A similar application was to use aerogels, which are highly insulating but not reflective, as clothing insulation. I recall a number of companies have explored this in the past [1]. The issue with aeogels appears to be two-fold: firstly, they are relatively expensive to manufacture, but secondly, the resulting garments are often too warm!
The arrest rate is also different from the incarceration rate, which is much more heavily skewed. According to Pew, black men are incarcerated at ~6.5 the rate that white men are, per capita[1].
This seems quite similar to the design AOL's Alto [1] used. I actually used Alto for a while, but found that the promotional images were less helpful than the short blurbs Gmail had already for quickly figuring out if I wanted to open a message, even one promotional in nature.
This is actually one of the tuition options that the US armed forces offers students: we pay for your schooling, and you serve in the military for an equal number of years. It's also quite common for your company to pay for business school for a promising employee as well.
For anyone looking, there are also a number of sites dedicated to just this, with a similar audience to HN. Betalist[1], Cloudlist[2], and ErliBird[3] are examples that come to mind which I've had good experiences with.
I think a major hurdle we have to overcome with big data is separating causation vs correlation. As the data set scales, we gain ever-increasing confidence in the correlation, but an ever more complex set of causations.
Take their House of Cards example. Netflix saw a strong correlation between David Fincher, Political Thrillers, and Kevin Spacey. Fantastic. But why? What did people like about these things? Why did this 'work'?
Let's try to replicate this decision: take great directors (Wachowski siblings), a strong cast (Emille Hirsch, John Goodman, Susan Sarandon), and nearly unlimited budget ($200m) to reboot an existing, well received franchise. Should be a hit, right? Wrong - it's a complete and utter failure known as 2008's Speed Racer.
When we say we want to be data-driven we actually mean we want to be insights-driven. We want to understanding the "Why?" from the data's "What"; it's the 'Why' which lets us know how to react next. It's easy to confuse the data's specificity with insight's certainty, but they are distinctly not the same: We can pinpoint conversions down to 6 digits of significance without having a clue why it occurs.
What we really need is Big Insight, but that's a significantly harder problem, not because we don't have the technology to create a solution, but because don't even know what the right questions are.
I'm optimistic about the possibilities of a system like IBM's Watson in helping solve this, but as it stands, Big Data's utility is giving us 99.755% certainty that we have no idea what is going on.
This is a masterpiece of a backhanded compliment. Never have I seen such elegant transitions between briefly masked contempt and half-hearted admiration. It's really stunning.
I think analyzing these acquisitions from a raw dollars-to-dollars perspective is a mistake. When doing a turnaround with a company so fundamentally troubled as Yahoo, you need more than just a few patch-in acquisitions, so that's clearly not what they are about. These moves are part of a long term investment in motivating employees, building relationships with the valley, and regaining footing in the markets that they can win.
Yeah, I'm having trouble seeing the advantage of this over the browser's native implementation: Chrome's CMD+SHIFT+I hotkey brings up a mail this page window automatically for me.
I would definitely put some effort into copywriting the main benefits into that landing page.
People forget about the amount of data LinkedIn has available to them: ConnectedHQ (the predecessor to LinkedIn Contacts) has direct access to thousands of email inboxes, Rapportive can log any time someone hovers over a new address, and millions of connections have been gleaned through 'import your contacts'.
If you really want to talk about creepy, I'm fairly sure they use your IP address to match against other people who live/work at the same location: when I created a test account with dummy information, the first contacts that were suggested to me were my roommates.
I've been thinking about this as well; the results I could find are from quite a while ago, but in general the answer is to use a reversible encryption like AES [1] along with secure storage of the encryption key [2], preferably on another server or in an isolated part of the server. Not particularly satisfying, is it...
The project I'm working on (http://www.musubimail.com) was originally meant to help keep in touch with professional contacts, but I've been using it for beta-user follow ups to some good success.
I made groups based on how soon I need to follow up (this week, next quarter, etc) and have them track certain labels in my Gmail inbox. If someone needs to move groups, I just flag their email with the right label and wait for the reminders.
