jacalulu

This past weekend, I decided to put AI to the test and challenged myseld to create a short film using only AI tools. The end result, a film I called "The Cardboard Navigator" - a whimsical and slightly surreal tale about finding magic in the mundane, turned out better than I was expecting...with lots of learnings and challenges along the way!

10/10 would recommend giving something like this a shot!

I often get asked how I think about product development as a Google Product Manager focused on AI products. Traditional advice is to find a user problem, then solve it - but when it comes to developing AI first products, I find a different approach is best.

I recently made an effort to attend every interesting Silicon Valley AI tech event that crossed my radar so I could get a sense for how different people were thinking about the state of Generative AI. This included a couple Google events, TED AI, a few OpenAI Dev Day events, and an AngelList happy hour.

The following are my top 4 takeaways.

Hey! Jaclyn here (eCommerce Group Product Manager @Weebly). We have made some improvements this launch to help get us closer to full VAT support, which is something that we plan to get to in the future. We know this is vital for EU businesses, and we definitely want to improve this experience, but in the meantime we have several options to help support this.

Specifically, we've added the option to specify if you want to include taxes in your prices. If selected, we will show a tax summary under the order total.

In addition to this, you can also add a Note to Seller field in checkout and use this to optionally collect VAT IDs if you are selling to customers that could be tax exempt. When an order comes in, the order details will display the message left here by your customer. If they left a valid VAT ID number, you can refund their order the tax amount using our improved refund functionality that easily lets you issue partial refunds.

Finally, you can specify on a per product basis whether an item should have tax applied to it or not.

Hope this helps - and as mentioned, we are working on improving this area and adding an even easier VAT setup feature inthe future!

Size is definitely something we are incredibly conscious of. This device will be 40mm x 40m x 17mm, but we are always working on trying to get it to be smaller. We want this device to look great, and we are approaching it as if it almost were a fashion statement, or at least an accessory that a senior will wear.

The option to expand into other markets is something that we are always considering. We've chosen to target seniors right now, but we definitely have other markets in mind for which this device might be useful (individuals with cognitive impairments is one of them).

Thanks for the feedback and input, you bring up some great points. We are currently working on a few ideas to make this device more senior friendly by adding features that would make it more than an alert pendant for them. We feel that the best way to get it right is to actually run a pilot program and get real user feedback. Right now we are focusing on solving a pain point, which for our target user is the fear of falling outside while alone. Once we have perfected this, we will be playing around with a few ideas during our pilot program. You can expect to see some new iterations and ideas emerge down the road that we are hoping will make this more than a simple help pendant.

As for selling to nursing homes, the stats might seem like a reassuring thing, but you might also be missing the underlying story. We have spoken with several retirement homes, and they have told us multiple stories about how staff (not necessarily at their home) have wanted to stop residents from leaving the grounds because they are worried that if something happens they won't be able to get help - and in some cases they do actually stop them from leaving. Point being, sometimes stats look good, because the rules and guidelines put in place to keep them looking good actually have a negative impact on a persons overall happiness and well being. So although the stats look nice, the bigger picture could still reveal that something is broken.

You are very right that this will be a marketing challenge, but I have hope. In my own case, my grandmother lives alone and my family wants her to continue doing so, but we also worry. Rather than having to ask her to move to a retirement home one day, it would be great if we could use a system like this to allow her to keep her freedom and independence while still having peace of mind that she will be ok. Our goal is to try to make a device like this feel empowering, rather than morbid, but we acknowledge that it will take some time. I have faith that something can be done in this space though because when you take a look at it, you can see how obviously broken it is ("I've fallen and I can't get up" is the perfect example of just how broken it is).

I actually read the article Slow Ideas last week and found it to be a great read. I agree that ads and pamphlets will not solve this problem, but doesn't mean we should shy away from trying to fix this broken industry. At YC we are constantly told to do things that do not scale at first, it's a strategy that has proven to work, and I'm all for trying it in this scenario.

Thanks again for your feedback, definitely some great food for thought :)

Thanks for the feedback, you bring up some valid points that we have definitely thought through.

First, the expense associated with the device is comparable to what is currently on the market (in some cases it is actually less expensive than the competition). We realize that not everyone will be able to afford devices like this, which is why we also want to explore ways to get this subsidized. We believe that a device like this can allow seniors to live independently for longer, thus allowing them to remain in their own homes longer, and saving them on the cost of retirement and nursing homes (not to mention studies show that 90%+ of seniors want to remain living in their own homes for as long as possible). Down the road we may even explore offering a less expensive version of this if that becomes possible on our end (we still need to cover manufacturing costs and overhead).

You bring up a few other examples, but none of them are exactly comparable. First, the Kindle makes its profits off the books you do buy (they may offer some for free, but the profit comes from the business model in which users do still pay for books on their device). Second, you bring up SPOT then add that it doesn't actually work the way we do. The added functionality does come at an additional cost on our end. We are also spending more on getting a smaller form factor (this means a lot more work on the hardware engineering side), and we are creating a custom dock so that the pendant can be easily recharged without needing to fidget with a micro USB.

In terms of ergonomics, the device will measure approximately 40mm x 40mm, which is comparable to current devices on the market with a limited set of features. We are continuously trying to engineer the device to be smaller, and over time we will be able to, but this does incur larger upfront costs and a longer period of time. So right now, we are focusing on making the best device possible, and will continue to iterate and improve on it as components get better and better :) As for the black - it tested rather well with males (although my preference, and that of a lot of the female seniors we showed the designs to, did prefer the lighter coloured device).

Great points, both of which we have put much thought into: i) our target customer is actually the daughter or daughter-in-law of the device user. They are almost always the ones who make decisions to get a system similar to Amulyte, and they are the ones that typically end up covering the cost for their elder relative. ii) we considered coming out with an app, but after talking to a lot of industry experts we verified what we had suspected - seniors simply don't use smartphones. There definitely are some that do, but the majority of them do not. Even those who have one rarely use it (it isn't uncommon for them to turn it off when they aren't using it or leave it somewhere, unused, for extended periods of time). Getting the right form factor is an important implementation consideration, and a cell phone isn't suited for this user.

Great points, this is something that we have given a lot of thought towards. We are going to be pinging the device at certain points (when someone logs into the portal for example), and the device will also send data at set intervals (we can adjust how often we send data to save battery life, and based on a few other things). When the device is not actively sending data or establishing a connected we do sleep the device.

We opted not to send GPS location via SMS because it is a lot less secure. We are also sending more than just GPS data, all of which we would have to interpret on the server side anyways thus complicating the implementation. We looked into this and for a variety of reasons it made more sense to use data to transmit information from the device.

Great point - the marketing for this device is going to sound quite a bit different based on the audience that we are reaching out to. For the TechCrunch crowd, we can say things like "a micro-controller to keep all those bits running in harmony"...definitely not something we would be telling our end-user :)

Couldn't have said this better myself, this is exactly what we are doing :) We are also conscious of making sure that charging the device becomes part of a seniors daily routine to help ensure that it remains charged. We are also using induction charging to make charging the device as simple as placing it on its holder (no micro USB to fiddle around with)