Yeah I wonder they did a backroom deal with Apple and Google. These backroom deals that Apple/Google are doing is so anti competitive for small app developers and they keep on stressing that they are helping millions of developers. If this is not unfair I don't know what is.
Thanks for the interest! We've been exploring this in limited ways; for example, https://github.com/google/android-emulator-container-scripts contains a set of Python/Docker/JS scripts for setting up WebRTC streaming of emulators remotely. More to come soon.
I'm very interested in this. I usually run into crashes in production on specific devices that I don't own. It would be nice to be able to reproduce them on a virtual device. FYI, the site is not loading atm.
So Facebook paid 5.7 billion dollar to buy "influence" in India. The biggest influencer of India is Mukesh Ambani who has strong influence in Indian politics. Now it will be a matter of months and WhatsApp payments will get regulatory approval to go ahead to launch WhatsApp payments in India. That is the boss move here IMO. Jio is just a way to solve for regulatory hurdles in India.
Jumping the gun here. Jio's founder, Ambani has his own ambitions in this space and he is highly unlikely to carry water for FB. This is akin to saying when Microsoft took a stake in Apple that they would carry water for Apple.
They are frenemies at best and outright competitors. FB gets to deploy its cash hoard into a relatively safe and perhaps lucrative investment and buy some insurance to being treated fairly on Jio's platform.
So no solace, because it's even worse. Jio is a bigger danger than FB to us Indians, we just don’t seem to realize/care (as in being an information monopoly). I don’t think even Jio realizes it. They may believe that they are doing God’s service in providing affordable 21st century services to the masses. But that’s how the really bad stuff usually starts.
Twice Mukesh Ambani has built telecom services that have lowered prices by an order of magnitude and greatly expanded coverage. Reliance Communications which Anil ran into the ground was built by Mukesh and changed the competitive landscape the first time around. Jio did it again and now India has the cheapest data in the world.
I am struggling to understand what exactly is the problem and why is Jio a danger? Because in the future they might become some unknown danger to morals and economic well being of Indians/humanity. Crush freedom in some inexplicable way that you cannot imagine but are sure they will. I am genuinely curious.
I am not sure why I am biting this, but here goes:
If you are the only Internet people know and can afford, it doesn't matter if you are a private entity or the Govt.
I can't satisfy your curiosity because I too also sincerely don't know what flavor of undesirable behavior a monopoly creates but that they create bad behavior is as intuitive to me as is breathing to anyone else.
A first person anecodote which doesn't necessarily further my point but still - I had Jio fiber installed for a relative, I was visiting in a small north Indian town - unbelievable price, offering, everything great. But it took me 3 days of multiple hours on the phone, and I still couldn't access Hackernews, or reddit or even New York Times. Pages for these and quite a few other sites just wouldn't load. The first canned response - 'Reliance only blocks what the Govt. has told it to block' (paraphrasing). I didn't anymore have the energy to analyze if it was a technical problem, casual censorship or just customer service issues because of fast scaling.
> If you are the only Internet people know and can afford, it doesn't matter if you are a private entity or the Govt.
The only thing worse than a monopoly is the non existence of the particular service.
Before Jio, reasonable speed Internet was non existent in rural India. The plans were priced so high that using Opera Mini with cloud compression was a reasonable decision, to save on data cost. I used to switch off 3G to ensure data doesn't get all consumed.
> But it took me 3 days of multiple hours on the phone, and I still couldn't access Hackernews, or reddit or even New York Times.
What do you mean by "not load"? Are you sure this was not something unrelated to Jio?
"not load" - nothing happens and eventually connection timed out (unfortunately I don't have exact recollection if there was a message or just nothing happened). But I did research it and closest evidence I found that this was not a technical issue but deliberate blocking was from some discussion on Center for Internet Security:
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/reliance-jio-...
as opposed to what, no cheap internet ? As compared to which comparable country, China ? Where literally the Govt controls everything.
I appreciate the enthusiasm for privacy and all, however the priorities for Indian citizens is having a cheap, reliable internet service that becomes a backbone of the modern economy.
Now i am not defending any business practices here, however you will be hard pressed to find something as succesful anywhere else in the world which is not politicized with currying of influence and favors. That is essentially the nature of an industry which has become a utility.
People are free to educate themselves and use alternatives based on their understanding.
> So no solace, because it's even worse. Jio is a bigger danger than FB to us Indians..
