mercuryrising

Actually it could be. Let's say there's this beacon software that lets you look a bit into how someone interacts. Say you get to know what 'spending tier' they're in - high, medium, or low. You also get to see how much 'social influence' they have - again, high, medium, low. Why would you give a free hot dog to someone in the low-low tier? You probably wouldn't, but right now you have to carpet bomb free stuff. Select who gets your free stuff so you can maximize your influence. Have it pop up when someone is walking down your street, at a particular time of day.

When the big spender with a lot of friends walks by, drunk, at 2:30 in the morning home from the bar, send him a free sandwich coupon when he hits your street. Throw in a bag of chips and a pop, make it 'special'. Perfect advertisement to target the perfect people.

Your software lets companies deliver freebies to 'important' people when they're nearby. Have some automated identity finders - find them on fb, g+, twitter, see how much reach they have. Give them some free stuff, see if they tweet about it, put them a bit higher in the ranks because they gave a good word (or any word at all).

Can anyone explain to me how they're worth $3 billion dollars? They haven't produced anything, they haven't advanced humanity, they have the eyeballs of teens - for the moment, until something cooler comes along. Are they really that valuable? It doesn't seem like there's any show stoppers for creating a snapchat clone (rather than having X users at the moment), and if snapchat were to start making money - say by sending ads to endorse a product rather than a user generated picture, people would probably start leaving the platform towards the newest green pasture.

I recently got a new phone, and I got hooked in to all the services my friends were talking about in recent memory - instagram's dead, twitter's dead, snap chat is in flux. Not for all users, but in my group of friends these services aren't used as much. There isn't really anything keeping you from moving onto something new - your digital life isn't really that valuable. It's probably better to not read the conversations you had a year ago. The pictures are always nice, that's probably the only thing that people would care about, but with Snapchat they're gone (unless you hit save). I'm not sure what I'm getting at, but this company isn't worth $3 billion dollars.

A small, but vocal minority.

That's kind of interesting. They seem to be tracking the expected delivery date really well. At first, it says 1-2 business days. Then it went to November 5th, then it moved to November 8th. The black 16gb is moving the quickest at the moment.

That sounds nice actually. It might not be for a little bit yet (got some more design to do first), but send me an email (in my profile) to touch base.

That wasn't intended to be the final one, but I made it and it worked. It was printed with support material that peeled off a little too strongly, exfoliating the back surface. The orientation is kind of tricky as there's a lip/groove interface between the front and back of the case which needs to be cosmetically clean to ensure a snug fit, so the only way to get that to work well is to print it with the back down, but there's a 'hood' over the ethernet connector that disallows printing directly onto the back. Slicing with slic3r.

That's something I only put a little bit of thought into, as I'm not very worried about my bike getting stolen.

It would be non-functional if someone stole it without stealing the magnet and reed switch as well, but they wouldn't know that.

There's a bit of a trade off, as you're going to want to remove the light to charge it up, in that if you want it to remove easy, it will be easy to steal, and if you want it to be hard to steal, it will be a pain to charge. I don't have any solutions for that yet.

Minnesota, USA.

I actually went to the local university - they said that you can't use university resources for personal gain (I was trying to print a case on their 3D printer). I'm sure there would be some people in the engineering department willing to give me some pointers, there's also a local prototyping company (I've emailed them a few times). Nothing too serious though - I guess I don't really have much of a plan yet, and didn't want to rush into getting roped into sticky situations.

Thanks for asking the questions - I just reached out to a friend who said he'd help me before, maybe this thing will start rolling :).