I wouldn't be surprised if MS is trying to leapfrog over the latest social craze and looking further down the road to DECIDE what the next craze will be before anyone else can.
These comparisons are disingenuous. It's much like comparing similiar cars from two different years. Plus I am sure Android will "leap frog" Siri soon anyway. With a semi open platform google gets tons of new VR apps. I have been using Vlingo for some time now and it has similar features as siri, including asking it questions and getting a response w/o going to the web and one button email dictation as in "Send email to Joe..I see you at the bar" and unlike iOS I don't have to wait for semi annual updates to get improvements.
This update was desperately needed. But you may have chance still. It seems you may have a head start on google as they are just now entering a limited test. Unlike most products i believe this is a "just has to work" solution. since people are already familiar with you in this area, leverage your contacts (people who currently use you) and get them to adopt your new service or recommend you to other web professionals. Once in place, i doubt they would switch to google if your product does what theirs does. Grab all the clients you can before google rolls out widespread. and of course be price competitive.
I agree completely. It does seem really obvious now. But anyone who's had a pre-Google/Facebook online life remembers that you had different handles for diff sites. My aol name was not the same as my underground name, wasn't the same as my regular email name. At first what seemed like a good idea, "mirroring" yourself online as Poole puts it became the bane of people who were diverse in their online dealings. But I look at Google and Facebook as the "establishment internet", there for the masses. And for most people that is fine, they rarely stray from these walled off gardens. But there are still options to be as diverse or "prisimatic" as you please if you look for them.
you can probably find many great reasons for why someone started a startup. But what I found underlying most reasons was the fact that a person thought that they could do something better than what was out there coupled with the fact that they deep down desperately wanted to be their own boss and be in control. Sometimes the latter even predated an actual idea for a startup.
you're absolutely right. Even though this idea's been out there he's shown a rare ability to be a critical thinker and problem solver, something that is lacking in most adults. I'm sure kickstarter thought about this and did the research but what they did was turn this relatively expensive idea into huge PR move. Cheap invention plus cute little kid with corresponding e-mails with childish font equals win-win.
objectively speaking, you still need teachers and social interactions in classrooms for students to progress in a well-rounded way.
well it is the union's job to protect jobs, it's a government's job to implement the best possible programs for society. There is little doubt that harnessing the power of the Internet for educational purposes is a good thing. It's efficient and cost saving.
In my opinion, to be successful we need to stop shoehorning new technology into obsolete models. What we need to be doing is restructuring these old models to best take advantage of the new technology.
technology has made the world an easier place to communicate, however looking at this map is easy to see the cultural divide that exists in the world.Facebook was built as an American company and therefore appeals to cultures that have embraced a similar cultural standard. Even though Facebook is available around the world for the most part, it goes to show how much a divide we have between different cultures.
while I can definitely follow the writers logic, it presupposes there is only one way to get to the singularity. If you assume that computers always need human input until we get to the singularity the writer's argument makes sense. But suppose that is not the case. When computers themselves become the majority/sole contributors to their next design cycle, the course of computer development will start to vary wildly from what humans have been attempting to do. When or if this becomes the case, you can see computers growing at a exponential rate. Where this would take us I'm not sure but I don't think would be long before computers with start exhibit intelligence beyond us.
There was a comment on the host page from a person who believed it was a mistake to think that the singularity would have to come in the form of mimicking human intelligence.
"You Don't need Human Intelligence for the Singularity
Allen and Greaves are resting their argument against the singularity on two fundamental premises:
1) The human brain and human cognition are too complex to simulate without major breakthroughs in neuroscience.
2) If you can't achieve the singularity using brain simulation, algorithmic AI breakthroughs are needed, and AI progress historically has been far less than exponential.
But hidden in both of these arguments is the premise that singularity can only occur when human intelligence can be engineered. It's far more likely that the inevitable accumulation of thousands of smart objects that don't even attempt to mimic human cognition will lead to systems that have inhuman intelligence, with the ability to outperform humans on so many different tasks that the intellectual contributions of all but the most creative humans will simply be unnecessary.
