mfrommil

Thanks. Didn't see that post yesterday before posting this one.

A "1 hour daily standup" is not agile. The point of a stand-up is just that... everyone can stand because the meeting is so short. Ideally 15 minutes max.

Calling bs on "uber as a company is very ethical" and "nothing nefarious is going on":

Spying on a journalist: http://www.businessinsider.com/ubers-new-york-manager-invest...

Tracking celebrities and sharing publicly: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/10/03/god-view-...

Hey Andrew,

Appreciate the thorough response. I definitely think you guys have a unique value proposition. I still wonder if it's enough to justify switching costs for a large enough # of customers (e.g. re-setup bill pays, stored cards on accts, etc) for one truly differentiating feature, but wish you guys best of luck with your launch!

If there's an annual fee, most customers expect either excellent rewards or top-tier customer service (e.g. amex). Hard to justify $50/yr for neither of these.

PCI deadline for US retailers to implement chip + pin is October 2015. Mentioned in the Home Depot link above

If you click through to EA's site - the catch is very apparent: new games aren't included: "If you’re an EA Access member, you can download upcoming EA games five days before the release date to play for a limited time."

"For a limited time" = play for a few days before the game comes out, then wait 3 months? 6 months? longer? for this year's game to be available on EA Access while being stuck with last year's game. EA was never going to cannibalize their top games' sales - just make their customers pay $5 / month to play for 5 days pre-launch.

Although having a 3% (or greater based on what happens in the future) shot at your startup becoming worth $100M has got to be significantly better than the odds of any other startup reaching a $100M valuation.

Lately there's been talks by high demand restaurants to charge a fee just to make a reservation. It will be interesting to see if Priceline pursues this as a revenue stream with OT.

Agreed. There may be cases where a hamburger menu makes sense, like a news app where you can switch between sections. The article shows a solution with the search bar moved to a more prevalent position and other menu options dropped to the bottom - this makes sense if users reach destination pages in the app via search. It's good to think about but I think the article missed the point of starting with the objectives first (customer's needs) and working backwards to find which menu layout is best.

"We recommend testing only one difference between the A and B groups. When there are several differences between test groups, it’s difficult to figure out which change impacted your engagement."

A/B testing may be better to figure out one specific aspect (time to send, sender name) but wouldn't multivariate testing make sense if you were looking for the best combination of those variables? i.e. if I wanted to find out that sending an email at 9pm, from a corporate account, with larger images is the best combination?

I'm interested to hear others' opinions on the pros/cons.

"no distractions, no internet"

I know there's browser plug-ins to turn off specific sites or the web as a whole... it would be interesting if microsoft included the functionality in office. Would have made for much more productive nights writing papers in college!

Would be great if the settings menu expanded with hovering instead of a click (similar to the 3 buttons on the bottom). It's far enough to the side that accidental hovers could be avoided, while saving a click.

I really like the transition from normal search -> images & videos.

Wish there was a way to have news embedded in search results similar to google, though.

I've always thought of upvote/downvote as a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" - do I like your comment?

Sounds like the new algorithm penalizes disrespectful/spammy comments, rather than the "difference in opinion" comments (which is good). Could a 3rd option be added to differentiate this, though? Have option for upvote, downvote, and mark as spam (I'm thinking a "no" symbol).

They can get it right (figure out how to increase order sizes, order frequency, margins, etc.) and then expand; or they can expand and try to figure all of those things out.

With their main business they chose to grow as fast as possible and are still figuring out profitability. When you're selling electronics with 50% markup that works. Groceries, which have <5% margins, not so much.

I think the point was "so simple a child could explain it".

Amazon needs to scale Fresh in order for it to be more successful. On a micro level, scaling could come in one of 2 ways: (1)increase order frequency or (2)average order size.

(1) Order frequency - Right now, a typical customer likely picks up groceries when they're out and it's convenient. This very well could be on the commute home from work, later at night, etc. With Dash sitting around the kitchen, Amazon has now created a very tangible reminder in the form of the Dash device to order your groceries, rather than waiting until it pops into your mind (and possibly not buying on Amazon).

(2) Average order size - As someone posted above, it takes 1 or 2 button clicks to reorder an item using Dash. Compared to the current way of online grocery shopping, Dash eliminates a lot of possibilities of forgetting to reorder something you intended to, because it is so simple. Compared to on the PC when you may forget to browse the snacks category, for example, and you forget to order chips and cookies. Way less likely to happen with Dash.

This doesn't address price concerns, but in terms of convenience for Amazon Fresh customers & increasing Fresh orders/order size, this seems like a massive win-win for Amazon and their customers.

Would be nice to see the "before and after" example of this after they do make the changes, and other customer feedback they used to make it.

Both Hotmail & Ironport reacted with a customer-centric focus (e.g. Hotmail: "How do we recover their emails? What else can we provide customers in the future? What steps will we take so this never happens again?")

I would guess a lot of companies in a WFIO situation that take a CYA approach rather than customer-first face a worse fate.

Don't even have to call it a "salespitch". A good product will sell itself. And it's quite clear a Tesla is a good product.

Considering Netflix comes out to $96/yr, $99 for Prime, with a comparable (albeit not quite as good) video library, along with shipping and the free ebook, it's still a deal.

And even if Amazon loses money on a Prime membership, there's been statistics about Prime customers spending over 2x as much annually then non-Prime customers.

I don't disagree with any of these comments... running employees into the ground for an extended period of time can't be good. Happy, motivated employees are crucial to the success of any company.

There's such a strong negative connotation to "burning out" in the article. If an employee puts in a solid 2-3 years and delivers great results for a company, "burns out", and then moves on to a new role or company, is that really that bad?

The company (in this case, Amazon) got great results from its employee, the employee had a good experience (and can leverage it to get a promotion, internally or externally).

I guess it depends on what employees are looking for in their career - to be the best they can be, or live a laid back lifestyle.

edit agree with the comments... this is a too simplified black/white comment. completely agree that finding the right balance between work/non-work on an individual basis is important.

I won't be surprised to see products like this grow into a huge industry. Just imagine... surgeons wearing Glass or a Glass-like device which can alert the surgeon to abnormalities while performing surgery. Or have a HUD for the surgeon to monitor all sorts of data while performing surgery.

What if a "normal" doctor could pull up a patient's information while chatting with them, and have the current chat (which usually goes something like: "Any new problems?" "No." "Started smoking recently?" "No.") transcribed to the patient's file. Way less clunky than reading through the manila envelope of charts.

Or have a small (?) next to it explaining in more detail what "remember me" actually does for anyone interested.

-Provides enough detail to answer anyone's questions about what it does -Doesn't clutter the overall UI

Looks like iOS gets a pretty significant market share boost from holiday sales. I wonder if that's Apple's plan for the future... maintain share for 9 months out of the year and sell as many as possible around Xmas.

Rather than flipping it up you could also slide it to the side. I like the idea of changing the appearance of Glass to let others know that it's off.

If I thought it could provide me value, free. If I thought the concept was interesting but questioned if it would actually be worth my time as a real product, $20 for a week of testing.