timedoctor

It's amazing the types of advances that are still posible in material sciences. Not sure that I'm skeptical, I tend to trust that Lockheed would not come up with a press release unless they were fairly sure about the technology.

I wonder if there are a bunch of advances such as this that are developed but not commercialised?

I think the premise of the article is that goods will be extremely cheap to produce.

It's not as simple as that. We need to make them extremely cheap to produce, for people to find them, select them, and distribute them.

I think the distribution is one of the hardest challenges ... how do you automate distribution and have a robot take the place of a UPS worker. I thought about it the other day. We already have self driving cars, so why not self driving UPS vehicles?

I think it is possible (but not in the next 10 years) to have a logistics company that delivers items to the consumer's door using robots. Self driving delivery van, robot gets out of the van, goes up to the door and rings the doorbell, asks for the person. Signature not necessary (they just take a photograph of the person accepting the item).

The problem is that privacy is better in EVERY way: 1. Faster to download the content 2. Much wider availability of content 3. Cheaper (free) 4. Easier to search and find the content that you want (for people who know how to pirate effectively, for those that don't it's actually quite hard to search and find the content and that's one of the main reasons why piracy hasn't dominated more than it already has) 5. Better formatting of the content (easier to manipulate, download it and consume it how you want it)

Personally I would always pay for content if it's available and easy to download. Unfortunately it's not. There are significant restrictions in what you can purchase online and download.

Seems like a super specific product, is there enough of a market for it? I do like it compared with the average website tour, but seems like they should create something more comprehensive somehow.

Works great for me. No issues with Chase. You need to come to the US to set up the account.

Chase and Citibank both have good online wire transfers. Wells Fargo do not have online wire transfers.

I have had a full time VA for many years now and she does all sorts of things for me, including purchasing items using my credit cards, research in buying a new couch ... and on-going research and promotional work for our business.

I'm hesitant about the concept of having multiple different people working on your tasks. I think this is ok for standardised tasks where there is a process that is followed every time. It's difficult if you have varied tasks. How can you develop trust in the relationship with a VA?

I agree that it's possible to scale a large company working remotely. I think in the next 20 years we are going to see some significant breakthroughs in the scale of companies that operate virtually. I think we will see companies with 10,000 employees that are 90% virtual (working from home or meeting in an office only one day per week). The whole notion of driving to work each day to sit in an office is such an antiquated 20th century concept.

Most people who think they work 50-60 hours actually work 40 hours. Most people who think they work 40 hours actually work 30 or less. I've seen that for myself, working very hard from morning to mid-night taking breaks only to eat and tracking every minute, adds up to only 50 hours of REAL work per week (not counting Saturday Sunday). People work a lot less than they think they do. Track your EXACT time worked and see how much you really worked ... I've been doing this for at least the last year.

I have a permanent side effect from LASIK which is dry eyes. it's supposed not to last more than a couple of weeks, but it's essentially permanent in my case.

This is combined with more people working from home ... more people ordering on the Internet. Generally the use of cars is going to continue to go down substantially.

Completely agree. Using starred emails as a to do list is not effective because you do not have an easy way to prioritise these actions.

Disagree with this article. I think the no 1 way to hire a great hacker is to see them code (either in real life through pair coding or through a coding test or through seeing what they have personally achieved).

Cultural fit is important also but it's a very vague notion. It's so easy to say that someone is a good cultural fit if you like them. That does not make them a great developer. That makes them likeable. Not denying that this is important, but it's down the list, it's not the number one factor to consider when hiring someone.

Have been working remotely for over 6 years and all of our team are remote. I think there is a massive change coming as businesses start to adapt to the idea of working remotely. It's just the beginning of the trend.

Looks awesome, seems like it totally fits the needs of shoppers, does it work for retailers? Not sure, but there could be a lot of people that will use it to get a discount for something they were going to purchase anyway?

I've been working at home and travelling the world for over 5 years with our whole team completely distributed, managing over 30 people remotely for all of this time. I've seen it doesn't work for some people. If the person doesn't have a partner, is a bit too introverted, they can get into an anti-social pattern and not communicate enough, not get out of the house.

My experience is that this is the minority, maybe 5% maximum 10% of people. The majority love working from home and the benefits of greater flexibility and not having to travel to and from work each day more than compensate for any downside.

A big factor if you are trying to succeed while doing it alone is can you hire a great team to complement your skills. This usually costs more money in the beginning stages in salaries than having a co-founder. It means the founder must have some money behind them and usually means they must have succeeded in business before.

Hope you like the infographic. The guys at infoactive are launching a startup with this type of interactive infographics. Pretty much all infographics I've seen previously have static data.

I think you could take this concept a lot further, more complex data interaction, and the ability to display a lot of data and organize it in useful and interesting ways.

Their pricing strategy is simple - make the maximum profit possible. Apple is a premium product and the upgrades are there to get more money out of the customer. The relationship with the value received is tenuous.

