an elite university, but in the US any good degree gets you over the threshold and able to compete on equal terms.
Very good layout and navigation, hope the ratings are real. One thing, though: the list of "highest rated" at the bottom of the page creates a THIRST for the ability to re-sort all apps in other orders, particularly in order by ratings, so I can review all the highest-rated apps in the format of the front page. (On Amazon, I nearly always re-sort products by "customer review" rankings--high to low is all that's needed, and find this the quickest way to go through a list of possibilities.)
Read the comments here first, went to check it out; typed in "www.webnotes.com" and ended up at some very strange site. Came back here, and couldn't believe that you were trying to do something with a "reasonable-sounding" domain name for which someone else has the .com. I predict this will be a big problem.
Well, FWIW, I backup my machine every night via both of Connected Online Backup ($995/yr) and JungleDisk, (about $350 a year to Amazon) and I won't use any of their competitors who can recover their own keys--so the story of enhanced security sells me. (I do trust these vendors not to transmit my password from their client applications to their servers, that's easy; I don't trust them to secure my unencrypted data on lots of machines for decades, that's much harder.)
The site says "We currently do not offer private key encryption," and adds "You are giving the key to those intrusted (the online Backup provider) with encrypting and storing your data."
But it isn't true that online backup requires giving the key to the backup provider.
There are two main security models: (1) All data is encrypted on the user's machine with a password known ONLY to the user that never leaves the user's machine, and the encrypted data is transmitted and written to backup exactly that way; on restores, the encrypted data is returned and then decrypted on the user's machine (Connected Online Backup from Iron Mountain and some ways of using JungleDisk work this way). Or (2) the data is transmitted securely, decrypted at the backup server, encrypted there with a key known to the backup service and saved; on restores, the data is decrypted at the backup server using the service's key, then returned securely to the user's machine (most other online backup services work this way).
The second model is, as you say, insecure--which is why it is a big competitive disadvantage.
The first model can be smart, of course, and employ the user's private encryption key which never leaves the client PC only for personal files, and use some other method on Windows system files, commercial application executables, and other files which are duplicated on millions of machines (identified on the client before encryption).
FWIW, Connected Online Backup does both incremental backups by changed file blocks and also does identification of files it already has seen and so doesn't need to send again (at all), while keeping the encryption key only on the client PC. You're right about the current price--Connected wants $995/yr for 50GB. Obviously that price level can't last much longer.
The "classic SV" along the south-western corner of the bay (Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park) dates from the old days (the '60s to the late '80s). Back then, all the VCs lived up north in urban San Francisco, and all the startup employees lived in auto-oriented suburbs down there.
Eventually many VCs moved their offices south, but nowadays more and more of the startups are actually in San Francisco. The SF lifestyle of easy walkability, little dependence on cars, vastly better restaurants, bars, shops, and entertainment, and all the other advantages of a dense city, appeal more to many of the current generation of hackers, and make SF more characteristic of contemporary startups than the old historic corridor located an hour south.
One of the interesting sights every morning now in San Francisco are all the private wifi-equipped coaches picking up employees for their free hour ride down to Google, Microsoft SVC, and other mega-employers located on large campuses in SV. Those employees, like startup founders, increasingly prefer to live in SF (and refuse to commute by car for two hours a day).
The "valley advantage" is much the same in both areas, and there's a fair amount of interchange, but the two areas are very different, and they are far enough apart to discourage casual traveling between them. Lots of people who live down in the suburbs of the old SV don't really feel comfortable anywhere in SF except Moscone Center for WWDC (and may only come up to the city once a year). Lots of people who live in SF can't imagine living in the upscale suburbs down south where you have to get in a car to go anywhere at all (and they may only go down to Stanford a few times a year).
But both are very interesting areas, and both have good people. For the "classic SV", look in the towns along the western hills from Cupertino up to Menlo Park; for the "contemporary SV" look around SF.
"hackoff.com: an historic murder mystery set in the Internet bubble and rubble", by Tom Evslin (pub. 2007).
Tom is a software hacker himself and a very well known serial startup entrepreneur, with successes in comm and graphics apps (both Mac and PC) and then a huge IPO for his company ITXC during the internet bubble. His fictional murder mystery is based on his insider view of startups, both the both technical and financial sides.
Go to http://hackoff.com (note that the fictional domain which is the title of the book is also a real domain to promote the book). You can read the entire book or listen to Tom read the entire book free, or receive all the text episodes by RSS or email, or receive all the audio episodes by RSS or podcast. You can order the hardback book edition from Amazon, or buy a Kindle edition.
An anecdote about hospital negotiation: I just got a bill for $7,000 for a two-hour visit to a San Francisco hospital emergency room. The bill arrived with a letter offering me a 20% discount if I paid directly (and claimed it back from my insurance or not, either way) versus if I asked them to submit an insurance claim, and another 20% discount for payment within 30 days. So the opening offer on the bill was to pay 40% less. This is probably in the neighborhood of what an insuror would pay, but the hospital saves a fortune in claims processing.
One day as I lit a cigarette someone said to me, "I used to smoke, and then I realized that I was the smartest person I knew who still smoked, so I quit." Later I thought about this and realized that I was the smartest person I knew who still smoked, so I quit too. Actually thinking about the smokers you know can be an eye-opening comparison.