I would think that vacuum cleaners are the prime example for household robots at this time? As an IT guy who nevertheless has zero desire to buy anything "geeky" for myself, still prefers analog dials and controls, still doesn't own a smartphone, those also are the only ones I could find a use for in my own home (but at this time I still vacuum manually). People with a lawn might be interested in robot lawn mowers, I don't know if they work as well as the vacuum robots (I imagine there might be a power issue) but if they do that too sounds like a good use. Same for swimming pool cleaners.
What I would really pay a lot for: Small hunter-killer robots to hunt insects in my home!
A bunch of small robots equipped with night-vision and some tiny weapon(s), mechanical and/or laser, crawling around catching bugs. Sure, spiders do that too - but I really, really don't want to live with (actual) spiders. It's psychological. A few well-armed mechanical spiders for bug hunting would be nice. I had bed bugs once, if I had had small insect hunter-killer robots well-equipped with sensors to see them crawl to me at night it would have been a godsend. Anyone producing something like that that actually works, you'll make billions! And it really doesn't have to be all that intelligent: Think about it, mosquitoes, bed bugs, they really don't have much of a brain, and how well they work. It should be doable to build robots that can compete with that low level of intelligence.
I can confirm that my robot vacuum cleaner at least is excellent - runs every day without a problem and leaves the house noticeably cleaner. For under £200, I have almost entirely eliminated a weekly chore.
I suspect future attitudes to manual vacuum cleaning will be similar to manual clothes or dish washing.
Yes, I've seen that article and I'm familiar with this industry. Are you suggesting that people aren't buying drones? They are. They're just buying them (mostly) from one company, DJI, that in 2017, had revenue of over 2.8 billion dollars. To suggest that consumer robotics is not a thing because DJI has dominated the market is akin to suggesting that operating systems weren't a thing in the 90s.
I use Slack frequently in about 20 different open source, interest-based, educational and hobbyist communities. I also use it frequently as part of small teams set up for various projects.
This is why being able to aggregate multiple channels into a single window would be a huge win. Right now you have to flip between multiple "tabs" to find anything.
I've said this elsewhere in the thread, but Slack could already be making money off me if they offered an attractively priced plan for open source and hobbyist communities and gave workspace owners an easy way to forward that monthly subscription fee onto the users. But at the moment I use Slack a lot and pay them nothing.
Slack is also very popular with open source and hobbyist communities. People often seem to assume that it's used only at work, which I guess makes some amount of sense given that the vast majority of paying customers are probably workplaces. Slack would already be making money off me if they offered an attractively priced plan for open source and hobbyist communities and gave workspace owners an easy way to forward that monthly subscription fee onto the users. But at the moment I use Slack a lot and pay them nothing.
Is that still the case? That there is no way to export message history? I'm trying to find a way to publish messages from my Slack channel to my website in real-time so that I can give visitors a look at what they are signing up for. Similar to how Pieter Levels has nomadlist.com/chat/ set up (if anyone knows how he does that, please let me know).
It was as far as I was able to tell when I checked many months ago. I've seen no indications that anything has changed, but would love to hear otherwise...
"Corporate Export
On the Plus plan, Workspace Owners can apply to access a self-service tool called Corporate Export. This type of export includes content from public and private channels and direct messages. If Corporate Export is enabled for your workspace, Standard Export will not be available."
https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201658943-Export-yo...
I don't use or even like Slack, but what is the problem with that?
I mean they are already giving you the oppportunity to use a limited version for free, you can't expect them to give you one of the most useful features imho when you are just using their resources and infrastructure in exchange for nothing; it doesn't make any business sense.
If I'm a non-paying user of Slack (or whatever other SaaS with a free tier) I am not entitled to anything whatsoever, I'd be grateful for the fact that they allow me partial functionality at all.
How is Discord superior? I haven't really used it but my first impressions are that it seems very tailored to the gaming community. I have used Slack extensively and it appears more professional. And if Discord is free, how do they make money / keep the lights on?
I do worry about Slack's pricing since there is a vast chasm between their free plan and their paid plans. I use Slack to run some open source and hobbyist communities with thousands of members and if for any reason we were forced to switch to a paid plan (at $x per user) we'd be forced to go elsewhere immediately.
Discord has much better performance for large communities, and I've found it to be perfect for remote collaboration with its intuitive and super low friction voice channels.
