I look forward to seeing Android devices powered by Microsoft apps/services in the future just so Google has a wee bit of competition!
We (at SweetLabs) have been proponents of this "Windroid" concept for some time, and I think Cyanogen is a very smart way for Microsoft to move forward. Our "Windroid" thoughts were written up last year if anyone is interested: http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/01/windroid-what-if-microsoft...
> One thing I did not understand is where all the mobile money on facebook is coming from. Looks like it is from app installs (don’t think FB breaks it out) which in turn is created by VC funding bubble.
In July re/code put the App Install Ads at $400-$800m in revenue per quarter. I'd guess it's on the upper-end of that spectrum and is out-pacing other revenue lines. It's not unusual for a top tier game to pay up to $3-5 for a US install.
This is why Twitter is so keen (desperate?) to replicate what FB is doing.
It's not unusual for a top tier game to pay up to $3-5 for a US install.
Yikes, that is much higher than I expected. I'm not really in that particular space, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I'm assuming these games are like the new and "improved" Dungeon Keeper that have ludicrous amounts of in-app purchases, so they expect to make back that $3-5 quickly.
I'm surprised by the privacy backlash in this thread! I understand why this product is so scary for someone who is concerned about privacy, but how is this that much worse than all the other devices you use?
You carry a smart-phone that presumably has GPS, a microphone, and a camera everywhere you go. There's a camera and microphone on your laptop too. Both are cloud connected. If the NSA (or any other super-power) wants to spy on you, they can and will. I believe we've learned that if nothing else w/ all of Snowden's revelations.
IMO if you detest this device's privacy it can only because either:
A) You take your privacy VERY seriously, to the point you avoid most mainstream technology and exclusively use burner feature-phones and Tor
B) You trust Amazon less than you trust Google, Apple, or others.
I am going to assume it's more the latter than the former. (If not, you really do not represent the mainstream and this audience isn't what I expected).
So assuming B, question for you: why don't you trust Amazon? I actually trust Amazon more than I trust Google or Apple. They have always delivered for me as a customer, and I believe they've always put me first.
I am not really worried about privacy, but this smacks of false equivalency.
> You carry a smart-phone that presumably has GPS, a microphone, and a camera everywhere you go. There's a camera and microphone on your laptop too. Both are cloud connected. If the NSA (or any other super-power) wants to spy on you, they can and will.
People are regularly discovering and shaming companies for transmitting more information than necessary from smart phones. It's true that the NSA could zero-day your phone, but you've still got opportunities to detect or react to that. If nothing else, put your phone in airplane mode.
This device, on the other hand, is designed to transmit everything it hears. There is no way to tell where that data goes and it may be difficult to determine exactly what it contains. Where it's possible to determine if your phone is sending unauthorized data, it seems very hard in this situation.
I don't trust amazon more or less than anyone else. I think we should just be honest about the nature of a device. A phone has an "offline" mode, this does not - its whole purpose is to be an omnipresent microphone. Those are two fundamentally different things.
>This device is designed to transmit everything it hears. There is no way to tell where that data goes and it may be difficult to determine exactly what it contains. Where it's possible to determine if your phone is sending unauthorized data.
Not necessarily true, a catch phrase programmed on-board is used to activate the device. If the device was constantly transmitting voice data to Amazon I would have to guess that the leakage of data would be picked up and could be exposed. I still don't think the smart phone analogy is dissimilar, if not worse than the Echo in terms of the privacy implications. What if a catch phrase was programmed into your phone (for instance a list of words a 'terrorist' might use), and it only sent recorded/geo/image/contact information for a short time after it was used? I don't think that would be an easy privacy compromise to spot if you didn't know the catch phrase. Not to mention that many people's smartphones are constantly transmitting location data to Google, without complaint.
As long as your phone's on, it can store whatever data it wants locally and shoot it off to Google/Apple/wherever so they can accomplish their nefarious purposes the next time it connects to the internet. If you're not extremely uncomfortable with the idea of a megacorporation leveraging your cellphone to gather info about you, you should also not be uncomfortable with Echo -- it can't do anything your phone can't already do.
