The intent of a startup is to develop a product that people will buy from you. It should be a product that isn't already on the market. If you are thinking another facebook/google/youtube/dropbox/trailers/angrybirds/office productivity clone of existing products: Stop, go back to your desk at work and keep churning out code for someone else.
You need a unique/newish idea:
If you have an idea you think is actually new and useful. Do some googling on the idea to see if anybody has considered it (or similar overlapping ideas) and the response to it. Do some basic patent research to see if anyone has staked ground on your idea. Do some informal research to see if people are interested in (and would pay money for) your idea. If you feel you have to to mask the purpose of the research, go for it (it just takes more time). Surveys can be written to show interest in one item while simultaneously drawing out information on a not so obvious second. Now you have an idea that should be relatively unique, patent free and people want (even if they don't know it or can't articulate it). If you can't answer these questions, stop now.
Get a lawyer
You will need to incorporate at some point and a business lawyer will be able to point your in the right direction on the pros and cons of different company types. Also plan with the lawyer on your future end goal (expand or buyout) so your company can be structured properly for future action.
You need manpower, budget and a business plan:
How many man hours will it take to have a demo model (no matter how crude)? How many man hours will it take to bring it to market? What is your time frame to bring it to market? Do you need to quit your current job to work on it? Do you need to hire people in order to meet your deadline? How much runway do you estimate you need in order to get off the ground with a saleable product? This is the basis of your development and launch budget. Your business plan is your estimate on keeping the company operating: what are your liabilities, assets, income and burn rate of reverses?
Where is your budget coming from?
If its just yourself you have to go back to a day job when you bank account is empty. If you are employing other people you need to continuously be out there pitching for seed money (which takes away from dev time). So having a working demo that you can pitch is needed. Have your pitch smooth and bullet proof and be ready to field all sorts of outlandish questions, be told "we'll think about it" and then ignored, and to be told NO many many times.
What is your end goal?
Do you want to develop into a larger company or be bought out for a pay day? Do some research on your Phase II goal. It doesn't need to be now, but you don't want to be surprised when you turn around and realize that you are suddenly employing 35 people and you have a large company knocking on your door with an offer and you don't know what to do with it.
Schedule for the vacation 4-8 months in advance. So depending upon how much vacation you accrue each year you may have more than one vacation scheduled in advance. When you schedule four months in advance no one thinks about saying "no" to a vacation request. Since it has been approved make sure your vacation is out of town, and preferably without cell phone coverage and has non-secure internet so VPN is not an option.
Two weeks before your vacation, remind your boss about the vacation they had already approved and hold them to it because you have already made plans and spent money on the vacation. If they reneg that is a major breach of trust (and you should be looking right there and then).
If they don't approve a vacation request four months in advance there is a problem there, and you should be looking for another position.
Part of the issue is since container shipping started in the 50s and told hold with a vengeance in the 80s with multi-modal following after that. Shipping is no longer the driving cost of total cost of a product (as it was before the 1950s). It is now labor. So manufacturers can place their factories anywhere in the world according to their labor cost and cumulative shipping cost to each country they ship to. Yes, lots of math is needed at this point.
If the total cost to manufacture the product is increased by moving the factory to the US, the factory is not going to move to the US. Whether their are tariffs for entering the US or not. The loss of world wide sales is going to drive the decision.
The US has to take a long objective look at itself in the US and decide how to compete in the world market instead of this jockeying between states. Different states can whine about different incentives; but when the factory moves to China not only do the states lose but so does the US.
This arguing between the states reminds me of how Sears is slowly getting its lunch eaten. Each of the departments have to fight amongst themselves for fame and glory even if it hurts the bottom line of the company. All the while Target and Walmart are eating their lunch.
I wouldn't be surprised if part of the purchase decision is based on where the closest repair rep is. With John Deere being that controlling to the farmers, I would not be surprised at all if they have attempted to lock in the reps and repair techs as well- "You can be a rep/tech for John Deere or someone else, but not both, we will pull your certifications off the wall and you will be left high and dry" - This is a side effect of the farming consolidation that has been going on for twenty years (or more), there are fewer different people buying tractors so it is easier to try to achieve lock in.
