The problem with this type of thing is that by removing one inconvenience it creates a host of others. The lock needs to be wifi connected which requires power, so I have to put batteries in it and change them every 6 months to a year, which I don't want to be bothered with. Changing batteries in smoke alarms already bothers me enough. And I don't need yet another web interface bothering me and sending me push notifications for something that should essentially require next to no thought, locking and unlocking a door.
From their FAQ page:
>What if there’s a stranger at the door, and I approach to answer, will the door automatically unlock?
>The auto-unlock feature is also optional and can be disabled at any time, depending on your behavior and use pattern. The August Smart Lock uses proprietary techniques to mitigate false unlocks from the interior side of the door.
Seems like it would be more annoying than convenient.
I would rather take a simple NFC enabled lock without fancy lights and internet connected bells and whistles on it, since NFC chips consume very little(or no) power and a ton of smartphones ship with NFC connectivity. NFC, unlike Bluetooth, which this lock relies on, requires you to actually touch your phone(or put it very close) to the receiver, so the scenario mentioned above wouldn't be a problem, nor would encryption be a problem since the transaction would be nigh impossible to eavesdrop on since the communication is so close range. Would also be cheaper to manufacture, with a cost of 10c per NFC receiver tag compared with $5 for a low energy Bluetooth one.
Just something that would make it easier for my family to get in and out of the house without worrying about whether they remembered to take their keys or lost them, since they are all glued to their phones anyway.
There are many in electrical/mechanical engineering which is I guess considered to be applied physics, to give a couple examples: Thomas Edison and Felix Wankel.
The goal of top-tier colleges is to make as much money as possible, like every other business. Thats the reason they've come under fire for letting in students from China and the like that cheated on their SATs and rejecting tax paying US citizens, because they can charge the foreign students huge premiums.
I think Snapchat is a cool company, and they showed their technical wisdom by building their original messaging service with Java atop App Engine, so they could scale effortlessly and just focus on the product. While this might not sound like wisdom per se it certainly shows more competence than all the tech companies building on top of garbage like node.js or whatever flavor of the month tech mouth-breathers happen to be hyping at the time, and then months later releasing a blog post about how they had to switch their entire architecture to an actually capable system, as if doing stupid things that cause you headaches later and wasting time fixing your broken garbage when you could be working on the actual product instead of doing things right the first time is some kind of engineering feat.
They have 100 million + users(not as small as it seems in these days of throwing around huge numbers), see:
The offers and valuation they got I assume are based on(aside from their huge funding rounds) the usual vastly overblown targeted userbase analytics advertising blah blah.
I say vastly overblown because the revenue potential based on the targeted ads hooplah really isn't what its made out to be. To put this in perspective, Facebook has 10x Snapchat's users and made around $8 billion in revenue last year, so a little over twice of its bid for Snapchat.
So unless they planned on putting extra special magic fairy dust ads on Snapchat(a platform of which its dubious what kind of ads will be successful/viable on, if any) after acquiring it, there are better companies out there that they could have acquired if they wanted to increase their earnings.
I think specifically Facebook's offer wasn't based on Snapchat's earning potential, more on the fact that Zuck seems to get antsy when the Facebook empire loses face(pun not intended) to any other platform in the least. He paid $1bil for Instagram when it had 30 million users, way more than it was valuated at at the time. The press made it seem like he alone spearheaded both offers, and that Facebook's board/other execs were barely involved in the decisions.
Google allegedly attempted to outbid Facebook for Snapchat, offering $4bil, which struck me as odd, seeing as their better known recent acquires included a machine learning firm and a company that makes smart home products. I thought Google had learned it's lesson in the social space after the colossal failure that was Google+.
how does yahoo actually generate revenue now?
the only people I know of that mainly use Yahoo mail are in countries like India where ads are worth next to nothing, and nobody uses Yahoo search. Is it just from ads on their properties?
Fairly straightforward: They sell ads (80% of revenue). 75% of them are to folks in the Americas. There is roughly a 50/50 split between search ads and display ads.
The Yahoo search engine is more popular than every product made by a YC company. Combined. Its chief draw is that it is on people's home page or in their toolbar.
But the answer to your question is indeed "other properties". Finance, News, Sports, Fantasy Sports are consistent category leaders (or make it into top 5 in their respective categories).
For what it's worth I have actually started using Yahoo! for the first time again in years. I really like the Aviate home screen replacement for android, which got me hooked on News Digest app, and now I'm using IFTTT to push pictures to flickr automatically because you get 1GB free storage and flickr really has the best photo viewing experience out there. It's way better than Dropbox, Google Drive or Amazon Cloud for looking at pictures.
I don't live in a major metropolitan area, are Uber/Lyft really that big of a deal in cities? They seem like something only yuppies would use.
This article is from a non tech/startup related publication so it would seem that they have penetrated the public conscience.
In Los Angeles it's huge. Especially for night-life.
Now, it's easy enough to pay a small fee to avoid a DUI. My wife works Lyft occasionally for rush-hours, and from her experience quite a lot of people using it to get to/from work can't drive due to a recent DUI.
As far as taking a taxi:
Previously you wouldn't ever even consider using a Taxi unless you absolutely had no other option including calling in favors from friends and family or splitting it 4 ways with friends. Only way I'd ever take a Taxi to/from the airport is if it's on the company dime. Lyft/Uber turned a $65-70 taxi ride into $20-30.