But the issue around professionalism that you bring up is certainly valid. I don't want to have to maintain separate accounts for work vs play (unless there's a seamless way to switch between them, like for Google, but currently there isn't), but currently there's no way to present different personas to different communities from the same account. Some examples:
I think they're still super laser focused on their core demographic of gamers rather than trying to expand into professional use and compete with the likes of Slack. You can certainly still use it in a professional capacity and it generally works great, and is better than Slack in some areas, but the lack of effort put into catering to those use cases definitely shows.
FWIW, I currently work around the issues around multi-account management using Firefox's excellent containers feature (using 1 work container to segregate all of my work accounts from personal ones without also having separate views of history).
And you still cannot leave a channel in Discord. You can mute, but that's not the same thing — it still clutters your sidebar, and still downloads contents from it.
Then, join any random server and there can be dozens of distinct channels, many of which are meta-on-meta channels: rules, announcements, shout-box, bot-sticky messages, bot commands, and a plethora of other noise, on top of the multitude of automated bot messages you get over time.
Discord bots are out of control. They remind me of the days of IRC and eggbot scripts and eggbot hosts: every channel went out and bought a cheap VPS or eggbot host to run their scrappy little bots. Except somehow worse and incredibly annoying.
I don't think Discord is ready, or even trying to be ready, for enterprise use. Not yet!
Obviously downloading contents from muted channels is not an issue. Also you can both mute and hide the channel which effectively leaves it. And obviously slack bots are just as powerful as discord's so it's just a matter of servers electing to add crazy bots or not. Everyone bitches about giphy... these are some real stretches if these are your actual complaints about enterprise readiness, rather than data/admin policies, account segregation, etc. Do you have a vested interest somewhere?
For me, the voice channels are actually off-putting. I've never been a gamer and don't like the idea of feeling like I'm chatting on the phone with strangers. Text feels much more comfortable.
Thanks for your response. It is good to get feedback from somebody who has used Discord as I am just about to launch a new community on Slack. I will stick with Slack for now.
The historical context of discord, is that every gaming group would have some sort of chat app (mainly IRC, more recently hipchat, yammer, slack) as well as a push-to-talk voice app (ventrilo, teamspeak, mumble, ...). Discord is merely combining the best of both (slack, and all its api support, with built in voice channels).
Nobody has to use voice. In many communities, most don't. But as the above said, it's a super frictionless way to talk if needed and is a lot less formal than "starting a call/meeting". You just publicly hop into one of a dozen visible channels and anyone else can hop in with you to discuss an issue or just hang out mostly-not-talking.
It's definitely not for everyone (or every kind of community), but I've had reasonable success with it in a mostly-remote workplace where voice channels can help emulate desk-to-desk interactions with your immediate team, but as a purely opt-in process compared to a real open-office where you open yourself up to disruptions by anyone at any given moment all the time, and have no opt-out mechanism outside of leaving your desk and camping in a conference room.
Not sure what sort of community you're launching, but if it's for coding definitely check out Spectrum. The Apollo team made a great post about their search for a new community platform and landed on Spectrum due to a couple of reasons that might apply to you as well: https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-spectrum-...
TL;DR: The product itself is open source, it has a mechanism for longer-form discourse like traditional forums as well as real-time chat, and is fully index-able by search engines.
> How is Discord superior? I haven't really used it but my first impressions are that it seems very tailored to the gaming community.
At NuCypher switched to Discord from Slack.
It's not particularly tailored, but certainly cultural influenced. There are maybe a feature or two that make more sense for gaming, but it's very useful for business.
The Discord voice features are particularly useful and are in use every day at NuCypher.
Slack also has a disastrous "feature" wherein any user can cause the SlackBot to send a message to another user. In an open instance (which Slack seems wont to discourage), this means that a user can easily impersonate another user and purport to be sending messages in an official capacity.
> I have used Slack extensively and it appears more professional.
I don't even know if I know what that means in 2019. As far as appearance, Discord is much more fun. Is that what you mean?
Slack doesn't seem particularly professional to me.
> Slack also has a disastrous "feature" wherein any user can cause the SlackBot to send a message to another user. In an open instance (which Slack seems wont to discourage), this means that a user can easily impersonate another user and purport to be sending messages in an official capacity.
Could you tell me more about that? How is that done and is there a way for workspace owners to prevent it?
It's not as disastrous as this person makes it seem. It's a rest call you can use to have slackbot do or say whatever you want for integration purposes. You can customize the name of the bot as well as its icon, which would allow you to "impersonate" someone.
The slackbot has limitations in that it looks different from a regular user and will identify it as slackbot if you click on it, as well as tell you who created the webhook to allow the integration.
