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dquigley

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Does anyone know of other cities / areas using this type of pricing? It sounds like this is pretty new, and I'd be interested in seeing any research / studies on the long term impact of this kind of pricing.

I could see how it is both useful and could have a disproportionate, negative impact on lower social-economic classes.

It used to be the case that you'd get the phone subsidized by your service plan from Verizon, but not any longer. Verizon and the other major US carriers stopped subsidizing phones in the past few years.

For me the biggest reason I wanted to buy through Verizon was they were offering a promotional $200 trade in value for my Note 4. For some people selling their phone separately would be a better deal though, so even that won't matter.

The training I have gone through in product management provides a more nuanced approach:

1) Get customer feedback by actually visiting and talking with customers in the environment where they use your app/service. This contextual knowledge should be helpful in getting to a root problem and not just a surface concern.

2) Don't depend on just one customer's feedback. Instead, survey at least a portion of your customer base to find out if this is a common problem or not.

3) Have a clear business growth strategy for which customer segments you are looking to grow, whether that's keeping existing customers, taking competitor's customers, etc and let that further filter which ideas move to the top of your list.

I don't think there are any magic bullets to ensure you get prioritization right every time, but this process might help some.

Just checked it out. Looks interesting. The pricing structure is still not quite the perfect fit for me, so let me explain.

I've got around 20 clients I have to meet with in person every 6-12 weeks. I'd like to have a client app I can install on each of their computers (PC and Mac) so at any time I can jump on and help them without any prompt (other than possibly a "allow David access, yes or no" option.

It is likely that the real problem is that I'm just not charging enough. With what I current charge my clients, I can't justify $5 / month for a client who generates on average $15-30 in revenue each month (that's average, because I don't meet with them every month).

I like the Copilot Classic pay by the minute pricing, and if my users were more tech savy, that could work well. But they aren't and by the time I get them to connect to a website and get the screenshare running, they'd rather I just setup an appointment to meet with them in person. The Copilot Classic pricing structure though could work well for allowing me to answer any questions that take less than 15-20 minutes remotely and reserve onsite appointments for the bigger issues.

I'll still have to give it a try with a few of my more tech savy clients and see if we can't make it work. Thanks for the suggestion.

Unfortunately the pricing plans for LogMeIn and TeamViewer are setup for enterprise customers. I understand it might not be worthwhile for them to deal with smaller customers, but I'd love to find a product for less than $50 per month (preferably $5-25 a month). But I am not an expert on the costs of running the services that LogMeIn or TeamViewer offer, so maybe that's not possible.

I've used Teamviewer a few times, but I found it cumbersome compared to LogMeIn. I'll have to check it out further.

I'm also looking for something that can be used commercially, that doesn't cost a ton. I've looked at both Teamviewer's and LogMeIn's licenses in the past and found them unmanageable for some of my situations.

Anyone have suggestions for an alternative? I haven't ever found a product that works as consistently and seamlessly (without having to fight firewall issues).

Edit: I should add that I'm willing to pay for a service, but most of the options I've seen are for enterprise customers, not individuals with a few clients.

I agree that "A missed profit is not a loss."

For example, Amazon is in my opinion a company that doesn't focus on increasing profits, especially in product areas where they are trying to push out competitors. Groupon could be artificially holding their price low to force out competitors.

I've personally had a different experience. (Background: I've had an iPhone 3GS and 4, HTC EVO 4G, a LG Optimus from Sprint and Virgin Mobile, some dirt cheap Android-based Samsung smartphone, and now the Samsung Galaxy Note II. All of these devices I've used for a minimum of multiple days

Other than the stock browser on the Samsung Galaxy Note II (which is easily replaced by Google Chrome's mobile browser) I haven't had issues with any Android device browsing the web compared to an iPhone. In fact in my experience, I would without a doubt say Chrome has been a better experience than Safari. Google Chrome's integration with their desktop browser has been awesome since I use Google Chrome on all my desktops.

But this is personal experience, and you can't really base all of this off personal experience. Second, if you're used to the iOS interface, switching to Android will be a big adjustment, one that if you only give it 24 hours you won't ever enjoy.

While frequently with these articles you have to wonder about the validity of all parts of the story, I can say I've had A similar experience from a consumer perspective. I was trying to book hotels for my wedding and couldn't find a hotel that I knew was in the town my in-laws lived in.

