Any commentary on the relative price ranges of each category? Do you think there’s further segmentation based on the size of the company, or the employee level within the company (i.e. engineer vs c-suite)?
As an example, the product in the linked article is designed to be customer facing, and at the very least, linked to from within an app or site. The person who decides to take that direction is some sort of product owner.
If a person has the authority to decide to incorporate that sort of product (accept & expose feature requests) into their app but doesn't have the authority to sign off on a few hundred dollars a month, then something very unusual is going on.
On the flip side if you're selling something to an individual engineer then the price point is a lot lower. A developer might have autonomy to pick their tools, but they typically won't have the authority to sign off on a large expense.
The police car is playing the "ice cream truck song" through external speakers on the police car – the same is done for actual ice cream trucks. There is no specific "ice cream truck siren."
This is an excellent idea! In the US, there's a culture/mind-set within this age group that going to the doctor is a waste of time or that they're "stronger" for not having to see a doctor, which only allows pain/injuries to linger or grow before they get too far out of hand that a doctor MUST be consulted.
I think there's an interesting angle to attract a wider audience here too – if your claim of losing ~10 pounds in 12 weeks is true, maybe there's an opportunity to be a "weight loss service" masquerading as a "wellness service." The difference being that well-being is a lifelong goal and weight loss is not.
Agreed! It's such a struggle encouraging people to take preventative health seriously, even as chronic issues start creeping in. Rising insurance deductibles in the US certainly don't help as well. We've found that the members who are must successful are those who have received some kind of "warning" from their doctor -- "if you don't lose the weight, you're going to need back surgery" -- or worse yet, people like my dad who had a near brush with death before realizing he needed to take his health into his own hands.
The anti-jukebox that lets you mute restaurants' ambient music to bring back the vitality of your surroundings. For when your favorite cafe is playing experimental electronic music and you really came for the sound of espresso machines and light background noise while you crank out that TPS report. Or, the jukebox that exclusively plays John Cage's 4'33". [1]
Yes! Maybe it could work like those song recognition apps. A microphone identifies the background music and then it plays an inverse waveform in to your earbuds to cancel it out. I would pay lots of money for that.
Active noise cancellation devices that I've heard of try to analyze the noise to predict what it will do next so they know what to cancel out. They're expensive because they have to be fast enough to react to changes in the sound, and imperfect because they will always lag behind changes to the sound they're trying to cancel.
If you could identify the song then you could simply fast-forward it to know "what it will do next" and the cancellation would be much easier and more accurate.
Combine that with a speech analyzer and synthesizer and you could theoretically even eliminate the voices of individual people (particularly that annoying person who sits near you in a cafe/plane/work).
I was curious if this was possible, and I did some quick research. From what I gathered, it's just not practical. There are a multitude of mutually interfering sources and reflective surfaces in a noisy real world environment. You just can't plop a mic down - or an array of mics - and cancel the audio it receives. You have to put the mic and the cancelling audio as close to the ear as possible, and isolate the listener as much as you can. Which we already have, in noise cancelling headphones.
Lukianoff and Haidt's "The Coddling of the American Mind" is a great read on exactly this idea (not being offended as a skill) and the impact of an easily offended society.
Ultimately, there's a line between offensiveness and empathy that requires judgement in order to get things done.
High price doesn't necessarily indicate a Veblen good. The best case for it not being a Veblen good is that its difficult to showcase status to the people who aren't subscribers, unlike a an expensive iPhone/purse/etc.
One step further – all that miserable work can be productive! Match prospective couples/friends with someone who has a grueling job they need completed (e.g. help me move this refrigerator). It's like Tinder x TaskRabbit – couples fulfilling your Instacart order as a first date.
> Those crumpled weak looking plastic barriers are just a cladding, and what’s underneath is enough to give people second thoughts about ramming a vehicle at them — massive spikes.
Its sad how much of an after-thought these covers are. Each cover is crumpled in from the inevitable teenager standing on top of one… besides looking bad, it seems like a huge liability for whomever implements these barriers.
I was equally annoyed by the narrative intro, angrily skimming to find the answer. Unfortunately, I think its a trend within information media – I find myself skimming Atlas Obscura the same way I skim Nautilus. These articles are good for keywords to prompt the real search…
This style is leaking into documentaries too. The best example is "Wild Wild Country" – a six hour long docuseries where I still had to read the wikipedia page afterwards.