And since we're talking about Slack's use in business, if someone does that you fire them. It might be a problem for people using the free version to host public communities, but that's not Slack's target market.
> t might be a problem for people using the free version to host public communities, but that's not Slack's target market.
But these two are not mutually exclusive. Many business use cases eventually require a public community chat, and Slack is a dead-end for them. Discord on the other hand has served us well.
For my purposes, voice chat is not a useful feature. I want our team's communications to be in text form so that we can communicate asynchronously, people don't have to be online at the same time and it's easy to read back through what has been said previously. I'm communicating with people all around the world, a very different use case to a team all working in the same office or time zone.
We switched from Slack to Discord in our community and I prefer it. It feels faster to me, the Slack app on a Mac got really slow after a while.
I wish Discord added Telegram style voice messages and it would be perfect.
To be totally honest I still think forums like phpbb where much better but they didn't really transitioned to the mobile world. I miss them.
This isn't the whole story. Discord also mines user data and sells it to advertisers:
"Information You Provide: We collect information from you when you voluntarily provide such information, such as when you register for access to the Services or use certain Services. Information we collect may include but not be limited to username, email address, and any messages, images, transient VOIP data (to enable communication delivery only) or other content you send via the chat feature."
"Data We Collect Automatically: When you interact with us through the Services, we receive and store certain information such as an IP address, device ID, and your activities within the Services. We may store such information or such information may be included in databases owned and maintained by affiliates, agents or service providers. The Services may use such information and pool it with other information to track, for example, the total number of visitors to our Site, the number of messages users have sent, as well as the sites which refer visitors to Discord."
"If you do not wish to receive personalized advertising that is delivered by third parties outside of the Discord Service, you may be able to exercise that choice through opt-out programs that are administered by third parties, including the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA). Our Services currently do not respond to “Do Not Track” (DNT) signals and operate as described in this Privacy Policy whether or not a DNT signal is received, as there is no consistent industry standard for compliance."
I say this as an avid user of Discord, which I use on a daily - dare I say hourly - basis. I'm perfectly fine with them collecting data on my gaming habits and the harmless stuff I talk about with friends. I don't think I would be okay with running a business through them, especially one in a similar vertical.
It lets you connect data via clean APIs without needing to code. So new website signups can automatically go to mailchimp, and zapier can text high priority leads to your best salesperson, and the lead can feed into a bi tool, etc etc.
I designed a hardware product but haven't brought it to market because even if it is successful, Chinese manufacturers will reverse engineer it and then have a cheaper clone on the market within weeks, long before I can recoup even the cost of manufacturing, let alone make a profit. And since I can't afford to pursue legal action, it seems pointless to manufacture the product, and everybody loses. I wonder how much innovation is stifled this way.
There's a joke that if you're considering making something but think it would cost too much or take too long, just send the design out to some Chinese companies for a quote, but don't order any. Then wait a week or so for it to show up on Alibaba, buy a bunch and resell them under your own brand.
I remember a while back there was a kickstarter for a phone case that folds out into a selfie stick, it got successfully funded.
Within weeks of the kickstarter finishing, before the kickstarter had even delivered or even started manufacturing the cases, they were for sale on Aliexpress.
It seems so easy for someone in China to do this. Look for successful product kickstarters and you already have market validation. Something like a selfie stick case would be so easy to set up a production run for.
An engineer friend noticed this with civil engineering applications as well.
Chinese companies troll RFPs for bridge and other designs. In this case, my friend saw a unique bridge/overpass that he was associated with in some obscure province that was completed before the original. He knew it was their design because it did not include changes that were made after the contract award.
It's just one of many options, but do you put your heart and soul into something then not let it see the light of day after you find out you can't profit?
fpvracing has already worked for free: spent effort to design a product, without any revenue, and apparently now having given up hope of getting any revenue.
I made two suggestions: one of which might provide a path to revenue, and another which, whilst providing no revenue, would also cost nothing, and require virtually no additional effort beyond that already expended.
The one advantage you have is that your competitors aren't aware of you yet, so use that time to prepare. I'd say either pursue minimum-cost overseas manufacturing right away, before you have competition, or position your brand to be higher quality than Chinese imports.
What's the hardware product? It's not like the counterfeit version will take over your product that fast and you'll always be able to keep a local market.
I was wondering if that would be an issue. It might be worthwhile to present it to the factory as something else. E.g. a quadcopter part presented as handheld fan for hot weather.
You're off by an order of magnitude. It works out to $840/page.