This sounds pretty cool! Are there any screenshots of the chess app available to non app.net members? I'd like to see what using an app in app.net looks like. If it looks good I'll sign up for app.net and start developing apps immediately.
Seems like there's some "low hanging fruit" problems that this app ecosystem could attempt to solve. First is search and discovery. Just do it better than Apple. Then there's the review process. Just scratch that entirely and use collaborative filtering to let the best apps bubble up to the top of the list. Of course have some flag for offensive, hate related etc apps.
How about partnering with Stripe and having an in-app-purchase system where developers get 100% of the revenue? Or perhaps 90%. Just being better than Apple is a great start.
One more thought: Apple's app ecosystem had the benefit of users' CC info pre-entered. Seems like app.net could benefit from the CC or other payment info already supplied by users when signing up.
In my mind the labels "brilliant" and "jerk" contradict each other. When someone is truly bright they will realize how much can be gained from learning to interact with other people, building rapport with coworkers etc. These skills can be practiced and the payoff is immense. I'd bet that even Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had to build rapport with at least their immediate reports.
There are certainly corner cases. For example a company developing a particular technology might need some savant for a while to build the proof-of-concept product. However once that's done this employee's abrasive nature can have a negative impact on other employees and company culture. In this rare case I'd choose compassion for the employee. This could involve working with them, giving them projects they enjoy that don't involve working with others or even recommending them to another company with a note about their talent and people skills trade-off.
There's also the case where an employee is regarded as brilliant but lacking people skills and is just plain dysfunctional. The technical skills are lacking but people are afraid to confront the person because they will yell or become angry. In this case the person should be fired ASAP.
I think code reviews are fine as long as people are learning and building rapport with each other. When either of those are missing the reviews can be a waste of time and even detrimental to working relationships.
YMMV to say the least. You can find yourself working with the friendliest person who teaches you something useful every time you look over code. Or you can end up working with someone who's emotional maturity level can only go up to put it nicely. Combine the latter case with someone who isn't quite old enough to "know what they know and know what they don't know" and you have a recipe for disaster.
It's good to distinguish between people who want to make a decent amount of money in order to live comfortably from those that want to make as much as possible in order to compete with their peers and perhaps make up for some self-esteem or other issues. I think OP was referring to the latter while it sounds like you're referring to the former.
Seems pretty silly to think that anyone who wants to make more than enough money to live comfortably wants to do so only to compete with their peers or make up for self-esteem issues.
This fun puzzle illustrates some of the ideas: Bob wants to send Alice something valuable in the mail. Unfortunately the postal system is very corrupt and very efficient. Any package containing a valuable item will always be spotted by postal workers. If the package doesn't have a lock the postal workers will steal the item. Also postal workers will always spot any key sent through the mail and hold it indefinitely. So even if a locked box is sent through and Alice receives it she will never receive the key when it comes through hence she can't obtain the package contents. How can Bob successfully deliver a valuable item to Alice?
Answer: Bob puts the item in a box with a lock and sends to Alice. Alice receives the box, places her lock on it and sends it back to Bob. Bob removes his lock and sends the box back to Alice. Now Alice removes her lock and obtains the package contents.
What you have described is more or less Diffie-Hellman. Unfortunately this alone wont guarantee your package's safe passage. If it did Verisign, would be out of a job.
The flaw is, you can basically just have the same scenario but replace Alice with the post office:
Bob puts the item in a box with a lock and sends to Alice. Post office intercepts the box, places their lock on it and sends it back to Bob. Bob removes his lock and sends the box back to Alice. Now the post office removes their lock and obtains the package contents.
The only way around this is to have some truly trusted third party. Even in RSA, if you aren't absolutely certain of the other user's public key, it won't work, which is why web-of-trust and other techniques are used.
It would be awesome if mobile developers could put targeted ads in their apps. I've tried Admob and Apple's iAds and there's literally no targeting. Two apps, one that focuses exclusively on pizza and another app that focuses exclusively on beer will show the same totally irrelevant ad for, say, some game app or "free text messages!".
how much of that may be due to not having enough relevant inventory? there's definitely a chicken/egg problem involved in targeted ad serving, but you'd have thought someone (apple?) might have been able to crack that nut by now.
