October 2009
20 posts
The great taxi app wars
A few days ago I did a post about how much I loved the taxi app on my iPhone called Taxi Magic. I immediately got a comment from my friend Ken Berger, about another taxi app that his friend John Wolpert is working on called Cabulous.
After the comment from Ken I ended up receiving a comment from a few other people talking about Cabulous (including the founder John Wolpert). I also received a...
“We could also be seeing the power of something less benign: cross-subsidization”
– Albert at Union Square Ventures tweeted this out yesterday in response to Google’s turn by turn directions announcement. He also did a much better and detailed post about this subject then the one I did below.
I believe that Google’s cross-subsidization of things like voice, maps,...
Taking taxi's to the next level
When we started traveling to Mountain View for Ditech Mark told me about an App on the iPhone called TaxiMagic.
In certain cities (San Francisco is one of them) you load the app and it will bring up the nearest Taxi’s to you. You can then book a Taxi through the app. About 30 seconds after booking it will confirm the taxi that is coming to you and exactly how far it is away (even shows it...
User Interface Obsession.
I saw this post from Bijan a few weeks ago and it really stuck in my mind. If you watch most VC’s you will see that they stick to very close verticals and usually crowd around the same ideas, like social networking. What was great about the below post is how you could take webby knowledge and apply it to things like a microwave. The great thing about microwave’s is that they are...
“Building or creating an object through a has_one association that contains...”
– -Nathaniel Bibler on the official Ruby on Rails blog.
Luciano is one of our team members and I could not be happier to see that he is being credited for assisting the furthering of rails. Opensource is something that Mark and I take very seriously and participating in the communities is such a...
Amazon is a incredible business, but...
Maybe I am just more sensitive to stock prices now that I am working at a public company. Amazon’s stock is shooting up over the last few days, the chart looks like the 1999-2000 days. Just look at the price/earnings that Amazon is selling at compared to some other incredible companies:
Amazon- 72
Apple- 32
Google- 36
Microsoft- 18
What the above means is that for every dollar makes,...
WatchI don’t know what it is about this week but I keep finding videos that I like. This one was done by The Really Mobile Project on their experience with the Nokia Ovi app store. Usually I am less of a fan of video and more of a text based post but this video might change my mind on that.
Who works for who?
I am currently on the runway in Newark airport in a frozen mode because of “VIP’s” (not the president) flying out of the city. I understand security but there has to be a better way of moving govermet officials around then closing down streets and airports at peak travel times on a weekday. This has a real cost to the economy.
Update- It was the president, I forgive him…
“But there I was, eating lunch at Saravana Bhavan in Sunnyvale (ahh, the things...”
– Chris Douvos
There are a few major problems that I think the US and Obama administration should be focused on. Getting brains to come back to the US and allowing them to stay here is one of them.
update- After this post went up, TechCrunch did this one about the startup visa idea which I support...
Is Yelp's success its demise?
I was a huge fan of Yelp. Being a traveler who really dislikes chain restaurants I have been a Yelp addict for the last 2-3 years. I remember last year I was on a business trip in Detroit and Yelp found us one of the best BBQ restaurants. One that I would have never found any other way.
However in the last 6 months I have started to get less and less out of Yelp. Then when I was in Palo Alto...