I think it would be in the other tractor manufacturer's interest to bring their tractors out to the farms for demos (if they don't already) and make sure they talk up the reparability of the unit. The other tractor manufacturers have to realize that a professional, well trained repair staff that gives accurate (non chiseling) repair estimates is going to go a lot further with the farmers that buy and use their products than the attempted lock-in of John Deere.
Various legislatures are trying to get it though and a wide variety of industries are fighting the legislation tooth and nail. If this legislation makes it through one state house into law you will see many lawsuits on the matter. Some companies will try to sell a "California only" version of their product and try to keep customers from buying from that state, or try to make the software incompatible between right to repair states and non-right-to-repair states. Software forking here we come!
There are several other Slashdot articles on the subject. Below is one of the more recent ones.
https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
While there are many people that are willing to exchange goods and services for BitCoin; it is not a recognized currency by anyone that actually matters (ie banks and governments). Make no mistake, just about everything is priced in a government back currency (dollars, Yen, Pounds, etc) and in addition banks and governments do not accept BitCoin as a way to cover debts and obligations.
In addition BitCoin is slow, not entirely trust worthy (you can argue the fact that one farming group controls more than 50% of the computing power used to back bitcoin is a real problem), doesn't understand the basics of monetary policy (price fluctations anyone), let alone a way to implement it. These could all be contributing factors as to why large organizations are not willing to exchange goods and services for bitcoin.
You can get $500 drones with a 1km control range. If you want to spend $5000 you can get drones with a 7km control range. That is far enough away in an urban environment to be almost impossible to track down.
You can get drones with preprogrammed flight paths, it isn't a stretch to have the drone fly to a predesignated location drop its payload and fly away. All you need to do is identify a soft target (antennas, power lines, fuel tanks) that doesn't move from day to day, some knowledge of the local winds, a couple of range finders and you can program the drone to fly to a point and make its bombing run. If the target is that important, program your drone(s) to attack in a cluster around the target. The attacks can't be re aimed on the fly, but you can get around the jamming.
I'm not worried about swarm tactics as the other person is. I just want to bleed you dry of ammunition and money. If I launch a drone attack against you everyday it is going to cost you a missile and $3.2m to shoot it down while I am out $500. If I do this for a month (30 days), you are out $96m and I am out $15,000. Drones have a shorter lead time than missiles so the drone can be replaced faster as well. Eventually I will run you out of defense missiles and start landing hits on your infrastructure (antennas, communication whips, power lines) and then things get harder for you.
How people use a tool does not always match how the tool maker thought the tool was going to be used. Sometimes the tool maker tries to adapt an existing tool to do things it was not designed to do, without considering how the current users use the tool.
Right now Facebook is falling into the second category. A competitor (snapchat, imagepotato, etc) has a tool that does something different from Facebook. So of course Facebook has to do the same thing. But facebook isn't considering the use case of snapchat versus facebook. Snapchat is the antithesis of facebook. Nothing is saved after the message is sent so there is nothing to data crunch, either you saw the message or you didn't. That is why people moved to facebook, to be outside the facebook environment. The last thing in the people some people want to share is "your friend is curious about [ostensibly sensitive subject that the friend hasn't discussed with anyone], do you want to know more about it". It is no wonder that people avoid facebook for some subjects.
Previously Amazon was allowed leeway by its investors because it had a path to profitability. What Uber hasn't demonstrated is if it has a path to profitability. A lot of issues that could be referred to a "growing pains" or "sustainability issues" haven't really Uber yet. Its entire black car fleet is still new and hasn't had to be replaced or have major repairs yet. The question that Uber has to answer is if it can wean itself off of VC money, stay solvent and maintain the same level of service as it has now. If Uber cannot demonstrate this the VC will dry up, the owners will cash in/sell out and walk away from Uber with pocket full of cash and a flaming wreck of a company behind them.
