I live in Alaska where billboards are banned, and it’s lovely. The ugliness of outdoor advertising is one of the first things I notice when traveling in most of the continental United States. Even without billboards, people still shop at local businesses.
Seems like my experience may not have been typical. I used Bench from 19-23 for a startup and always felt like I was getting great service. I agree that they were a bit expensive, but the financials passed external reviews and always made my investors happy.
It is a shame to see them closing down this way, awful timing and awful treatment of their customers. As a founder, you need to fully understand your financials, but you should have a pro managing the day-to-day and even month-to-month.
Agreed, the world would be a simpler place if we all followed the same play book...for online communication and everything else.
But we don't, and we probably can't. Cultural, language, religious, gender, and educational differences mean that part of any non-trivial discussion is going to involve some sort of "handshake" where you establish the rules of the discussion. And it is going to be a slightly set of rules for any discussion. I've seen sites (and before the web, messages) like this for years. You paste the link and are on your way. Or, more commonly, you paste the link and then proceed to provide the information someone is looking for. This is a variation of the "use the search, this has been covered" fight that every forum has.
Why go through that? If you want to engage with somebody, do it. If not, don't.
There weren't tax increases, we don't have taxes to increase. We use oil tax and PF revenue to fund our government almost exclusively. Some municipalities and cities have sales/property taxes, but most don't.
I agree that we need a balanced package, but we also need to stop paying billions a year in tax credits and incentive to oil companies.
I agree that regulation is a good idea. Throughout history, news and facts have always been provided to most people by groups with vested interests in controlling the prevailing narrative. It started in churches, moved to papers and has taken a lot of forms over the years. Moneyed parties have always used their resources to sell products, ideas, and agendas via these channels. Companies like Facebook are different because they allow near-universal access.
Facebook doesn't provide the information, they provide a platform and tools for anybody to be a publisher. Anything they can do to improve the platform is a good idea.
All this is to say: Facebook has done a great thing by bringing Randall and co. on board and should continue to bring new ideas and talent in, through whatever means they can.
That is a little too reductionist. It can hold a lot of things. Millions of people get all of their facts and information from live video. A lot of it is delivered by cable tv right now, but in the same way that TV news overtook newspapers, Facebook will overtake cable. People have watched moon landings, walls falling, and the birth and death of democracies, all live--and there were always advertisers paying the bills.
I know that we're in the middle of an awakening of sorts about personal data, but that doesn't negate the value that services like Facebook can offer. I may be naive, but I think this is a step in the right direction.
Congrats! Facebook could not have gotten anybody better to make live video awesome. I'm excited to see what the future holds for the fb/vidpresso combo.
To me, it is about what they are able to create independently, and the value of the end product.
Senior people have made the right mistakes, wasted weeks of time, and know what to avoid, what to embrace, and what to ignore. A senior dev can understand the requirements and figure out what is important and deliver something without a lot of external input.
Addiction. It affects so many of us-maybe all of us-greatly. Our legal system, education system, healthcare system are all heavily burdened by it, and they all treat it differently. Good solid science (and a health dose of PR) in the name of ending addiction could go a long way towards making the world a lot cooler place.
It seems like getting a wide enough adoption to make this useful would be really tough, since as soon as you started to get traction (if at all) you'd get bought by someone who was scared of you or a more established player would break into the space. Further, inventory and sales systems are long established and are big investments for a lot of places, so kind of tough to upend. As many have said, widespread retail adoption would be unlikely.
The meat of the concept is fantastic, but why not come at it from the consumer side of things. Try to figure out a way to take transaction information (like, from a receipt) and upload it at the point of sale. You'd get a live data stream of what was being bought, where, and for how much. You could entice consumers to use the product by providing them with mint-like app for day to day purchases. You wouldn't have inventory for individual stores per se, but you could make a lot of inferences.
Well, this whole thing is pretty off-the-cuff, but I'll hang out in the ##startup2012 freenode channel, and maybe we can come up with something a little more formal.
1. Good Question. I (and a lot of others around here, I think) 'jump' head first into projects on our own all the time, and stay totally committed for like the first week. I've got a long list of projects and concepts and a boat load of code that faded into oblivion. I'm hoping that working as a group might keep the momentum going until something is actually produced. Working with a bunch of folks I just met seems like a lot of fun, and they aren't totally random; we at least have HN in common.
2. True, but I think for the sake of this exercise, something should be achievable.