>this process will be overseen by David Kappos, the current director of the USPTO and formerly an attorney at IBM in charge of their heavy-handed patent strategy.
Looks like the deck is already stacked. Are there any companies or elected officials with significant political/financial capital aggressively campaigning for this? This movement needs a champion to make this topic relevant to bureacrats and I don't know if Stallman's the guy.
Well you can't get divorced if you can't find a wife! I kid. I kid.
But engineers strike a good balance of time at home and financial compensation. If you're making much more than a decent engineer, you're probably a senior exec, lawyer, or business owner with not enough time for the wife. Don't have any data to back this up, but just my suspicion.
If you're making much less than an engineer, you may run into money problems which is a leading cause of divorce.
For a while I thought Google would be sweeping this under the rug.
Great call on Khan Academy.
But the $1M spent on schweeb could have done more good elsewhere. Nobody wants to go pedaling upside down on a suspended monorail. The bicycle has solved this problem pretty elegantly.
Quite a bit of it has to do with YC and the tech community buzz and implicit validation. The founder of HipMunk mentioned that CNN contacted him out of the blue within a day after they launched.
If it was the same product done outside YC I don't think they would have got CNN coverage, at least not this soon.
An address as entered from left-to-right goes from the very specific to the general. Therefore all the api calls and screen updating you make are completely irrelevant until I type in my city half -way through.
There's no getting around understanding what the value of your technology to your customers is.
The starting point is to find out the raw ROI. So if they use your technology, how much money will they make or save? How does this compare to your competitor? So I would say, you need to take the final step and translate that 10x reduction in error to dollars.
I don't care if my GPS is exact, but to an airline company this is critical and they would spend well to make sure it takes into account the curvature of earth, etc...
But the raw ROI is just the starting point. Companies also pay a lot of money for other intangible features. There are some companies that spend millions on Oracle when they could probably get by with free open-source. Clearly Oracle is not competiting on price here, but on a feeling of 'security', knowing that my site will not go down and if it does, I have someone to yell at and come fix it.
If your product is truly revolutionary, maybe there are early adopter advantages. Could early adopters of your product steal revenue from competitors by using your tech? Price that in.
If your product is truly revolutionary, this final price may end up being pretty high and give some customers pause. A good approach would be reduce the price of your product for a pilot phase of say months. In return for reducing your price, you can ask for some specific feedback or a testimonial. Make sure they understand you aren't just reducing the price in return for nothing.
After they go through the pilot and have a real tangible sense of the value of your product, they may be willing to pay your high price you initially calculated.
There was an article that was linked to here where a French tech guy (speaking in English though) gave a pretty good video blog analysis of how much the average mobile app developer makes (not much).
The ACM abstract gave a good overview of what the site was supposed to do, but when I went to the actual site, it was horriblyi designed with no clear description of what the service was supposed to do.
Maybe if the OP Gave a very well designed application using existing implementations it would take off.
I'm watching one of the 2 hours videos from the Stanford professor. He looks like a college freshman! No offense intended.
Do you have any resources on how to use these tools (especially the python library), and examples of implementation? I'm interested in learning more and using these tools on real data, but don't necessarily want to spend the time learning all of the theory behind it.
Their business model assumes most of their investment doesn't take off, with a few rock stars that make up for the losses.
Incidentally, which is one reason cash flow positive startups should really think before accepting VC money. VC's are happy with a 10% success rate. You on the other hand, need a 100% success rate. Interests are not wholly aligned.
I'm no fan of excessive taxing, but if you shifted the source of all current tax revenue to consumption based transactions, this would cripple the poor and middle class.
For much of the lower/middle class, a significant, sometimes 100% of their income goes to consumption. For the wealthy, consumption as percent of income can be very small.
I would highly recommend the developer add a simple voice recognition functionality. Even something as simple as "next" & "back" which scrolls the screen would improve the usefulness of this app.
I read the esquire articles and the chow.com, and neither of these authors really perfected the art. Although the self-titled $20 millionaire occassionally got serviced, he was often punked because he had no style, no swagger.
And when he DID get service, he did it openly & brazenly without the required discretion. Publicly announcing in a first class airplane section that he wanted to trade seats?! Tacky. Cutting the line at a cab stand, only to end up having to pay not only the front customer, but also the 2 cab stand guys? Buddy, that just cost you sixty bucks and a half cup of coffee thrown at your cab.
The demeanor and style in which you execute the handoff matters just as much, if not more than the actual note you've got in your hand.
Looks like the deck is already stacked. Are there any companies or elected officials with significant political/financial capital aggressively campaigning for this? This movement needs a champion to make this topic relevant to bureacrats and I don't know if Stallman's the guy.