Small communal companies; where everyone is in agreement on the company's focus and direction can run without senior management keeping a hand on the tiller. Once the company size grows beyond 50-60, it will either factionalize based on the differing visions for the company, implode, or strictly stay below the size where factions occur, it will grow and senior leadership/management will be needed.
If the camera system is watching the gestures from the blind side of the phone and making a guess based on the gestures that is can see. IE the camera's vision is occluded by the phone itself but it can see some of the gestures operating the phone and can make a guess from there. Somehow I think this would be more than 5 candidates.
If you have a written log that spans weeks or months, it becomes much harder to refute it. The written documentation has to be detailed enough to point to other documentation (commits, emails, other permanent records) and provide a road map so the lawyers can follow the log and subpoena the supporting documentation. The written log lives in your bag and never leaves your bag unless you are writing in it. IF you think something could be a threat to you for firing or lawsuit, you write about it in the log. A handwritten log, in ink is best. It cannot easily be modified after the fact. Hand date every page and hand number every page. It is much harder to replace pages after the fact if every page is dated and numbered.
I was keeping a log this year against my supervisor. He was not acting as a project manager or an organized manager. If the shit hit the fan I could take the log out and start quoting chapter and verse on the times he failed in his role. Assuming he didn't have a competing log it is going to be very hard to compete with the written record. DO NOT SURRENDER THE ORIGINAL COPY TO ANYONE, unless ordered by a judge. If need be, provide full color copies of every page.
While this is not a perfect system, if provides guideposts of what was happening when and why so if an argument comes up you can look back at your notes to remember what was going on.
Having spoken to Amazon employees they take the privacy issue VERY seriously. You can believe the conspiracy theory on the subject that there are super-secret backups.
Slashdot Mirror
The intent of a startup is to develop a product that people will buy from you. It should be a product that isn't already on the market. If you are thinking another facebook/google/youtube/dropbox/trailers/angrybirds/office productivity clone of existing products: Stop, go back to your desk at work and keep churning out code for someone else.
You need a unique/newish idea:
If you have an idea you think is actually new and useful. Do some googling on the idea to see if anybody has considered it (or similar overlapping ideas) and the response to it. Do some basic patent research to see if anyone has staked ground on your idea. Do some informal research to see if people are interested in (and would pay money for) your idea. If you feel you have to to mask the purpose of the research, go for it (it just takes more time). Surveys can be written to show interest in one item while simultaneously drawing out information on a not so obvious second. Now you have an idea that should be relatively unique, patent free and people want (even if they don't know it or can't articulate it). If you can't answer these questions, stop now.
Get a lawyer
You will need to incorporate at some point and a business lawyer will be able to point your in the right direction on the pros and cons of different company types. Also plan with the lawyer on your future end goal (expand or buyout) so your company can be structured properly for future action. You need manpower, budget and a business plan:
How many man hours will it take to have a demo model (no matter how crude)? How many man hours will it take to bring it to market? What is your time frame to bring it to market? Do you need to quit your current job to work on it? Do you need to hire people in order to meet your deadline? How much runway do you estimate you need in order to get off the ground with a saleable product? This is the basis of your development and launch budget. Your business plan is your estimate on keeping the company operating: what are your liabilities, assets, income and burn rate of reverses?
Where is your budget coming from?
If its just yourself you have to go back to a day job when you bank account is empty. If you are employing other people you need to continuously be out there pitching for seed money (which takes away from dev time). So having a working demo that you can pitch is needed. Have your pitch smooth and bullet proof and be ready to field all sorts of outlandish questions, be told "we'll think about it" and then ignored, and to be told NO many many times.
What is your end goal?
Do you want to develop into a larger company or be bought out for a pay day? Do some research on your Phase II goal. It doesn't need to be now, but you don't want to be surprised when you turn around and realize that you are suddenly employing 35 people and you have a large company knocking on your door with an offer and you don't know what to do with it.
Schedule for the vacation 4-8 months in advance. So depending upon how much vacation you accrue each year you may have more than one vacation scheduled in advance. When you schedule four months in advance no one thinks about saying "no" to a vacation request. Since it has been approved make sure your vacation is out of town, and preferably without cell phone coverage and has non-secure internet so VPN is not an option.
