New food delivery service Kiwi brings robots to UC Berkeley campus

Re:New food delivery service Kiwi brings robots to UC Berkel... by anon4this1 on Tuesday May 16, 2017 @03:44PM (#14352639)

This reminds me of hearing Reed Hastings of netflix talking about starting the DVD mail-rental business as preparation for when streaming became technologically viable. They knew that internet delivery would eventually work, but to be the big first mover they needed to establish a customer base. As soon as broadband reached a level where streaming video is viable, they convert the customer base over to it.

Likewise, robot street delivery is going to be huge. The marginal cost of delivery will tend towards zero, and its really useful. If a company spends years and zillions of dollars messing around with AI and machine learning bullshit to power these, they will miss the boat. The goal of a successful company should be:

- Get as much VC as possible

- Spend it on low cost chinese built bareboned GSM controlled bots

- Hire warehouses full of vietnamese computer gamers to control them

- Get more VC

Once you have a market cap of billions, THEN you get a lab of engineers together to make them increasingly autonomous

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Re:New food delivery service Kiwi brings robots to UC Berkel... by wand3r on Tuesday May 16, 2017 @04:03PM (#14352802)

So compete at a high burnrate in an extremely crowded space with a huge workforce faking your technology until you can pivot your product and market down the road?

I get what you're saying as a general heuristic; but this is not that in my opinion.

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Re:New food delivery service Kiwi brings robots to UC Berkel... by majormajor on Tuesday May 16, 2017 @08:44PM (#14354671)

Here it's important to remember that the only reason that worked for Netflix was because they could be a huge disruptor even before streaming. They IPO'd, and basically all but put Blockbuster out of business, years before they launched streaming.

Netflix could've never moved to streaming and still made a lot of people a lot of money and have been a successful business.

But if they'd been losing tons of money on DVDs, that 10 year wait between launch and streaming would've been much, much more interesting.

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