at first, i also thought it was stupid that they required you to tether it to a blackberry. then i realized that i kind of like that fact that you don't need to buy two $80 / month data plans (though tethering a blackberry by bluetooth kills the battery) for each.
too bad the playbook was too little, too late, and too expensive. hope they take a cue from HP and drop the price massively to clear their inventory
Interesting point - the "friend ranking" numbers are different when I checked Mozilla vs. Chrome.
In Mozilla, the first person ranked was at -6.2650374; on Chrome, it was -7.2581474 (I go back and forth with this person quite a bit). Also, the ranking of some of the people were different.
My guess is something to do with browser cookies or caching - any ideas why this might be the case?
Agreed that (1) is not by definition intelligence gathering. It's a fine line, but it should be pretty clear if you reflect carefully on what was asked.
Using finance as an example (since veyron mentioned it), it's one thing to ask an interesting brain teaser, or even, for example, the candidate's perspective on how a market will evolve over the next 5 years (e.g., natural gas). It's another to try to ask them what trading strategies they've used (which they could bring up more subtly by saying something like "what are some interesting trading strategies for natural gas you think could work"), or how they interact with their clients.
I'm just throwing this out there, but is there a way to make it such that other people congratulate you? people already do this on facebook (e.g., weddings, babies, graduations, new jobs, etc.), so you might have some adoption issues, but turning it around would alleviate the awkwardness of tooting your own horn. people could then post other stuff to it (like pictures related to the milestone), which they might be more apprehensive to do (or is awkward / cumbersome to link to a wall post) on a site like Facebook.
i think the reason it works on facebook (and personal blogs, i guess) is it's more fluid - people do actually post some of their milestones there ("Just graduated from X school!", "Just climbed Mt. Y"), and people comment on those posts, but it's a little different to do it on a site that's primary purpose is to pat one's self on her back.
I think AMC's doing something along these lines, where people with their loyalty card get deals on concessions. They probably throw in a free ticket after several visits. I think I remember hearing some doing packages (e.g., tickets + popcorn and drinks).
In any case agreed, anything they can do to push food and drinks is how they can fleece customers more and blow out their bottom line
So basically, as a customer, you'd have to assume you're going to 4-7 movies per month to break even on this (depending on how much movies cost in your area - $6.50 matinees or $13+ a ticket in Manhattan).
A bunch of mid-2000s polls suggest the average American goes to 4-6 movies per YEAR - probably has come down a bit given structural trends. Not sure what the distribution looks like, but I'd guess it's a pretty thin tail of people who go more than 4-6 times per month.
So either they're hoping people think they go a lot more often than they really do, or are giving a great deal to a small portion of the population.
Pricing seems quite a bit off for this to be attractive to 95% of the populace (though given theaters need to pay a cut for each body that comes in to the distributor, they probably wanted to be on the conservative side)... maybe should have done something like $25-30/month, and hope the users buy enough concessions to make up the difference. Or do the $50, but throw in a free massive bucket of popcorn for every trip, which costs virtually nothing to the theater anyway (and presumably, the customer's usually going to want to buy a drink, which is basically 95% profit).
While "cold calls" with strangers sometimes do work out, I've found one way to form productive mentoring relationships is to start with people you have some connection to - that could include teachers (e.g., if there is one, the comp sci teacher at your high school), people from your high school who went down the entrepreneurship track, etc. Even if you didn't know them, it's much easier to build on some common ground / experience than start from scratch - they'll also be more likely to respond to any call or emails you drop them. You might not find the perfect person / people at first, but it's a start and having at least someone who's somewhat on the same page as you to bounce ideas off and get advice from is better than nothing.
I don't know what resources you have to "discover" these people (as an example, you could search for your high school with some technology-oriented key words on LinkedIn), but you can get creative on that.
Hopefully, as both your network and your needs develop, you can "level up" to the people who can actually provide the support you need.
I won't say it's common practice, but I'm aware of people at a few companies (not just startups, but some Fortune 500 ones as well) who use "interviews" to gather competitive intelligence and ideas.
Given your (1), it sounds like you might have run into that at least once. What industry / role were you talking to them about?
At first, I was going to say it's tiny relative to the overall DoD budget... but if true, it's actually pretty ridiculous:
- 0.5% of the US federal budget overall (including entitlement programs)
- 3-4% of the overall defense budget
- More than 2x the budget of the FBI
- ~40% of the Homeland Security budget ($47B)
- Rather close to the budget allocation for the Marine Corp ($29B) (though there might technically be some overlap there)
If that's for 2 wars in 2 countries, what's government's total air conditioning bill? Our soldiers deserve it, but there's gotta be a better way.
i realize this might be a bit of an experiment here, but i think it would be really cool if i could get an hour with a YC alum, for example, to get their feedback on my business plan. whether it's a call or just sitting down to get coffee (hell, i'll even buy you dinner or something)
pretty funny - i'd like to see the data cut by box office, since some people have consistently made terrible movies but those movies may have made a lot of money. of course, you'd get a bunch of random people who no one knows because they're so bad, but perhaps filtered by some minimum # of films and at least 1 box office hit.
it would also be interesting to see what filmmakers or actors consistently make critically reviled films, but those films do very well in the marketplace - in addition to m night (arguably), also the michael bays of the world.
for this to be remotely useful and interesting, you do need some critical mass of people interested in discussing these topics. i'm sure you've thought of these already, but if i were you'd, i'd ping every legislator i could about the site and what it's trying to offer - potentially get them to start dialogues with their constituents through it or something. i'd also reach out interest and lobbying groups(on both sides - e.g., repeal Prop X, support Prop Y) - it's all about just building the presence. one argument against those is that you'd want to get "real people" discussing the issues, but i think you'd at least get some impassioned perspectives from these people, who are the ones that arguably care the most - from there, you can hope it builds on itself in facilitating a dialogue.
to the earlier comments, the site probably needs a design refresh and some tangible, clear focus where visitors can engage (not currently clear)
too bad the playbook was too little, too late, and too expensive. hope they take a cue from HP and drop the price massively to clear their inventory