We're just starting as a competitor (www.Staff.com) and kind of starting in the same way by helping companies to find staff with personal interaction. The competitive advantage that we are focussing on is: 1. Focus on full time hires with technology and staff that are oriented to working full time for one company. One of the issues with oDesk is that great freelancers are in high demand working for several clients and so are not focussed on your work. On the other side of the coin, most freelancers on the platform do not earn enough to make ends meet, because they only get a couple of jobs for $2 per hour to try and get started and they never get traction 2. More of a managed solution where we help companies to find the right staff member. This is possible because we are focussed only on full time hires.

Then as a second stage of the business build a platform that has some advantages over oDesk and other existing remote staffing platforms.

Yes I'm using the new IOS maps, and yes it's pretty bad. Searched for a bar I wanted to go to in my city and it wanted to send me to Italy (other end of the earth).

Would love to revert to IOS 5 if it's possible

Not checking email first thing is really hard to do! I manage to do it (just) but it requires an immense amount of discipline and easy to slip back into bad habits.

This is essentially the luxury of a successful company. I think they take time off because they are successful. They are not successful because they take time off.

Really loving braintree, haven't checked out stripe, but I think for what we are doing braintree are totally awesome. There has to be a reason why basecamp and others are using them for example. I guess everyone has their reasons to like or dislike something, and valid to have both opinions but we love it.

Seems like a pretty light innovation to me. I think a more important chat innovation is to know (for sure) if the person is actually online and working versus, online and not working, versus not online at all. Just noticing if the person is browsing the web versus on email is not enough information to know this. For example you can be on a word document creating your wedding invitations or for work. The app will have no clue. It needs to be an accurate record if the person is working or now. Then if you have that accurate record you can do a whole lot more with it as well (know exact times that you start and stop working).

The other potential chat innovation for business is having the teams configured ONE time by the company admin and then all team members are instantly in the correct teams and each person doesn't have to configure their teams.

Also better search of previous team discussions.

I'm guessing the business model will evolve :)

I think this forgets the MOST important point of the name. Easy to remember and easy for people to spread it virally. For example, facebook.com or even "thefacebook.com" is not too hard to remember.

I have a systematic way to evaluate this by actually telling over 100-200 people via an audio or video the domain name and then asking them later to remember and write down the name. You will be shocked at how difficult it is for people to remember most names and also at how easily they misspell.

I also totally disagree that the .com name does not matter. It matters a huge amount for referral dynamics, for the brand. The companies listed in the article were mostly forced to buy the .com name at great expense. If it didn't matter they wouldn't have bothered.

In these cases listed in the article the companies succeeded DESPITE the handicap of not having a great .com domain.

It's better to start with a cheap domain to save costs if you don't have the money, but if you can get a memorable .com domain then great.

Whatever you do don't get a .co domain. These are proven by overstock to be total duds (they tried to launch o.co and after a huge and expensive launch they realised that a large percentage of people will remember it as .com and they lost all that type in traffic). A .net .me .biz is much better than a .co

One thing to consider is that you are competing with the entire world. So average developers in the US will have trouble. Doesn't matter so much if you start at 30, matters more how good you are in comparison with younger (or older) men and women.

Building my entire business around the idea of remote teams and there are few valid reasons why you should have an office and hire locally versus hire in any city or any country around the world

I have two reports of people having their accounts frozen for 6 months at paypal for no apparent reason, no recourse and no explanation.

I also have severe problems paying with paypal. Why is it that I can pay on amazon, apple, expedia etc etc very easily, never have a problem, but when I try to enter my credit card on paypal they do not allow the payment?

And yes from personal experience braintree is a million times better than paypal.

Creating jobs for 10 US citizens is a ridiculous requirement. Creating 1-2 jobs would be more reasonable.

Also US residency and citizenship is such not a wonderful asset. I for one would never want citizenship because it means that you now have to pay taxes on your worldwide income, even if you do not live in the US.

So if you earn $1000 per year and you live in a developing country, the right to live in the US is very valuable. If you earn $100k per year or higher the right to live in the US or to get US citizenship becomes a lot less interesting.

I'm basing my entire business around this idea of hiring people remotely, and now have a new startup staff.com which is about hiring people from any location. LOTS of problems to be solved with remove hiring and remote working:

1. Are the team actually working each day (many people need the discipline of coming into the office) 2. Are they moonlighting with multiple companies at the same time 3. How do you get a sense that you are really part of one team, a feeling of connection 4. Communication issues related to working remotely 5. Hiring effectively without actually meeting in person 6. Maintaining a sense of team and having people feel like they are part of a team (even when not meeting in person). This is very important as part of maintaining a sense of loyalty and connection with team members.

My personal experience in managing over 50 staff members in 9 countries is that all of these problems CAN be solved, but it takes work. My ideal situation is to meet 4 times per year in person, but sometimes this is difficult when staff are really in completely different locations.