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Was scrolling through the comments to see if anyone mentioned this. I started taking magnesium supplements a couple of years ago after hearing somewhere (forget where at this point) that it helped with teeth grinding. Whenever I'd go into dentist appointments, they'd always mention something about my teeth grinding and recommended getting a mouth guard, which I didn't pursue due to expense. Oddly enough, they never mentioned magnesium. When I started taking magnesium supplements every day, my grinding almost completely stopped. I now notice after a couple days if I haven't taken it, my jaw starts tensing up again and naturally reverts into clenching mode. I don't have any medical expertise or evidence to back its effectiveness, but it sure worked for me. Worth a try before exploring other options.

Perhaps I should have extended it a bit more--as someone else commented, they will likely drive the price point down as the tech improves and they're able to do things algorithmically which will reduce overhead. The Tesla strategy is probably a better fit here than Uber, though.

This is like Tesla entering the market with a high end sports car, or Uber entering the market with only black cars. They're targeting a smaller niche of wealthy early adopters to tweak the service and revenue model and will eventually move downmarket to address a broader customer base (if they're successful with this initial niche). This is an ideal niche to start with because a) they have the money for it b) they're more tech savvy and generally forgiving of product shortfalls for bleeding edge services and c) they have lots of connections and can spread word-of-mouth more effectively (think Chris Dixon). It will be interesting to see if this becomes more of an API for other on-demand platforms such as Seamless or if it will be standalone. Also curious to see how this will stack up to Facebook's M and if they've built something defensible enough to pose a real threat.

I wrote an opinion on what I think Twitter could become (https://medium.com/@danclay/how-twitter-could-become-the-ube...), before I learned that Facebook is essentially doing the exact same thing with its Instant Articles. I think this will be the nail in the coffin for Twitter becoming anything more than a niche service for techies, celebrities, and thought leaders. Facebook is making big moves in the news space, and if they're able to beat Twitter at their own game of real-time, it's game over. Moments is a start, but it may be too little too late. Perhaps it's time to pull a Foursquare and separate the traditional feed with a much more robust version of Moments into separate apps to try and gain a lead in real-time, but that'd be a hell of a Hail Mary. Twitter has a lot of good people and it's a shame to see them become a zombie in the tech space after so much early promise.

“We literally bet the company and went through 12 months of runway in a couple of months because we thought that the time to own the market was right.”

This makes no sense. The switching costs for both consumers and businesses is basically zero, and there are aren't really any network effects like there are with Facebook, Twitter, etc. What did they expect to happen at the end of those 2 months? That consumers would ignore the hundreds of other deal players in the market and only buy from LivingSocial?

I'm currently re-reading the classic "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie, and one of the principles he outlines to win people over to your way of thinking is to "show respect for the other person's opinion. Never say 'you're wrong'." He tells a story from Ben Franklin's autobiography outlining how insolent and opinionated he used to be, to the point that nobody could stand being around him. One day, someone wiser and older pointed this out to him and from that moment, Franklin made it a point to never directly contradict people or positively assert his own opinions. Instead, he'd say things like "I may be wrong. Let's examine the facts." This warmed people up instead of immediately putting them on the defensive and completely changed the success he had in dealing with people. A little tact and diplomacy goes a long way towards persuading others towards your way of thinking. And you never have to say "you're wrong."

The company I work for recently won a contest put on by Lyft offering free Lyft Line rides to and from work for an entire week. I live in Lower Pac Heights and work in the Financial District and take a couple different Muni routes to and from work. I'll take either the 2 or the 3 heading in and the 38L heading back; the 38L is way too crowded in the morning by the time it gets to my closest stop. Morning commute usually takes around 15 minutes and afternoon takes around 10.

So, my commute isn't bad by any means but I decided to give Lyft Line a shot to see if I could do any better. The first day I tried hailing one in the morning, the app hung up looking for drivers; it said 1 minute to match with a driver but I waited 3 before quitting the app and deciding to take Muni. That afternoon, I tried again but ran into the same issue. The next afternoon, I was finally able to line up a ride but had to wait 10 minutes for the driver to get to me. Once he did and we were on our way, I had the joyful experience of sitting in traffic for blocks on end while watching Munis zip by in the designated lanes beside us. Not including wait time, the ride took around 20 minutes (double my normal commute time).

