
The Echo Chamber of Silicon Valley - sethbannon
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/disruptions-the-echo-chamber-of-silicon-valley/
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austinz
How do we know which problems are fake problems and which ones are real
problems, though? Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it might not be as clear.

Twitter probably seemed like a fake problem at its inception (post 140
characters to a personal blog from your phone), and yet it's been adopted and
used daily by many, many people outside the Valley. Google's founders weren't
thinking about ads when they first built their search engine, but apparently
the ads they serve are considered lucrative enough by their customers to turn
the company huge. (Of course there are the data privacy issues, but on a more
cynical note _someone's_ needs are being served.)

On the other hand, Better Place seemed like a useful idea. EVs presumably
aren't more widely adopted because of range anxiety and charge times, so why
not create a business model and technology to swap out batteries and make
recharging as painless as filling up at a gas station? But Better Place is
dead now and Tesla is building out its fast charger network and selling more
and more cars.

~~~
exratione
Does the problem directly cause death, injury, or disability? If so, real
problem. Everything else is just a matter of optimizing your level of comfort
in the absence of real problems.

We can then talk about grading problem importance by its distance from death,
injury, or disability (e.g. it's a problem in the solution to a problem in the
solution to a real problem), and the probabilities and amounts of death,
injury, or disability it does, can, or might in the future cause.

~~~
dquail
Under that definition ... there's hardly anyone working on "real" problems.
Even Nasa.

~~~
sliverstorm
Space travel can be viewed as a very abstract indirect approach to "real"
problems, for a variety of reasons, depending on your views of NASA's role in
technological advance and the future of our planet.

~~~
salgernon
Just to be a devils advocate, perhaps it is important to let NASA know that
you will be 5 minutes late for a meeting. No, the single instance may not
present a life or death situation, but maybe at some point the cumulative
effect of solving these first world type problems can have a trickle down
effect on making the world a better place for everyone.

I saw this as someone that doesn't use uber, twitter, twist or any of the
other referenced products.

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ericflo
One data point: my mom (in Minnesota) has repeatedly tried to get me to use
Twist when I head home to visit her and my dad. I had never heard of the app,
and I live in San Francisco.

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nhebb
Hmmm. Where else can we find an echo chamber ...

> _"As George Packer wrote in The New Yorker last week"_

Maybe enclosing the New York media?

Seriously, though, we are all products of our environments, and we leverage
the opportunities we have on hand. I don't see this as a problem for SV. If
the ideas get tired and the solutions are too myopic to generate revenue, then
the next wave of entrepreneurs will realize that they need to reach beyond the
Bay Area to find problems that software can help solve. Ideas feed other
ideas, and solving trivial problems can sometimes lead to solving bigger ones.

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danso
Twist seems to have a nice, if somewhat infrequent usecase. But this seems
like a function that could very easily become part of an iOS update...is it
being too cynical to say that whatever the merits of the Twist app, that the
$6M funding is fueled by the expectation of an Apple buyout?

Not a bad use of $6M...it's a useful feature, and how much time/money would it
otherwise have taken to light the spark in Apple to have it become a built-in
function to iOS?

~~~
jasonlotito
You mean like something besides Find Friends or Google Latitude?

~~~
garry
Find Friends is probably one of the least usable location services out there
-- it is so slow to find a location so as to be unusable. Latitude is so
complicated to get set up that I find that unusable as well.

Twist, on the other hand, is fast to use and reduces number of taps to do
things using a number of smart tricks, and was clearly crafted with a lot of
thought to making it so.

~~~
jasonlotito
My comment was in direct response to this:

> But this seems like a function that could very easily become part of an iOS
> update.

Regardless, Twist is essentially banking on both Google and Apple _not_
improving the quality of their products that do the same thing.

I agree that the investment into Twist is probably banking on an 'acquihire.'

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atirip
So Twist is an app that says "i'm an asshole who can not plan my time and do
not value your time" in an intelligent way?

~~~
taybin
Yes. Those are the only reasons someone might be running late.

~~~
wtbob
If one is late enough that one uses an app to tell others that one is late,
then yes.

If one needs to be somewhere half an hour away, one does not leave 30 minutes
beforehand; one leaves 35-45 minutes beforehand, or even more, depending on
importance (e.g. one probably leaves for one's wedding very early indeed, just
in case a bridge drops and one's engine drops on the same trip).

Arriving late says, 'I either did not care enough about you to leave early
enough, or I did not care enough about you to accurately model the journey
duration to anticipate delays.'

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mc-lovin
I'm biased because I thought of about making an app similar to twist, but I
think this is a great app, and not just something that appeals to "techies" or
whatever we are calling nerds now. In fact, I think it has the potential to
reduce road accidents by reducing unnecessary phone calls while driving.

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fatemayasmine
The quote at the end, explains a little on how SV nurtures the entrepreneurial
spirit: “One of perhaps the most compelling things about Silicon Valley is
that it is a place where you can fail, and if you do, you can raise money and
try again,” said Mark Leslie, a retired entrepreneur and lecturer at the
Stanford Graduate School of Business. “It’s a miraculous place; the streets
are lined with gold here.”

~~~
Apreche
Yeah, that says it all. Rich people can blow millions down the toilet, and
still be ok. Then do it again and again forever! Real people are lucky to try
even once. If they fail, they're homeless.

If you've already got millions to burn, you've already succeeded. Surely you
must have something better to spend it on than building silly apps.

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skc
The only thing that jumped out at me is why Twist needed 6 million dollars
worth of funding and why they have 10 employees.

Really?

~~~
pbiggar
Because funding is not always about the idea, sometimes it's about the people.
VCs make bets hoping that some of them will pay off. A good bet is to bet one
a guy (2 in this case) who have succeeded before.

So Twist sounds ridiculous, sure. But so did twitter.

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kmasters
Twist isn't solving a fake problem anymore the many services trying to solve
the problem of hailing a cab.

That said, sometimes I think it would be nice if a lot of these micro
solutions could be aggregated into macro solutions ;)

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andyl
New York journalists sure are interested in software developers on the other
side of the continent. They can't write anything serious about the tech
industry because they don't understand it. But they've perfected the art of
link-bait titles. How many so-called 'real problems' has this writer solved?
Zero.

~~~
rsingel
Not only is this a troll comment, but it's based on false assumptions. Nick
Bilton lives in San Francisco. Also, he knows how to code and used to work in
the NYT tech development arm.