In my particular case I don't think there was an inventory limitation issue. Reason is websites with Adsense addressing the same niche were serving extremely relevant and targeted ads while my Android app with Admob just gets junk. The obvious question is how does the Admob banner know about the app's contents? On the Admob site there's a note saying that the app's description will be used to target ads. However this doesn't seem to work or I'm misunderstanding. Either way my ads still suck.
Rovio excels at monetization on mobile. Same with Popcap. Obviously these companies' mobile products are different than facebook's.
Why is mobile monetization so difficult? Seems like a company that can monetize the desktop experience can do mobile too. They're both computers on which users consume information. If ads work on the desktop then I can't see a reason why they won't work on mobile.
>Why is mobile monetization so difficult? Seems like a company that can monetize the desktop experience can do mobile too.
From the article: The paradigm shift to the app model is unequivocally bad for Facebook, [...] Facebook is designed to be open all the time, to be visited in the gaps of the day or as a platform in its own right, bridging to a variety of activities related to the social network. [...] Why use Facebook to play a game, read an article, manage your photos, stream music, or shop, [...] when you can select a specialized app directly.
How can the shift to mobile possibly reduce volume of FB usage? I see friends and family consuming Facebook trash dozens of times per day on their mobile devices. If anything FB consumption has gone up (at least from my perspective). Look at the review count for the iOS app. That app is extremely popular. So why not just put a banner ad in the app?
I noticed that too. Some of the issues can be fixed over time. But how is Apple going to match street view? Start their own fleet of cars driving around the city? I just tried street view (iOS 5) on iPhone and iPad and it's really awesome. So yeah claiming "the best mapping platform on any mobile platform" is BS.
Remember this is a company with billions of dollars in the bank, and collecting street imagery is a very parallelizable task.
Lets do some basic math. Lets say you pay a driver $10/hr to drive 8 hrs a day at an average speed of 35mph in the city. That is about 250 miles covered per driver, per day and $80. So you do that for 10 days and that is 2,500 miles for $800.
Now you build 10,000 cars with street view like capabilities, call it $40,000 per car, perhaps you get a car maker to help you perhaps not. that is 400M$ for cars, and 10,000 drivers is $8M for 10 days and 250 million miles. You haven't even spent close to a billion dollars and you've got street view like imagery for every major city on the planet in 10 days. Run this program for a year and you cover every road twice with your 10,000 drivers.
Its certainly doable by Apple if they choose to go that route.
The sensor pile on top of google cars costs somewhere near $100 000, the car bolted under it is the cheap part.
Also, driving is the cheap part - structuring all the gathered data and images is a nontrivial task, you simply can't do it in a few months (as apple would need) if you don't have the know-how and software tools for this.
It would be kinda neat to have Apple and Google street view mobiles going around and pseudo-competing with each other.
Apple has the money to do it no question. However it takes more than just money. On the data collection side there's designing, building and integrating the sensor system on the car. That has to be tested. Then it needs to be replicated many times. The data collected needs to be stored somewhere. Either locally on the car or in the cloud. Either way that has to be figured out. You need to hire drivers, protect yourself from liability etc. While all of the these pieces are doable they're non-trivial. Especially when you consider the number of people involved. And that's just collecting the data.
Now Apple has to process the data and make that available to the maps app. And there needs to be software written for the maps mobile apps. Perhaps desktop too. All that needs to be tested. This "presentation" side of the problem involves a bunch of people too.
So how long do you think it takes a company the size of Apple to accomplish all that? I'd set a lower bound of one year. So for 12 months Google maps still has street view over Apple and will probably improve it (especially if they know Apple is creating a competing product).
While money isn't an issue the amount of time, energy and other resources required to make a product as refined as Google street view is enormous. Can Apple do it? It probably comes down to leadership. Steve probably could have done it. I wonder if the current leadership can.
>you've got street view like imagery for every major city on the planet in 10 days.
It took Google years to get Street View right, with massive amount of engineering talent and financial capital committed along the way.
12 months would be extremely challenging even for Apple. As for 10 days... well let's just say I'd be a bit unhappy, if ChuckMcM was my program manager :p
You overlook a couple of things, first is that Streetview has already been 'done' so there are a number of things which are more straight forward (do you recall how quickly Microsoft duplicated it relative to Google's effort?) and the second is that yes doing it in a year would be extreme.
