asharpe

Be careful here. Despite announcing 42 price reductions over the 7 years of AWS existence, the M1 tier was only reduced for the first time in 3 years after Google/Azure dropped their pricing. They push through a huge number of price drops, but sometimes (actually often) their headline drop is one very small, unique charge, leaving everything else unaffected.

Unfortunately, Uber in Australia is seeing some of the same myopic and special interest difficulties that Elon Musk and Tesla are in the US. To provide context, payment processing for credit cards in Australian taxis is exorbitant (10%) on top of the fare and mainly processed by an oligopoly that will fight to maintain this cash cow.

Of course, they are doing this through a regulatory agency, and clearly backed by a law designed to serve them. And there is no way to waive this requirement (that would impact regulatory fees for licenses etc).

Another case where technology is a long way ahead of the law in providing valuable solutions to the wider community.

I researched this for myself a couple of years back and found a couple of things but only speak from my personal account: 1. There are a couple of different options, the first being done completely without surgery, and the second where they cut the lens and 'flap it up' (literally) and then do the laser surgery. Obviously, the second option is more complex and as a result can result in more problems. 2. A lot will depend on how thick your lens is. I was looking at it and they said that as I had a thin lens, it drastically changed my options. It also raised the risk as they only had one chance (if you have a think lens, they can do follow-up laser surgery to fix mistakes - no such luck with me). It must be said, that overall the chances of anything going wrong are less than 1% or something insignificant and in most cases you will just have the same or slightly worse vision. I just wasn't willing to take the risk given I had no chance for fixing it if they went wrong. Sorry it's not data - just my personal experience a couple of years back.

Agreed - there are thousands (tens of thousands?) of E-Commerce sites that have revenues in excess of $1m. It is staggering when you scratch the surface.

Not at all: 1. He is talking about how people actually make money out of E-Commerce - that is driving sales and ensuring you have a margin on what you sell. It is very myopic to believe that the technology underlying the E-Commerce solution will drive the success of E-Commerce (a situation all to common on Hacker News - yes I am aware it is technology focussed, but not the exclusion of everything) 2. Andy Dunn has backed Spree Commerce through Ayr, Bonobos, Red Swan. I imagine, he has done that because he believes proprietary all in one platform solutions have inherent limitations. Spree Commerce has the opportunity to significantly disrupt the Shopify model (and likely will impact their valuation and/or longevity).

There is a beauty to a system that has been designed and implemented so effectively where almost every example will be a unique deployment yet simply work. There is a whole other layer of directions on the taxi ways that ensures planes can keep moving and is standardised across all airports. Doesn't sound like an important factor, but when the wind changes and you have to have all planes take off (and land) in another direction ... and they don't have reverse ...

When I was at B-School, I would call up an alumnus at a company I was interested in working for and say, "I am going to be in your city/town this Friday, any chance for a coffee?". They would almost always say yes ... and then I would have to quickly book travel. On more than one occasion I did this, I turned up and found that I had meetings with HR, senior managers (even a CEO) planned. My experience is there is no substitute for travel during a MBA.

While I agree with your sentiment, I would like the article to drill down on the reported behaviour. What happens to those people who gave good early traction (the 4 quick repeat purchases). ie do they continue to buy (niche) or do they move on to the next bright new-fangled thing. If it's the latter, as a two-person company, the fad may wear off quicker than allowing you to get the refocus, target etc.

Identifying who these buyers are is the key ... and ultimately very difficult to ascertain. Any tips on that would be incredibly valuable.

The default position that all innovation comes only out of apple (vis the Apple keyboard comment) suggests that: 1. Apple marketing is still doing a great job convincing everyone they still have innovation in the heart of everything they do (I dare say it's not innovation as improvement and miniturisation) 2. Microsoft needs to do more to burnish it's innovation credentials

That none of the data is normalised for wider economic conditions seems to invalidate the findings of PC and Tablet numbers.

Smartphone growth is nothing new. PC and Tablet growth falling as well.

Is this a result of the success of the 'old blogosphere' and mirroring the challenges of monetization so many tech companies are challenged by.

1. build an audience 2. start monetising 3. quit your job 4. drive more audience and try to monetise

Quickly, you end up serving the monetisation and the soft money that goes to influential bloggers to say nice things. It's sad, but unfortunately not the first time an industry/content/company has lost it's core success and function as a result of the need to pay the bills.

How to overcome this and stay independent? That's the exciting challenge!

While by no means trying to defend what the Koch's and their ilk are trying to achieve, there is a real underlying econmoic issue at play.

Simply put, transmission networks (aka the grid) were never built with thought that local residential providers would input into said grid. While this sounds trivial, when you add a significant new input into the infrastructure especially local end points that are only one-way flows, serious investment is required to ensure this continues to work (ie no blackouts).

Similarly, solar supply is not consistent and scheduled. The system is built for coal to provide a strong baseline where peaks are met by on demand providers (typically gas). This is significantly more expensive than coal. The flip side is that a coal plant can require 6-12 hours to 'warm up'. That the cost of supplying electricity with unscheduled solar is not a fallacy.

I, for one, completely agree and demand that solar should be part of the mix (and can end up being a replacement for coal). That should be the long term goal. Legislatures should be working towards that. Unfortunately, as in most public policy issues today, this is an incredibly complex and difficult area to make progress and will require more detailed analysis and hard decisions. This is the opening that the Koch's are using and will require more commitment to push them back.

While I love the concept of bitcoins and how they disintermediate the traditional currency structures (that just don't seem to work). However, seeing this makes you stop and realise just how much is in place to protect/secure our current primary means of exchange. Imagine the furore if this was impacting your Visa card ...

And then when the responsive design is released I might as well pack it all in

Ruining productivity since 2014 - and I thought I had kicked my 2048 habit

The lack of customer service really is the crux of this article (putting aside the issues surrounding whether surge was agreed to or not).

On one hand, I can appreciate that Uber doesn't want to provide a 'service level agreement' when the service providers are third parties (the taxi/car driver).

On the other hand, not helping someone resolve an issue (that is well more than trivial) is worrisome.

Much has been said and promised of Uber (yes, I use it and love it). However, this could well be another example of a company that scales quickly promising a level of customer service that simply can't scale (either operationally or financially). The real question is how many repeat customers Uber has over time. Buying once is nice, buying everyday is what they need.

That's a very cool engagement model. I think that is more aligned with some engagement with Open source: release the building blocks, let the community of users start manipulating, then package up the best bits as a release. Not piracy outright as you say and very cool way to engage.