It's an interesting point about fundamental research. The old industrial labs are dead and while academic institutions can do a lot someone in the private sector has to pick up the research mantle. Google X is a good example, but I think smaller efforts like this are much more interesting. If it's done right that is...

I'm the article's author. I had a pretty long interview with GM developer chief Nick Pudar so not all of the details made it into the post. If anyone has any questions, I can try to answer them.

Hi, I'm a writer from GigaOM. I can't tell you what works well for other startups, but I can tell you what I look for when weighing whether to profile a startup.

1) A good or at least interesting idea that isn't just mimicking what a dozen other companies are doing. 2) A founder with an impressive resume 3) Backers that know what they're doing. Elon Musk doesn't need to be on your board, but if you're money man is your dentist, you'll have to impress some other way.

I can't tell you how many pitches I get for "the newest startup in mobile advertising". There has to be something different about your startup otherwise you wouldn't be bothering right? (At least i hope so) You really need to identify that point of difference and highlight it in the first sentence. Most of us won't get much further unless you're really impressive in category 2 and 3.

Finally, a good pic of your founder/founders. Not a year book photo. Not a Zuck photo of some kid making faces in hoodie. A decent human shot of person that doesn't look like a canned shot. If someone choses to interview your startup that will be the first thing they ask for. Might as well make the process easier.

Do you profile Kickstarter campaigns? If so, what do you look for in those instances?

what's the best way to pitch a writer like yourself? Does email work, or do you prefer twitter?

I am the author of this post. I wanted to be upfront about that. But I'm very curious about what the HN community thinks about the concept of creating this kind of distributed mobile network where every device acts as a relay node carrying the community's traffic.

Well, I think Verizon's point is that some games never let the device go into sleep mode even when paused, inactive or running in the background. I get the impression that Verizon compiled its rating by comparing actual resource consumption compared to "expected" resource consumption, which is probably a fairly relative term. For instance you expect Netflix to consume a lot of data and run down your battery when you're actually watching a movie, but you don't expect a game to do the same when you're not playing it.

-- Kevin F (the article's author)

(Disclaimer: I'm the article's author.) Quorn isn't an artificial meat. It's a meat substitute or imitation meat. There are a lot of these on the market right now like Beyond Meat. In-vitro meat actually seeks to grow animal muscle cells. Think cloning steaks :)

I think the OP was pointing out that it's not impossible to convince people to eat stuff like this. If you can get people to eat fungus grown in large vats (Quorn), then with the right marketing you can probably get them to eat artificial meat.

But yes, you are correct. If you sign up for a value plan you're on contract. They're subsidizing rates not phones in this case.

Ha! Maybe an exaggeration, but not much of one. Then again there's the problem of whenever operators create new capacity their customers just fill it.

A quick google for "compound annual growth rate mobile data" turns up numbers around 100%, so 30% would take 4 or 5 months and 50% might be 7 or so. You're right, an exaggeration to call 4-7 "a few", but certainly not much of one.