Let me know if this is something that interests you!
Like you suggest, the technical part just isn't quite there. I used Summly for almost 3 months, giving it chance and chance again to impress me. It never did. The summaries were mediocre at best and commonly irrelevant, and it got deleted soon after. It's stuck at the point voice recognition is, where it works ok at time, but generally isn't worth the hassle.
Yahoo's been buying up start-ups with good talent but middling traction to do a turn-around. Stamped, Jybe, and now Summly all fit the mold. Yes, they're purchasing at a premium - it's hard to convince a young, scrappy start up founder to join a company with Yahoo's stodgy reputation. But that's exactly what they need - a new infusion of big thinkers to turn around the company.
VC shops are like most PE firms - hiring is done on a small scale by the partners themselves, typically through their private network first, then using a recruiter second. If you can't break into the network individually, try breaking in through a recruiter who specializes in tech or VC.
This reminds me: I'd love to see how many of CodeYear's sign-ups completed a term.
I have lots of friends who want to "learn to code" but get frustrated and quit. It's too easy to give up if you don't have "something bigger" continually pushing you forward.
It's small - I launched an MVP into this area recently. Business people who are inundated by email want a heavy, full-service solution like SaneBox, whereas consumers have been conditioned into thinking that everything regarding email should be free. There's not a lot of (paid) room in the market left.
This will actually happen for any extension which requires many IMAP calls, or any combination of extensions thereof. As a Gmail extension developer myself, it takes a lot of effort to be efficient about your IMAP usage to avoid these kinds of issues.
IIRC, the Gmail tema has said that when most people report of slow Gmail mailboxes, it can usually be traced back to an overload of these extensions.
I'm curious to see what happens to Amazon FPS if these product based crowd-funding apps take off. We may be in for a bit of a Paypal style crackdown debacle.
I actually spoke with the Kickstarter guys back in 2009 when I was considering branching off their idea specifically for product based ideas, thinking that it could be "Amazon for stuff that doesn't exist yet".
We all agreed that the idea should happen, but Kickstarter didn't want to do it for two reasons:
1. Their goal is to help artists succeed. They're artists themselves, and the guy who started the site's been working on this for years. It means a lot to them to help the little one-man filmmakers.
2. The risk in having products that aren't delivered on time, in the same form as envisioned, or aren't even completed was just too high. They were terrified of having a backlash of backers who thought they were purchasing a product when in fact the transaction is structured as a donation.
The second one is what makes me worried. What happens if, worst case scenario, Pebble goes bankrupt without producing any items? Who takes the hit there? Is it Amazon, Pebble, Kickstarter, or the backers? It isn't clear yet because we haven't had a high-profile failure yet. But it's only a matter of time.
Golden nugget that that Jason just starts to uncover here: the reason customers purchase your software is rarely the same reason as why you started creating the software in the first place.
As a consultant, the one-line zinger that was thrown around was that we were selling "profits at a discount". You pay us, we reduce costs or boost revenues to pay for the service ten times over. The description certainly appealed to the firm's employees; we'd like to think that our analytical rigor and probing, independent viewpoint added value. Our jobs were supporting a raw, logical, business-driven decision.
But the longer I stayed in the field, the more I realized that making money was rarely the reason a case got purchased. There were situations where a short project would've had ROI's in the tens of millions of dollars if implemented, but never got picked up.
The real product we were selling were careers. Buyers would bring in the firm to help themselves hit specific milestones or objectives they had for themselves. Did we benefit the company in achieving those? Greatly. But the reason people were willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a month were because of the coaching, the 'white-glove service', and the network a successful case would entail. They were buying a promotion to SVP, the key results which got them their own division, or the track record to shoot for the CEO spot for the next company.
Jason's tips are pragmatic - over-deliver on value so that your customer never even tries to do the math and price according to how they pay are two great ways to grease the purchasing pathway. But understanding the customer's pain and guiding them towards their aspirations will have them fighting for your service, budgets be damned.
[1] http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-gear/clothing-apparel/H...