lower barriers --> more competition
You Are Not Late
61–66 of 66 posts
Re: You Are Not Late
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they (and the world in general) would be better off to just spend their spare time volunteering or reading books or hiking or having coffee with friends But those aren't the viable alternatives! These aren't typically wealthy people with time on their hands, they're people trying to find a good place for themselves in the economy by working on something that they think people will like. The real alternative is work…
"What I'd really like to see would be more 'small businesses' and fewer 'startups', but the economics of the software industry at the moment don't seem to encourage that." My guess is that there are currently many more small software businesses than startups, but we don't hear a lot about them because (1) they're targeting business segments that we're not familiar with (e.g., writing accounting software for law pract…
That definitely has the ring of truth, thanks for giving me some perspective!
Re: You Are Not Late
#63The Internet is not just a technical innovation; the Internet is perhaps the greatest social innovation of all-time. For the first time in human history almost everyone on earth is instantly connected. This changes everything . Sometimes I'll just sit and think for hours about how different this makes the world we live in. We're playing by a completely new set of rules -- we're playing a completely new game, and even…
"almost everyone on Earth"? Not even close: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
Re: You Are Not Late
#64This is the single best article I've read that explains why I'm writing the novel I'm writing. It's called Solarversia, and it's about a game played in Virtual Reality by 100m people in the year 2020. I'm going to publish it on the same day that Oculus Rift goes on sale to the public, and plan to make the game for real by using the profits from the book / film to form a company (the same one mentioned in the book). M…
You should read "Ready Player One" if you haven't already. The VR in the book is called Oasis. It might give you some ideas to go with yours: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ready-Player-One-Ernest-Cline/dp/009... Best of luck, man.
Hey, sorry the late reply! I already read RPO as soon as someone else told me about it, and I absolutely loved it! Thanks so much for mentioning it. I'm even going to brand Solarversia as:
"Hunger Games meets Ready Player One"
(but someone told me it work better using Hitchhiker's Guide as more people know it.)
Re: You Are Not Late
#65This is the single best article I've read that explains why I'm writing the novel I'm writing. It's called Solarversia, and it's about a game played in Virtual Reality by 100m people in the year 2020. I'm going to publish it on the same day that Oculus Rift goes on sale to the public, and plan to make the game for real by using the profits from the book / film to form a company (the same one mentioned in the book). M…
This sounds wonderful, and I wish you the best of luck. I love the idea of a game being deliberately based on a book about that exact game. I'll buy the book, and back the game. I assume I'll also need to buy an Oculus Rift at that point...
Awesome, thanks for saying so. I'll dm you website details, but for anyone else reading the thread:
http://solarversia.com/about/
Re: You Are Not Late
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Here's an opportunity to think about. Replace Facebook, and all the various messaging services and streaming video services, with a pay service that costs about $1 a month, with no ads. Whatsapp did a tiny sliver of that - they got acquired by Facebook. It's a trap. The social network needs to be run by a non-profit.
Nonprofits can be acquired too (maybe not the org itself, but everything including staff¹). The reason most don't is because the people who run it are usually not interested, but you can get the same result with a for-profit company. Just don't let VCs invest :) ¹ http://www.citylab.com/commute/2013/05/what-happens-when-non...
You can build a charter that makes that sort of thing functionally impossible.
Strong data protection guidelines that prohibit giving third-parties access to data would be a starting place, but there are a lot of barriers you could put up to such an outcome (barriers that wouldn't be possible for a for-profit corporation.)