Neat prospect, but I'm not convinced this is a big enough problem for the majority of people which is how this is marketed. I would also expect a price point comparative to other hearing aids to further distance the average consumer.
I have trouble hearing in noisy environments. When I was young I was diagnosed with an auditory processing problem so I assume it's related to that.
When I meet with someone in a noisy environment I just accept that I'm only going to understand every other word that someone says. Which leads to a lot of smiling and nodding blankly.
I know very expensive hearing aids could handle this for me but it's not a big enough problem for me to check into that route. However if this was $150 bucks or so I might get some. Though I expect the price tag will be more like $600.
Interesting, to me I would never carry an additional independent hearing aid for this problem. I generally have my keys, wallet, smartphone, and possibly music headphones. If this could be paired in with existing headphones - awesome, otherwise I can't see many people adding an additional headphone to the aforementioned list without a larger problem. I do like the expansion of the Bose objective though with this.
Think of augmented reality. It's generally conceived as modifying what you see, but why couldn't you benefit from a computer able to modify what you hear? It ought to be possible to do a lot of Google Glass-like things, not to mention Black Mirror-like, without looking as much like a space cadet or demanding as much of the hardware. (As a hearing aid user I was thinking about this 10 years ago.)
This is an extremely narrow view - Musk just elicits pathos to an extreme degree because that is the inherent nature of his products. If you seriously don't think social media has brought positive effects to the world and the human condition, you are naive and set in viewing the world through the lens of black and white.
In this case, video game technology would be a super-set of other applications. Take any non-game usage and turn it into a game, for example.
First, I think Minecraft was an over-valuation as well.
Second, it's more of a personal affront.
When I first saw Minecraft, I thought it was simple and something that anyone could make. I would rather see 15 unique block-building games made by amateurs gain success than one predictable commercial application. Obviously not the kind of success VC's want to see. Maybe this is because when I was the target demographic age (11-14) I was trying to make a Doom renderer. With the amount of time that your average kid plays Minecraft and with that amount of focus, you could easily instruct a child how to make Minecraft from scratch.
When I first saw Unity, I thought it was similar to what I was trying to achieve programming. This was back when I was working on making cross-platform (homebrew) games that supported PC, Linux, and Sony PSP, plus doing some Wii development commercially and making WebGL games. When you're thinking competitively, every framework is an enemy.
I have to agree that Unity has value, and perhaps this is a fair evaluation of their value, but when I first heard about Unity (2008?), it was unorganized and it didn't seem like the project organizers had the necessary know-how to actually build the project. One of those, I have a really great idea projects. Somehow, they've been able to make connections all over the industry and come a long way since then.
I'm not exactly sure what nearly $200 million will do for them now. For the upstarter, the real capital needed in this field is about $50,000 for development kits for each platform and twice that for licenses to develop as well, and a $100,000 education plus about $1000 in library books and about as much time as Unity has been in existence, a decade or so. That's just for one person, but that would be quite a bit of work for one billion dollars. The point is, the product is worthless unless it's built by experts.
The whole market of video game engines is upside-down, but that's another issue. Another reason to be upset is that lower entry barriers lead to lower quality commercial releases. Many top-selling games now have terrible performance and crippling bugs.
You really do get incredible insight into how they work up and tear down ideas in a setting that is both art and technology. Also fun to hear about lessons learned from iconic films such as toy story, finding nemo, and inside out.
Sounds like what happened with messaging platforms in China. WeChat became the single bundled platform for mobile and thus got to play kingmaker with default service providers. I agree with your opinion, although it feels like a natural progression as the sheer number of services grows at a rapid pace and its the attempt to remove friction built up from the excessive overhead of choice.
Fair statement but the military also has medical professionals. A wild speculative guess from my perspective is that airlines view it as an objective profession, you do these things to handle the machine and that is end of the story. Medical fields are somewhat subjective since we don't really understand the human body like we do airplanes - we didn't build humans from the ground up. We need to make the medical industry absolutely objective and quantitative in order for procedures and checklists to be effective. It still weirds me out how you need second "opinions" on a diagnosis, it just highlights our inability to understand ailments.
> Fair statement but the military also has medical professionals.
Sure, the military has medical professions, but the military is not as dominant a source of medical professionals as it has been for professional pilots. So, it seems (to me, at least) plausible that military culture might have a substantially stronger impact on the piloting profession than medicine.
I don't understand the point here I guess. Facebook is clearly a service to people. People need validation and they can come here to get it quickly and easily - they also come here to stay in contact with friends and family. The work being provided is you using their service - so its not unpaid feudal system work, it is you coming for a personal benefit that in turn produces profitable output for facebook. This is just an odd analogy in my opinion, one a bit too simplistic.
Isn't that the point, people worked the fields of a feudal system for the food they got. The food they got was significantly less than the food the king got because he owned the land.
Sure people are using Facebook to get some value, but the value they are getting is nothing compared to the land owners value.
Also, the users of Facebook are the 'product' not the customer(advertisers are the customer).
If the quality was actually that stark of a difference, they wouldn't have paid for a sub-par search engine - the cost of a search engine is too large of a cost to find marginal savings.
