This seems a lot like fancy hands, via text messaging. The big difference I see is that there is no monthly commitment. Since my personal assistant quit, I've been using Fancy Hands I have been quite delighted by the service.
I'd love to know the model that this business uses. I dug into fancy hands a little bit and it seems like the operations are not quite so straightforward(crowdsourcing what the headache of managing employees).
When I first looked through this I assumed this was coded onto fancy hands API. But given the scaling issues and the pricing structure of this app it probably isn't.
Magic
371–380 of 558 posts
Re: Magic
#372This looks great! It would be really cool if, in the far future, this service could make deals to cut out some of the natural 'fee stacking' that occurs. If you order from magic and magic uses Postmates, you're going to pay a delivery fee to each service. This will add up to probably 20-30% of the price, but that's the price of convenience I guess.
Re: Magic
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you visit this link, you can pay them $5,000: http://getmagicnow.com/pay.php?p=500000 Payment pages should really be linked to an order ID of some sort, without which customers shouldn't be allowed to pay. Otherwise, lots of things can go wrong. Depending on how they have configured things on the server side, a customer could change the amount being paid and the system would consider the ticket paid, cheating them…
If you visit this link, they can pay you $5,000: https://magic.bettir.com/?p=-500000
Re: Magic
#374This reminds me of an opinion that I have which I've been looking for an opportunity to flesh out and share. Despite all of the research and engineering that's gone into the user interface (and "experience") of smartphones, text messaging as an interface has one massive advantage: the perceived cost of sending a text is miniscule in comparison to other operations. I don't have units, but it's probably an order of mag…
Yes, but with sms you're not easily sending your current location, for example. Here in China sms is being replaced by wechat, which can also be very fast, but has more power.
Re: Magic
#375When is this coming to Canada eh?
Re: Magic
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree generally, but I do wonder why in 2015 this has to be driven manually by humans. I understand we're flexible decision makers, but we're also a significant cost in these sorts of processes. I can appreciate this definitely follows the "do things that don't scale" line. If there was a standard by which browsers stored payment and delivery details, a little beefed up from what we have now, would that get us part w…
>If there was a standard by which browsers stored payment and delivery details, a little beefed up from what we have now, would that get us part way? Isn't that basically the idea of PayPal or Amazon Payments and similar things?
I'm pretty sure Google Chrome has an API hidden away for payment info. Google seems to market it towards ecommerce developers (that's how I found out about it), but I can't find my documentation on it. Plus it's not on track for any sort of standardisations.
Re: Magic
#377Is this really new in the states? In sweden we've had these numbers called 118 100, or 118 118 where it costs relatively much to call in but they can take care of a lot of things for you.
For example since my company pays for my phone I tend to use them for things like getting a taxi wherever I am. "I want a taxi in X city". And they can do this via SMS or phone call, they can send the reply via phone or via sms if you want, included in the service charge.
Essentially they can do what magic claims, with operators standing by 24/7, for a service fee that comes from your phone operator.
We've had this in Sweden for many, many years now. I don't even remember how long but I know that some time 6-7 years ago they started advertising that you could call them (or text them) about any stupid question you might have and they would try to answer it.
If this magic really is new to the states then I predict it will explode just like our swedish alternatives have here.
Re: Magic
#378Is this really new in the states? In sweden we've had these numbers called 118 100, or 118 118 where it costs relatively much to call in but they can take care of a lot of things for you. For example since my company pays for my phone I tend to use them for things like getting a taxi wherever I am. "I want a taxi in X city". And they can do this via SMS or phone call, they can send the reply via phone or via sms if y…
Do they handle payment? When I lived in Belgium there were a few services like what you describe (2000-2001 ish), but they were all basically glorified Yellow Pages - they'd find and call a service provider for you, but from there on out you were on your own. Also don't bother sending them a list like '6 eggs, a gallon of milk and a pair of black socks', which it seems this service does cater for.
Re: Magic
#379Wow, everyone! This is truly amazing. We released Magic under 48 hours ago as an experiment and a side project, and now the traffic and requests are streaming in faster than we can handle. Don't worry - we have a plan to handle it. For now we are closing down free registrations so that we can focus on delivering the product to the awesome people who have signed up so far and who are using the service. I've replaced t…
If you haven't already, I'd use a fake number as the "blurred number", as it's pretty easy to read the number if you open the image directly, shrink it down, and squint :)
Re: Magic
#380I think this particularly clever and refreshingly simple. I wish you luck!