That said, if you had been unemployed for over a year and I said, I've got a really simple job for you that will last at least a year, you drive this car up and down every street in the town at the legal limit. I'll pay you $400/week with benefits. Probably pretty appealing to you.
> Lets do some basic math. Lets say you pay a driver $10/hr to drive 8 hrs a day at an average speed of 35mph in the city. That is about 250 miles covered per driver, per day and $80. So you do that for 10 days and that is 2,500 miles for $800.
Don't forget fuel charges! ~$40 per day (at 3 USD per gallon for a car that gives 20 miles per gallon).
It will take considerable coordination to direct 10.000 drivers across the country or globe. Not sure if you can pull this off in a year, maybe it takes a year just to get a 1000 drivers on the road?
1) "an average speed of 35mph in the city" is not going to happen. In Manhattan that's 15 MPH. In midtown Manhattan it's 1.7 MPH. So 10 MPH on average would be more realistic.
2) You forgot gas
3) You forgot tickets
4) You forgot car insurance
5) You forgot car maintenance
6) You forgot car accidents and the cost of replacement
7) You forgot tolls
8) You forgot lawsuit costs
9) You forgot parking costs (and time to drive from and to parking)
10) You forgot the costs of the hiring process (try hiring 10 drivers in 10 days)
11) You forgot the cost of routing of all these cars (you have to organize 10,000 cars somehow)
12) Your guess of $40,000/car for design, approval, production of a specialized car is way off.
13) You forgot server costs (stitching the images)
14) You forgot storage costs (storing, transferring) millions of photos.
15) You forgot IT and management costs to support all this shit. $8M will buy you a few executives in charge of this project.
16) Your estimate of $10/hr for the driver salary is way off (assuming it's just a driver, and not a trained technician). Average salary of a cab drive in NYC is $25/hr. Chicago - $17/hr. Los Angeles - $17.5/hr. That's not counting the benefits - health insurance, social security, etc.
Heh, part of the goal of 'simplfying' is so that you can reason about things. Most people don't really conceptualize what it means to have 100 billion dollars of 'cash on hand'.
We can make the numbers more accurate. Hell if Tim Cook hired me and gave me the budget for it we could knock this out in a couple of years. I'm sure there are at least half a dozen folks out there who could. The simple point remains though which is that you can solve this problem with money, and you can make the solution time arbitrarily short by scaling the money.
Apple could solve this problem with money by licensing Google's existing service. Actually building a competing service can't be solved with money alone. Just think of the number of people involved.
FWIW a street view 'type' car (differential GPS, 360 view camera, drive train encoding, wide band celluar/wifi scanner, and 100 TB of on board storage is significantly less than $40,000 these days. It is easier if you're just pulling ground data (no need to optically stabilize the cameras).
Oooh, wanna test me? Went through a pretty deep dive on the streetview stuff when I was working where you are but I'd be willing to bet you I could build you a 3rd gen car that would out perform the current ones for a lot less than $40K. I'd get dibs on Rod though, that man is hecka talented with a CNC mill.
Sure, Google, couldn't figure out how to make it cheaper than $100K per vehicle, but ChuckMcM on the internets sure can do it for "a lot less than $40K".
As an iOS developer I'm not too thrilled about this. However as a mobile developer I'm actually happy to see this. And I'm glad that Apple's review process is pissing off developers. And I'm glad that Apple took an awesome, frequently used app (Google maps) and just removed it. And I'm glad that the new devices' taller screens make developers' lives harder (at least in some cases). Why am I glad? Because all these screw ups provide incentives for developers and other companies to stay in the game and compete with Apple. So as mobile developers I believe it's in our best interests to have a diverse ecosystem that's not dominated by a single company or at the very least where there exist incentives for multiple organizations to compete and innovate.
Seems like there's some "low hanging fruit" problems that this app ecosystem could attempt to solve. First is search and discovery. Just do it better than Apple. Then there's the review process. Just scratch that entirely and use collaborative filtering to let the best apps bubble up to the top of the list. Of course have some flag for offensive, hate related etc apps.
How about partnering with Stripe and having an in-app-purchase system where developers get 100% of the revenue? Or perhaps 90%. Just being better than Apple is a great start.
One more thought: Apple's app ecosystem had the benefit of users' CC info pre-entered. Seems like app.net could benefit from the CC or other payment info already supplied by users when signing up.