Write for yourself. Jio has destroyed the cartel that ensured high mobile prices for a long time in the country. It's because of their efforts that millions of Indians are connected to the Internet today and could only dream about it a decade back.
in fact arguably this is the first time in Indian history where i believe the people at the top are not corrupt to the extent previous Govts were (coalition politics !). The middle and low level corruption is slowly reducing as we move to more tech enabled services and transparency is a feature although it can never be eliminated, people find a way. However as the new generation in rural areas start using mobile phones with data and access services like banking online i can see a sea change. I saw farmers taking pics of their cultivations and uploading to Govt websites for availing subsidy in Karnataka. Now they had to pay 10% of the subsidy amount in cash beforehand to their local officer, but i still consider this a win and improvement. The primary reason this happened , digitization and a strong push for it.
How different is the tracking that TikTok does compared to what Facebook and Google does? Except may be TikTok might be shipping this data off to the Chinese?
It's not meaningfully different. It's not even different from literally every other successful business built on ads. They're all collecting data, and the ad industry is their customer - not the people making the content.
Exactly this is the point. It's one thing to allow companies in your own country/influence sphere (NATO/western world) to build massive data piles about your citizens, but an entirely different thing to allow a national enemy (or at the very least, competitor) such as China to do the same.
Given that there are many young soldiers, policemen, politicians or employees in security-critical environments it's not far fetched that a social media app such as tiktok which has cam/mic access is able to serve as a remote controlled bug for its owners. For what it's worth, ordinary tracking of location data is already an interesting data pile - a bunch of phones that for half a year only appear on a US military base and then suddenly appear somewhere remote in Afghanistan? Most likely they're deployed soldiers. Then look at what they post and suddenly you have names, ranks, specializations... and as said, all of that is possible with ordinary tracking, the dangers of an actual bug are magnitudes larger.
If someone gets a lot of leverage, makes a wild bet, loses, and then there is an uncollectable debt, then someone out there made a lot of money that Robinhood is possibly out, and the recipient probably wasn't poor beforehand.
Robin Hood of myth was not a person known for being robbed by poor people who gave his wealth to the rich.
Our founding team left or were made to leave by the acquirer. For one year everyone kind of relaxed because we all made money. After that our management team left had no vision because they were bunch of execs hired recently. They lacked innovation and kept beating around the bush and left in 2 years of the acquisition. At this point most of old timers left the company because of lack of innovation or anything to do. I becomes like a graveyard.
It is nearly impossible to do so given the private nature of these numbers but having worked in the industry extensively I can tell you the returns are generally atrocious and that no one invests in VCs to be fiscally responsible in the traditional sense.
Investors who put money in VC are generally so wealthy that by the time they are ready to invest in VC they have exhausted all other standard investment opportunities like stocks, private investments in mature companies, personal trusts and real estate and are simply looking for anything with a higher chance of return than a bond.
I’d estimate 90 out of 100 times the VC burns entirely through the money, 9 out of those 100 break even, and 1 out of 100 is profitable. 0.1 generate a return of something like Apple or Google.
That 0.1 in a 100 chance is good enough for the investors as they don’t feel any pain when it’s lost.
That’s why VCs have no interest in sustainable but mid-size businesses, only 100x opportunities. Their public marketing will push that it is because they are visionaries, the reality is that they have no interest or expertise in building mid-size businesses and the returns are so awful for their ‘visionary’ picks that without that 100x investment working out their funds would consistently be total losses.
Are you for real? This makes vc bros seem like the greatest con there is then. I'm sure the people running these vc's are making decent money from collecting fees on these random bets
1. Consistent High Performers vs Everyone Else: As with colleges, grad schools, starting salaries, hedge funds, and a host of other things -- it would be good to have a top-20 "typical" return and an aggregate "typical" return.
2. Returns are only one aspect, returns correlation is another. Even post-fee returns at s&p500 rates would be awesome if they are uncorrelated to the rest of the portfolio.
Could you elaborate on what it means to have "exhausted all other standard investment opportunities like stocks, private investments in mature companies, personal trusts and real estate"? Is this due to some tax/estate laws?
Generally it's more about allocation and diversification. You can only put so much money in "standard investments".
When you already have a few hundred million in stocks, bonds, etc, the marginal benefit to putting another few million into the bond market is completely irrelevant--it's a rounding error in the overall portfolio. But putting those few million into a venture capital fund has the potential to generate a noticeable return.
It can also insulate you against structural shifts in markets. If WeWork were to fundamentally change the global real estate market, or some new battery startup fundamentally changes the energy landscape, investors in the incumbents can be left with significantly devalued portfolios.
Having a piece of anything/everything that might become the "next be thing" is a hedge against that.
It means they are already well diversified in all the traditional "safe" plays. "Exhausted" is maybe not the right word. Once you've got significant capital in the standard five ways then VC is your high-risk sixth play.
This is the best analysis I have ever seen on this subject. Kauffman is probably the only major investor that has enough exposure to do this (none of the Vcs they’re invested in are going to cut them).
