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Magic

getmagicnow.com

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Re: Magic

#441

Post by cookiecaper »

cpkpad wrote: post #327
cookiecaper wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't, but if you make CA mad and they decide to sue you, you'll be out much more than it would've cost to just copy and paste a boilerplate privacy policy. A great deal of legal mechanics work this way -- sure, someone can't technically make that kind of mandate, but since it costs a lot of money and time to have a court case where that kind of thing gets proven, you're better off just making sure no one even t…

Bad idea: Giving legal advice without a license. Worse idea: giving incorrect legal advice without a license. Jurisdiction is complex. With the Internet, you do not need to have a physical location somewhere to do business there.

Fortunately for us, no reasonable person would construe my generalities as "legal advice".

>With the Internet, you do not need to have a physical location somewhere to do business there.

Although this is true, the rule of thumb has generally been that sites are governed by the rules of the principality where their servers reside, because it's the only effective or practical way to determine jurisdiction in a worldwide network. (It's likely that most websites have something hosted in CA, by the way).

I agree that this issue can become complex, but it's really only a side note to the intent of the post, which is that under our current legal structure, people are regularly bullied by plaintiffs that make exercising legal rights and obtaining justice much more costly than just complying with their original demands. The privacy policy thing is just one example of this.

Re: Magic

#442

Post by alphydan »

ars wrote: post #242
sidcool wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm...Because I can't send a text from India from my phone at least.

Maybe make a google voice account? It lets you text. There must be other services that let you text internationally, or pretend to have a US number.

there is also https://nomadsms.com for that.

Re: Magic

#443

Post by ada1981 »

zxcvcxz wrote: post #395
scrollaway wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't interesting because of pizzas. This is interesting because of the potential to centralize and offload all decisions of a certain type. It's like a pay-per-use secretary. What I do find.. "decadent"... is people like you, judging masses of other people on the basis of what they find interesting or useful. Especially when you can't see past the low hanging fruit and aren't able to grasp any potential a servi…

It's also not an interesting idea because it will never get off the ground. It's like one of those businesses that go on that TV show with the billionaires who bid on their ideas (forget the title). You pretty much never really hear about them again. Like some kind of American Idol of the start-up world. I'm sure these guys will make a little bit of money, but how hard would it be to get current AIs to do this crap f…

but I wanted pepperoni.

Re: Magic

#444

Post by __d »

api wrote: post #109
jonheller wrote: post #5

Besides questions about revenue and such, can I just say that I absolutely love the landing page. No gimmicks, no parallax, no videos, no fake testimonials, no hero images, no marquees. Just good copy. Not sure if this is because of how quickly this blew up, but well done.

But how can you disrupt without parallax? ... And thanks. I thought I was the only one who thought the video fad was dumb. Now it's just a toll booth for getting a product presented, and I never watch them. How about others? Do you find videos actually useful or are they just glitz?

I don't have time to watch a video for every thing I look at. Give me text that can processed in seconds, not video that takes minutes.

It's extremely rare for me to indulge a linear narrative when I'm looking for information.

Re: Magic

#445

Post by zaroth »

freehunter wrote: post #217
zaroth wrote: post #85

I love the idea, and the execution, but just one nit -- you say "no hidden fees", but I think bundling the fee into the total price is the definition of a hidden fee . If your examples itemized the fee it would be a different story. Other comments here express a similar anxiety, e.g. how much [extra] am I actually paying for this? Also, I know you're busy, but FYI CA state law requires you have a Privacy Policy. I wo…

Well it's not hidden because they tell you up front, before the order is placed, how much it will cost. If they told you $20 and asked for $25 when they got there, that would be a hidden fee. Like AT&T saying you can get cable for $20/mo, but your cable bill always ends up being $32.88.

Charging more than you say is not a 'hidden fee' it is fraud. Hiding the fee in the total price is exactly a 'hidden fee'.

To this point, look at @exogen's extremely helpful demo of the service he posted. Can you tell how much the fee was? I was curious, so I actually went to Octo Sushi's site and tried to mock up a fake similar order, and I couldn't figure out if there even was a fee added on top of Octo's price or not.

Re: Magic

#446

Post by gosmart4u »

I discovered this through a Facebook thread that has a ton of comments on it from non HN or techie peeps. Thought you might want to know what normal non-techies think.

