Plaid is really just a centralized API layer for all the different bank accounts and bank systems which all have different specifications and data formats. Plaid just makes it easy for to get it in a clean JSON response. They don't store the transaction data themselves, they're just a middleman.
I work at a company that is one of Plaid's largest customers and have chatted with their engineers before at a meetup in San Francisco. They were very open that they store the data themselves, and even shared this blog post with me about how they poll for data: https://blog.plaid.com/distributed-duplicate-detective/.
For what it's worth, I actually like Plaid's API compared to Yodlee, but have serious concerns about privacy. There's no way to determine if they are _just_ collecting transactions when you request the user's transactions as a dev. The user is handing over their user/pass/MFA and Plaid could be doing god knows what with that.
Yeah, they've failed at every attempt of making a pure social network (they bought youtube, its a kind of social network) with Microsoft buying github, it would be prudent of them to buy Twitter before someone else does.
It will be interesting to watch. My hunch is that after looking at the shit storm that is happening around Facebook, Google may be having second thoughts about being in the social networking business (youtube excluded).
With Twitter's current state and Google's moves to kill their social side, this is unlikely. Why buy a moderate sized social network when you just killed your similarly sized social network?
If you're referring to G+, I don't think G+ was a "moderate sized social network" any more than twitter (although in opposite directions).
Also, imo, calling them "similarly sized" would be incorrect, except perhaps in signed up users (from which google got a ton from the "login with google and your account is already setup", not daily active users)
Don’t forget that they ran logins and notifications for everything through the Google+ interface and did things to juice the numbers like uncontrollable push notifications every time someone you’d ever exchanged email with joined (hi random person who bought a bookcase on Craigslist!).
The G+ numbers looked suspicious if you ran any sort of public website, where e.g. I saw metrics for referrals or shares at least an order of magnitude lower than Facebook or Twitter.
The Wikipedia article goes on to talk about G+'s very low engagement. I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter's engagement rates were somewhere near Facebook's.
> User engagement on Google+ was low compared with its competitors; ComScore estimated that users averaged just 3.3 minutes on the site in January 2012, versus 7.5 hours for Facebook.[22][23]
Indeed, and high DAUs doesn't translate to a high number of engaged users either. Just a 301 HTTP redirect through a domain as part of a chain can count as DAU and mean nothing.
yeah i visited g+ primarily for the active dev communities oriented around google products. def just once or twice a week and the activity on those "circles" was pretty slow
Slow growth/lack of user traction was what caused Google to pull the plug. Its a similar overarching problem to Twitter, but more of users being disinterested than actively repulsed due to the content the most popular users of said service post...
Fortnite skins have become somewhat of a social status amongst kids and their friends, especially since its a game where they play with their friends. Many times kids are asking parents to buy these add ons to keep up with their friends, and may feel excluded (or even bullied) if not staying with the latest trends (AKA latest Fortnite skins). Parents denying kids that can definitely impact the kids even outside of the game itself. To these kids it is much more than bit flips in a database even if that's actually what it is.
Grandparent advocated for education as it shields young consumers from sales trickery.
It's a good thing that such education "impacts the kids even outside of the game itself".
It's the equivalent of not having the latest sneakers (which was a thing in my age bracket).
Regarding the bullying: That's not related to brand choices but group dynamics. A skilled bully doesn't need you not to buy a skin for your child to bully her or him.
Of course Facebook would made this change now. They have the freedom to do this now. They have effectively won social at this point. They control 3 of the biggest mobile social apps in the world: Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook itself. No startup really poses a realistic threat to them anymore. This policy change is just FB saving face in the eyes of regulators (and developers like here on HN).
Facebook's market position is certainly enviable but I (perhaps naively) think they will eventually be dethroned. WalMart was the retail king... until Amazon came along. I haven't heard a "WalMart kills small businesses" rant in at least five years. They've been replaced. Facebook will eventually suffer the same fate.
But there is very little left to innovate. Almost all kinds of apps are there. AGI is only possible by large corps because of the massive compute requirement.
The next Google/Facebook will be made when either of the following criteria are met:
1. They mess up hard, causing a critical mass to boycott it (highly unlikely)
2. New world changing communication technology is invented, similar to the internet. With similar applications AND government regulations delaying them from developing on the new technology
3. Processing chips become so fast that the average person is able to afford and run a 1 petaflop computer just like the cost of buying and running a PC's today.
