mickdj

[10] is the best

"ANCESTRY. I don't totally understand this variable. It's a fill-in-the-blank question on the American Community Survey, but there weren't any Asian categories."

Looks like a Japanese design firm tried something similar back in 2013 called the unbrella, still shipping for about $90 (http://h-concept.jp/fs/hshop/c/unbrella).

English press story at http://www.damngeeky.com/2013/12/11/16246/unbrella-solves-th...

Minor marketing fail that while the Kazbrella solves the 'brush against other people's pants' problem, it doesn't solve the 'drip water on the floor problem', yet the promotional video implies it will.

No it doesn't.

If you are interested in life tracking, you might want to try out one of our (Whereoscope, YC10) apps called DriveTime.

Passively monitors your location every 10 minutes, collates, and then lets you view graphs etc. from within the app. Information is not shared with anyone - it's designed purely for an individual user.

I realize this is a self-serving post, but thought it might be relevant. The app just got dropped to $0.99.

Actually we started off with that - having the same interface for both Android and iOS.

But Android users don't expect Android apps to behave like iPhone apps - so the affordances don't carry over.

They kept tapping the context menu, or holding down list items: actions which are normal on Android but nonexistent on iOS.

"The OS will almost always be able to minimize battery usage because it has way more information than the App could or should ever have."

This is only true for standalone apps which don't share location information between people.

The OS doesn't know that one person wants to turn on the GPS on another person's phone.

I'm actually pretty pro-Apple and anti-Android (James, OP is the Android developer and I develop exclusively on Obj-C).

I don't want to veer O/T, but that's not the hard stuff in CLLocation.

There's a lot that could be discussed, but as one example: optimizing for battery conservation requires knowing which radios are currently powered up.

iOS makes its own decision as to which of the 3 styles of location service to engage, based on the desiredAccuracy and distanceFilter values.

However the WiFi/GPS radio have different costs for runtime and warmup, so this API doesn't help when you are attempting to optimize for all 3 of: Accuracy, Timeliness, Battery conservation

Furthermore, the accessible battery percentage in UIDevice.batteryLevel is only reported to the nearest 5%, which is not granular enough to be of use in real-time server-based tweaking.

Clarification: We don't use any private API's on iOS, James' comments were with respect to what we do with location and networking.

Apple's documentation is great for most visual elements, but CLLocation* in particular has quite flawed documentation.

Yes, voip apps can also be relaunched in the background.

The focus of this article was location-based apps, but there are also interesting behaviors with voip and audio applications.

Thank you for that - I have updated the post to more clearly identify the subset of apps I was talking about.

The description under startMonitoringSignificantLocationUpdates at

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/CoreLo...

is the place to start, where they state "If you start this service and your application is subsequently terminated, the system automatically relaunches the application into the background if a new event arrives."

The other required piece of information is that when you reboot the phone, it triggers this event for all applications that have registered this service.

More info at: https://devforums.apple.com/message/307725

If you're further interested, downloading the SongMap sample code from Apple will let you test this functionality yourself.

Thanks for the insight!

I'm curious about this - I've seen that behavior with Android users as well.

Why specifically do you want to turn WiFi, GPS, and bluetooth on or off? I can think of several potential reasons, but would like a user's perspective.

You have to have asked for the Significant Location Update Service.

I have verified this in code numerous times, and Apple representatives have confirmed in the development forums.

You may want to look at:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2135081/does-my-applicati...

http://blog.theanimail.com/iphone-encryption-export-complian...

Good work Euwyn!

You raise valid criticisms, and ones we considered for some time before building the product as we did.

a) Multiple proxies for demand exist, from the existing carrier-based services to portable GPS units to the use of cards swiped at the school gate in Japan and China.

b) Agreed. And the people we share our go-to-market plan with agree.

I make it a point to speak on the phone to several families a week. We have heard from hundreds of users directly via e-mail.

