I was an early Airbnb adopter, but haven't used it in years...curious what types of travel people use Airbnb for these days?
For business, I would never use it - I need reliability, consistency, and a staff on hand if anything comes up. For a family vacation, I've been finding old school property management companies that don't cross-list on Airbnb actually have more availability, better prices, and good experiences overall.
I've had Wavians for a couple years. In our lake community, we get compliments about our gas cans. It's amazing how people respond when you build something well.
NetDocuments is a leading, secure cloud-based document management and collaboration solution that's been serving the legal industry for over 20 years! We host billions of files, from the largest global law firms and legal departments to the smallest boutique shops, across web, mobile and desktop applications.
We're looking for a UX Director to lead design across our entire product portfolio.
Startups win on creating efficiency: saving time and/or money. Compare that to a hobby, almost the entire point of which is to consume time and money...
Wedding planning feels more analogous to a hobby. My wife and I enjoyed the time we spent together while planning...tasting cakes, "dates" at caterers, looking at flowers, picking out attire, etc. Yes, there were some stressful moments, but if we had a startup that was designed to "streamline" everything, we would have missed out on that experience.
Weddings are deeply personal experiences. That's the hard part to scale, every one of them is pratically built to order.
What I learned on organizing mine is that service providers self organize in networks that refer each other not just as "favourtisement" but because they shared previous jobs and integrated well and that reduces their friction on delivering the client requests.
That something that a startup should target more than the end clients. Disrupting wedding planners seems more efficient than disrupting the wedding industry whole.
Yes, market size for people who don't want to put a lot of themselves into a wedding but also are willing to put in decent amount of money into paying someone else to do it for them seems rather slim.
If you don't want to bother so much about the wedding it seems likely you don't want to pay enough for a middleman to make a profit.
Maybe all of the discrete parts (the venue, the entree, the dessert) are more-or-less commodities, but it's how we package these things together that prevents an end-to-end commoditization of "wedding as a service".
It cheapens the experience if planning a wedding is as simple as going to a McDonald's drive-thru. For something that's supposed to be once-in-a-lifetime, I don't think people would want an app where they could just customize a few options, and have an entire wedding planned. The point of it, really, is that it isn't supposed to easy.
Maybe I'm a minority, but I love a management layer between me any anything. Any sort of software that offers a checklist, reviews, comparisons, contact management, status updates, progress bars, gantt charts, budgets, registries, seating, warnings about conflict or missed deadlines. I should be able to open the "my wedding app" click food, and within a click be able to contact any of my vendors. People helping me plan should be able to read each others communications so they can pick up where I left off. I should be able to add anyone in the wedding party, and even guests, and they see information that is relevant to them. Yelp+Slant+Mint+Intercom for the planning industry sounds great.
The thing that just a budget and schedule lacks is being able to watch each others progress and preferences.
I assumed (and I see there are) all sorts of online tools that purport to help with planning. Many people also set up websites these days. I assume these have affiliate links and the like but they're not exactly disruptive applications.
Some of them all do one or a couple parts of what I described, but they are all designed to be "easy and simple" more than powerful. And I really doubt most of them do things like watch my credit card to keep track of how much has been paid out.
There's plenty of room for innovation, with some more imagination.
> Maybe all of the discrete parts (the venue, the entree, the dessert) are more-or-less commodities, but it's how we package these things together that prevents an end-to-end commoditization of "wedding as a service".
I think you are partially right, but the key components aren't commodities, at least, for the clientele willing to spend enough money to be worth serving. Venues for ceremony and/or reception are quite often not, for instance
Safari's autosuggest of the numeric code from 2FA text messages is outstanding. I don't hear anyone talk about this feature, but I could never live without it. I use 2FA for every website possible and this makes it easy.
Yeah that feature (along with iOS 12 native OS-level password manager integrations) was a major leap forward. I no longer dread enabling 2FA on websites when push/HOTP tokens aren’t supported - at least from a usability perspective. The security of SMS-based 2FA is still poor, though generally better than nothing.
Almost nobody implements the API for password managers. It's either apples password store or bust. I use 1password and frequently have to switch to the app to grab a password. Although, with face ID enabled this is relatively painless.
I’ve never had to use it because I use hardware/software 2FA, but while developing an app recently it worked in a native app. I was stunned and thrilled.
I just bought one because Apple didn't refresh the MBP. It is nice - maybe I need to get used to it, but it's not a MBP. Continuity between my phone for everything - iMessage, clipboard, wifi networks - is something you begin to miss quickly. The Apple trackpad is also hands-down the best experience.
As an Atlanta resident, I find it a terrible place to visit but a great place to live.
Great cities have (1) cool places to visit; and (2) lots of hidden gems - parks, restaurants, etc. - that take years to discover. Atlanta lacks the first, but has plenty of the second. That combined with good weather, great housing options and a Delta hub make it pretty nice to live in.
