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This wasn't an "automatic price increase" unless software got really good at explaining why they were increasing prices.

http://cl.ly/image/2U3l242l350p/Image%202014-12-15%20at%2012...

"We are all concerned with events in CBD. Fares have increased to encourage more drivers to come online & pick up passengers in the area."

Somebody wrote that sentence, and it's a gross one. The same doesn't belong on the Post, it belongs on the person who wrote that and upon the culture that allows for sentences like that to be written.

I'm certain you're right, but surely you can see how trusting a stranger on the internet isn't really a viable option. If you're interested in getting people to use your framework, it sure would be nice if there was a demo for your framework that didn't involve giving you so much access.

Hmmm, you want to be able to modify and read my emails, and send emails on my behalf with my google account in order to see a demo application for your framework? I'd love to take a look at what the app can do, but I'm not sure I'm into granting you those permissions.

Well, except that Einstein was an actual person, and Nimrod was a mythological one.

Actually, not just money. It means that the community is able to draw in lots of talent, and the entire community is committed to the success of the community. So I'm not certain, but those high end photographs could have been taken by a resident who just wanted to make the website that much more awesome.

And this speaks to my overarching point: Small, dense communities work. Dunbar's number. When you have a group of people, all of whom know each other's names (we're wholly organized on Facebook, actually), the social cost of being an asshole is REALLY HIGH (as a recovering asshole myself, it's part of the reason I moved here). You can't honk your horn at somebody without the risk of that being your neighbor.

But most people don't have horns. They get around by foot, bike, or sometimes even a golf cart.

It's a great community. There's not really any membership. You can just show up and live here like you live anywhere else. And should you choose to buy food from the farm, you go to market on Saturday. Or you join the CSA.

The farm is an independent organization that's funded by additional closing costs (1%) of housing transactions, and by its own revenue stream. It's now a profitable business selling produce to a lot of the restaurants in Atlanta.

More about Serenbe here: http://terrain.org/2012/unsprawl/serenbe/

Sure. If you have a job where you have to commute in every day, I can see how this wouldn't be a great place to live. But there are enough people -- especially the self-employed -- who can sustain this community it seems.

A lot of people are telecommuters -- my wife and I both work out of our home, and what matters to us more than proximity to office is proximity to airport. It's a 20 minute, no-traffic ride to a world-class airport from here.

Lots of consultants, a few commuters (people carpool) and even a few farmers -- my neighbors are making a killing raising sheep at ManyFold Farm.

No, not yet. They're building a rental property very soon -- http://serenberealestate.com/?property=textile-lofts . I suspect this will start attracting some singles. But it's mostly true, you're not going to fire up Tinder and find a date at Serenbe.

I live in a community called Serenbe. (http://serenbe.com) which has taken a much different approach to suburban new urbanist development. It's built around an organic farm rather than a golf course, it's got miles of green space and trails, and a fantastic commitment to ecology and the environment -- for example the outdoor irrigation system is built from gray water from the homes in the community.

Also: it's got some great restaurants and about 80% of my diet comes from food that's made within 25 miles of where I live now. To get to a restaurant, we take a brief stroll through the woods.

Smartest thing I ever did was move here. I've spent my whole life trying to work with governments (mostly federal) to use technology to improve service delivery and if I'm honest with myself, it's been mostly discouraging. But since I've moved here, I've met with the mayor and we're beginning to do amazing things.

What makes an amazing place to live, though isn't the lack of automobiles (as the author of this post seems to believe), or great architecture -- but rather an attitude of community. That you all have a shared role in the success of each other's life environment. Human beings are wired for that, and both urban and suburban environments tend to separate us from that.

They still charge 10x what Twilio does to send text messages.

It's useful to note that, while a country, Estonia's population is smaller than that of most large US cities (1.3mil). What can work for Estonia may not be something particularly portable to larger nation states. Still interesting stuff.

The biggest users of the open data movement are, in fact, real estate professionals. It's companies like Trulia and Estately and Zillow and what not that are actually taking open data from government and putting it to good use.

It'd be interesting to see some kind of startup come out of this. Though it's fairly hands-on, real estate is still a fairly hands on market, and with real estate lobbying being what it is, it's likely that agents aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Building them tools that allow them to make better recommendations to their clients or to find better buyers might be something really interesting.

This tells an interesting story about good "looking" but not adopted software. At a cursory glance, this looks great! All these datasets online! How wonderful.

But once you start to dig a bit deeper and scratch the surface, just barely, you can see that it's actually a graveyard of an open data era gone by. Many of the datasets here look like this:

https://data.cityofchicago.org/FOIA/FOIA-Request-Log-Mayor-s...