Conversely, consumers can and do watch the data leaving such devices.
The open-sourciness (while not complete) also eludes to what is being stored and shipped to these "megacorps" who have "nefarious" purposes.
I would be more worried about a small third-party flashlight app dev selling your ocntact list and gps history, as opposed to a company with a billion active users.
I think you're asking the wrong question. It's about the company's motivation.
Google makes money from your data, and by showing you ads.
Amazon makes money by creating services and devices that sell you products.
Apple makes money just by selling you services and devices.
Looked at this way, I certainly trust Apple more than Google or Amazon, and this is borne out by Apple's recent "A message from Tim Cook". http://www.apple.com/privacy/
Yes, this. My gripe is not privacy-related. It's that we've built an entire society that puts things to spend money on in my face, and studies me to better learn how to do that. Google and Amazon are both problematic in this regard.
It takes most people aback when I say that Facebook is probably a much richer intelligence agency than the NSA. And people offer that information to them. Data is far too valuable and it creates the wrong incentives throughout life.
I do have control over my laptop, the NSA or Amazon would have to actively hack me in order go get to that mic and luckily I'm not worth it anyways.
In order for someone (the NSA?) to track a phone and do whatever they need to do, they need to have a warrant and what-not.
That's like deliberately sending all your living-room conversations (yours and your family's) online for analysis for God-knows-what purpose.
You trust Amazon that's good for you then. I don't trust anybody with admittedly uncontrolled access to all table conversations my family will have in the future.
There are two basic ways for the NSA to snoop on you using this device.
1. Listen to the internet traffic
2. Install malware to listen to everything
For #1, the Echo only sends conversations preceded by it's keyword. But since the alternatives to the commands you're telling Echo involve the internet anyways, what's the difference? IOW, asking echo for the weather sends the same basic information to the NSA that pulling up the weather app on your phone does.
If the NSA is going to do #2, they're going to do it to the phone in your pocket rather then targeting a niche device like the Echo.
Modern smartphones are always listening for "siri" or "ok google", and are regularly sending keep-alive packets, so I doubt that the battery drain for spying would be significantly noticeable, if done properly.
> why do one or the other?
Because resources are limited, even at government agencies. Effort spent hacking a device that will probably sell in the tens of thousands when they could be targeting devices that sell in the hundreds of millions just seems silly.
I agree that hacking the Echo might be pointless because it won't sell many is reasonable but that's a somewhat different argument.
Still, personally if I had concerns about privacy and secrecy I'd be looking to limit the number of devices in my own home which had an always active microphone.
Intel vPro chips have a VNC server built right into the chip, you can VNC in without the need for there to even be an OS installed. It would be very easy to hide a backdoor in one the hundreds of chips stashed in your laptop.
> but how is this that much worse than all the other devices you use?
Because the other devices I have have useful purposes besides listening to my speech for sales and advertising purposes. The Echo exists solely for that. It's all it does.
But does that matter? Just because your laptop can also play games/movies/etc. doesn't prevent the NSA or whoever else from tapping into the mic or camera.
Is there a tax advantage here? Estonia's tax system is supposed to be very simple, and allows for a 0% corporate income tax on all profits that are re-invested into the corporation (source: http://www.incorporate.ee/why-estonia/low-tax-jurisdiction).
Does this mean I can form a corporate entity in Estonia and gain all the tax benefits without any physical presence?
You will have to be very very careful about making Estonia the real physical center of the commercial activities deployed by your company.
If you don't - let's say you're Dutch, living in Holland and consulting mostly for Dutch clients, then forget it.
But let's say you're Dutch, you have a girlfriend in Estonia, you work from there a week every month, and you have clients in several EU countries, with NL only one of them... Maybe you even have a local employee in Estonia. That will work no problem.
Or you and your girlfriend are both directors and you meet at least 4 times (from what I've read) there to discuss company business. Hey, the company can pay for the trip from Netherlands too.