I feel the same way about Atlanta. And the money that I save by living here as opposed to a cool place to visit means I can actually afford to visit those places.
My guess is that Amazon will want to effectively "own" whatever city it selects. Not only will they get incentives from government, but they'll want to have primary influence over the business and educational communities. So that when Amazon wants something, the city will go along. This will give them a laboratory for all sorts of experiments, which is both fascinating and scary.
While a city like my hometown Atlanta makes sense on paper - transportation, great schools, awesome cost of living - there are too many other big players here. I think they want a next-generation "company town."
I joined for about six months and dropped them last week. Third shipment in a row with missing ingredients.
On the plus side, it put me in the regular habit of cooking together with my wife. We love many of the recipes, which are freely available on their website...we've already started "re-doing" many meals by picking up the ingredients on regular shopping trips.
EDIT: One other thought - the whole market seems a lot like the GroupOn craze in some ways. It's an idea that consumers are attracted to, but the economics and excess competition make the whole concept fragile.
> One other thought - the whole market seems a lot like the GroupOn craze in some ways.
Yeah, Groupon is a great comparison IMO. Huge initial growth, but spending a bunch of money to acquire each customer doesn't work once a bunch of copy-cat competitors enter the market.
I also wonder how many folks drop off once they've learned some basic cooking skills from the recipes - chopping, searing, getting the right proportions, etc.
Please take a moment to notice how horribly unfriendly a deposition transcript is. Thousands of these documents are produced every day, in a proprietary format that is antiquated and near impossible to work with. The PDF is unusable given the line numbers, headers, footers, etc. The simple act of copying and pasting - for example, writing a brief, a blog, etc. - is painful.
I know developers could create an amazing solution, but the legal community hasn't asked yet, unfortunately.
There is nothing antiquated about PDF. It's an incredibly widely supported standardized format that can cleanly handle everything from a Word document to a scan of a prisoner's hand written pro se brief to a printed document that someone has scribbled on. It preserves formatting information, which is incredibly important because court filings are regularly printed on paper. Not because there is no electronic workflow (the entire workflow is electronic at least in federal court), but because it's a pain in the ass to read and annotate things on a computer versus putting tabs in a binder.
As to the line/page format, it's used because sentences or even words within depositions are quoted in briefs with citations to exactly where they appear. And frankly, if your software can't even grok a simple 2D format it's probably not intelligent enough to do any useful processing of the document.
I'm always on the lookout for good legal technology. But legal technology purveyors are like those people who think programming IDEs should all be visual environments where you program by dragging and dropping connectors between blocks. It's like, no.
A lot of the time they're also provided in other formats, including plain text. It's still got pages and line numbers (they're essential for citing to), and it uses an ASCII form feed for new page, but it's better to work with. You can actually pipe it to port 9100 on a common network printer and it'll come out about right. There is also software to work with these transcripts.
There are a number of legal tech companies fighting to break into legal document management (ediscovery). I worked for Everlaw (a16z) and there's also Disco and Logikcull, among others
Litigants are wasting money with the status quo. Not because of the format, per se, but because of a lack of reasonably good NLP-based search and summary tools. Much money is spent paying people to review transcripts by hand, when the bulk of the heavy lifting could be done with software. I know the market well enough to manage the product development and sell it but lack the NLP skills to build it. Anyone interested in talking about it feel free to hit me up.
You're obligated to provide everything to the other side, doing so in a format that requires them to have a small army of people to read every line instead of being able to do a simple text search is exactly the point. There are even companies that specialize in taking large amounts of electronic data (email is a good example) and printing every single page so that opposing council ends up with enough paper to fill a room.
Edit: I also have no idea how you'd sell a product that considerably reduces billable hours.
Exactly. Large cases often produce box after box of documents and frequently supply documents not related that were not requested. It is a game of burying them in paper because if there is a smoking gun (document that is critical to their side) they may not see it or when they find it, they have paid tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees for the attorneys to find it in the many boxes of documents.
Often times one litigant can starve the less funded litigant out. Successfully starving a litigant out results in favorable settlements for the offending litigant.
You could sell it to plaintiffs lawyers and the increasing universe of firms that do fixed fee or capped arrangements. Plaintiffs lawyers have huge incentives to minimize per-case investment, but they don't use much legal tech. Which is pretty great evidence of how well it works.
Also you can obviously search PDFs. People read every line of deposition transcripts because they're looking for admissions (places where the deponent slips up and reveals useful information).
> I also have no idea how you'd sell a product that considerably reduces billable hours.
Hmm.. perhaps, if they can force the opposition to use similar tech, then they can promise faster resolutions.(That's still assuming both the parties wouldn't mind it much, but don't see it happening).