There is a long road from thousands to tens of millions - we don't pretend otherwise, but we do have that road mapped out.

Hi,

Latitude (and other friend finders) are solving a different problem.

Our users (families, couples, etc.) tell us their main concerns are:

1) Privacy model: people don't want to broadcast location to everyone, or (particularly for women) have their use of such a service be known. Having adjustable privacy settings don't solve this problem.

2) Battery: As soon as you notice battery drain, users turn the service off.

We believe we've solved the first (with small, closed, private groups) and the second (with sampling only when necessary).

Our Android version is under development right now.

Definitely :) I'm one of the developers and we actually have hockey teams, couples, real estate agents, small legal teams and tour bus drivers using the app as it is.

There are also quite a few people who just track their own iPhone in case it's lost, stolen, or for curiosity about their own movements.

I'm a native English speaker and relatively fluent Japanese speaker. I used to speak only Japanese for several days straight, dreamed in Japanese, thought in Japnese etc. when I lived there.

There are words in Japanese I cannot translate to English - any translation just has the wrong meaning outside of the Japanese context.

My friends who've seen me speak in both languages say I have quite different personalities in each language. I would say that it's primarily related to the cultural context I learned the words in.

In the same way different groups of friends bring out different aspects of me, so too do different languages.

I work with jamesg (who's already commented) as an Aussie in the current YC batch.

The short answer is there isn't really an equivalent, although I think I speak for many expat Aussies in saying we wish there were!

There are certainly many entrepreneurs in Sydney - check out some of the local meetups like http://www.meetup.com/open-coffee-sydney/ or contact people like Mick Liubinskas and Bart Jellema.

However as James said, the incredible wealth of talent, opportunity, and funding available in Silicon Valley has to be seen to be believed. Without such a context, I think it will be hard to develop such a seed funding model.

The debate about why Australians need to come to the Valley to start companies has been raging for decades - see commentary on Atlassian's most recent round of funding as a classic example.

I think it notable that YC's specific value proposition especially makes sense in a climate where later stages of funding are plentiful. I have no quantitative data to back this up, but it appears sensible to assume that the volume of deal flow (in $M terms) raised in Australia for tech startups would need to be massively higher before a seed investment funnel model would make sense.

Finally, go for it! If not now and you, then when and who? :-)

Yes we spoke to the kids and the parents. Can I ask how many 12 year-old kids you've asked about this?

I try to spend several hours a week on the phone doing exactly that - talking to all the users of the service.

We agree that they're just as big a stakeholder as the parents.

Hi axod,

We, like you, hate the idea of abusing trust and privacy.

However, children who want their parents to know when they're getting home from soccer practise, or see how far away their mother is when she's coming to pick them up, is quite a different scenario.

There are services that are as one-sided as you imply - the child doesn't have to 'opt-in'. Whereoscope is built quite differently.

cheers Mick

Yeah we're really aiming to cut down the number of times you have to call and say 'Where are you?' 'Where are you now?' 'How about now?' :-)

We hope so too and thanks!

Hi,

To be clear - this is about building trust not a lack of it. The kids can see where the parents are, and the parents can see where the kid is.

We agree 100% that setting this up as a spying tool isn't useful for the parents, the child, or the family.

So we deliberately designed the system to be 2-way - both parents and kids need to consent and are aware that their location is being broadcast.

Additionally, on iPhone you can always tell when location services are running as there's an arrow that appears in the top bar. You can also see in Settings->General->Location Services which applications are using it.

1)

It's really up to the families - if they are ok with sharing location data then they can keep it running. It seems like this would be most useful when the kids are 12 to 14 years old.

We have very plans for products that extend up and down the age range, but this isn't it.

2) All parties on the system get the same visibility; you can see your own history and your parent's history in the same way that they can see yours.

We've really tried hard to make the app useful to both parents and kids.

That seems funny but it's definitely the opposite direction to where we're going :-)

We're just focused on building a system that both kids and parents enjoy using.