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Uber and Cheezburger will deliver you 15 minutes of kitten playtime for $20

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Re: Uber and Cheezburger will deliver you 15 minutes of kitten playtime for $20

#61

Post by GuiA »

chrismonsanto wrote: post #52
mcantelon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much. I went to one of those places in Tokyo, years ago, where you pay to pet cats and it was a depressing place. There were cats who were into it, but there were cats who clearly didn't want to be there (and some who'd been confined to cages that looked like little human apartments and were pacing constantly inside them).

I've been to a cat cafe in Tokyo, and I don't remember seeing any cats in cages. I do agree that it was a depressing place though, none of the cats were interested in interacting with the humans. The place still seemed popular. I don't know why. The one stray cat I found during my stay in Tokyo was much more friendly than any of the cats in the cafe.

> The place still seemed popular. I don't know why.

Isn't it because Japanese people love animals, but with the sizes of apartments in Tokyo it's pretty much impossible to have one of your own?

Re: Uber and Cheezburger will deliver you 15 minutes of kitten playtime for $20

#62

Post by sharkweek »

swalsh wrote: post #33
PeterisP wrote: post #8

This does feel a bit weird - short-term rental of petting animals? I'm worried about mishandling, animal cruelty and the whole concept - pets form an attachment with you, doing it as a short-term rental isn't an acceptable way of building a relationship...

I had this idea a few years ago. Before my wife and I moved to a place that allowed animals, I used to wish there was a way I could rent a dog while at the beach.

The shelter I used to volunteer at had a program where you could take the dogs off site for the day -- it was the best thing ever for the dog as it got a day out in the world as opposed to in a kennel.

It never ceased to amaze me how quickly they would get adopted after an off-site day; seemed to just hit a reset button on their stress levels.

Re: Uber and Cheezburger will deliver you 15 minutes of kitten playtime for $20

#64

Post by boyter »

w0utert wrote: post #32
blhack wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to volunteer at an animal shelter: One of the big things they stressed, at least for the dogs, was how important it was to play with the them. Expose them to people, scratch their ears through the grate on their kennel, pay attention to them, etc. etc. The reasoning being that dogs who are used to humans, and are affectionate towards them, are more likely to get adopted. If this was for dogs, it would be a HUG…

Cats are nothing like dogs though. While it's also important to socialize kittens as soon as possible to make them comfortable around humans, I don't think it's a good idea to haul them around town in a car. Cats don't like to be taken outside their known environment at all, and they don't like to be locked inside a box, or transported in a noisy car. Just to give some perspective, my own cat loves people, strange or…

You can train cats to like this too. I knew a guy who would take his cat out for walks like a dog. It loved the attention and seemed quite happy wandering around looking at new things.

Re: Uber and Cheezburger will deliver you 15 minutes of kitten playtime for $20

#65

Post by pcwalton »

PeterisP wrote: post #8

This does feel a bit weird - short-term rental of petting animals? I'm worried about mishandling, animal cruelty and the whole concept - pets form an attachment with you, doing it as a short-term rental isn't an acceptable way of building a relationship...

Short-term pet rental is fairly common in Japan and elsewhere. They are regulated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_cafe

You have to select cats that are well-socialized, but it can be very healthy for both participants if done properly.

Re: Uber and Cheezburger will deliver you 15 minutes of kitten playtime for $20

#66

Post by AnkhMorporkian »

deletes wrote: post #26
bfe wrote: post #23

BTW I presume Uber implemented this in LOLCODE? HAI CAN HAZ UBERDEPLOY? VISIBLE "O HAI! WILL U HAZ UBERKITTY?" LOL VAR R USERSEZ IM IN YR LOOP GIMMEH USERSEZ IZ USERSEZ LIEK "KITTENS!"? YARLY VISIBLE "KITTYZ IN YR LAP!" UBERDEPLOY KTHX NOWAI VISIBLE "CAN U HAZ KITTYZ?" KTHX KTHX KTHXBYE

I'm so going to learn this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOLCODE

Please don't, the LOLCODE market is competitive enough already.

Re: Uber and Cheezburger will deliver you 15 minutes of kitten playtime for $20

#67

Post by zaidf »

aetherson wrote: post #58
mason55 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Uber = On-Demand... anything? Yes, Uber has said in their interviews (or maybe it was pg talking about them?) that once they have the infrastructure set up to deliver a car anywhere they can branch out into on demand delivery of anything.

(A disclaimer: I work for Flywheel -- we're an Uber competitor. Take anything I say about Uber with a grain of salt.) I'm not sure how much synergy there actually is between "get a taxi on demand" and "deliver goods on demand." I mean, taxis have existed forever. Presumably, if someone thought it was cost effective, they could have used taxis as a logistics network long ago. But taxis are really, really, really expen…

Uber could know with 100% confidence based on past data that a driver passes by a certain address almost daily. For him to deliver a courier to that address would be significantly less work to driving a few miles only to deliver the coirier(the assumption in your argument).

I still don't know if the financials make sense in my particular example but it does tell you the optimizations Uber can make based on the historical data.

Re: Uber and Cheezburger will deliver you 15 minutes of kitten playtime for $20

#68

Post by aetherson »

zaidf wrote: post #67
aetherson wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(A disclaimer: I work for Flywheel -- we're an Uber competitor. Take anything I say about Uber with a grain of salt.) I'm not sure how much synergy there actually is between "get a taxi on demand" and "deliver goods on demand." I mean, taxis have existed forever. Presumably, if someone thought it was cost effective, they could have used taxis as a logistics network long ago. But taxis are really, really, really expen…

Uber could know with 100% confidence based on past data that a driver passes by a certain address almost daily. For him to deliver a courier to that address would be significantly less work to driving a few miles only to deliver the coirier(the assumption in your argument). I still don't know if the financials make sense in my particular example but it does tell you the optimizations Uber can make based on the histor…

Well, but no. They can't know with "100% confidence" where a driver will drive in any given day. They probably can't even know with 90% confidence. Taxi drivers don't drive regular routes, they drive where a diverse set of passengers need to go. There are probably a few destinations that a lot of drivers hit almost every shift (most notably the airport), but arbitrary business or residential address 1 to arbitrary business or residential address 2? Probably not.

And if they were to offer some kind of "by the way" service where you say, "I want to get this package across town, you send somebody who will eventually deliver it to my destination because my destination is near a major taxi destination," do people actually want that service? I was under the impression that in-town point-to-point couriering was typically done because you have a tight deadline for when the package needs to arrive -- after all, if it's just a few miles away, and you aren't on a tight schedule, you could just mail it and it would probably arrive the next business day. This doesn't sound like a big business opportunity to me.

Delivery of large quantities of goods on a same-day timeframe, like Amazon wants to do, that's a big business opportunity. But I don't see how Uber's business or Uber's dataset solves that problem.

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