I'd like to offer a different definition of the singularity: It's the point at which the productivity growth rate permanently surpasses the economic output growth rate. Once that occurs, the economy must continuously shed (human) jobs.
Today, we're shedding jobs in the developed world, and especially in the US, because our unskilled and semi-skilled labor is priced too high, sending work to the developing world, where labor is considerably cheaper. That trend won't continue forever; at some point prices come up in the developing world while they decline here, until prices meet somewhere in the middle, then slowly inflate.
But meanwhile, productivity improvements from automation are accelerating. These improvements don't require human cognition, and many of them barely require AI. (As Charles Stross recently wrote, "It's not AI if you can understand what it's doing.") These automation improvements are causing productivity to accelerate. The point where the productivity rate crosses the output rate is only years away. After that, the world is a very, very different place. Sounds like a pretty good definition for the singularity to me."
I used to work in the financial industry, and while technology and business practices change, here are some things I found out that might be useful to you. Most large commercial trading sites do require substantial deposit to begin trading. Two main reasons why they do this are, to set the bar high enough to discourage tourist trading. People who know very little about the stock market and how it works that will poke their heads and just to try it out. Since the stock market is supposed to be based on knowledgeable people making knowledgeable trades a large influx of people trading haphazardly could have negative effect on the market. Given the past few years I definitely know the irony of this past statement. Secondly being that they have no history with an individual they have to make sure you have a sizable deposit on hand to cover all the different trading options. It is very easy to get in over your head financially we start to deal with options puts and calls.
On the other hand if you're looking to start your own trading you can always purchase software and not really be beholden to a commercial trading firm. However trading software is not cheap. So there is a trade-off with going commercial and putting the money on deposit or being on your own and buying the software upfront.
An option you may want to look into is your own personal bank. Many large banks now have a financial arm. Most not provide self trading accounts to the customers, but there may be some. But if you really want to try it out without too much of an investment, you can always use your bank's broker and make trades for him or her. While it won't be as exciting as daytrading, you can still do your own research and instruct them on what stocks to buy at what price and when to sell them at what price.
I'm not a YC funded company, but I don't think one has to die for there to be another option. And YC's existence should not stop anyone from offering alternatives. YC created something that works for them..and others from the looks of it and should continue to carry on in their own way.
you're right, "avoiding your customers" is not a scalable long-term solution for deployment. As businesses, big or small become more global this will become a bigger problem. As I'm sitting here reading this I see a potential for new business. We need to find some way to filter traffic. Think about two different versions of the website existing at the same address and in front of the website sits a fork (like a fork in the road) that splits incoming traffic into two groups. As traffic comes in a portion, say 20% is then the diverted to your brand-new deployment while the rest, 80% is directed to your older site. It's almost like having an semi-open beta in regards to the new deployment. It will be tested in real time under real circumstances. Then as bugs get ironed out you can increase the ratio from 80 – 20 gradually until all traffic is now being fed into the brand-new live site.
so who wants to co-found this with me? we might be able to make it in time for the next round of Y Combinator!
by the way I didn't think you were saying that you should deploy during your busiest time, I just met all things being equal, the should definitely look for "off-peak" times to rollout new deployments. But we both seem to agree that the long-term solution. Globalization is going to make off-peak times a thing of the past. Hence see my solution above, we can get ahead of it and make some money.
if you dig deep on this site you will find examples of written applications and video submissions that were successful. That should give you an idea, just an idea mind you of what YC is looking for. While it seems you're coming up with a multitude of ideas for your project I will concentrate on producing some limited scope of what you have to show. This is not a Hollywood edition so razzle dazzle will not get you far. Substance is the key. If your idea was well articulated and got your point across, PG and the rest of the team will be able to evaluate application properly. You have until October 10, so look over your application and be concise and direct. if you've already accomplished that way and hope for the best, if not edit your application and resubmit. Good luck excavation!
here are two tips
go online to your county clerk's office they will have a list of newly formed businesses. The listing usually includes name address and telephone number. It should be easy to get those people to listen to you as they are usually in a process of just getting started and I need of design services.