Where they were initially placed online, perhaps with an attempt to be more transparent and open to the public, and they haven't been updated since 2012. The political points got scored by the elected officials and appointees, but either the software that the career bureaucrats is too burdensome to use, or the will to be open to the public just isn't there.

After spending 10 years in this field, That's the primary problem with these transparency efforts. They sound great to the public, and great to the politicians, but nobody bothers to sell the staff of government on why it's important. And when they don't want to do something, or when they're not sold on it, it just doesn't get done.

Software designers and "civic hackers" need to grok that to be successful their first customer isn't the public or the politician, it's usually the career civil servant.

This seems to be a bit of a deep assumption, no? There are lots of advantages to home automation besides "fathers wanting to control every aspect of their families lives."

The Nest Thermostat, for instance is about energy savings and not having to think too much about the thermostat. Lockitron about the convenience about never having to worry about keys again...

What's wrong with this story is that Outbox didn't want to do the one thing that would keep it in business: make its customers fill out a form that allows a third party to accept mail on their behalf. There are plenty of businesses digitizing mail right now -- travelingmailbox.com, earthclassmail.com, amongst others. Why Outbox.com refused to go this route and instead decided to go out of business was their decision. There was a workaround (http://travelingmailbox.com/usps-form-1583-ca) -- they just opted not to take it. That's not the USPS's fault.

It's pretty difficult. E-Filing isn't as simple as a web service.

I believe that if it were to actually do the e-filing, the people who ran the e-filing would have to submit to federal background and clearance checks at those people's expense and the servers it ran on would have to probably get FISMA High certification, provided it actually posted to the Efiling API.

That's just my speculation, fwiw. But I think that's true.

While I wish people took more moral stances like this, I feel like it's nonsensical to worry about Condi Rice, and worry more about the broken incentives around the financial system that Dropbox is headed for. Goldman Sachs is a substantial investor in Dropbox. Where were the cries to drop dropbox then?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs#Controversies

Or the ideology "fiduciary responsibility" for public companies, which involve companies like Google and Apple hoarding money offshore and using sophisticated accounting tricks to avoid paying taxes?

I'd like to see more of our "I AM OUTRAGED" efforts be aimed more towards the systems that cause our problems than the people who arise from them.

"Of particular interest to us are ways to use the Internet to fix government—for example, crowdfunding social services."

Aren't all social services crowdfunded?

Minority set-asides aren't our exclusive purpose. We want to reform the procurement process to make it more competitive and honest. Part of that is making it so that a woman doesn't have to write an essay explaining that she's a woman before she gets granted woman owned business status by the SBA.

But another part of it is advocating for the RFP-IT Act, which would make it a lot easier for small businesses to sell to the federal government: http://blog.dobt.co/2014/01/27/Reform-Federal-Procurement-fo...

And another is piloting our software, Screendoor.io, which is based on the project we ran successfully in the White House, RFP-EZ: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/05/15/rfp-ez-delivers-sa...

Cool. Well, if you'd like to help out, let us know.

We did the best we could, and tried to help on it as much as the law would allow. And still do. But one cannot simply volunteer to help the government do things, as the federal advisory committee act prohibits government from accepting free advice or work (you can infer why).

Not sure what you mean about fundraising though, as we don't raise money (we have received a grant for our operations from the Knight Foundation, but aren't looking to raise any VC money).

I get the startupland thing. The point I'm making is -- couldn't they have tried Flippa or something? Startupland isn't "valuable asset land" when it comes to folding.

Also worth pointing out that if his staff (house.gov) sent him an email (house.gov) and they all presumably use the same mail server (they do, House IT is all in house), then the tubes he's referring to were literal wires going from the basement of the capitol building into his office. I suspect it'd be pretty hard for the "commercial" stuff to get caught up in that.

Sounds like House IT was bad at administering a mailserver (they are -- when I was at the Sunlight Foundation, we linked to them and they called us accusing us of a DDoS), and decided to blame it on "the commercial internet."

The underappreciated brilliance of this quote is that it's not clear what regulated industry he doesn't understand from his quote. Is it the Internet? Transportation? Waste removal? Plumbing?

Stevens' whole quote:

"I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially...

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.

It's a series of tubes.

And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."

This doesn't strike me as someone who knows what they're talking about.

Is it me, or is this website subtly paying homage to Sen. Ted Stevens' famous "Series of Tubes" anti-net-neutrality speech.

2,000 customers is substantial, especially when the feedback from those 2,000 seems to be "I would like to pay you more money"

Seems really strange that they're shutting down. With a substantial customer list and some infrastructure that's hard to build, that's a business that could be sold for something -- perhaps not substantial exit money, but still.

That said, they were charging less than what the service cost to provide, and -- judging from the comments here -- less than what their customers valued their services for. So perhaps they didn't have a good idea of what value is and how to sell it.