vtail

James - that's pretty interesting. Could you please share what SW (or other tools) did you use to train for dual-n-back?

In Russia, where there is a similar regulation, the solution is simple: find a homeless person with a passport, pay him to register a new mobile phone number under his name. There are also companies selling already registered phone numbers.

Or, you know, the childless old people can talk to each other and provide emotional companionship in an "old" way, from the previous age before all these modern economic inventions.

That's a GREAT question. Information Technology is $5.6T market, and telecommunications services is another $1.8T [1]. Uber and AirBnB, which I believe ARE tech companies, are under $90B combined, so ~2% of IT sector.

SpaceX is aerospace: ~$12B valuation vs ~$600B Aerospace & Defense industry size, and Tesla is automotive, $28B vs ~$750B Auto + components market.

Note that Uber, AirBnB, SpaceX and Tesla are probably the biggest unicorns out there.

But you are raising an important point - many industries will be redefined when new competitors are using IT much more heavily. Still, that growth mostly comes from existing players, and I believe the growth of the IT sector itself is limited now.

[1] https://eresearch.fidelity.com/eresearch/markets_sectors/sec...

edit: typos, minor clarifications.

Sure, but important difference is that 10-100 people startup that raised $300m behaves way differently than an internal department of a major tech firm that has decided to invest into a side project: authority to make decisions, willingness to take on risk, speed of innovation - everything is very different between the two.

Of course - most of what I wrote is an opinion shared by many people, I don't want to claim originality here :).

A related anecdote - at my previous job, I was at an annual sales conference event, where Mr. Christensen was an invited speaker. Both before and after his speech, the management kept bragging about "how unique we are", "how fat our margins are", and "how none of our low-cost competitors could match our offering", despite real mid-to-long term danger to their core business, completely ignoring the innovators dilemma, or hoping that it's not applicable to them. It was almost painful to watch. My prediction is that my old company will get disrupted and ceased to play such an important role in just 5-7 years.

According to Wikipedia[1], Intel set aside "$300m over 3-4 years" to invest in Ultrabooks, so $100m/year. Contrast that to ~$8B they spend on R&D each year[2]. So it was a relatively small bet for them.

I'm not saying tech companies never invest in anything outside of their core products. It's just often those projects are given low internal priority precisely because their (presumed) impact to the bottom line will be small.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrabook [2] https://ycharts.com/companies/INTC/r_and_d_expense

edit: typos

Expect the same fate for many more tech companies.

Although not many people realize, tech is a _mature_ sector of the U.S. economy now - it grows at about 3% a year, pretty much in line with GDP. But the perception is different - just ask your friends - and the reason for this is that there are highly visible _pockets of growth_, like Uber/SpaceX/name-your-favorite-unicorn, and people often extrapolate their growth to the rest of the industry.

Now what happens with many tech companies is that they often have a product with exceptional margins and double-digit growth rate, and it makes sense to invest all the available resources into it - better from ROIC perspective - ignoring all the alternatives which either lack volume or high margin to look attractive. This inevitably leads to problems once your exceptional product stops growing, and you realize you have barely invested in anything else.

Just much like Intel with x86 and ARM chips, or Qualcomm, or EMC, or RIM, ... - the list goes on and on.

Even when you look at Google, most of their resources are invested into search/ad business, so when that's stops growing - or, rather, they got all the share from the TV and start growing at a GDP rate - they will be in the same boat.

Edit: typos.

Can you say in which countries?

Note that Ireland case happened long time before: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/31/judge-rules-that-mi...

"The Microsoft case is believed to be the first time that an American company has fought against a domestic search warrant for data stored overseas."

You mentioned Palantir's talk at GovCon. Do you know if it's available online?

Yes, but everything other than HRM is available in the vivid it itself.

I used to be a Fitbit fan, but now I switched to Garmin Vivofit (and later Vivofit 2) and never looked back. My data is open, I have a battery that lasts a year+(!), a watch and an HR monitor (with a strap) in one device.

As a non-native English speaker myself, I agree with GP. I have a bunch "English Vocabulary in Use" books of various levels which I almost never open because, you know, it's hard to carry it around with you.

$14.99 seems to be a right price, too.