It's definitely not as simple as that. To get an idea of some complexities, just read the double taxation avoidance treaties between the two EU countries involved to start, and have a look at the EU posted workers directive http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=471 .
Those should convince you that you need good fiscal advice and a somewhat conservative attitude when it comes to fiscal grey areas.
If you want to avoid paying a lot of taxes, build a multinational and set up tax avoidance schemes like the Double Irish with a Dutch sandwich. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement . But hurry, because some of this might actually become a bit more difficult starting from next year...
> If you want to avoid paying a lot of taxes, build a multinational and set up tax avoidance schemes like the Double Irish with a Dutch sandwich.
It's probably cheaper to simply pay Irish corp. tax (12.5%) for all but the biggest companies. You have to setup 2 Irish companies, a Dutch company and a Caribbean-based company, a battalion of tax lawyers and advisers to exploit the loophole legally....etc
I'm not sure if this applies to Holland, but generally countries with high taxes implement Controlled Foreign Corporation (CFC) laws which force you to pay local taxes even if company is registered offshore.
Whether a company is considered to be CFC depends on many factors such as double taxation treaties between the two countries, the amount of shares you own and the level of taxation in the offshore country.
Yes, you can keep the corporate profits in the corporate entity until their distribution. There is a 21% tax though on distributed profits like dividends. Until you keep the money in the company or re-invest to subsidiaries, it's ot taxed. http://www.investinestonia.com/en/investment-guide/tax-syste...
The rest depends on various double-taxation treaties which affect more individuals.
You're likely to run into domestic Controlled Foreign Corporation rules. Basically if you or your family own a large portion of a foreign registered company and that company is taxed less than domestic tax rates, it'll be classed as actually residing in your home country for corporate tax purposes.
If you want to pay taxes only in Estonia, consult a Double Tax Treaty between Estonia and your country of physical residence. Usually you would be able to employ a person in Estonia to close deals/contracts to qualify. But read the document.
As soon as you distribute the profits, 10% tax applies from the Estonian end.
Usually, if your country has a DTA with estonia you'll have to pay whatever your country takes for dividend distributions anyway. The DTA means you can pay 10% to Estonia and the rest to your country but in total you're still paying whatever your country wants, in total.
There might be other advantages, however, but repatriating dividends is not going to be one of them.
Exactly, so you keep the money in the company, reinvesting the profits (and repatriate when you are a resident of say Bahamas or BVI if you build up quite a nest egg).
As someone of the "Facebook generation", I have to say my mind was blown by this video. Thanks for sharing.
I feel there is clearly a trend line one could draw here in the evolution of social networking and social media. Since the initial era of social networking, friction was reduced (e.g. Instagram / Twitter) and now it's moving to be both frictionless and ephemeral (Snapchat).
It's interesting because the trend almost leads you something like life broadcasting (e.g. Justin.tv) - but we've already been there. I wonder what the next phase will be.
86400 seconds is 24 hours. It is surprisingly commonly mis-entered as 84600 seconds, as evidenced by this search. As such, many unintended consequences can ensue.
I would love to see a visual representation of the relationship between pitch deck length and successful raise. I was surprised by the length of this deck.
For a different perspective I found this older article which ponders the economic impact of forcing 9 million people to spend time and energy sorting their trash: http://mises.org/daily/2855
I find sorting garbage to be better and cleaner for me, personally, actually. You don't have one large festering heap in your home, you have three heaps and only one of them actually smells. The rest are used up plastic containers, bottles, paper, etc. - materials that don't decompose on their own. You get to throw all the biological waste in one place, which can be smaller than the rest and you can clean it up every other day. You can of course throw all your trash away every other day, but it's easier when you only have to throw away only a small portion of it.
I currently live in a city that doesn't collect trash separately and I still separate my trash - it's just nicer and cleaner.
The marketing budget needed to convince people to transition to the new model will pay itself off shortly. Consider also that you'll get unpaid "split-trash evangelists" in most neighbourhoods doing your work for you.
Well, the point he makes is that the same is true for the other statistics. It'd probably be cheaper environmentally for a garbage truck to pick up all your garbage for instance, rather than each person traveling to the recycling center themselves.
