Operated with food delivery robots for two years in a major downtown city area. City councils were excited but they can't accommodate as much as school councils though.

Also fun fact, the robot companies are usually contracted and dealing with the food service providers to the college than to the college themselves.

Glad I'm not the only one

What's cool also is that this is from the West African tech scene.

Busted! Curious what gave it away, my username?

4th link to blog has a link to homepage. Homepage lists country in the footer.

Ah indeed ;)

that's pretty good that someone went past your original link and looked at more of what you were doing. looks like the effort pays off!

Indeed; I didn't expect this level of interest, to be honest. The HN demographics didn't seem to match my target market.

Awesome! You should be proud of this. I grew up next door in Ghana and I am delighted that someone from Togo is doing this. Well done.

Thanks tchalé ;) Btw, my parents never managed to decide if they were Togolese or Ghanaian

Is there actually an international West Africa tech scene? Or is it nation by nation?

Mostly nation by nation, but key hubs like Nigeria/Ghana (English) and Senegal/Ivory Coast (French) draw other countries in, due to the presence of a larger pool of investors.

I found a book teaching HTML at a library somewhere in 1995. It was in a visual format explaining what the markups do.

My favorite was the one that made words blink.

I typed things into Notepad, meticulously tabbing and aligning the little tags to make sure it's okay.

Next year I stumbled upon a Taiwanese website somehow, with a call to action for submissions to their design contest.

I made something and sent it. For some miracle I won. They called my jr. high school for it too for some reason and got confused when I answered thinking I was a student in a fancy college in the Americas.

For the award ceremony my mom had to go accept. She was on the way home grocery shopping and didn't understand what the Internet or World Wide Web was. They congratulated her with her shopping bags in hand.

What a wild 30 years to the whole world getting connected.

That's Bing Copilot and it's still not that impressive, it's just search engine with Clippy then.

Google can't change for now, in doing so they undermine all the AdWords accounts, the real customers to Google, paying six figures to stay on top of SERPs.

But the other competitors can and will.

So it goes

In short: a chat bot is not AI.

Xbox, Surface. Holo didn't go far. May return back to mobile in some form soon.

Services, and their sales team, are still Microsoft's strong point.

Apple seeing its services grow and is leaning in on it now.

The question is whether Apple eats services faster than Microsoft eats into hardware.

Xbox and Surface have been around a long time as product categories. Xbox isn't even the premier device in its segment.

Highly doubt MS will ever be successful on mobile... their last OS was pretty great and they were willing to pay devs to develop, they just couldn't get it going. This is from someone who spent a ton of time developing on PocketPC and Windows Mobile back in the day.

Products are not the reason for their resurgence.

Apple makes a ton in services, but their R&D is heavily focused on product and platform synergy to that ecosystem extremely valuable.

Microsoft grinds constantly and consistently though, sprinkled with some monopolistic tendencies now and then to clinch a win.

I think the grind from Windows CE to Windows Phone is just a blip to them for now.

MS products all suck. They only survive because they throw billions at them and dont care about profitability.

Microsoft is still the same old Microsoft

Afaict, Windows Phone mostly failed because of timing. In the same way that XBox mostly succeeded because of timing. (In the sense that timing dominated the huge amount of excellent work that went into both)

Microsoft is a decent physical product company... they've usually just missed on the strategic timing part.

It's not a question of timing, but of Microsoft's brand image (Internet Explorer) and the fact that Android was already open source.

Timing was definitely an issue - first Windows Phone came 3 years after iOS and 2 after Android. AFA the product itself, I think the perception it needed to overcome was more PocketPC/Windows Mobile having an incredibly substandard image in the market after the iOS release which seemed light years ahead, esp. since MS had that market to themselves for so many years.

That said, it got great reviews and they threw $$ at devs to develop for it, just couldn't gain traction. IME it was timing more than anything and by the time it came to market felt more reactionary than truly innovative.

"Open source" in the sense there was open source. Which you could use if you were willing to jettison Maps et al.

Given dog eat dog of early Android manufacturers, most couldn't afford to recreate Google services.

By this I mean that Microsoft had the positioning of an iPhone in a not-so-great version. Where as Android relied on the "Open source" and free side for manufacturers to adapt to their phones, even if Google's services remained proprietary.

Can we really talk about timing, when it's above all a problem of a product that didn't fit the market?

Airbnb hosts do this.

An engineering friend of mine has documented and labeled every aspect of his vacation rental in Hawaii.

The only thing is, it's styled the same as the 1980s terminal systems he worked on down to the embossed black tape labels that gets attached to every switch, knob, and dial.

Treat your house like a black box.

Just thinking about those labels made me flash back to the 1980s. I hated the embossed black tape label aesthetic.

You built Patreon, even that stock photos carousel you have above the fold is ripped from patreon.com but the rest of isn't even built out.

So yeah, you niched down to say creators and IRL tasks, tossed in some sense of community activism.

Well, this is an example of how it really is about ideas and not just execution to reach success.

This is a great idea. Who hadn't thought of some utopian altruism in the middle of a global crisis?

But it's not a good idea. Because you don't have the means to get traction because it's a two sided platform play that without critical mass will not lead to further utility. And because it's merely but a singular use case out of multiple for the larger entrenched competitor.

You need more usage to even build your way into success and you don't have usage because... while this is a great idea it's not a good idea.

But now we're here.

You want to know what to do?

1. Highlight user stories.

Find the most interesting one, make content, share. Segment on a morning infotainment news? Blog articles on guest writing platforms? Sappy robot voice TikTok videos? Reddit?

2. Quit and add this to your portfolio.

Your friends and families don't want to be spammed with this. Don't be weird about it.

Health insurance is a coupon code you subscribe and pay for every month.

Except coupons actually lower your bill.