Two weeks before your vacation, remind your boss about the vacation they had already approved and hold them to it because you have already made plans and spent money on the vacation. If they reneg that is a major breach of trust (and you should be looking right there and then).
If they don't approve a vacation request four months in advance there is a problem there, and you should be looking for another position.
Without critical thought people will accept many things that are just shoveled at them. Admittedly critical thought requires practice and is hard.
http://resistancereport.com/ne...
Part of the issue is since container shipping started in the 50s and told hold with a vengeance in the 80s with multi-modal following after that. Shipping is no longer the driving cost of total cost of a product (as it was before the 1950s). It is now labor. So manufacturers can place their factories anywhere in the world according to their labor cost and cumulative shipping cost to each country they ship to. Yes, lots of math is needed at this point.
If the total cost to manufacture the product is increased by moving the factory to the US, the factory is not going to move to the US. Whether their are tariffs for entering the US or not. The loss of world wide sales is going to drive the decision.
The US has to take a long objective look at itself in the US and decide how to compete in the world market instead of this jockeying between states. Different states can whine about different incentives; but when the factory moves to China not only do the states lose but so does the US.
This arguing between the states reminds me of how Sears is slowly getting its lunch eaten. Each of the departments have to fight amongst themselves for fame and glory even if it hurts the bottom line of the company. All the while Target and Walmart are eating their lunch.
Some of us did play starcraft 20 years ago. I understand needing an un ending swarm of troops.
On the other hand it is six days before April first and I can believe something like this being fed/leaked to Kotaku in advance as a gag.
I mean this is the right time of year for it. But really; 4k resolution update for a twenty year old game?
I wouldn't be surprised if part of the purchase decision is based on where the closest repair rep is. With John Deere being that controlling to the farmers, I would not be surprised at all if they have attempted to lock in the reps and repair techs as well- "You can be a rep/tech for John Deere or someone else, but not both, we will pull your certifications off the wall and you will be left high and dry" - This is a side effect of the farming consolidation that has been going on for twenty years (or more), there are fewer different people buying tractors so it is easier to try to achieve lock in.
I think it would be in the other tractor manufacturer's interest to bring their tractors out to the farms for demos (if they don't already) and make sure they talk up the reparability of the unit. The other tractor manufacturers have to realize that a professional, well trained repair staff that gives accurate (non chiseling) repair estimates is going to go a lot further with the farmers that buy and use their products than the attempted lock-in of John Deere.
Various legislatures are trying to get it though and a wide variety of industries are fighting the legislation tooth and nail. If this legislation makes it through one state house into law you will see many lawsuits on the matter. Some companies will try to sell a "California only" version of their product and try to keep customers from buying from that state, or try to make the software incompatible between right to repair states and non-right-to-repair states. Software forking here we come! There are several other Slashdot articles on the subject. Below is one of the more recent ones. https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
Let me know when any of these countries will accept it for tax payments.
When you can pay your taxes with it, let me know. Until then it isn't money.
Some banks will accept foreign currency for deposit. Usually in person, and with advance notice.
While there are many people that are willing to exchange goods and services for BitCoin; it is not a recognized currency by anyone that actually matters (ie banks and governments). Make no mistake, just about everything is priced in a government back currency (dollars, Yen, Pounds, etc) and in addition banks and governments do not accept BitCoin as a way to cover debts and obligations.
In addition BitCoin is slow, not entirely trust worthy (you can argue the fact that one farming group controls more than 50% of the computing power used to back bitcoin is a real problem), doesn't understand the basics of monetary policy (price fluctations anyone), let alone a way to implement it. These could all be contributing factors as to why large organizations are not willing to exchange goods and services for bitcoin.
The Japanese use nets deployed from their own drones to stop drug running drones.
You can get $500 drones with a 1km control range. If you want to spend $5000 you can get drones with a 7km control range. That is far enough away in an urban environment to be almost impossible to track down.
