phulst

Hi Bert,

I felt like I had to respond to this, because our backgrounds are so similar and I was facing the same questions years ago. here's my advice:

Travel while you can. You'll learn more valuable life lessons in a year of travelling than you will in 10 years of, well, doing almost anything else. I am Dutch, studied Electrical Engineering too, and left Holland when I was 24. I left for a 1 year working holiday in Australia, but I ended up spending 8 months in New Zealand as well, so was away for 20 months. It turned out it's pretty easy to get a temporary work permit in NZ as well if you have some technical skills, and I was able to fund a much longer trip by doing some consulting for the bank of New Zealand. After 6 months back in Holland, I left again, this time on a one way ticket to Indonesia. After exploring South East Asia for another 10 months, I ended flying to San Francisco to visit the US for the first time, in hopes of being able to find a job in Silicon Valley, make some money there and then move on with my travels. I never moved on.

Almost 14 years later, I'm still in the SF bay area, and I am now founder and CEO of my own bootstrapped startup, and an independent software consultant. I'm married, have 2 kids, live in a great place, and have always felt that that decision to go traveling was the best decision I've made in my life. Without those travels, I don't know where I'd be right now, but highly unlikely that it would be here.

I think the things you learn by traveling to an unknown place, with unspecified plans, prepare you better for entrepreneurship than pretty much anything you would learn in an office. On the road, you'll learn to be comfortable with the unknown, you'll be forced to look for creative solutions, to pivot when necessary. You'll widen your horizon and expose yourself to new places, other cultures, new ideas. You'll learn valuable social skills, you'll learn to get along with people that you have almost nothing in common with. You'll experience all the benefits of having to venture outside of the fairly small demographic that you are in at home. You'll learn to appreciate and make the best of what you have, however little that may be. Maybe I was just lucky, being able to find jobs on the way, and making it to San Francisco at the height of the dot-com boom, when developers were treated like gods and immigrant work visas were easier to come by. But you may be surprised by the random opportunities you will end up walking into if you just go out on a whim, like I did at the time.

Some people may have thought of me as a lazy bum as I was roaming around the world, but I always knew that it was the right thing to do for me, and that it would make me a better person, a better dad and a more successful entrepreneur down the line. If you need any more convincing: I've never talked to anyone who regretted going traveling. I've spoken to hundreds of people who regret not having done it before they were tied down by careers, families, mortgages and other adult responsibilities.

My advice for you, save up some money, do some consulting and get a little bit of working experience, and then venture out into the unknown. Try to find some work abroad, even if it's unskilled work. (I also picked kiwis in New Zealand and worked in a small factory in Sydney). And then, while you are away, you'll have plenty of time to think about what you want to do with the rest of your life. Or somehow you'll find that those questions will be answered for you.

no, that wasn't us. If you remember their name would love to check it out.

thank you! I've actually worked with an ecommerce site that sells beads and things and uses a flatbad scanner for most of their products. With that site I was able to skip the 'add' step altogether and calibrate images on the fly as they are first viewed. Unfortunately this is more the exception than the rule, and in most cases there's not enough consistency in etailers' images that I can always assume the same number of pixels per physical inch.

I'm definitely aware of the potential overhead of adding lifesizer images though, so I've developed a bookmarklet with which customers can calibrate images without leaving their own site. And we continue to look at other methods (ie outsourcing this work) to reduce the amount of integration work to near zero. Thanks for your input though, it's great to see that people see the value.

on most mac systems it will offer you a suggested screen based on your current resolution. If you're viewing it on your laptop screen you can just choose 'macbook pro 17' and you're good to go. If you move your browser over to your external screen it will typically detect that you're now on a different screen (unless that screen is exactly the same resolution), and it should tell you that. You can then do the manual calibration thingy there. At that point (and this is a feature I'm particularly proud of though it may not be used that often), you could drag the LifeSizer window from one screen to the other and it will instantly resize the item to show in lifesize whereever you move the window. Let me know if that works for you!

very good point. I do think product comparison will be an important use of this technology, and I'm definitely planning on adding features that would allow this. For now, you could hold your current phone up to your screen and see exactly how it compares ;)

it would work for a fridge (provided you use a high enough resolution image), though of course if you were to view that in actual size on a laptop, you would only see a small part of it. You could certainly put it on a big screen in lifesize... it will work with projectors too. There are some measuring tools in the viewer as well, which would allow you to measure the object or part of it, which can be very useful even if you're not viewing it in actual size. Sorry about the patent ;-) I have mixed feelings on them too, but the reality is that patents can open doors in terms of getting funding and building a successful product/service.