It's actually common practice in many parts of the country. The practice is called Economic Development. Rarely used for residential purposes, but does finance commercial development and promote hiring. The funding typically comes from the calculated/expected incremental tax revenue to the area (State, Local, etc). Newark, CA in the Bay Area did this for a while (may still?).
Too funny - did the same thing in 2009 for a print on demand greeting card site. Wonder how many of these are still around. Cardstore, Greeting Card Universe, SendOutCards, etc. There was a moment ~ 13-15 years ago...
Funny enough, on the completely opposite end of the spectrum, I was once surprised that after you close an account (post M&A in this case), you can typically restore the resources for ~90 days if you decide you want it back and don't nuke before you request the closure. Can be useful or scary depending on the contents of the account...
Many folks are talking about bus schedules, but California hardly offers transporation in most districts. Only 9% of children take a bus to school [1] and that's been trending down for decades. Pay more, get less; sad state of affairs.
Founders get golden handcuffs via the deal (if they're desired). At the end of the day, just about every "material" trigger is renegotiated in an acquisition...
I bought one of these on eBay for like $75 and use it as a running companion, which I pretty much love. Using Google Fi, I throw a data only SIM in and it runs Spotify and acts as an emergency phone. After an hour run with next to no screen time, the battery is usually close to 50%, but definitely beats carrying a jumbo phone along. I wish they could improve on the battery, even if it was 10-20% larger (typing is really tough), but I don't know of anything else like this save for the Pebble Core, which never saw the light of day.
So many companies have come and gone in the "print on demand" space. The barriers to entry are low and the market, while shrinking, is still quite large... If you consider the market those that send stationary (cards, letters, etc.). Having started a company in the space (engreet.com, since renamed https://www.thegreetingcardshop.com by its new owners), the fallacy is that most folks that send offline won't make the jump to digital. It's a different demographic that is slowly dying (sadly). From cardstore.com to Minted, there's still a market out there, but it's a fraction of the offline spend.
Surprised at Sales and Marketing expense given the low number of Enterprise (>$100k) contracts. Wonder what's baked in there beyond AE compensation? I don't see a whole lot of traditional advertising, but maybe it's out there?
Thinking through this a bit... So the end result of this move is less SPAM and higher quality content. Great! But if SPAM is a form of activity (albeit a less desirable one) and activity represents feed liquidity - which directly impacts revenue - how does this not significantly hurt the bottom line? Time to short TWTR in Q4ish.
Also vividly recall buying my first Bigfoot HDD, which I think was multiple GB, thinking I'd never have use for any more storage...