Since I started reading HN a couple years ago (yes, reading. I don't feel confident enough to comment) I learned so many things. Now I use code almost everyday in my day job as a UX designer. I work in tech, so it only makes sense I understand as much of it as possible.
Also, it's a hobby of mine to build things. Since I joined HN it's been quite a journey : got myself a RPi and played around with it, build a couple dynamic websites on my own server, taught myself Ruby on Rails (that's what the hackers use at my startup) and so on.
I find it interesting that Netflix is such a success, despite the availability of many great films.
As the presence of great films on the platform may suggest, it's a long shot to assume that they're more interested in creating their own -great- content than simply offering you great content. But given the unavailability of a single legal platform to rule them all, the bet on original ideas propelled with data and smart marketing was and is still the best one.
IMO, if Netflix had all the content in the world, they would probably stop creating their own.
There is a time-to-market distortion with this excitement over bot platforms.
On the one hand major messaging actors (Facebook, Slack, Kik, WeChat and Line) are competing over their IM platforms. On the other hand, they are competing over who gets the best bots (thus, the developer market). No unsupervised AI is reliable, yet everyone is fighting over who gets there first.
I think the company that will seize this market has not been born yet. Thoughts ?
A considerable part of our base does not come back after the first two weeks. However, we are noticing an increase of the segment that comes back more than twice a week. They seem to use Jam as a way to get rid of tasks that demand little reflexion/benchmarking (eg. "What's the best oven for <150€", "Where can I eat brunch right now at République ?"). Our ideal user should ask 3 things per week.
About the travel assistant feature, it is indeed a feature that many could use. I have personally discovered this use-case and found it truly powerful.
This week, we have put a lot of effort into making the experience around bars as delightful as possible (put some interpolations and randomness in our wordings, put a few jokes in there, etc...).
About the business model : So far, we have tried to help companies hire talent using Jam. We signed 3 contracts in one month (25k€) but abandoned the idea eventually because we felt the product was not ready for that.
Right now, we are interested in helping brands grow in the student market. Say Uber is looking for ambassadors, we can find them rapidly as our user-base is cash-poor and time-rich and there is already a high demand for student jobs.
Here's a repartition of our requests received in the last 7 days (878 "student jobs") : https://infinit.io/_/BHZzvHE
We are based in Paris and the entire team is French (some of us work remotely). We could either translate it into English or more "rare" languages (ie. where text-based training sets are rare)
Promising ! This could be an interesting way to stimulate startups from around the globe. Last time I felt this way was when I discovered Stripe Atlas.
"Senate rules allow a final vote, which only needs a simple majority of 51, to occur early Tuesday morning"
I am not certain it'll go through. What do you think ?
This is very interesting. If we look at [Pebble](https://getpebble.com/), their model respects the view where one connected product should not duplicate or bring new dependencies to an existing network. The problem is, the only way Pebble could concretize was by creating an app that connected the watch to several other apps.
IMHO, these islands of technology are profitable to Apple, Google (and Microsoft).
SDKs for specific products are abundant, I would suggest an open-source IoT SDK that frames and federates the development of new 'things'.
As one of the aforementioned firms, you can leverage an existing outsider service and make the experience easier for users whilst keeping a hand on their SDK. Divide and rule ?