"I think it is a great idea that has potential but I personally wouldn't use them because I can't find anything about them on the website. Looks like a scam."

"They need to re-design their website so it doesn't look like it was slapped together in 10 minutes and add an about page so we know who they are."

"Not even a business at this point."

"This stuff kind of annoys me actually. I get the minimal product concept to test the market but when stuff like this is pushed out there it makes consumers very wary."

"These guys will take this to some bay area VC's and probably get funded because it blew up on Reddit and HN with a bunch of other techies. Meh!"

"It is going to take some serious $$ to get a service like this going. The support alone for handling inbound texts and having reps look for and book deals is a very big undertaking."

"Yay! Another useless service that creates more low wage service jobs that cater to the wealthy."

Re: Magic

#447

Post by jpalomaki »

Maybe one approach is to start by doing everything by hand but then gradually try to automate things. This would not work for answering questions, but when it comes to ordering things I would assume majority of orders would fall into not-so-many categories.

It could be valuable to just record all the transactions and how the agents filled them. What the customer asked, what kind of questions the agent asked, did agent Google for the service, what steps did they take on web sites to perform the order etc. If you have this kind of data for thousands of transactions that might have some value for Google, Apple or other companies working to build digital assistants.

For more complex/expensive purchases one added value thing for customer could be that the agent knows how to find a good deal. There's for example a service (or maybe just a forum) where people can post their travel plans and airline ticketing experts compete to provide the best ticket options.

One obvious income source that comes to my mind is affiliate fees and companies paying for you to introduce them for new customers. This is of course also difficult one since customers would like you to recommended the best provider and not the one that pays best affiliate fees.

Re: Magic

#448

Post by practicalpants »

sly010 wrote: post #416
practicalpants wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, this has obviously got some nice buzz, but never would I want to be the person having to run this business. Lots of manual work for little fees. They could hire/ outsource, but the quality will drop and prices will hike. They might be able to find a niche of people willing to pay a lot for simple things they could probably do easily themselves (like ordering food, or booking a flight), and use that extra mone…

I guess beause it's SMS they can you employ machine learning and simple classification, and internal tools to automate whatever is requested the most. Requests that require manual work will probably cost a little bit more. They also seem to pass requests down to backend providers, which you can probably do very cheaply.

I couldn't disagree with this characterization more. They will need human intelligence overseeing the majority of the cases, and those that they try to automate will be fraught with difficulty and take a long time to iron out. Even the examples I've seen posted of people using it so far would not have been able to be automated and required extended conversations.

(And just in general stuff that is actually easy to automate will mean a ton of middle men already exist to make it easy, or more likely, the person could just do it themselves quickly)

The founders can either outsource to someone for as cheap as they can manage and target clients who don't care about likely significant middleman fees (and who are most likely on the lazy side), or they can spend all of their attention each day doing these little tasks for people.

Since it was a whimsical side project, as they described it, I imagine this will go on for a little while longer, but then they will wind it down and/or maybe try to sell it like the glitter envelope guy who didn't want to do all the work, and then have something quite nice for their resumes, plus some PR to go towards their next project.

Re: Magic

#449

Post by lcfcjs1 »

jonheller wrote: post #5

Besides questions about revenue and such, can I just say that I absolutely love the landing page. No gimmicks, no parallax, no videos, no fake testimonials, no hero images, no marquees. Just good copy. Not sure if this is because of how quickly this blew up, but well done.

Wow you sound like a real hacker lol

Re: Magic

#450

Post by fineIllregister »

zaroth wrote: post #445
freehunter wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it's not hidden because they tell you up front, before the order is placed, how much it will cost. If they told you $20 and asked for $25 when they got there, that would be a hidden fee. Like AT&T saying you can get cable for $20/mo, but your cable bill always ends up being $32.88.

Charging more than you say is not a 'hidden fee' it is fraud. Hiding the fee in the total price is exactly a 'hidden fee'. To this point, look at @exogen's extremely helpful demo of the service he posted. Can you tell how much the fee was? I was curious, so I actually went to Octo Sushi's site and tried to mock up a fake similar order, and I couldn't figure out if there even was a fee added on top of Octo's price or…

The minimum order is 25$, not including tax, and I don't know if that includes the delivery charge. So the final Octo Sushi price has a minimum of around $27.50-30.00.
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