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NDT - Non destructive testing? So coupled with "specialised equipment" I assume something like scanning the steel in a bridge for corrosion? Is that feasible - the noise in any feed from distance / stability must mean "usual" specialised equipment cannot be used?
You are probably overthinking this. Simply being able to fly a high resolution camera with a bright light up underneath a bridge probably saves an enormous amount of time.
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EOS and Tron. There are probably others. I went to a couple cryptocurrency meetups recently that were sponsored by a startup, 6 months old, which had offices in 3 cities, 2 different product lines, and was launching a venture capital fund. To me, that's a red flag that they have too much money and no idea how to deploy it.
Off topic, but is there anything interesting going on in the cryptocurrency space? I stopped following circa 2015 after seeing Bitcoin/blockchain co-opted by a bunch of hucksters for a bunch of get-rich-quick schemes (including internal projects at more than a few major technology companies). I've heard stirrings about a few "stablecoin" project with more solid economic underpinnings, but am skeptical anyone can come…
Fixing the transaction delays & scalability problems of Bitcoin (Nano, Iota).
Fixing web advertising (Brave/BAT).
Decentralized prediction markets (Augur).
Tokenizing real estate (lots of startups).
Decentralized stablecoins (DAI).
DApp platforms (Ethereum, EOS, bunch of others now) and infrastructure built to solve problems with those platforms (Loom Network, Cardstack).
It remains to be seen how much of this will be profitable or even get any significant user adoption.
I'm thinking back to the dot-com boom, though. The WWW started, fundamentally, as a communication technology, and it had its biggest impact as a communication technology. But in between, there was a 5-year period (1995-2000) when everybody was trying to get rich off dot-coms, usually by applying them to existing profitable markets that it was completely unsuited to. And then there was a further 2 year period (2001-2003) where nobody was getting rich off anything, companies were going bankrupt left and right, but people were figuring out what the web was actually good for. Once they did, the resulting companies changed the world far more than Tim Berners-Lee could've imagined.
Cryptocurrencies are fundamentally financial products, and I bet that their ultimate use will end up replacing much of the financial industry. We just had 4 years of hobbyist development (2009-2013) followed by 5 years of everybody trying to get rich off them (2013-2018) by either building platforms or applying them to existing industries, much of which they're ill-suited for. A lot of people have recently lost their shirt. I don't know whether this means we're in the "let's figure out what they're actually good for" phase, or whether they'll be a further, even bigger bubble. It's likely that cryptocurrencies will take longer to penetrate the mass market than the WWW did, because communications (by its nature) spreads virally, while finance is the underpinning for the entire rest of the economy. But I don't think cryptocurrencies are a fad that'll die out, at this point...there are too many people experimenting with them and too many people desperate for an alternative to the mainstream financial system.
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It has less to do with the space, and more to do with the odd engineering decisions and multiple pivots. There wasn't a SDK or platform to build on and we didn't take any actual orders for anything (so we had minimal success stories or $$$). The hardware we showed was built by us, and ran a custom OS (not based on linux) that was nearly impossible to work with. We had a very talented engineer rage-quit after spending…
So, a death by NIH?
> entire enterprise cloud stack written in only the newest of the new JS frameworks and containers
I'm of the opinion that the JS ecosystem is one of the few spaces where a healthy dose of NIH can save you a lot of time and money in the long run. And it seems like the only place where they didn't go for a custom solution.
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So, a death by NIH?
Certainly sounds like it. I find this bit pretty funny though: > entire enterprise cloud stack written in only the newest of the new JS frameworks and containers I'm of the opinion that the JS ecosystem is one of the few spaces where a healthy dose of NIH can save you a lot of time and money in the long run. And it seems like the only place where they didn't go for a custom solution.
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So, a death by NIH?
Certainly sounds like it. I find this bit pretty funny though: > entire enterprise cloud stack written in only the newest of the new JS frameworks and containers I'm of the opinion that the JS ecosystem is one of the few spaces where a healthy dose of NIH can save you a lot of time and money in the long run. And it seems like the only place where they didn't go for a custom solution.
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If they have an office they have stuff like chairs and desks and computers that are at least worth a little bit. But it’s true most of the money went to employees.
Office liquidators typically offer 2% to 5% of retail on office furniture, although an office manager can try to direct sell the Aerons or new modular units.
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It has less to do with the space, and more to do with the odd engineering decisions and multiple pivots. There wasn't a SDK or platform to build on and we didn't take any actual orders for anything (so we had minimal success stories or $$$). The hardware we showed was built by us, and ran a custom OS (not based on linux) that was nearly impossible to work with. We had a very talented engineer rage-quit after spending…
Was the engineering leadership all from academia or something?