I'm sure there are some routes for which Line is a better option than public transportation, but I personally have a much better experience on Muni than I did with Line. I get why they're focused on rush hour; a service like Line requires a critical mass of people to use the app concurrently in order to make it work. But, the downside of this is that the times when it reaches this point are the times when traffic is the worst and public transportation offers a superior alternative in many cases. We'll see if this ends up taking off, but I know I won't be using it for my commute. Maybe this would be better suited for one-off events like Outside Lands, Giants games etc. but I'd imagine they'd run into the same problems.

Graduates fresh out of college have the one thing that's most important for long-term wealth accumulation on their side: time. Take two scenarios, for instance, both assuming retirement age of 65 and a long-term average stock market return of 7% annually.

Scenario one: Smart 20-year-old college grad accepts an offer to go work for Big Tech, Consulting, whatever. Their salary allows them to pay down any student loan debt they might have, build a cash cushion, and sock away $10K/year for retirement. At 35, when they've built valuable industry experience and connections, they decide to go out and do their own thing. They stop investing in their retirement account, putting their cash into the startup or raising money, and let the retirement account sit and grow with compound interest.[1]

Scenario two: Smart 20-year-old college grad decides against the BigCo route and founds a startup (assuming this is even feasible given any loan debt they might have). Maybe raises a small funding round, takes a low salary...everything goes back into the business. There is no investment into a retirement account. Let's say they meander through startup land up until 35, making some money here, losing some there and given the high failure rate of startups never really sees the "big exit". At 35, when things like marriage and family happen, they're forced to take a job at BigCo (or MediumCo, SmallCo, whatever) and finally have the means to start investing something into a retirement account. Let's get aggressive and say they put in the same $10K/year that scenario 1 grad did up until 65 (hard to do if you start having kids, buy a house, etc).

At 65, scenario 1 grad would have $2,046,783 in their retirement account after just 10 years of investing $10K/year and then letting it sit and collect compound interest. Scenario 2 grad would have just $1,010,730 in their retirement account after investing $10K/year over a period of 30 years. The difference between scenarios comes out to over a million dollars!

Obviously there's an endless list of variables that could throw a wrench in this model, but the point is that people who fail to assess the time value of money and the opportunity cost for a dollar spent (or not invested) today vs. one invested over the long term do so at their own peril. If you're 20, just $1,000 invested into the market once will turn into $21,000 when you're 65. If you keep putting money in regularly, this amount will grow significantly and the sooner you start the more it will grow. It's up to each individual to determine the right path for them, and I'm not saying it would never make sense to go do a startup when you're young (you have more energy, creativity etc), but you must be aware that the tradeoff is losing valuable years early in your financial path that you will never be able to get back. Arriving at the same spot at 35 that you could have started at at 20 will put you significantly behind others who have used those early years to put the miracle that is compound interest to work for them.

[1] http://www.moneychimp.com/calculator/compound_interest_calcu...

There are varying degrees of changing the world, and not all have to have the aspirations of something like "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." If you're creating value by helping someone do their job better, or faster, or with less waste, etc, then you're still changing the world just in a relatively smaller way. Perhaps a better way to state it would be "making a change on the world". The startups that are upending entire industries (Uber, SpaceX etc) get the most attention, but there are significantly more focused on missions that may directly affect a lot less people, but still improve their lives in a meaningful way.

I'm glad nobody told Larry or Sergey that before they started Google.

I'm not sure I understand the allure of this; perhaps I'm missing something. So I have to send a video/photo in response to someone who sent me one, in order to see what they sent? It seems like there would be a massive disparity in interesting activities between two parties at any given time to make this concept work. If one of my buddies is having a riot at Coachella and sends me a crazy festival pic for instance, and I'm just sitting at my desk doing work, what am I supposed to do? Send them back a pic of my coffee mug or something? Seems like they felt they had to do something to distinguish themselves from Snapchat but I'm not sure this is the answer. Time till tell though, I guess.

Sounds kind of like how Kodak died out. It failed to anticipate the speed at which the market would shift into digital imaging and did a crappy job at entering other non-film markets (printers, cameras, etc). It's cash cow rapidly shrank to the point it couldn't fund viable entrants into new markets.

I was a longtime Uber user who started using Flywheel a few months ago and haven't switched back. You get the convenience of an app as you would with Lyft/Uber along with the professionalism and expertise of a cab driver. I don't want to have to sit idle in the front seat of a Lyft for two minutes while the driver punches in the address on Google Maps, I want to say "Bush and Sansome" and have the driver take me there the quickest way possible. Also I don't have to feign interest in the driver's backstory and keep up a weak conversation during the entire ride--I just want to sit back, check my FB/Twitter feed, and zone out for a few minutes until I have to be "on" again when I arrive at my destination. If the cab driver sucks, you can just give them a low rating and you'll never get that driver again. I should note that I do not work for Flywheel, just a huge fan who switched from Uber due to some scummy tactics I read about (employees overwhelming competitive apps, etc).

