Phablet Murse

@wsj:

A survey by the Shanghai research firm Hurun Report shows that 64% of China's rich—defined as those with assets of more than $1.6 million—are either emigrating or planning to.

...

Politics, though, isn't the most important issue on the mind of Ms. Sun, a 34-year-old Beijing resident who's bailing out.  The main reason she's planning to pack up: Her 6-year-old daughter is asthmatic, and Beijing's chronic pollution irritates the girl's lungs. "Breathing freely is a basic requirement," she says. The girl also has a talent for music, art and storytelling that Ms. Sun fears China's test-driven schools won't nurture.

Chinese immigrating to Vancouver want exactly what we want.  Health, safety, opportunity and a good education for their children.

@ttunguz:

The difference between consumer and the SaaS startups' effectiveness leveraging mobile app store distribution hinges on the end user. In the case of consumer companies, the end user is the buyer. In SaaS, the end user is very infrequently the buyer. This is why mobile SaaS companies must employ a two-step value proposition, first convincing the end user to download and use the app, and second, using this data to initiate a sales process with the decision-maker within the enterprise. This second step, at least to date, has been the limiting factor in using mobile-app distribution to drive SaaS company growth.

@elonmusk:

We move very fast at Intercom, so it is critical to the success of our product that we have a deliberate, thoughtful and comprehensive design process. That we are solving real problems, that we are fully understanding them, and that the likelihood of our design work being successful is very high.

...

In that light I’d like to outline how we design at Intercom, so we can collectively think about and refine our process. As always, let’s discuss in person, and question why we do what we do.

Understand the problem

Understand what a good outcome looks like, and how to measure it

Don’t make any assumptions around user behaviour or data

Research how other products solve similar problems

Decide whether our requirements are different

Come up with many ways we could solve the problem

Iterate, iterate, iterate

Work systematically from level to level, don’t mix levels

Optimise for simplicity

@trengriffin:

1. “Percentage margins are not one of the things we are seeking to optimize. It’s the absolute dollar free cash flow per share that you want to maximize, and if you can do that by lowering margins, we would do that.  So if you could take the free cash flow, that’s something that investors can spend. Investors can’t spend percentage margins.”

...

@fabulavancouver:

The current line has a capacity for 6,100 people per hour per direction.

At the latest count (yes, they go in and do physical counts), the line is carrying a maximum of 5,500 pphpd

@GFontenot:

Despite goaltending’s outsize impact on the outcomes of hockey games, it’s extremely hard to say exactly which goalies are truly good or bad at their jobs.

...

@gt:

@timechange:

Here are some lessons I’ve learned that I hope will help wearables entrepreneurs in this field avoid common pitfalls along their journey — lessons that are also well-suited for connected devices startups in general:

Assembling a killer team

Telling a story, building a community and leveraging crowdfunding

Figuring out manufacturing, pricing, ongoing demand-gen and distribution

Understanding the role of data, users and metrics

@cdixon:

This is a worrisome trend for the web. Mobile is the future. What wins mobile, wins the Internet. Right now, apps are winning and the web is losing.

Moreover, there are signs that it will only get worse. Ask any web company and they will tell you that they value app users more than web users. This is why you see so many popups and banners on mobile websites that try to get you to download apps. It is also why so many mobile websites are broken. Resources are going to app development over web development. As the mobile web UX further deteriorates, the momentum toward apps will only increase.

The slice of the pie that mobile browsers are getting is smaller.  However, the entirety of the pie is much larger.

It's important to realize that native Apps use HTTP to make network requests.  They also display HTML in web views when scrolling performance is not an issue.

It's displaying HTML in a browser that is lagging.  For this to improve:

Monetization in the browser needs to improve.  Ads suck.  Saas works.

Browsers need to catch up to native Apps with respect to accessing the Address Books, accelerometer, etc

@VentureBeat:

Tomorrow, Uber will launch an on-demand courier service in Manhattan, allowing users to request item pickup and delivery via a smartphone app.

According to a job listing obtained by VentureBeat, Uber plans to pay bike couriers between $20 and $30 per hour for “on-demand deliveries.” Uber plans to give couriers a free iPhone 4S, allowing them to “receive pickup requests from nearby customers.”

A program just launched by Boston is betting it's a significant amount. Prescribe-a-Bike, as it's being called, will allow doctors at Boston Medical Center to write low-income patients prescriptions for a one-year membership to Hubway, the city's bike-sharing system, for just $5. That’s $80 less than the usual charge for an annual subscription to the service.

@CodingHorror:

Call me crazy, but I think if we’re going to talk about hiring the best talent available, we should actually try to do that. This means letting go of the idea, at least in IT work, that people need to be physically present for any meaningful work to occur. There’s a better way.

@NateSilver538:

My purpose here is not to weigh in on the ethics of Eich’s resignation or the protests of his appointment (see Andrew Sullivan and Will Oremus for different views on those topics). But I can provide some context about just how unusual Eich’s financial support of Proposition 8 was in Silicon Valley.

...

You can see the trendy neighborhoods in the heart of the city are dominated by iPhone. The southern areas, less so.

The maps illustrate a debate among app developers and mobile tech execs about the apparent socioeconomic divide between users of the two largest mobile platforms in the world, Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.

My experience is that people pick the Nexus5 over the iPhone5/S because of the $350 to $650 price point difference.