Actually I would argue that your traveling experience is exactly what made you aware of the opportunity of living a decent life right there at home, and if you never had such experiences you probably would not value your current situation as much.
837 karma · joined April 2, 2007
BTW, that's a great UI, much better than timeanddate.com (which I normally use)
It should be the other way around: They should be buying lunches for entrepreneurs. Scouting deals is their job after all.
Firefox is a great alternative to a sucky dominant player (IE). Inkscape is a great alternative to expensive dominant players (graphic software). The problem with this case is that Skype is excellent, free and dominant. There is no incentive for users to switch, other than being open source (which appeals to people like you and me, but the masses don't care)
1. Already has an iPhone or Android; and 2. Takes the order him or herself.
Reason #2 alone already excludes the huge majority of businesses. Inside that minority, reason #1 excludes small-size vendors who cannot afford a smart-phone.
Sure, Square has its place as a niche, but it's hardly revolutionary.
I don't understand why a 0.15 drop is such a big deal, considering the service requires an expensive iPhone (or Android) and a major mobile plan.
1. In China the system is set-up for that. The little web-cam and the system are integrated with a push of a button, and the process is very quick. In Brazil they didn't have anything. They were taking pictures with off-the-shelf digital cameras, and I read an article saying that they did not even have a system set-up to transfer the pictures out! It was really something implemented overnight, clearly just to piss people off.
2. Sorry if I was not clear, but my point about the hassle was not much the picture itself, but the fact that Americans were singled-out and placed on a different line. This is borderline racist IMO.
Note: Brazil eliminated this stupid policy a while ago. I mentioned it just as an example.
Oh, c'mon, this sounds very over-the-top. My experience is that TSA and USCIS (formerly INS) are very professional and follow a strict protocol. The protocol may be unfair or not, but that's the protocol, not the professional's fault. In places like Brazil your entire trip is at the hands of chance: Most times you get a nice officer, but sometimes not.
For example: After an incident involving an American in Brazil [1], all Americans were out of a sudden required by the Brazilian authorities to get pictures taken at the Brazilian customs. The situation got so ridiculous, that at some point the airports ended up with 3 lines: "Brazilian Citizens", "Foreigners", and "Americans". In other words, Americans were singled-out from the rest of the world. Would the OP describe that as a "pleasant experience"???
I have had somewhat bad experiences in the US too, but that's not even close to the kind of stuff I (or close family members and friends) went through in Brazil, or as a Brazilian in Europe. In the US I never had any trouble, and officers always acted professionally.
And I highly doubt this person would get compensated in any one of these countries.
[1] http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/americas/01/14/finger.gesture....
Disclaimer: I am a Brazilian naturalized American.
Google did not really do anything new. Speech recognition is around for a while, as well as translation engines. Although putting the two technologies on the cell phone makes an impressive demo and good PR, it does not actually solves the problem at a practical level.
All this drilling and tests may sound crazy, but I do think it teaches an important value that is missing in the west's education: discipline
My wife is a teacher. She taught kids in the US (California) and here in China. One difference is that in the US a huge amount of her preparation time is spent on making lessons interesting to students, otherwise they disconnect. In China she is more focused on the lesson's subject matter, rather than tweaking the lesson for entertainment / attention value.
True, Chinese education does not value creativity or self-expression like in the west (and Chinese students are aware of that). But the lack of discipline is not the way to go IMO.
Jean Hsu's post is wonderful, by the way.
You can make Skype-to-phone calls with Tom-Skype (the Chinese Skype partner), but you need to buy credits through their system.
Geolocation technology is around for decades, with widely supported standards and a number of open-source servers available. Augmented Reality in the other hand sounds very challenging, due to image manipulation and dealing with an environment with limited resources (mobiles).
Am I missing something?
[1] http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/qq_china_im_web20.php
Also, his key point is "blame the system, not the people".
I also find fascinating that even Skype's business model seems to be P2P-driven: Skype seems to charge only for services that use the company's infrastructure, while P2P services (those that do not directly use Skype's servers) are free.
* Unfortunately internship does not reflect real work environment. In a "real job" there's always that 20% of stuff we hate to do but it needs to get done (this is also true in start-ups), while 80% is moderate-to-cool stuff. In an internship pretty much 100% sucks, but maybe you were expecting a lot more of cool stuff to do?
* It sounds like your supervisor didn't have enough time to handle/train you. Assigning work to new employees (not only interns) always require a certain amount of internal training. The job of an intern is not to complete work, but to learn. It looks like he asked you to see other employees so you could learn from them first, before getting more work. This is a common practice, it's called "shadowing". Did you learn anything from the employees you observed?
* The clothing and stuff... It's stupid but sometimes it's necessary to follow certain rituals so you "fit in" (that's also true for start-ups or any other social structure). Eventually you will earn the "privilege" to dress-up as you wish.
My point is that maybe there is an opportunity for such solution today. Instead of an expensive robot, one could hire a trusted person to hold a camera, so someone else could do the inspection remotely.
Would that be useful for your job?
http://silkroadintl.net/blog/2010/09/01/%e2%80%9cdoing-busin...
Note the amount of local knowledge required to make things happen. One cannot acquire that much knowledge with a webcam attached to a machine.
My point it that it's not just a matter of being physically somewhere, but also the context knowledge that matters.
I disagree. After all, Africa in Mandarin is feizhou, literally "wrong continent". (USA in the other hand is meiguo, or "beautiful country")
China is going to Africa for resources because that's the only place they can trade peacefully, without relying on the military, like the US does.
http://caderno.josesaramago.org/category/o-caderno-de-sarama...
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