That's exactly the use case we're going after. Docks work if you happen to near them, and most people aren't within a convenient distance from them. We aim to place everyone within minutes of one of our bikes at any point in time, so you wouldn't have to think about commuting between docks.
Yup, over the past few years, station-based bikeshares like Citibike have done a great job at showing the bikes as a public resource can work, and help develop biking into a legitimate commute option.
Hey stevenrace, I'm Derrick, one of the co-founders of Spin. Given our roots in the US, we're building our bikes for the local market, and use different tech than the Chinese companies, for example, FCC-compliant devices or networks that are available in the US (3G and newer).
Sorry you experienced that! We just discovered a bug that didn't persist the offer to the end in a minority of cases, and it's now been fixed. And thanks for your feedback about our prices. Our price at launch is actually derived from other services in the reservations space (ie Table8, TableSaavy), but we're always evaluating our price point.
Thanks Jacob. It's our dream to be able to roll it out in Brisbane, but given the size of our team and how young the project is, it won't happen quite so soon :)
Much like the concierge services (ie Magic) out there, we want The Loft Club to provide simplify people's habits of dining out. The added element of a pleasant surprise - as you mentioned - is something we want to focus on too as we build out the service.
Thanks for the feedback! We are actively adding a dining preference feature, so hang tight for that.
The first iteration of the product actually had that kind of flexible scheduling in place, but we decided to simplify it for launch. We do want to add it back once demand scales up!
Hey everyone, this is Derrick, the creator of The Loft Club.
We noticed a common pattern when we eat out. A cursory Yelp search, perhaps a cross reference dining guides, and finally making the reservation (via OpenTable/SeatMe/phone), only to find out that there aren't any tables left. We then wish we had done all this couple weeks back, but that's hardly practical.
The Loft Club removes all that hassle. Trust us to do the research, and we'll make the reservations for you every two weeks. We've started this small project to scratch our own itch for now, and we'd love to hear your feedback!
I've spent some time at Microsoft, and have only good things to say about my experience.
My qualm isn't with the company, but rather, the content, approach and flippant tone of Kevin's post. Having previously worked there, that's not something I'd expect from the company, which is disappointing.
Thanks for the excellent write up, Andrew. Glad to see that Mailcheck's working well for you! I'll post up your post on our Github readme in a bit.
As a side note, I'll be releasing version 1.1 shortly, which has a bunch of improvements, including the option to use keyboard-distance based string matching. Look out for it!
I totally hear you. The jQuery plugin actually wraps Kicksend.mailcheck, so it's easily decoupled (do fork it!). Since its main use would be on the client side, we released as a plugin for the ease of adoption.