Here is another idea/fun experiment: try to express your idea in:

- 5 words

- 1 sentence

- 1 paragraph

- 3 paragraphs

Adding constraints like that really help you focus on what's important. For example, does "Lightweight" section belong to the introduction, or is it an implementation detail? Should you move screenshots up on the page above the "fold line"? etc. etc.

Thanks - it does help. So now I have a better understanding what it does - if I were to express my understanding in a single sentence, it would be something like "Mjolnir allows you to script Apple mouse events or system dialogs in Lua and assign them to a hotkey - no need to use Apple C API".

Again, if you target Mac power users (which is the right market you should probably target - much bigger than just developers), I would emphasize higher-level stuff you can do with Mjolnir and ease of use comparing to AppleScript.

For some inspiration, go to App Store and search for "Automator" - you'll see several bundles that help people automate programs like Adobe Illustrator, etc.

Just my 2 cents. Good luck!

Congratulations on releasing Mjolnir!

Here is some feedback: I have never heard of Mjolnir, or Hydra, before. I visited the page you linked and skimmed through. Here is what I learnt:

- That it's a "Lightweight automation and productivity power-tool for OS X"

- How to try it out

- How to uninstall it, or install it to $HOME

- How to install it's doc sets

- How to work with modules

- FAQ on some very technical questions

- Some high-level phylosophical comparison with other apps ("Mjolnir is more modularized, Slate is more all-in-one")

- Thanks, technical changes, license etc.

I still have no idea what is it, what problems could it solve and what are some typical examples of automation, apart from a single paragraph"start writing some fun staff" in "Try it out" section.

I'm certainly interested in automating tasks on my Mac, but after reading the landing page I have no idea what kinds of tasks it could be. Is it better that Automator? How does it compare? Is it better then writing shell scripts? etc.

If I were you, I would spend 70% of the page to explain what someone can accomplish with Mjolnir and why they should care, and 30% (or less) on the technical stuff. May be I'm not an intended audience.

Why not buy a Mac Mini?

At the same time, while they spent $1.7 of S&M expenses to generate $1 in revenue in 2012-13, they decreased this to just $1.37 in 2014, so that's an improvement given that S&M is 2/3rds of their operating expenses.

> we grew from 369 employees as of January 31, 2012 to 972 employees as of January 31, 2014

What stops you from encrypting the body of the message on you own computer and use USB stick to just copy over an encrypted file?

Not sure if the acquisition makes strategic sense for Dropbox, but at least I have some confidence that Mailbox wouldn't simply disappear: Dropbox core product has a freemium model, and they are very successful company.

What about bypassing an electric meter to connect to the grid directly?

Re: 6 - I should also say that to "give the TSA the boot", it is the US government who should stick up for its customers and end this security theater.

Internet access on board of a flying plane is non trivial and certainly doesn't come free: you need to install and maintain equipment on board, maintain a network of ground stations, write and debug some software, pay money to other internet providers etc.

With relatively small number of paying customers (yet), you have to keep prices high to maintain the profitability of your business.

Think about this: if nobody pays, they will close this service. Just like the bakery will close if nobody pays for the bread.

"This bakery's bread is OKish, but $10 is too much to pay for a loaf. But I found a cool trick: when you're offered to take a free sampler, you can actually take the whole lot while the owner is not watching.

I sent him couple of postcards telling about this but he never responded, so enjoy this free bread while you can!"

I'm amazed by some of the comments like "Wow great article. I knew there must be a way to avoid paying." and by author's apparent believe that contacting the support several times via twitter and not getting a response morally justifies sharing his recipe with other people and wishing them "Happy “free” surfing, for now anyway".

Stealing is stealing, no matter what "justification" one may have about high prices.

edit: grammar

I'm wondering (honest question) why do you believe that Gogo business model is clunky?

Why this is even on the front page?

Someone who doesn't have patience decides that selling apps for money is not for them. Fine.

Entrepreneurship requires a lot of hard work and patience. You need to be resourceful.[1] Big news.

1: http://www.paulgraham.com/relres.html

Stanford is an outlier as they are very entrepreneur focused. I believe the number is much smaller for other top schools.