I'm a massive proponent of the Distributed Social Networking Protocol concept, but since Diaspora tanked no one else seems to be picking up the mantle and Google/Yahoo/Microsoft don't look like they're going to roll out anything resembling an open SN protocol any time soon I wonder if it will ever happen.
No, unsolicited email is never legal, CAN-SPAM only allows you to send email to people you have a prior business relationship with e.g. they signed up for your service/mailing list. Someone who posted a property to Craigslist hardly fits the profile.
"The N97 coulda been an iPhone killer and the N8 and E7 all exhibited potential they might have been big... if Nokia ever really put their mind to it, they coulda crushed the iPhone"
I'll have two of whatever this guy is having.
Nokia doesn't just have a problem with execution it's not just about a features check list of touchscreen, appstore, music and gaming.It's about the attention to detail and ruthless application of quality in hardware build, software and UI. Nokia never even came close.
I think it is quality as you say, but also having a vision.
The iPhone comes from a perspective on the "right way to interact with touch computers" and everything follows out of that.
All the other attempts to replicate the iPhone are focused on replicating the iphone, not on understanding the iphone's vision and attempting to come up with "the best way to interact with touch computers". This is why android, for instance, is such a lower quality experience.
I think google engineers may not focus on fit and finish as much as apple engineers, but they probably are as good in terms of code quality. But even with quality code you can't have the level or quality of interaction when the hardware maker is some random company that downloaded the source from the net and then built a phone. Even when that company is a big one like HTC. Maybe especially.
On several occasions I've had feature phones built by nokia, including one I just happened to pick up a few weeks ago.
I find that the UIs have become less intuitive and ever more maddening over the years, with the latest one being a good example.
Build quality is fine for a plastic phone. Screen resulution- well it is a feature phone. But look of the UI is poor, and the discoverability of the UI is extremely poor.
All that said, you may well be right - they may still be a leader for the feature phone market, and thus that means the others are much worse.
If you read jacquesm's blog post, he mentions the Nokia 2110.
That thing was an F-in' beast. I had friends in high school who wanted their parents to buy them new phones try to destroy Nokia 2110's (or maybe it was one of the later Nokia bricks) and just fail. You wash it? No problem. You throw it down the stairs? No problem. You run it over with a car, no problem.
With my Android phone, which frequently and bafflingly fails to function (randomly changes ring tones, stops receiving incoming calls, battery life drops under 10 minutes) I look back fondly on the days of the indestructible Nokia 2110.
It's been a while since I bought a Nokia phone, but if they put out an ad that said: "Remember this?", followed by someone running a 2110 over with a car and making a call, "Well check this out!", followed by someone running a Nokia WP7 phone over with a car and checking their e-mail, I would buy the shit out of that phone.
Anyways, not really insightful, just the brand impression that Nokia has on this consumer.
> and at that price I feel that there are plenty of companies who would bite Google's hand off.
What does this expression mean? Does that mean that companies would think this is too expensive? or companies would jump at the chance to buy YouTube for 5 Billion?
It's not clear at all to me what you mean and I'm a native English speaker:)
If someone offers you a sandwich then you take a bite. If you are particularly enthusiastic or quick to react, you take a really big bite and bite their hand off.
It signals extreme enthusiasm and keenness. I hear it all the time (UK).
Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day?
Horseshit, I make a very comfortable, middle class living at an online/mobile travel commerce start-up that does booking transactions in much the same way that a travel agent used to. The travel agent job disappeared, but Expedia, Tarvelocity and Orbitz -to name just the big, public facing brands of this transition- employ tens of thousands of middle class people.
Way to miss the point. His whole argument is that computers and internet-enabled self-service have taken over the majority of the menial labor that travel agents used to do. A travel agent, in case you've never seen one, is someone working in a retail-location shop, behind a counter where they help people plan trips by showing them glossy brochures of hotels, finding the cheapest fares for people, or assemble packages of hotel stays, flights and restaurant visits. Pretty much all of which has been taken over by computers, replacing hundreds of thousands of jobs with tens of thousands of jobs, a large number of which in high-tech with (relatively) high wages. Lots of manual labor by people who aren't very capable are replaced with a few highly capable (or at least highly specialized) people. That's his point, and it's happening in the travel industry, in mail distribution, in manufacturing - everywhere.