We take it occasionally for night-life and have noticed nearly all the drivers that we asked that have over a few months wised up and do Lyft & Uber simultaneously.
I see. As I said I don't live in the city so I don't know why people do whatever they do there. Looks like I stand corrected, apparently in some cases using Uber everyday is cheaper than owning a car in SF.
On a sort of related note, why do Uber and Lyft create so much drama? Brazenly sabotaging each other, burning shit, super-conspicuous launch parties, etc. Does this drum up more customers or something? I don't know about you, but a company whose job it is to get me safely from point A to point B in a motor vehicle pulling crap like this doesn't exactly sit well with me.
In London at least, Uber is cheaper than using normal taxis, and the process of using an app for ordering and payment is much easier than calling or finding a taxi, and you don't have to worry about having enough cash on you to cover the ride.
There are questions of legality here and in other cities (they kind of use a loophole to get around licensing requirements), but at the moment they just provide a better service than any alternatives.
Idk, parking and traffic may suck but I couldn't justify shelling out out my hard earned cash any time I needed to get somewhere. Once in a while is fine, but only people with lots of disposable income who don't care about saving money I'd think would use them daily. In cities there are buses and subway systems, SF which seems to be where Uber gets the most usage has the BART which is great, and you can always walk.
Seems to be the same case with Airbnb, I don't see any normal people using it, it seems to be rich people who want to make some extra cash off their nice condo/vacation home.
I'm sure people ask this all the time, but why do these companies have such high valuations? ($17 billion for Uber - really now?). I mean they already generate revenue and are profitable, so shouldn't the value of them be proportional to their profit?
I thought I just said this, but I will say it again in a slightly different way.
Lyft and Uber have taken a huge percentage of the _entire taxi cab and black car service industries_. To the point where they may very possibly entirely replace them.
That is why those companies have large valuations.
The reason people use Lyft and Uber is the same reason people use taxi cabs. They went out drinking and can't drive home, or never planned to drive home.
Its true that people with disposable income are also a large user base.
Also in my area of southern California and many other areas, the buses are horrible and only students, homeless or poor people use them. Almost literally. And their routes are limited. Everything is massively spread out around here.
Personally, I had to sell my car, and I have zero disposable income. I just use Lyft now because it is cheaper than a taxi and arrives much more quickly. I also very rarely go anywhere far. Last two times I went to the store I walked.
Public transit in places like SF is generally not fast or convenient, so many people choose taxis. Maybe it's just the rich that make that choice, but the median household income in San Francisco is $72,947 so there are a lot of rich people.
> SF which seems to be where Uber gets the most usage has the BART which is great, and you can always walk.
Uh, do you even live in the bay. I don't but I know that the BART is pricey, stops running late, and the bay is filled with places you'd never walk at night.
It's funny because I can't justify owning a car, and even if I did, in cities it can be expensive and inconvenient to find parking if you even had one. It's not like gasoline is free or anything.
Let me preface this by saying that I find it ridiculous that many people seem to think there is some kind of intellectual/aptitude discrepancy between males and females. To reference the article itself("math is hard"), in my personal experiences in high school at least, I knew more girls who were awesome at math and science than boys.
Can people not just do what they like and shut up about it? Why does every single little thing have to devolve into some huge scene about race/gender inequality?
There are good parts and bad parts of working in any field, learn to deal with the bad parts, that's life. Leaving a field that you otherwise found interesting and enjoyable because "the men were rude to me", or "I was the only ethnic/gay person there" really isn't helping your case. Do people really feel the need to fit in so badly that the fact that everyone at their workplace is not like them is enough to make them leave their field of work? Try being someone who comes to this country and doesn't speak good english. You're all people and share a common interest in tech, try to make the best of it for Christ's sake. If you aren't happy with the conditions, try and be someone who helps make a difference. By leaving and writing passive-aggressive blog posts you are part of the problem. Some of these people really just need to get over themselves(boohoo I was the only black trigender pansexual in the office and people joked lightheartedly with me, the horror!).
This generation really is the overly entitled, whiny group that all those middle aged columnists seem to be writing about.
They may have a point about the maternity leave thing though, I don't see that one brought up often.
From their FAQ page:
>What if there’s a stranger at the door, and I approach to answer, will the door automatically unlock?
>The auto-unlock feature is also optional and can be disabled at any time, depending on your behavior and use pattern. The August Smart Lock uses proprietary techniques to mitigate false unlocks from the interior side of the door.
Seems like it would be more annoying than convenient. I would rather take a simple NFC enabled lock without fancy lights and internet connected bells and whistles on it, since NFC chips consume very little(or no) power and a ton of smartphones ship with NFC connectivity. NFC, unlike Bluetooth, which this lock relies on, requires you to actually touch your phone(or put it very close) to the receiver, so the scenario mentioned above wouldn't be a problem, nor would encryption be a problem since the transaction would be nigh impossible to eavesdrop on since the communication is so close range. Would also be cheaper to manufacture, with a cost of 10c per NFC receiver tag compared with $5 for a low energy Bluetooth one.
Just something that would make it easier for my family to get in and out of the house without worrying about whether they remembered to take their keys or lost them, since they are all glued to their phones anyway.