1,421 karma · joined March 31, 2008
I'm one of the two people at Focused Apps. We make Emoji Me and Hit Tennis for iOS.
I think you do have to be careful with excluding the poor from a new "invention" that is designed to make better the thing that a lot of poor people use. But I don't think poor people not using this initially is a good enough reason not to try.
There are so many examples of this. What about Lyft itself? Isn't that just a "taxi"? By the (low) standards of this article, sure. Obviously though, that characterization would miss something since the entire taxi industry has been upended by the ride-sharing companies.
I think what the author did was think of four companies that were obviously silly in her mind, and characterized them as not wholly original inventions. Which of course they aren't. The thing is, it's rare to find the company that is. Sure it's easy to make fun of Soylent (not saying they're bad or good--just easy to make fun of), but I'm surprised by the author's shortsightedness on something like Lyft Shuttle. I don't know a single person who's said, "Buses? They're great as they are. That's a solved problem."
But the important difference that pavel was identifying was that you don't have to decide ahead of time that you are heading to the bus station. That's huge! You decide to head downtown or whereever, pull out the app, bam someone's coming to pick you up. To me this feels very different than, e.g., "casual carpool" in the Bay Area.
Interesting to note, PG said this about FlightCar in 2013: "They went from what seemed like one of the least promising startups in the batch to one of the most promising in the batch." (http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/03/27/smaller-c...)
FlightCar anecdote from the early days: I rented a car from BOS and drove it to a wedding about 4 hours away. Got a call from FlightCar that they actually needed the car back (don't know if the owner returned early, or it was a scheduling screw-up.) So someone drove the 4 hours to me in a different car, met me in my hotel parking lot 30 minutes before the wedding, and we swapped cars. :)
Haven't noticed the performance problems though. I'm on a Macbook Pro, using Chrome.
If your numbers go up steeply enough for long enough, you could have eyeballs on stalks and investors will fund you.
What are these "stalks"?