i had to press pause on the dvr several times (and check twitter) just to get through a few of the episodes.
what hit me hardest was: if you are going to devote a large percentage of your air time to party scenes (each episode was 25% - 75% party scenes) there has got to be better people to follow to parties than techies.
of all the people on the program I thought Kim came off the best (she seems pretty legit), Dwight wasn't a total tool either.
yeah this is a pretty classic example of what startups have to deal with: irrational customers.
the guy is getting $3k from a transaction that breaks all kind of rules, and is upset that a _SCAN_ of his Driver's License might be intercepted in a "man in the middle" attack on a sent email!?!?!?
my guess about the car industry is it had to do with the interaction between diverse customer preferences (car colors, options) and the realities of car production (large batches, economies of scale).
basically, the economies of scale cause the production of large batches of cars that then all needed to be sold (even that last white one on the lot).
This looks... erm ... neat. A "sophomore OpenGL term project" kind of neat. Baidu on the other hand does the maps right [0], which hardly surprising given their 20 years of head start.
On a more general note, this reminds me of old Microsoft's tactics. Google should really stick to the search, but instead they throw together something that mimics competitor's feature. Something that looks more featureful and which is free, but upon closer inspection is effectively a half-ass effort, because it's an entirely different domain that's not their specialty.
i am starting to see that some of these social websites might just have a normal lifespan like the run of a TV show. Signing up to something like Foresquare might be like starting to watch "Seinfeld" or "Friends", it's exciting at first, you get to know the characters and you get engaged, and then after a normal involvement arc you move on to new things.
nothing wrong with it,,,, unless of course you staff up 100 engineers thinking that this will be a new permanent part of the landscape ;)
well the first automobiles needed to be started with a crank on the front grill. sometimes the crank would catch and whip around an break the user's arm.
its a neat thing that even in this day and age, people aren't completely shielded from being on the cutting edge.
hmmm, "almost" 2.5m round and $10m in revenue "booked for next year" is not that credible of a company. you are taking a lot of risk that the money does not come through.
if you sign a deal w/ everything "on the come" they can jack you around pretty hard.
venture backed companies _consume_ cash, they usually don't throw it off (6m extra in a few years) until later.
They can sit out the electric car revolution as well...
Who the hell wants to go to "Milford, Conn." anyways ;)