I've lived in a couple of villages/towns/cities in Sweden, and the garbage trucks do pick up the sorted household garbage. Recycling centers are for stuff like old furniture, used engine oil, etc.
I guess you could implement a system for that too. Inform the city when you have less common items to throw away and when the quota for your neighborhood is full, a truck gets dispatched to pick it up. Would require some extra infrastructure I guess, but it might be worth it.
Here in Portugal - or at least, in many municipalities - you can call up the city and arrange for them to pick it up at a certain day, for free (yes, it's paid by taxes, yada yada).
They take furniture, appliances and green waste (from gardens and such).
In Australia, virtually no one travels to the "recycling center themselves" - we have three bins (green waste, recyclables [paper/card/plastics/tins/etc], general). General waste is picked up from the kerb each week, while the other two are picked up on alternate weeks. Even accounting for the more frequent pick-ups of general waste, I still produce more recycling (wine bottles, etc) or green waste (weeding, pruning, etc) than general rubbish.
Last I checked, no one is "forced" to do anything. They are free to let the trash pile up in their homes, so long as they keep it from impacting their neighbors. Instead, the service of trash disposal is being offered with restrictions.
Libertarians don't like recycling because it's a political intervention into the market.
Not only do they dislike that on principal, if people start to like any one particular intervention (which many people do with recycling) then it undermines their entire political approach.
That article is biased and full of exaggerations (and possibly also outright errors). I live inside the city in Stockholm and have lived both in a suburb and a small town in another part of Sweden in my life. No one I've met spend much time "cleaning and sorting" their garbage. Sure, we might rinse out our cans and milk cartons before putting them in their respective bags underneath the sink, but that takes probably less than three seconds, and we do it mostly so that it won't smell. I've never met anyone that separates the paper from cans. Everyone I know would laugh at such ideas.
Furthermore, the kinds of things we recycle from day to day do not consist of more than 6 categories. Two colors of glass, metal (cans mostly), cartons, paper, plastic. Everyone I know collects this in their own home in paper bags, and then leaves them at a collection point close to their house when they get full. And of course, we don't normally take an extra trip to do this. I leave it on my way to the subway, other people might leave them when they take the car to work. It's really not much of an extra workload. I'm guessing I spend 15 minutes a month on my recycling.
Then we have more rare trash. Electronics, batteries, light bulbs, wood, paint etc. For the suburbs and small towns they have larger recycling plants in each municipality which you can drive to. They have shipping containers where you dump your old bikes, tv's, your large pine tree that you cut down to get some more sun in your yard, etc. A typical family might visit this place one to three times a year to dump some more hazardous or clunky trash.
If you live in an apartment complex (and possibly don't have access to a car) there's usually a room in the complex for all of these things. They have the plastic, glass, metal, batteries and electronics containers close to your own apartment.
For me who live in the city and don't have access to a car, there is actually a truck that comes around a few times a year for me to deposit these things. It has a few collection points close to me (within walking distance) and sends out a text message to my phone a few weeks before they're coming, besides having a schedule online.
Having been raised in this type of a recycling system, I'm always amazed by people, even in Sweden, who think it's too cumbersome. Sure, it happens that I forget to empty my recycling bins at the collection points some times, and then I do throw cartons and cans in my regular garbage (which from what I know is not illegal, btw). But in general there really isn't any noticeable overhead.
I really think the fact that Sweden is 30 time smaller than the US is a significant aspect of the problem, which ought to be highlighted a bit more when doing a comparison between these two countries on their energy models.
How hard would it be for the US to implement such solution (assuming the cost would not be as prohibitive as it is compared with nuclear energy), first in a large city like NY (or LA) as a test bed? Maybe something like that already exist in the States?
About ten years ago, in Tokyo, at least the business districts, it was somewhat difficult to find public trash receptacles rather than recycling receptacles. The recycling setups I saw were typically three-ish receptacle configurations.
>Go look up Harrisburg and how their trash->energy plant as worked out.
