I think the jokes with negative votes should increasingly loose points with time to avoid it losing a chance right after submission. I've been working on a similar upvote/downvote system and think that way will work more efficiently.
"the average student spends $2,600/year on beer" Are you kidding me? What are these average students drinking? Cheap cases are at most $20 which is 130 cases or 3900 beers a year. Thats beside the $4,000 on entertainment. Absurd calculations.
I agree entirely. I'm a recent grad and I know I spent more than $2,600 in a year across all types of alcohol, but I was purchasing for parties, not for myself, and insisted on quality booze. Your average student is most definitely not purchasing top-shelf alcohol in party quantities. And $1700 for a computer? I paid that for the three computers I had, even including all of the upgrades on the desktop. Never paid more than $500/year on books. I'm willing to bet most people are not paying all three of lab fees, music room fees, and Greek dues. And a number of other costs here are simply ridiculous, representing upper bounds more than averages in many cases.
bar spending? $50/weekend * 52 weeks in a year = $2600/year. I did much worse than that I have to admit. And don't start with 'most college students are under 21' because most people I knew were resourceful when it came to age modification, not to mention our proximity to Mexico :)
What about all the people living above their means with the mortgages they couldn't afford. Didn't they play a part? Should they go to jail too? Plus what they did was unethical, not illegal, and therefore not punishable through jail-time...
I was really impressed by Watson. His first choice was the daily double though, so I think he hacked it, haha.
It seemed like for the answers it was very confident on it could react faster than Brad and Ken. It always was the first to buzz in, and jumped to a huge lead. I don't know if that is true, but its pure reaction time may be its winning factor.
> its pure reaction time may be its winning factor.
Indeed. Jennings himself has said that his buzzer instincts and reflexes created his winning streak more so than actual knowledge. You can easily see that when he clicks and then comes up with the answer a few seconds later. About half of all Jeopardy questions are known by all three players so it's a tossup as to who buzzes the fastest.
I'm not entirely clear how Watson buzzes. The general Jeopardy buzzer system is that an offstage operator presses a button to enable the buzzers as soon as Alex is done speaking. That button also turns on a light near the board to alert the contestants. If you press too early, there's a 300ms lockout until you can press again. We've been told that Watson uses a physical arm to press the Jeopardy buzzer, but we haven't been told exactly how Watson times it: does it listen for Alex to stop speaking, or use an optical sensor on the light, or some other method. An optical sensor would seem pretty hard for humans to beat on timing.
I think a smaller version is a good idea. Its funny how new/more advanced cellphones used to mean smaller, thinner and sleeker, but now with smart-phones they are increasing in size again. The Droid X is freakin' huge! The iphone is still a reasonable size, but some of these new phones are just too big for my liking (ended up getting the incredible). Plus cheaper never hurt...
Groupon may be the strongest brand, best venture backing, and most revenue compared to all the clones, but it certainly could become worthless practically overnight. Easily replicable as seen by many others, staying power is questionable as mentioned.
I'd have trouble sleeping at night if I were Andrew Mason. Especially hearing the company that I turned down 6 bil from was joining the market. Post ipo his wealth will pretty much always be tied to groupons success.
I agree I wouldn't have turned down the buyout, but from what I understand they're certainly not easily replicable.
Sure, you or I could set up a site that offers all the tech of Groupon pretty quickly. Then what? The strength is in their large and proven sales force and network of contacts. That can and will experience churn and cross-pollination with competitors, but they've got a heck of a head start, huge brand recognition and the resources to try new parallel ventures to hedge against problems with their current offering.
Any of a number of companies could and did duplicate eBay's tech. Outside a few national markets where eBay dropped the ball (Japan, New Zealand), how many succeeded?
Ebay is a deceptive example; auctions inherently have powerful network effects. I think Amazon might be a slightly better example: tons of competition but still a lot of money to be made. There can be many winners in this market, and Groupon will probably be the biggest winner.
If there's one thing Groupon shouldn't be worried about, it's Google's ability to do sales and customer support. Groupon's business is ridiculously human-intensive, and Google is notorious for doing everything (customer support included) with as little human contact as possible.