You can get drones with preprogrammed flight paths, it isn't a stretch to have the drone fly to a predesignated location drop its payload and fly away. All you need to do is identify a soft target (antennas, power lines, fuel tanks) that doesn't move from day to day, some knowledge of the local winds, a couple of range finders and you can program the drone to fly to a point and make its bombing run. If the target is that important, program your drone(s) to attack in a cluster around the target. The attacks can't be re aimed on the fly, but you can get around the jamming.
I'm not worried about swarm tactics as the other person is. I just want to bleed you dry of ammunition and money. If I launch a drone attack against you everyday it is going to cost you a missile and $3.2m to shoot it down while I am out $500. If I do this for a month (30 days), you are out $96m and I am out $15,000. Drones have a shorter lead time than missiles so the drone can be replaced faster as well. Eventually I will run you out of defense missiles and start landing hits on your infrastructure (antennas, communication whips, power lines) and then things get harder for you.
How people use a tool does not always match how the tool maker thought the tool was going to be used. Sometimes the tool maker tries to adapt an existing tool to do things it was not designed to do, without considering how the current users use the tool.
Right now Facebook is falling into the second category. A competitor (snapchat, imagepotato, etc) has a tool that does something different from Facebook. So of course Facebook has to do the same thing. But facebook isn't considering the use case of snapchat versus facebook. Snapchat is the antithesis of facebook. Nothing is saved after the message is sent so there is nothing to data crunch, either you saw the message or you didn't. That is why people moved to facebook, to be outside the facebook environment. The last thing in the people some people want to share is "your friend is curious about [ostensibly sensitive subject that the friend hasn't discussed with anyone], do you want to know more about it". It is no wonder that people avoid facebook for some subjects.
Previously Amazon was allowed leeway by its investors because it had a path to profitability. What Uber hasn't demonstrated is if it has a path to profitability. A lot of issues that could be referred to a "growing pains" or "sustainability issues" haven't really Uber yet. Its entire black car fleet is still new and hasn't had to be replaced or have major repairs yet. The question that Uber has to answer is if it can wean itself off of VC money, stay solvent and maintain the same level of service as it has now. If Uber cannot demonstrate this the VC will dry up, the owners will cash in/sell out and walk away from Uber with pocket full of cash and a flaming wreck of a company behind them.
Small communal companies; where everyone is in agreement on the company's focus and direction can run without senior management keeping a hand on the tiller. Once the company size grows beyond 50-60, it will either factionalize based on the differing visions for the company, implode, or strictly stay below the size where factions occur, it will grow and senior leadership/management will be needed.
Normally there is a pretty long lag with the retries after retry 5 or six. The kid must have been playing with the phone for hours for that to occur.
If the camera system is watching the gestures from the blind side of the phone and making a guess based on the gestures that is can see. IE the camera's vision is occluded by the phone itself but it can see some of the gestures operating the phone and can make a guess from there. Somehow I think this would be more than 5 candidates.
I haven't shared it with them. But I still have it in my back pocket in case there is a dispute.
If you have a written log that spans weeks or months, it becomes much harder to refute it. The written documentation has to be detailed enough to point to other documentation (commits, emails, other permanent records) and provide a road map so the lawyers can follow the log and subpoena the supporting documentation. The written log lives in your bag and never leaves your bag unless you are writing in it. IF you think something could be a threat to you for firing or lawsuit, you write about it in the log. A handwritten log, in ink is best. It cannot easily be modified after the fact. Hand date every page and hand number every page. It is much harder to replace pages after the fact if every page is dated and numbered.
I was keeping a log this year against my supervisor. He was not acting as a project manager or an organized manager. If the shit hit the fan I could take the log out and start quoting chapter and verse on the times he failed in his role. Assuming he didn't have a competing log it is going to be very hard to compete with the written record. DO NOT SURRENDER THE ORIGINAL COPY TO ANYONE, unless ordered by a judge. If need be, provide full color copies of every page.
While this is not a perfect system, if provides guideposts of what was happening when and why so if an argument comes up you can look back at your notes to remember what was going on.
Having spoken to Amazon employees they take the privacy issue VERY seriously. You can believe the conspiracy theory on the subject that there are super-secret backups.