mailarchis

I had to look up Best Western on wiki. You are right. It is similar to Best Western Hotels.

I don't think Oyo subleases the rooms, but instead has some kind of revenue share agreement with the Hotels. One thing you need to consider is that that they partner with Hotels that are small and independent players and do not have their own brand.

I had a hard time understanding this analogy too from the title. The analogy is used in terms of the core/most important value proposition. For Uber, it is Predictabilty and for AirBnB Discovery.

In hospitality industry, the problem is not that of discovering hotels but that of having a consistent experience(predictability).

The way Oyo addresses that by having designated Oyo Rooms in partnered hotels which adhere to certain quality criteria like bedsheets, interior decor, toiletries etc.

So, if you book a Oyo Room in a Hotel A or a Oyo Room in Hotel B, the experience should be similar ideally.

I did check out stripe. Maybe this is something I should have added in Q. I don't live in US though I am building the app for customers in US and Stripe is not supported from where I am.

Just added.

Thanks for the pointer. What I really wanted to understand was do you need to have an incorporated company to offer a simple subscription service or you can offer it as an individual

You should definitely check out crowdflower.com we had been using them for image tagging tasks with great results. Plus they gave advanced features that help with quality control.

Search for jawed karims talk at CMU I guess. One of the key reasons of YouTube fast growth was the HTML snippet that you could embed in you MySpace page.

And INTJ are supposed to be one of the rarest personality type.

Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTJ

I did something similar few months. I've been developing webapps using django for a while now. But my frontend skills (html/css) had always been very rusty. I decided to improve it by building a personal website without using any frontend framework or doing any server side development.

It was an interesting exercise. The output is here - http://archisman.com/

Hi, I guess you can make your messaging more powerful if you add in an example automation code to show an use case.

It looks like a cool idea. All the best.

I struggled through the same thing for couple of months. Few things that helped me get back on track

1. Define your working hours and stick to it. Setup alarms and go to work at same time of the day every day.

2. Designated working place - If you are working from your home, try to setup a place in your house that you will use only for work. Don't use it for anything else. The way it worked for me was when I got to that place, I used to switch into work time mode and when I got out of it, I will switch back personal time mode.

3. Log your hours - Use something like toggl to log your hours for yourself. Track your working hours and if you are falling on the short end, you will make up for it by working on weekends. But eventually you will try logging consistently your work hours.

In the end, its matter of creating a habit.

mailchimp.com

Trilogy at one point of time was among fastest growing software companies. Its training program for new employees called Trilogy University was covered by HBR in one of their case studies [1].

One of the reasons why so many Trilogy alums have gone ahead to found their own startups is because Trilogy University in itself encourage entrepreneurial thinking. New grads who had joined Trilogy were given opportunity to form teams and pitch new business ideas to the CEO. Irrespective of the fact if the CEO liked the idea or not, you could go ahead and work on it. The goal somewhat ( maybe similar to YCombinator) was to have a working prototype with real users live by end of 3 months. And then the whole team decided which ideas were success and worth pursuing post the training program.

[1] - http://hbr.org/2001/04/no-ordinary-boot-camp/ar/1

Slightly tangent

the new ui has no modal popups. Its either a new page or the ui element slides from up , down or sides. It makes an interesting redesign.

I remember the 15 Year old me. I was an extremely introvert guy participating in school debate competitions for the first time. While I was speaking in front of the audience, my legs (hidden behind the dais) would be shaking (the first few times). Somehow, I learnt to control my fear of public speaking and manage to put my points across.

Courage (faking courage) is probably the strength to do a thing well without letting the fear of failing paralyzing you.

Your answers raises the question that how does a country with people from different ethnic background become a nation ?

So, can the Afghan issue be resolved by splitting the country ? And if yes, do the people of Afghanistan want that.

True.

Maybe, the small amount of money spend per person indicates that the government doesn't have sufficient money to invest in development of the infrastructure and human resources required for creating a developed economy.

If you look at South Africa's public debt, it is 43.3%[1] of their GDP. In contrast, Zambia's is 20%[2]. Maybe, what Zambia needs is to secure more loans from organizations like World Bank and invest

1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_South_Africa 2 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Zambia

I'm not an expert in economics, so maybe someone with a better understanding can weigh in.

But what I think the writer is trying to say here the economy (value of the total goods produced which is reflected in money circulated) is too small to support the population of zambia.

I guess this is the core reason

"It’s easy to paint all of the problems in Zambia with this brush, to talk about kleptocrats wringing their privilege for as much income, as many perks, as they can squeeze. But even if Zambia was run by a coalition of charitable technocrats and Mormon philanthropists, that wouldn’t solve the most fundamental problem of all: There simply isn’t that much money to go around. In 2011, Zambia spent a total of $4.3 billion running itself. Stretch that to cover every man, woman, and child, and it amounts to just $325 per person per year. That amount—less than a dollar per person per day—has to cover education, health care, infrastructure, law enforcement, foreign debt … everything."

Someone wise once said.... The journey is the reward.

All the best.

I remember a startup that had presented a similar app couple of years back at TC 50 (can't recall the name) it had also signed up a US west coast city as one of their customers. I found it as one of promising ideas of tat year.

[EDIT] this was it http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/15/tc50-citysourced-lets-you-r...

"The industry is struggling to find new COBOL programmers because few young programmers love the thought of maintaining decades-old enterprise systems where all data is global and GOTO is often the first choice in flow control."

A significant percentage of Freshers joining Indian it services companies like Infosys,tcs etc (who maintain such legacy systems) are trained in COBOL.

There is a bit of irony in the timing. Living Socials first product was visual bookshelf. They pivoted to daily deals business.

Fast forward 6 years, amazon acquires goodreads while all daily deal sites are struggling.

Well you are not taking into consideration google glass and self driving cars.

I guess the third approach breaks if one of the two numbers is 0

You should definitely pick up Marty Cagan's "Inspired - How to create products customers love". That is one of the best books I've read on Product Management

+1 carry a 3G dongle in case you need Internet on your laptop during power breakdowns.

Am guessing this is something to do with windows store.

"The belief in the development community is that Microsoft will make Windows 8 a closed system, an operating system that seeks to more stringently control, much in the way that Apple does with Mac OS X and the iOS platform. This would allow Microsoft to better monitor the quality of applications running on its platform, but it will also wall off the most widely used operating system in the world from myriad developers. PC game makers use Windows because of the openness of the platform and its ubiquity. If Microsoft takes that openness away, what will developers do?"

Ref http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/blizzard-agrees-with-...

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