Just sent you an email. Curious to know what kind of CMS you're using as I'm working on a similar project.

Funny you mention that. There was an article a few days ago that TaskRabbit quietly shuttered their 'for business' offering and rolled it into the general service. http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/01/taskrabbit-for-business-ser...

Have you tried Onetab for Chrome? It has some of the functionality you're looking for in that it pulls all of your open tabs into one tab and vertically orders them on the page for you to go back and access later. Neat tool, I use it quite a bit. http://www.one-tab.com/

Yes, FB added the ability to target job titles in February this year: http://adage.com/article/btob/facebook-takes-shot-linkedin-j...

I closed my PayPal account a few months ago and will never use them again. I had transferred $300 from my bank account to my PayPal account to pay for a weekend outing I was attending, and once the money was in my PP balance I transferred it to my buddy along with the $10 fee. So far, so good.

A few weeks later, I started getting emails and calls almost daily about past due payments for my PayPal balance, which I was confused about since I used my own funds and thought that was the end of it. Turns out, PayPal charged that $300 to my credit account with them instead of taking it out of my balance, so now I owed an extra $300 and had to pay interest and late payment fees. When I called in to customer service to ask what was going on, it took me almost an hour to finally reach someone and they told me there was nothing they could do.

After that, I paid my remaining balance, closed my account and never looked back. I've since used Venmo, Square, bank transfers, and good ol cash to accept payments from friends, but I will NEVER use PayPal again in my life. Fuck them.

If he really couldn't take it anymore, and really wanted out of the game, he would have taken it down without any fanfare and gone off the grid completely.

By announcing it, though, he's drawing an incredible amount of attention to the game which leads me to believe this was the intended effect. Heck, it made me download it as I've never played it before.

Genius move.

The moment this gets turned down by a merchant you visit frequently, there goes the magic. That means you'll have to keep your regular card in your wallet along with your Coin, and the whole value prop comes crashing down. It seems interesting as a novelty, but I'm not sure I'd pay $100 to play with the cool kids in this case.

No wonder Path and Klout are both laughingstocks in the Valley...

Just quit. Then you'll have all the time in the world to look for a new job.

They've only just started ramping their monetization engine as they've only been offering paid solutions for a few years now. They get all their revenue from essentially two products: promoted tweets and promoted accounts, so I see their revenue as pretty impressive given their simplistic offerings. They're now trying to get a piece of the $85B/year TV ad industry in the US too, so expect to see revenue start to come in from a variety of sources. For those criticizing Twitter because the majority of its users are a passive audience, remember that TV is in the same boat and commands the lionshare of ad spend globally. There's a lot of potential here, and they are just scratching the surface with what's possible.

This was posted a couple weeks ago from the founder of a failed parking startup in Boston: http://chrishoog.com/from-beginning-to-end-the-story-of-a-fa...

tl;dr - The demand for this far outstrips the supply of people willing to rent their spots to strangers for a few bucks.

Love Uber. After using it for over a year, just had my first negative experience this past weekend in SF when the UberX driver had no clue how to get from SOMA to Ocean Beach. I left negative feedback and in a few hours got a response from one of their customer experience folks apologizing for the poor service and refunding my money for the trip. Service like that is why I'll always choose Uber over alternatives like Lyft, Sidecar, etc.

I use GroupMe; although it isn't laid out as "beautifully" as Path is, it's simple to use and you can share photos pretty effortlessly. I don't think it has as many bells and whistles as Path (I installed it once but then ended up deleting it because the utility was near zero) but it works great to have an ongoing conversation with a gorup of buddies. The thing I love about GroupMe is that you can create new groups and add different people according to the situation at hand; it's awesome for concerts, festivals, and shared events to keep track of everyone. The downsides are it doesn't have the longevity of something like a Path, and it's a battery HOG...make sure to turn off Push notifications or you're going to have a bad time. Also just to disclose, I don't work for GroupMe so not a corporate plug. I've also heard What's App is great although I've never used it myself.

"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."

The best was putting proximity mines on the body armor!

Yes! Left joystick + R + left C, twirl around and end up back in the vent. Plant a mine at the spawn point and hope you don't end up there when you die before someone else does!

My brother works there as a QA, and he's enjoyed every minute of it. There is a reverence and appreciation for their users that trickles down from the CEO into the rest of the company that seems to be the exact opposite of the situation at Zynga.