I looked up the hotel on the corporate website and it showed it as completely booked, and this particular had didn't show up in any searches for rooms because of that.

I ended up calling them and found out they had left the chain and were becoming independent and had plenty of rooms. So I can't confirm this small business' story, I Can confirm that similar things happen.

The presumptuous labeling is definitely questionable, but the coordination and communication seems applaudable.(for a government organization)

If there was a movement of people planing to protest Google or Facebook, I would expect the FBI to warn them if they had solid information it was going to happen. In fact if they were aware of large scale protests again an all but convicted child killer, they still have a responsibility to inform and protect. We protect criminals and saints equally in this country.

Second in my mind there is no question that on both "sides", police and protesters, individual people broke laws. Protests bring out the worst in some of the police officers under pressure and some of the protesters. So the FBI and the agencies they coordinated with would have been failing at their job to not monitor and report in an effort to protect the employees of the businesses.

You might not like the protection big banks got but they should receive it. Just like the most heinous criminal receives a lawyer to defend themselves, access to protection from danger (vigilanties), etc

So if we can step the emotions back a bit and use a critical eye on both sides of the protests I think we will see a FBI that jumped to conclusions but did their job.

And finally, I find it surprising in a start up forum that promotes agility and a lack of bureaucracy as the ideal that we are so quick to suggest more of it to an already bureaucratic, slow government.

The Worst 14 years ago

I agree, because some may think the best is a tool that does as much as possible, and others may think the best is a tool perfectly suited for a particular task. Some people swear by multi-tools and swiss army knives, but other people hate them.

Clay Christensen in the Innovators Solution lays out an explanation for what is happening here. Apple used vertical integration to make a giant leap forward with their iPhone that you couldn't have made in a non-integrated company. They ended up overshooting the typical consumer's needs though in the following iterations of the iPhone. And the technology that was at first difficult for competitors to reproduce became easier to replicate (thanks in part to Android). Samsung, HTC, and others were able then to provide good enough devices (and in certain ways, better devices) to consumers at a lower price point.

Apple's response has been to move up market towards tablets, and have been able to use their vertical integration to produce devices that no other Android manufacturer could match at first. Microsoft is building their own device to have similar quality, but they are doing it as a vertically integrated company. Amazon showed you could do a partial vertical integration (heavily customized Android and integration into their own media resources) to take away the low end of the tablet market from Apple. And slowly the Android tablet manufacturers are catching up to Apple.

So what this makes me ask is what will be next for Apple? They haven't been good at playing the high-volume, low-profit electronics game, so they'll need another "blockbuster", highly innovative device, and I am excited to see what that will be. It drives the industry forward, and creates exciting new technology we all get to benefit from eventually.

It seems like many people don't like this, but I had this exact issue last night. And opening another tab takes a while to load simply because the gmail app is so big. So while I'm not sure about this exact implementation yet, it could be a nice feature.

This is definitely a cool demo.

One detail I noticed that might be worth adjusting is that I assumed clicking on the "Flip" box on the right side of the page would actually flip the page.

So from a usability perspective if you were actually implementing this on a real site, a popup when you click on that explaining how to swipe/drag the page over could be helpful since this is a new style of changing pages not everyone would expect? Or just make clicking on that button actually flip the page, although that kind of ruins the point of the design.

This article while citing some legitimate concerns fails to recognize that Google wins as the mobile platforms being used continue to support Google Advertising. From what I understand Google's biggest goal for Android is to keep one company from becoming an monopoly and as a result keeping Google out of the business of advertising to those consumers.

I've had similar thoughts. Another purpose your testing mobile security which you could potentially resell to businesses and eventually to the military.

build a dependable prototype that you could resell to business that have storage units, and someone with a warehouse that needs security, or a museum even.

"I believe the right way to be something else, though: Never display a list that mixes data and actions. Even better: never display a list at all. Lists are bad for the user. Scrolling is bad." - Interesting, I'd love to know if there is more of a reason for this, specifically why scrolling is bad?

Either way, it's an interesting idea, and I'm tempted to agree with you. I would love to see the open source community, Android included, expand on what is done on this one site, and continue testing, discussing, and demoing theses types of user experience and interface questions, so we can all benefit from it.