dbot

I was an early Airbnb adopter, but haven't used it in years...curious what types of travel people use Airbnb for these days?

For business, I would never use it - I need reliability, consistency, and a staff on hand if anything comes up. For a family vacation, I've been finding old school property management companies that don't cross-list on Airbnb actually have more availability, better prices, and good experiences overall.

I've had Wavians for a couple years. In our lake community, we get compliments about our gas cans. It's amazing how people respond when you build something well.

Startups win on creating efficiency: saving time and/or money. Compare that to a hobby, almost the entire point of which is to consume time and money...

Wedding planning feels more analogous to a hobby. My wife and I enjoyed the time we spent together while planning...tasting cakes, "dates" at caterers, looking at flowers, picking out attire, etc. Yes, there were some stressful moments, but if we had a startup that was designed to "streamline" everything, we would have missed out on that experience.

Safari's autosuggest of the numeric code from 2FA text messages is outstanding. I don't hear anyone talk about this feature, but I could never live without it. I use 2FA for every website possible and this makes it easy.

I just bought one because Apple didn't refresh the MBP. It is nice - maybe I need to get used to it, but it's not a MBP. Continuity between my phone for everything - iMessage, clipboard, wifi networks - is something you begin to miss quickly. The Apple trackpad is also hands-down the best experience.

As an Atlanta resident, I find it a terrible place to visit but a great place to live.

Great cities have (1) cool places to visit; and (2) lots of hidden gems - parks, restaurants, etc. - that take years to discover. Atlanta lacks the first, but has plenty of the second. That combined with good weather, great housing options and a Delta hub make it pretty nice to live in.

My guess is that Amazon will want to effectively "own" whatever city it selects. Not only will they get incentives from government, but they'll want to have primary influence over the business and educational communities. So that when Amazon wants something, the city will go along. This will give them a laboratory for all sorts of experiments, which is both fascinating and scary.

While a city like my hometown Atlanta makes sense on paper - transportation, great schools, awesome cost of living - there are too many other big players here. I think they want a next-generation "company town."

I joined for about six months and dropped them last week. Third shipment in a row with missing ingredients.

On the plus side, it put me in the regular habit of cooking together with my wife. We love many of the recipes, which are freely available on their website...we've already started "re-doing" many meals by picking up the ingredients on regular shopping trips.

EDIT: One other thought - the whole market seems a lot like the GroupOn craze in some ways. It's an idea that consumers are attracted to, but the economics and excess competition make the whole concept fragile.

Please take a moment to notice how horribly unfriendly a deposition transcript is. Thousands of these documents are produced every day, in a proprietary format that is antiquated and near impossible to work with. The PDF is unusable given the line numbers, headers, footers, etc. The simple act of copying and pasting - for example, writing a brief, a blog, etc. - is painful.

I know developers could create an amazing solution, but the legal community hasn't asked yet, unfortunately.

Related, there's an iOS app called Mealboard which lets you plan out recipes for the week/month/etc. We've started using it all the time, mostly because it has an amazing in-app browser that scrapes web recipes and stores them in the recipe list. Really impressive tool.

Cooking involves 3 steps: (1) recipe selection, (2) ingredient acquisition, and (3) cooking.

Blue Apron takes care of the first two, which I don't enjoy, and let's me do (3), which I very much enjoy. A grocery store doesn't solve (1) and only partially solves (2) (often has item availability, too much quantity issues, and then I have to measure it, too).

Uber needs to focus on customer loyalty - having a base of loyal customers means they can engage in licensing deals with the true automakers.

How to build loyalty? Create a rewards/milage program similar to airlines. Most business travelers commit to one airline because of the status and perks they receive. Some Uber perk ideas include:

1. priority response during high demand

2. free "upgrades" from UberX to higher class vehicles when demand/wait time allows

3. partnership with airline lounges to get access when traveling