I've felt for some time that the incentives we're given in school are incorrectly formulated: performance on massive standardised tests gear your brain toward an ability for short-term rote memorisation.
How many classes did you take in high school or college and pass with flying colours, but if you had to recall anything but the name of a core concept you would fail? At Michigan we called it "academic bulimia" — binge on textbooks the night of the exam for the class, purge it all over the paper, take your grade and repeat whilst you spent the rest of your time doing something you felt was more important.
Chatroulette is fun. Chatroulette is silly.
Chatroulette as a cultural mainstay? Nah.
I hate to bring business into this, but Chatroulette never really scored that high on a net promoter score — even if people recommended that I play with Chatroulette, it was under the guise of something illicit and/or taboo. Most reports of Chatroulette were negative, and it was only taboo feeding the fire of people looking at it. Once. And then fading away.
Once you're there, Alexey's Law kicks in: your probability of seeing a penis is almost 100% after three or so "Next"s.
As much as I loved the concept, Chatroulette was ruined by the typical scourge of the Internet: male sexual frustration.
I've seen too much news trying to spin the "Tesla raises $221MM" as a huge number. Sure, for most of us that hack away on web apps, $221 million is insanely high, but it's important to remember that Tesla's operating at a loss of nearly half a billion right now and is still losing money. The S is necessary to turn the cash flow around.
I wonder if Google has the proper Party connections to keep this mischief going — I suspect with the shenanigans they're playing they either don't or don't care about keeping them. There appear to be too many forces against them for this to keep up for much longer.
The EC2/Rackspace Cloud type of micropayment system is what I'd use here. Charge per chat session to begin with.
Why?
1. Psychologically, to the consumer of the solution, each chat session seems way cheaper. Getting somebody to sign on to paying 0.025 cents a session is easier than getting somebody to sign onto a $30 or $50/month solution, even though in the end the number of chat sessions may add up in your favour.
2. Most potential value is captured. Charging per chat session takes out the hard work of calculating large, tiered pricing models to capture your consumer base. Think microeconomics: a small-time user might want to pay you $10/mo for a few chat sessions, but your pricing starts at $30/month.
3. You can always add tiers later that are based on usage by scaling down the price as quantity goes up (a traditional economy of scale.) Have somebody running through tens of thousands of requests? Give them a slightly lower price.
It's a wonder that Apple is still a primarily American corporation at all. Really big companies like Accenture are multinational corporations, generally incorporated in a tax haven with decent legal standing and running its HQ in the US as a domestic subsidiary.
1. There are a bunch of environmental costs that still make them largely impractical:
- the environmental cost of making the filters (plastic injection molding, etc.)
- the environmental cost of disposing of the filters
- the environmental cost of waste produced by installing new waterless urinals in place of the old watered ones
These costs are surprisingly high for something trying to be "green". You can model these positive externalities as such in a "dollar amount" by taking into account things such as offset taxes toward pollution (from manufacturing,) costs of disposal over the decomposition life of the object, etc.
2. Unfortunately, the environmental cost is almost never the one that wins in any real-world scenario unless the personal utility of the person owning said waterless urinal is greater than the cost of running the watered one — i.e., the person that installed the waterless urinal enjoys the waterless one enough to compensate for the extra costs involved in running it over a watered one. They are more expensive right now, and will be for quite some time if we're talking about replacing the watered ones with waterless ones. Dollars are the bottom line, especially when negative externalities are not offset in the costs of the watered product.
3. I'm a general skeptic of many of these types of green things due to #2 - it's the "Prius syndrome" in effect. Many of these types of things have little real-world environmental impact when the full cost of ownership is taken into account. Once you add up all of the costs involved:
(manufacturing costs of old watered urinal) + (disposal costs of old watered urinal) + (opportunity cost of purchasing waterless urinal and installing waterless urinal) + (cost of new waterless urinal) + (cost of filters) * ((uses / single filter life) * (life of waterless urinal product))
When all is said and done, the overall real cost - even environmentally - of many of these "green" products ends up being far greater than just using the old product. People don't buy many of these types of things for anything other than their own psychological benefit of feeling greener, such as is the case with the Prius - I read somewhere if you actually wanted to maximise for environmental cost, you'd buy a used Toyota Echo.
One of my last undergraduate reports as an economics student at the University of Michigan in 2007 was on the "true cost" of watered urinals vs. waterless urinals for the campus. The waterless ones were primarily used in the Dana (Environmental Sciences) building, which even had expensive composting toilets- basically large, windy abysses which you defecated into.
We spent nearly a month doing research on vendors for waterless urinals as well as attempting to model the cost of negative externalities from the water use (sewer system upgrades, water treatment) and the waterless ones (manufacturing and disposal of cartridges, smell and hygiene.)
Whilst I can't locate a PDF of the report anymore, the evidence came out overwhelmingly in favour of the watered urinals. The cost of the waterless filters and hardware, even if all of the waterless urinals were installed new, was still over 2x the cost of running watered urinals at the University, externalities included (I think it was nearly 6x IIRC.)
I can't imagine these being useful for many municipalities – including the more water-scarce ones — unless costs have really dropped.
Scoble's video is cool, but I'd like to hear Rana play an actual one-hour set with these (and live mixing of various audio tracks.) I'm a little skeptical as to whether or not it'd be really repetitive and/or possible to really rock a full set with iPad controllers unless they're controlling Ableton or some other DAW/DJ software. The lack of MIDI sync from iPad to iPad also has to be a huge pain point for any serious controllerism.
I've felt for some time that the incentives we're given in school are incorrectly formulated: performance on massive standardised tests gear your brain toward an ability for short-term rote memorisation.
How many classes did you take in high school or college and pass with flying colours, but if you had to recall anything but the name of a core concept you would fail? At Michigan we called it "academic bulimia" — binge on textbooks the night of the exam for the class, purge it all over the paper, take your grade and repeat whilst you spent the rest of your time doing something you felt was more important.