Amazon was possible because of the internet. Facebook will remain the King until some communication related world changing technology arrives.
I think TikTok is going to have the staying power of vine. While Im glad for the people that enjoy tiktok type content have an app where they can create and consume this kind of content, it offers no appeal to me.
Uber has done the hard work of normalizing ride sharing everywhere and giving consumer pricing expectations of rides, just for Google to sweep in with it fixed-cost self driving car ride sharing service to start collecting massive profits. It is going to take a while to spread nationwide but Google will do it eventually, really just a matter of time (not even money for a company as rich as Google). I'm really wondering where Uber goes from here.
I legitimately thought this was parody at first. Uber did the hard work just for Google to swoop in with its self driving cars? I mean, I guess it's hard to get VCs to subsidize rides to the tune of billions of dollars, but it's not technically challenging, compared to something like self driving cars which is straight out of science fiction.
At the current cost of a self-driving car (~$250K), it would be ridiculously expensive to build a fully self-driving ride-sharing fleet [1]. So expensive that I doubt it's possible to make real money that way right now.
Self-driving cars are a long game until companies can bring down the costs. It might be years before that happens. Uber has the advantage of being able to ramp up self-driving cars as part of their existing fleet until then.
If a self-driving car can serve for 5 years without a costly overhaul, the amortized cost is only $250k/5 = $50k per annum. Let's say the annual maintenance is $10k, the total would be $60k a year.
It can possibly serve two effective shifts (in fact longer than that but the demand at some hours could be lower and it may need some time to charge, unless battery swapping is performed), which means the cost per shift is only $30k per year which could be in the same ballpark or a bit lower than a human driver would make per shift (depending on the market it serves, etc.)
This is just the beginning though and the costs will most likely come down while the human driver's costs will likely go up.
What makes you say that? Computers drive a self-driving car, and they've been at scale for a long time.
It might require moving to the Tesla camera-only approach to bring down costs enough to make self-driving cars viable. But that technology is still nowhere near there.
The computers needed to run self-driving cars are not the expensive parts. The sensors are. And the sensors are expensive because there are so few users.
High-precision accelerometers used to be extremely expensive, with the best having prices in the high 5 figures. Then companies started putting (initially really crappy) accelerometers into smartphones, just to know which side is up. Then economies of scale hit and suddenly every smartphone has an accelerometer better than those super-expensive ones, and cost per part is pennies. (And then drones became a thing.)
The same will happen with LIDAR. Nothing about any of the parts of a self-driving car requires it to be super expensive, it's just that things that are made in quantity are cheaper than special snowflake parts.
We’re just bouncing low energy waves off shit bro, and hitting them with some Fourier transforms. If you’ve got a Russian mathematician WFH in his moms cabin, he’ll get this thing running on a Celeron.
Costs always come down with mass production. The more self-driving cars you produce, the easier it will be to bring down costs. LIDARs themselves can likely be had for cheaper if purchased in large quantities. There are also multiple companies working on less expensive solid state LIDARs.
Also, if we assume the cost of a self-driving car is 250K, that might seem like a lot, but if you amortize it over 5 years, that's 50K a year. Assuming that a car can bring in a mean profit of $10 per ride, that means it has to do 13.7 rides a day for 5 years to break even. That might seem high, but these cars are not human drivers, they don't need to sleep or take breaks, they could be on the road 20-23 hours a day, leaving some time for refueling and maintenance. I think it would be possible to bring in a profit with $250K self-driving cars and an uber-equivalent price points. It will become even easier when these cars drop to 200K, 150K and 100K, which is certain to happen once the technology spreads.
The car may be ready 24/7, but humans have a nasty habit of all wanting to travel at the same times. In reality the vast majority of trips will happen at rush hour and most cars will sit idle the rest of the day.
It’s brand suicide to not have a car when needed so fleets will be sized for peak load. When you apply queuing theory none of the numbers seem to add up.
The numbers for just driving around and getting paid for the drive might not pencil out. But if you include the real time data about who (for payment purposes), intended destination, origin, and historical trips, that represents data advertisers will pay handsomely for.
If an advertiser tried to entice people to place a tracking device in their cars today for a reward, that would go over like a lead balloon. But Waymo will get people to pay for the tracking data and enjoy the riding convenience, while vacuuming up insights into consumer behavior at granularities that are the story elements of Black Mirror episodes. Advertisers are salivating at sending targeted offers that add pinpoint location and time to the axes they can already select upon.