> There are even companies that specialize in taking large amounts of electronic data (email is a good example) and printing every single page so that opposing council ends up with enough paper to fill a room.
Surely there's a limit to how awkward you can make this for the other side? Why would the courts allow making it intentionally difficult for one side to gather evidence to help their case?
For example, I'm sure they wouldn't allow you to deliver the documents on numbered post-it notes, one sentence per note and in a random order.
I would have thought the court would insist the material is delivered in the most practical format (e.g. emails as text files or in a searchable database) and both sides get access to the same format unless there are special circumstances.
I would imagine they are stuck back a few decades when delivering documents on paper was standard and nothing unusual. So printed paper is a minimal acceptable format. Since part of the legal battle is to also drain the other side's resources it would make sense then to go by the absolute allowed minimum and nothing more.
If delivering documents on posted notes was allowed surely they'd be companies specializing in that.
Seems like requiring an electronic copy when one is available originally would go a long way. Is it court's prerogative, or do we need a Congressional amendment for this to become commonplace?
It is common place. I've never gotten paper discovery in a civil case. Opposing counsel sends links to a secure download site, sometimes a CD or USB. The documents are sent as natives plus TIFF images of each page plus metadata. We load them into an ediscovery platform where everything is OCR-ed and indexed. Whoever reviews it works within the platform where documents can be searched, tagged, marked up, etc.
This is where us old-timers go into get-off-my-lawn mode: "You kids today don't know how easy you have it for document discovery — in my day we spent days and weeks in hot, dusty warehouses looking through boxes of mouldering paper files ...."
I thought this happens only on TV. Why the hell would you not require by law that electronic information in the best available format must be supplied if available???
So are you saying it's sensible that we're stuck with emails printed on reams of paper because it's too hard to define a better spec? There is really no reason for digital files not to be mandated in 2017 except "lol bureaucracy." Frankly, if someone only has access to paper files they should be required to scan them. As is, at least as much work is being done in the opposite direction (printing tons of paper) which is just ridiculous.
> So are you saying it's sensible that we're stuck with emails printed on reams of paper because it's too hard to define a better spec?
Oh, it's not sensible but I do appreciate the huge gap between a tossed out "lol, use digital" and reality that people blithely ignore. As a trivial example, marking up emails printed on paper can be a lot easier than doing it digitally.
> Frankly, if someone only has access to paper files they should be required to scan them.
How do you prove the scans are correct? Presumably the paper files have some kind of chain of custody going on - how do you enforce that for digital files? What resolution do you enforce? What colour settings? Or B&W? Or shades of grey, even? What happens to the forensic dots that printers add when you scan a document? They might be vital evidence.
It's fine to just "scan them" in an office but you really want to avoid any kind of potential data loss when you're talking about evidence in a court case.
And dipping into the wilder reaches of fantasy, how do you guard against things like steganography being used to pass information secretly? Or avoid viruses / trojans / zipbombs / whatnots?
There is a significant industry based on e-discovery that never sees, or requires actual paper. Much more likely is an inhalation of the contents of a custodian's hard drive, or the ingestion of a full PST file (MS Outlook email form) into a system, or downloading email inboxes from Office 365 or Gmail.
Once ingested, the documents are searched for words or phrases, tagged as relevant, privileged, or non-responsive. See the FRCP (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) for discussion of electronic documents in discovery.
Not only are courts expecting parties in lawsuits to supply documents in electronic form, there are are now rules in some courts tailored to TAR, or technical assisted review, which often means LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis).
So the idea of dropping tons of paper on the hapless opponent is an idea that is practically of antiquity, dating back to the MCI/ATT lawsuits. Large lawsuits simply don't work that way anymore.
Given developers are responsible for CSV, PDF (a complex programming language that renders documents as a side effect), XML, and JSON, I see no particular reason to share your optimism.
For all the good press PDF is still a bitch to work with when trying make end to end workflows (particularly if you want to avoid opening acrobat or something).
This is a particular file format used for legal transcripts rendered as a PDF. The underlying format is not all that difficult to work with. Good legal software needs to be able to deal with hundreds of different file formats, from Lotus Notes to the oldest MS Word format or early forms of PowerPoint. The transcript format is a piece of cake relative to others.
But it would be an act of faith and patience to redact and docket-file high-tech versions-- that is seamless for the low-tech PDF, which was pen-signed and docket-friendly. The PDF was even pulled from the docket and re-posted on scribd, with searchable text intact.
There also would be a time-synchronized video and an e-transcript, yes, in proprietary non-open standards.
The goal of law firms is to maximize billable hours and make it difficult for non-lawyers to conduct legal work. Working efficiently is not the goal at all.
For business, I would never use it - I need reliability, consistency, and a staff on hand if anything comes up. For a family vacation, I've been finding old school property management companies that don't cross-list on Airbnb actually have more availability, better prices, and good experiences overall.