Second you can either actively or passively look for old dated looking websites. Identify outdated designs and contact the company with one or two suggestions for improvement and offered to do it for them. The e-mail should include a link of your previous work.
not bad for a 48 hour build. A little attention to formatting and graphical aesthetics and I can see your site easily be used by some blogger. the most important thing you've already done, you major site valuable. It's a quick and easy way to look up caloric information about very popular foods. you make something people want it easy for the layman to understand and use. He followed the first rule of getting something to market fast now all you have to do is make incremental improvements based on user feedback.
I have to completely disagree with this author. Even if you're confident in your code, send your best people to work on it, are able to rollout a phased deployment and have the capability for quick rollback in overnight or off-peak deployment is preferable. If ever there was anything to happen unless people affected by it the better. Why put the strain of peak traffic and bandwidth up against a brand-new deployment?
while postponing your IPO may seem like a good idea, technology companies need to be aware of the fact that the industry changes so fast that competitors could emerge and given such fierce competition that their earnings outlook could start to look bleak at worst or make them obsolete thereby devaluing the whole company. What happened to myspace should be a cautionary tale to everyone.
I would first like to preface this by saying that I think insider trading is wrong. And individuals who blatantly and obviously take advantage of privileged private information for profit should be punished. However for most cases I find that the punishment far outweighs the crime. When bankers and CEOs on Wall Street manipulate the market for their own gains or cause industry crashes based on reckless behavior and ordinary people lose billions of dollars in net worth the Wall Street hotshot get to walk away Scott free. In my opinion I rather have a guy who purchased options on a tip in making money versus reckless money managers who lost his senior citizens entire life savings. The mortgage crisis was completely avoidable and most people agree that what companies did bordered on the illegal yet no one has been prosecuted for crime. These high-profile prosecutions by the SEC seemed to be just a bit of posturing to get the image polished in the news.
Martha Stewart and Mark Cuban for both in the same boat, bad knowledge that their investment was about to tank in there were about to lose money. What normal person would sit back and allow their money to go down the drain. Especially when information is not solicited by you. In both cases it seems someone came to them with the information they did not actively seek it out. How could you not act on that tip. I'm not crying for multimillionaires but it's hard to ignore the fact that any normal Joe blow citizen would do any differently. this is exactly the case with the factory workers. The chief mechanical executive was observant of his surroundings and concluded something was up. He was not involved in the deal, no one came to him and give him information, he pieced the puzzle together himself. He should not be penalized for that.
The problem is the vagueness of the law. Laws should not be left open for wide speculation and interpretation of said law. Especially in finance, it should be as defined in particular as possible. We definitely should have fair markets, without it Wall Street would evolve into an even more chaotic and corrupt place. The people need to know where they stand and what they can and cannot do.
This type of disparity in the law and its enforcement is not unique to the financial industry. Drug laws and penalties vary wildly. The Rockefeller drug laws are some of the most notoriously lopsided legislation that was ever passed. You could do decades for possession of crack but only a few years of probation for the equivalent amount of cocaine.
Define the laws, level the playing field and enforce penalties uniformly. It's really just a simple as that.
On a funny note the guys who used a Croatian seamstress at the front first tried to hire strippers to solicit tips from bankers while they were partying at a strip club. Illegal, yes but funny as hell.
Great start! You had an idea and was motivated enough to follow through. I wish you the best and hope your app is a big success. I'm going to go take a look at it now in support a fellow HN message board member.
Make it even more decentralized and more P2P based. Eliminate as many points of failure as possible. Use something like the Phantom Protocol for increased freedom and security as well: