Woah! Nice find! I can't say for certain if that's it, but it certainly looks similar. Same minimalist (blank white) format, at least.
That said, I never saw the site I had seen on mobile, so I don't know if it looked more like a mortar layout on a phone. And no one ever demoed that kind of chat functionality. So it might be a similar thing? Or it might just be an evolution of what I had seen. Either way, Pegg looks pretty cool. Sorry to see it didn't take off (either?).
Disney is a classic example of a company that made huge leaps and transformed itself from a single revenue stream to a very diverse one.
Can you think of what the board of Disney said to Walt when he decided to open a brick and mortar theme park when their only product to date had been a few animated films? Or how what they said when he unveiled the original vision of EPCOT as a real city with a theme park bolted on.
I don't have a strong opinion in Google doing their moonshots but it's happened before.
> * you think of what the board of Disney said to Walt when he decided to open a brick and mortar theme park when their only product to date had been a few animated films?*
I read an article on Walt once that covered this.. he went to all his friends and family and told them his plan. Every single person told him he was nuts and it would never work.
That was how he knew he was on to something - the fact it had never been attempted before only made him more certain it was going to work.
> he went to all his friends and family and told them his plan. Every single person told him he was nuts and it would never work.
> the fact it had never been attempted before only made him more certain it was going to work.
Those are interesting reasons for being certain it will work. The combination of all the people you cherish the most telling you it's a bad idea and the fact that no one had tried it before. I mean, sure, I understand the romance of it and these reasons giving someone the drive to try it and succeed. But making you certain it's going to work? That I don't understand.
If people are universal in their opinions that something isn't going to work, you then have to assess their credibility.
If you decide that the problem is they lack some specific insight that you possess (and you're really sure about that fact), then in combination with their universal negative position, I believe you can be confident that you're on to something. There's a tendency for strikingly new things to be laughed at, or otherwise denounced as absurd; once you notice that effect at play by people, and you can reasonably confirm your own thesis that you know something they don't, it's a great indicator.
I'm sure there are plenty of people that went to all their friends and family with an idea, were told it wouldn't work and when they tried it it didn't.
A few? Walt got to Hollywood in 1923 and Disneyland opened in 1955. Perhaps more than a few. I would think the board would be fine with it, like Google's board seems to be fine with what Page is doing.
This article articulates well that it's important to have good board members and it's disasterous to have bad ones, but then doesn't really explain what to look for in a board member besides experience.
I'd love to see some input here about what makes a good vs bad board member and how to identify one when making a board.
Board members that have impressed me are ones that both care about the business and they are willing to invest time in making it successful. Bad board members don't show up for meetings, or don't contribute anything when they are at the meeting or between meetings. These folks are, in theory, either experienced at getting the company to the next level or connected to people who can help there.
This is a combination of Dubai's two greatest past times: spectacle and surveillance, so naturally they will implement this as quickly as possible, paying top dollar to contractors to make it work.
I'm sorry if this sounds jaded, but I lived this for 2.5 years, running projects whose sole purpose was pomp and circumstance for various Emiratis who have virtually unlimited (debt funded) budgets.
To all those saying it won't work because {{technical reason}} you're probably right, but it won't stop them from overpaying to do so.
Some more examples of this:
* They have a road toll system called Salik, which is like EZ Pass gone amuck. There are numerous tolls and each give the police the ability to track any car to a small area. So ther is very little auto crime.
* There are speed cameras about every 10km, which residents speed up and speed down to "obey" the speed limit. So to whomever was talking about high speed chases: they don't happen. They just wait for the criminal to stop, know exactly where he is, and then apprehend him.
* Most projects I worked on had a whole component about being "the best", "the biggest", "the tallest" where we would have to show why {{costly technology}} is the best in the world. There was no definition of "the best" beyond just claiming something.
* In my apartment building, there were cameras from outside my door to the carpark in the basement. And they were regularly watched. I know this because the door man would make it a habit of hitting the elevator button for me when I was about a meter away from the elevator, having seen me from CC cameras far below
* To those talking about how burqas and hijabs will make this technology impossible: most folks there don't wear traditional, national dress. 87% of the country are westerners who stay there for an average of 2 years and leave. Westerners and low-wage workers are who they want to track anyway.
* All internet is filtered by "du" and "Etisalat" (think ATT and Verizon) - by order of the state. But they don't maintain a common block list, so some websites work on du, some on Etisalat.
* There are large articles on this, but basically the UAE compelled Blackberry to allow them to install backdoors so that the government could circumvent secure communication (this was back when Blackberry was dominant).
And there are many more.
I'm not saying other countries don't have these problems. I'm more just listing these things out to show that this is exactly the kind of project that Dubai would love - high technology, spectacle, and above all controlling.
Many (most?) doorman buildings - whether high-rise apartments or office towers - have a security desk in the main lobby where someone watches the cameras and elevators. They may or may not have full elevator controls but they definitely have a "stop" button. That might be a foreign experience to SV natives, but for people who live in dense urban centers and work at medium to large organizations, it's pretty normal.
I'll expound on the doorman situation because it was something I thought a lot about during my time in Dubai. I knew I was being watched by CCTV all the time (and to some extent that's probably the case while I'm walking around in NYC), but I wasn't constantly reminded of it.
The fact that the door man would watch the feed and press the elevator button remotely was an unwanted and often reminder that I was constantly under surveillance even at my residence. It wasn't that I walked by the door man and he hit the button for me just as I walked up. It wasn't that he had a control for the elevator (which I get is common). It was that I was several floors above or below him and he was monitoring me and pressed the button for me. He even said once, when I asked him if he was the one doing, that "Yessir, I see you all the time."
I think this is a really good answer to the question of "What do you do when [Google | Facebook | Microsoft] enter this space?"
Just because they're big and have scale of users doesn't mean that a) they can create a product that people want to use, b) failing that are able to force them to use this product.
Though it was a defeat against Facebook, this is a good sign for smaller companies: the behemoths aren't invincible.
I'm a full-stack developer that specializes in mobile - both iOS and Android. I've got a few apps in both stores, check them out at http://kurt.so
Fluent in Objective-C, Java, HTML+CSS. Experienced with .NET, python, and ruby on the backend. I have a few open source projects at https://github.com/kurtguenther
This article disappoints me because it seems to boil down to:
BAD: making money by selling software
GOOD: making money by selling ads
So how do you make money selling ads? By getting a bunch of users and auctioning off their private information.
I wish more people in the position to fund software development would support a model where your users are your customers and not just eyeballs to be sold to the highest bidder.
Barriers to entry are what capitalism is all about. (Real world capitalism, not the utopian capitalism from Econ 101.)
Patents, R&D, trade secrets, network effects, natural monopolies... all of these are competitive advantages that capitalistic companies want to have. It's the reason that "nobody else can provide what we do". Otherwise you're just trading commodities and you won't realize economic profits.
Now I'm not ascribing any morality to this. You can call it evil if you like. Just know that this definition makes 90% of businesses "evil".
Don't forget regulation. Complex regulation with a large compliance department to dot the i's and cross the t's is a great way to keep new entrants out. Why do you think there are so few new banks?
A better way to look at it is... If you put your users first, and create a site with enough utility and value to bring in a massive network of people..You'll be worth much more even if you have to start by monetizing with ads...but don't worry, eventually you can sell products and services between dentists and patients, dentist and vendors, and patients and retailers.
TL;DR put people first, your users are your defense. Monetization will fall into place if you have a network effect.
you left out the transactions part which is in the same sentence as the ads part. i would imagine, if this fable were true, that dentistry.com would make maybe 20-30% of its revenue from ads and 70-80% from transactions. that's about the ratio at Etsy. ads drive transactions so it's a good model for everyone.
Congrats on making and shipping something - that is always a good thing. A lot of these are to taste, but that's what feedback is:
* I hit no when I get asked for Push Notifications on first launch. Give me a reason to enable this later and I will, but on launch it just obscures the good UI you created and I hit Don't Allow
* You need to show something before asking someone to register or sign in. People will just stop here including me
* Coachmarks are pretty nice.
* Created an album, pulled to refresh, infinite spinner (bug)
* Doing some kind of work on the main thread for the photo capture that you shouldn't (makes capture flow jaggy)
* The app seems needlessly complicated between feeds, albums, friends, etc. Most of these things should be hidden when I just want to take, view, share photos.
Overall my big question about this app isn't related to the UI but to purpose: why trust your app to share photos with all my friends. I have to get all my friends on this service to do so. And there's no guarantee it will be around for any amount of time so why store my files there.
But seriously, good job on shipping this. Keep making the things you want.
The original and updated title are a bit misleading. I expected an article showing some valuation of Fairchild in 1950/1960's dollars to be equal to $1 trillion in 2014 dollars. That's not the case.
TC is making the argument that 92 companies today had some contact with Fairchild and if you sum these 92 companies valuations you get $2.1 trillion.
And the barrier for whether it's an offshoot of Fairchild is pretty tenuous. For example, they count Apple in the total because Steve Jobs had conversations with Robert Noyce (co-founder of Fairchild) when they were starting.
Maybe it's just me but this seems like far reaching hyperbole.
Maybe it's just me but this seems like far reaching hyperbole.
It's not you, it's typical lowbrow techcrunch idiocy. What amazes me is not the stupidity of this blog, but the fact that there are enough dumb people interested in tech to support sites like this. I've never clicked on a TC link here based on HN commentary alone. But somehow, a talentless, unaccomplished hack like Arrington was able to take this idiocy to a multi mm cashout. I dont get it.
