This is so cool. It lets Facebook amass a massive amount of data about customer whereabouts and whatabouts. The incentive for merchants is quite compelling. However, Facebook needs to do a damn good job to convince the customers to use it.
Really? I don't think they do at all. I know for certain that if my wife were at Starbucks and had the option of "sign onto wifi using Facebook" that she would happily do it.
I don't know about that. Looks at Google DNS. The convenience of circumventing regional restrictions on things like The Pirate Bay often are enough for people to convert.
I think it's going to go down rather well, assuming the shop owners have the savvy to implement it.
Very informative. We are a payments company (http://www.juspay.in) based out of India. We came to similar conclusion just after the inception of the company. Instead of building a payment gateway, we built a solution that acts as a wrapper on top of payment processors and positioned our product as a specialization in cards processing. And today, some of the biggest companies in India are using our product (1-click checkout).
Our positioning gives us better margins than processors and the icing on the cake is that we are also not exposed to fraud related risks. Settlement process in India is cumbersome and mostly manual. Being a completely engineering team, we are happy that we aren't dragged into settlements and related issues as well.
One of the big downsides for us is that we don't get to have a big float like the processors.
As having having used several at different scales in both tech and business capacities, general feedback on payment gateways is:
- developer support (libraries, examples to get apps going quickly and sandbox APIs)
- clear communication of due-diligence process for new accounts
- advance notification for production changes
- discussion of security and audit standards (makes customer due-diligence, internal selling easier)
Stripe and others shake things up a little whereas traditional US/multinational basically didn't care about anyone, especially customer service unless you happen to be a Fortune 100 that can yell at their mgmt at a high level.
A vague generalization. Can you conclusively say that all the YCombinator (or any other similar incubator) startups are groundbreaking innovations?
Given the transformation that technology is undergoing, there are too many low hanging fruits to be ignored. And if you try to define "startup", then you are already on a slippery slope.
Do note that I never said a startup has to be a groundbreaking innovation, nor that people shouldn't take advantage of low hanging fruits. Just that an SEO consultant not call himself an entrepreneur or a group of freelancers call themselves a startup.
This is very good! I work for a payments service provider in India. And at our company, we have something similar but not so detailed as this. Ours is built on top of Pingdom - http://status.juspay.in/.
The bottomline here is that transparency is a virtue. And this is something that is all the more important for a company operating in the payments industry.
Why such a great support to Apple even when it is so evident that the mini iPad is a first generation product? I think it has become fashionable to praise Apple even when it falls short and bash others even when they exceed expectations. This is analogous to transforming from fanboyism to fanaticism.
I hail from a place where the worth of 200$ or 300$ for a tablet cannot be justified, where we demand true value for money. So I guess I can look at these without any bias.
I am quite confident that Apple's iPad mini will have better resolution (more pixels, to be clear) in its next version. And you will find yourself saying "yes, more pixels is better".
Perhaps, Amazon is not the greatest competitor that Apple will face. Perhaps, it would be Samsung or Google. Amazon's products will not match Apple's perceived quality. Yet, these things do not change the fact that Amazon's price point would drive down the profitability of Apple products. And that, Amazon's price point will look attractive to certain segment of people (at least those like me, who believe in value for money).
> I hail from a place where the worth of 200$ or 300$ for a tablet cannot be justified, where we demand true value for money. So I guess I can look at these without any bias.
No, you just have a different bias.
If a $100 difference in price is a lot to you but it's not a lot to me, then your definition of value and mine are likely to be very different.
Value for money is tied into a whole load of things including how hard I had to work to get that money, what else that money might be spent on, what the improvement you get for that money is worth and so on.
These things are all relative - when it comes to matters of opinion, it's best not to claim no bias, it's easier just to state your positions and assumptions and let others factor them in.
Ideas are indeed worthless today. But to believe that completely is stupidity.
Internet, as of today, is a gold rush. Anyone worth his programming skill can work on an idea and get funded. But then, with the passing of time, all the low hanging fruits will be gone. Once we reach that point, good ideas will become scarce. Great ideas may not even emerge. VC funding will be gone too. Perhaps, in a decade or so.
Internet based companies are extremely easy to replace today. A chilling fact but true. Compare this with firms like Citibank, British Petroleum, etc. They have been here for decades and will be here. The same cannot be said for companies like Facebook and to a large extent Apple.
As long as new technology emerges, new opportunities will emerge with it. There's also reason to believe that technological change is accelerating, leading to ever more possible great ideas.
Your 'perhaps in a decade or so there will be no more great ideas' reminds me of many failed predictions about the saturation of technology.
Could it be that he got fired from Facebook for the same reason as well? For founders, this seems like an easy way to guard themselves against dilution.
Nobody is perfect. Be it life or work, we all do mistakes. It is easy to disillusion ourselves or justify ourselves, that others were right. In this occasion, it is probably easy for Noah to relate to few things that didn't go well and assume them as reasons for getting fired.
If Mark Zuckerberg used this tactic so that he could have more value for his stocks at the end of the day, then it is quite a disgusting one. I have great respect for Mark. I hope it is not true.
If so many people were fired, then clearly there was a problem with hiring the right people.
> For founders, this seems like an easy way to guard themselves against dilution.
I think the most important property of a good leader is behave like an umbrella. Guard the shit and magnify the happiness. If someone takes the stance of firing employees to justify dilution then, in my not so humble opinion, they dont deserve to lead.
>Nobody is perfect. Be it life or work, we all do mistakes.
And be man enough to own up, learn from the mistake and don't repeat it again.
>If Mark Zuckerberg used this tactic so that he could have more value for his stocks at the end of the day, then it is quite a disgusting one. I have great respect for Mark. I hope it is not true.
"I'm a CEO, bitch". Does that sound familiar? The whole of Facebook works with the preamble of "Mark is always right". That sounds more like a dictator than a founder. And a dictator is only interested in his own interests.
>If so many people were fired, then clearly there was a problem with hiring the right people.
Or, the founder just wanted to get work by paying less. Ideally these people should have been hired as contractors. But the founder decided to create an illusion of a long term commitment to compromise on the Cost to the Company.
Disclaimer: I had worked for Facebook, got fed up with the idiocy and resigned after 3 months.
I very much agree with the last point. Objective evaluation of a developer is much more than burned down points.
I worked at Amazon and could see evidently that Scrum was turning good developers into mediocre ones. But not many raised a finger against it as Scrum was seen as the norm. And there was no scientific way to establish this fact.
But it's not costing me much. My devs still need to be in on planning their own work, and if they're all on the same scrum there should be a lot of overlap. Listening in on the planning for work entirely unrelated to their own should be pretty rare.
At last some sanity sets in. That button really made no sense at all. In a typical scenario, I will decide whether I like or not only after visiting the page. And to visit the page, I have to leave the Google search results page.