Or look up Lancaster, PA (one county over from Harrisburg) and how their trash->energy plant "is considered a national model for waste disposal, featured in industry trade publications."[1], and how they (Lancaster county) are in the process of buying the Harrisburg facility.[2]
Yeah because a mismanaged city project in a dysfunctional city is a great example of the actual technology, especially when you hire totally unqualified companies to do it. But hey, we could have spent all that money on a Wild West Museum instead or maybe just prayed some more for a balanced budget.
Yeah, that comment was a little snarkier than I had intended it to be. My point was more that it had been tried in the US, but in this one case it failed, mostly because of complete incompetence. Not that the tech was bad.
>> In all, I can see 41 app tiles without scrolling, both large and small, all of them are easily identifiable and relatively easy to reach.
In practice, I find seeing so much quite overwhelming. Is seeing 41 app tiles - many animated - actually a good thing? My ability to scan and make sense of the Start Screen is quite low. I find it grades on my senses as time passes and every visit to the Start Screen becomes less and less pleasant.
And regarding scrolling, on the desktop are we not used to vertical scrolling? I find it odd when my vertical scroll wheel action results in a horizontal scroll. It's harder to scan while scrolling.
Lastly, regarding have to "dexterously following a series of menus" using a mouse - is it really that hard? Did the MS research say users are unable to use a mouse effectively? I assumed the tiles are huge because a finger is much larger than a mouse pointer, and the Start Screen UI is designed as a touch-first experience.
My start menu has 2 live tiles, 3 if you count the store (it has a little number in the corner for how many apps have updates). I haven't tried with lots of live tiles; and I could see where having too much random activity on the screen could be a bad thing (unless you had them centralized or something; but I haven't tested this use case, so I have no idea).
That said, in my experience, I've only been confused/disoriented/had my senses degraded from looking at too much data when all the tiles are unorganized. If you have a single, giant group with 40 or 50 or who knows how many tiles, and they're all random, that would be, to me, a very confusing scenario. Indeed, if all the tiles I have on my start screen were all in the same group, I'd be confused; but, with groups, they're very easy to distinguish and differentiate. Again, it's like having many many icons on your desktop; or, having icons on your desktop grouped into clusters.
Scrolling. My start screen I try not to scroll. I personally feel that if you're scrolling on your start screen, you're taking too much space and you should tone down the number of quick-access apps you have -- you probably don't use all of them with regularity. That's my personal, private opinion. I am not on the team that worked on the Windows 8 user interface, so I have no idea. That said, I don't know why we're doing horizontal scrolling versus vertical scrolling and anything I said here would be pure speculation. In a column-friendly format, like the start screen, it's not that disorienting, though, because information naturally becomes columns versus rows. That could have been a design feature that came from the horizontal scrolling, I certainly don't know.
As far as the "Dexterously follow a series of menus" and the big buttons on the start menu are concerned, I have to put a disclaimer here: I only have as much knowledge on this as has been displayed on the internet from Microsoft, I wasn't a part of that team. BUT, I do have a grandfather; and I can anecdotal-ly remember him trying to maneuver his mouse and occasionally losing it in menus or miss-clicking because his hand would shake. As computer scientists and engineers and computer/modern-tech savvy people, our hands and fingers are more dexterous than others, I imagine, because we use them for these meticulous tasks all day long. For use cases like that, this new, large-button interface would probably be much easier. I have not had a chance to let him test the UI, so I can't say; and as my co-workers often remind me, my needs and wants are, often, not normal to computer users at large, so I could be very off.
In regard to #1, Microsoft wants to leverage their desktop monopoly to force users into the Metro ecosystem thus forcing developers to build Metro apps.
I don't believe it's to get users comfortable with Microsoft's interface on mobile offerings though that is clearly a side-effect.
We (at SweetLabs) have been proponents of this "Windroid" concept for some time, and I think Cyanogen is a very smart way for Microsoft to move forward. Our "Windroid" thoughts were written up last year if anyone is interested: http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/01/windroid-what-if-microsoft...