While a teeny bopper rides, the screen screams out a BOGO offer to buy “the latest Kardashian shoe just 10 meters from your destination, press the Buy It Now button in the next 30 seconds and we’ll have both shoes ready for you in your size for immediate pickup at our entrance including a FREE gift $100 value for true Kardashian collectible fans! BE Kardashian Glamorous Tonight!”
Uber and Lyft have all that data about their customers today, and could monetize the same way. Maybe that's a significant additional revenue stream, but it's orthogonal to whether the cars are self-driving.
I'm not an expert, but I'd guess that most of the cost is not the physical hardware, but that each one is put together manually by a team of experts. That's a task that seems able to decrease significantly in price.
How is undercutting the driver (that already don’t get paid shit) going to reap massive profits? Also think about what it takes for uber to start in new city (literally a guy with a phone in a motel) vs self driving company =)
I've never understood why the model isn't for self driving public buses. This should be the primary focus. More riders in one vehicle lowers costs for running the service itself as well as greatly cheapening wide area coverage abilities.
We all love the on-demand, single rider model that Lyft pioneered, but it also isn't sustainable with traffic demands increasing every year with population. Machine learning and productive partnerships with city traffic officials will ensure buses are routed on sensible routes that could be changed with demand without inconveniencing riders. Strictly protected bus lanes would also simplify the programming needed to maneuver a self driving vehicle through traffic.
Removing one driver from a bus which can carry 30-60 people is less cost cutting than removing one driver for 1-4 passengers for a private/pooled ride. Companies don't attack problems from a societal benefit-analysis standpoint, they attack them from a profit standpoint.
The driver grosses that much, but has to cover gas and the cost of the car itself out of their share. The actual amount the driver keeps appears to be on the order of $10 an hour, so I doubt we'll see very cheap rides any time soon.
I imagine those details work out to be cheaper per vehicle for a company with a large fleet of nearly identical vehicles and a dedicated operations team.
Doesn't Uber have their own driverless car division? Toyota recently invested $500 million in it as well. I think where Uber goes from here is to compete in the space they're very familiar with.
Corporate car services have existed for decades before Uber. Googe and partners popularized smartphones and mobile mapping, and developed mobile payments. Uber added nothing of relevance here except creating labor+capital intensive low paying jobs.
I'm no particular fan of Uber but I don't think that's fair.
Yes, some of the attraction is a price that undercuts taxis. I often take a Lyft to and from the airport in a city I visit fairly frequently. But literally the only reason I do that rather than take a taxi of some variety is that it's 30-40% cheaper.
However, in many cases, Uber/Lyft are indeed easier to use than the alternatives. Not always--I take a private car back and forth to the airport at home--but under many circumstances.
Uber definitely has the levers to become profitable anytime they want since they are entrenched in hundreds of major cities in the world. At the end of the day they control the supply and demand of their own platform and most Uber users will pay whatever the price is since they have been a necessity in many of their user's lives.
So Uber is charging their current rates as a way of giving back to the community or whatever? If Uber (or even Uber and Lyft) were to double their prices tomorrow there would most certainly be a drop in volume. Just a couple of days ago I took a Lyft from the airport for no other reason than that a cab would cost about 2x. Yes, there are also circumstances and places in which Uber/Lyft is demonstrably better than a cab but the decision can also just be about who is cheapest.
Uber is funded by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.[1] Softbank's Vision Fund is mostly a front for the Kingdom. That may be more of a political move than a financial one.
Even that wasn't enough money. Uber recently borrowed another $2 billion at 7.5 to 8% for 5-8 years.
No, the blame would be on you then and you would be held responsible for whatever legal action is necessary, not the company trying to block Europeans users like you. Benefit of the doubt is for the company because of their best effort European citizen blocking.
Google's search expertise was meant to succeed in voice. That is just their forte, like Facebook's is social and Amazon's is commerce. I don't see how Google doesn't win voice in the long haul.
Office 365 operates at scale. Of course they can offer prices that low for so many valuable services. They have millions upon millions of users. The more customers they acquire, the cheaper it is for them to offer those services per customer.
Of course it's all upside for the company and down for the customer. Which company wouldn't love predictable revenue from customers every month. It's an amazing business model for software businesses, especially when the customer completely forgets about it and just let's their card be charged every month.