(to be clear, I'm all in favor of this - it's progress. It's going to suck being of median intelligence in 20 years though; relatively, someone of median intelligence is going to be worse off as compared to 50 years ago. Of course in absolute terms they're going to have a major advantage, so I don't feel bad for anyone.)
Aren't you significantly more efficient than the travel agents of the 80s?
So, your single-person living has removed the need for 10 or 20 (or 50?) travel agency folks of a previous non-Internet 'must visit that travel agent around the corner to get my trivial purchase Thanksgiving tickets' world.
Which represents progress, are you really missing out on anything using the internet and being shown all the best deals available and all the information a travel agent would have provided.
Employment for the sake of employment isn't the answer, all throughout history people have done things in the most efficient ways available to then, just for most of history this involved a sizable labor force.
I don't think he was referring to "middle class" in the same sense you are. You are using "middle class" to describe a certain standard of living. The author is saying that we will all achieve this standard of living and it will no longer be a status marker.
You can already see this occurring. Having a cell phone, for example, is not a status marker anymore - everyone who wants one has one. Status is now about having the most pictures/friends/farms on facebook.
There is nothing inherently bad about a lack of status symbols, if you even consider a cell phone a status symbol. You can get a cell phone for free on a $20/month contract.
Meanwhile, luxury items stay out of reach for most people, even if they want them (designer anything, expensive cars, mansion sized houses, etc).
I digressed, but there is no danger to cell phones or any new tech for that matter, being universally available.
The point is that cell phones used to be a luxury item - if you recall the movie "Wall Street", they were an example of conspicuous consumption by Gordon Gekko. In the sequel (according to the trailer), the the old cell phone is comic relief.
Apart from goods with an artificially high price and limited supply (designer goods), and possibly goods which cannot be manufactured (land), the author is predicting that luxury items of today will be commodities of tomorrow.
I agree with you - this is an extremely good thing.
A $10 gift card for 10 mins of phone feedback is probably the best investment of time/money that I have ever heard of, I will be shamelessly stealing this idea for years.
what revenue?
where are the customers?
how much are they paying to acquire them?
how much affiliate revenue do they actually receive per transaction?
how do they retain customers?
how are they planning to overcome the non-existent barriers to entry in that space?
scorpion032's comment: "Steve has enough from the Reddit sale." is dead on. think about it.. these guys could self-fund the project without breaking a sweat and yet they still sold 20 point equity stake. why? --diversifying risk or pr, really.
either steve realizes hipmunk's a longshot and isn't quite sure that he and his co-founder's street cred will actually play out in terms of long-term customer acquisitions and retention so he's cashing out now while the handful of early adopters (their "e-following") will still look like an aggressive growth curve), or he's trying to get some free press. basically.
edit: i say "longshot" in the sense that i feel it's unlikely that their competitors will do nothing to adapt to any serious hipmunk rise... so unless their competitors are clueless-- which i doubt they are-- and unless they develop some sort of non-replicable competitive advantage-- which i dont see happening-- i think they'll have a hell of a time gaining any ground.
The team are proven entrepreneurs, but it's not like other travel start-ups like Kayak and Tripit where the founders all have proven domain expertise, Steve and Adam are hardly travel industry veterans.
I once had a short conversation with Max Levchin (of PayPal fame) and the one thing he said that stuck in my mind -besides all the drivel about how Slide was going to change the world- was that 10% of a start-up's workforce should be metrics people, obsessed with measuring the company performance i.e. if you have a ten person start-up, at least one should should be an analyst, otherwise he said, the company is essentially flying blind.
From my own experience, if you can not only master the technical side of working with metrics, but be the kind of guy who can actually ask intelligent, relevant questions and structure them in a way that gets meaningful answers from raw data, then you are worth your weight in gold to any start-up.
I'd just like to leave a comment here, but I wonder if you misunderstood him. It seems more practical to me that every employee in a startup should dedicate time to metrics, and probably more than 10%. For instance, at the last startup I worked for, the CEO put together metrics useful for VC conversations/sales metrics etc. The CTO put together metrics on bug fix flow/hardware throughput etc, the VP of CS put together metrics on turnaround time on customer issues etc. Our architect kept metrics on time based data throughput.
I think it's a poor use of recources to dedicate one person to do all of that. The people steering the company at that stage should have a total hands on feel for the data and a level of indirection seems unnecessary.
I'd like to hear back from founders on this. Were you tracking metrics yourself? Do you think you were more or less effective that way?
