"Can I take a glance at your code?" - If applying for an programming position, this is one of the leading indicators of how well the team works regarding refactoring, communication, and their philosophy towards coding.
"We’ve attracted over 1.5 million users, found over $300 million in savings, managed $50 billion in assets, and helped people track nearly $200 billion in purchases."
I'm not sure I would sell - $170m seems rather low. Furthermore, they have so much room for expansion, which only will be crippled by working under a tax software company. They might be trying to automagically do your taxes for you, but they don't have enough relevant information without having it to be the same hassle as using the software.
*I apologize for the previous grammatical mistake.
From my friend's point of view, your service will not be considered without cheat-protection so I don't think it should be appropriate as a premium feature. I may be wrong, but my take on freemium is to allow the user to recognize the value when under the free plan and the use of premium to make things faster, larger, or better. In that vein, I would suggest automated grading for absolute or relatively absolute answers as a premium feature (i.e. integral x = (x^2)/2 or a single US founding founder would be part of a set {Thomas Jefferson, James Adams, ... }). That way, grading is completely automated. I'm sure teachers will pay for such a feature.
I asked my friend, who is a teacher, about using the service. She had replied that it is too difficult to discourage cheating on Math-related assignments (she still has students hand-write).
A potential idea would be to have students do there assignment online, and have a "playback" button to show the student working. A crude cheating measurement (or genius measurement) would be the time between answer submission and the time to completion.
Lenovo were the OEMs for IBM's Thinkpads. LG still makes monitors for Dell, hard drives that are rebadged and I'm not sure of what else (they are a huge conglomerate)
True, but innovation may occur based on necessity rather than incentives (Most of the population is still ridiculously poor). Different constraints and resources may also yield other solutions.
From a Electrical Engineering standpoint, any battery of tests will not hold up due to the amount of variables, both software and hardware. The article references iPhone as a perfect case, but Apple (and AT&T, indirectly) have 100% control on what occurs on the device. The software, hardware, and user flow is under strict standards of processing and memory allocation. Furthermore, the low processing power and subsequent need makes the margin-of-error and standard deviation lower.
This is not the case for laptops. Due to running different programs, there are differing memory and processing allocations which cause different hardware elements to be accessed. Chrome and Firefox (same use case) have vastly different memory footprints and certain versions of Photoshop (same program) will utilize the GPU, increasing current drain. Since programs are constantly under development and will use different amounts of resources, a manufacturer cannot say that browsing the internet or using a specific program will be a certain amount of time.
Mainstream laptop batteries are Lithium-Ion, which degrades with time (faster with use). Unless retailers begin to throw out older batteries (by manufacturing date), there will be no standardization for consumers.
I know you want to look in your online communities, but I have a friend who is a wedding photographer who can introduce couples with specific dates. Let me know if interested.
It would be great if you could comment on coders coding at night and sleeping during the day or other schedules to optimize productivity. Is this detrimental from a sleep perspective? (I have heard unqualified statements that light affects the amount of awareness when awake/sleeping)
Well, Mars exploration can be a potential commercial enterprise in real estate, travel, and natural resources (unsure on this one). Regardless, I think the point of the article was to point out there needs to be 1) focus on a tangible benefit/gain, and 2) be able to scale from small to big, similar to most startups.
I'm been meaning to build my own library under pretentious motivation; however, I've had a hard time to justify the performance, time, and money of an archaic medium. A simple ebook reader will do.