
Boost by Mercedes-Benz - protomyth
https://boostbybenz.com/
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ChuckMcM
I guess this is disrupting KidCab[1] :-) It seems like it should be a giant
warning sign if you can't facilitate taking your kids to activities, either
you, or they, are over scheduling :-) For the occasional pick up from a
football game or a play or something, I think its great though.

I can imagine a birthday invitation that asks for RSVP's so that the van could
come by and pick up your child (the guest), that is when it gets weird for me.

[1] [http://kidskab.com/](http://kidskab.com/)

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jhulla
Your smiley face notwithstanding, suggesting that kids and or families are
over scheduling is passing an unnecessary judgement. There are many, many
deadlocks in scheduling children that cannot be easily resolved.

If anything, the deadlocks are resolved by "over" scheduling. By placing the
child in a supervised activity, the parental units are freeing up time to
allocate into other needs. The simplest example is kids in different schools.

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001sky
_By placing the child in a supervised activity, the parental units are freeing
up time to allocate into other needs._

this is really the key to the gordian knot here

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cassowary37
Okay, judgmental 20- and 30-somethings, 40-year-old here with 2 kids. My wife
and I both work full time; doing so allows us to do things like go on
vacations with our kids, live in an expensive city, and pay tuition. If our
kids are going to have afternoon activities even occasionally during the week,
we have two choices - shift to part-time employment, or arrange for
transportation. I find it ironic, given the number of 'live your dream' and
'go for it' startup posts on HN (oh, the humanity!), that the assumption is
that working parents should just pack it in to provide high-quality
transportation for our youngsters. It smacks of hypocrisy. And, for what it's
worth, kids who live in the city can't exactly go play in the creek and ride
their bikes. I wish they could, but they can't. It's not 20 or 30 years ago.

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hawleyal
They can. Fear is the only deterrent.

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giarc
You are correct. I believe child kidnappings are at an all time low. Fear of
child kidnappings due to sensationalized news is at an all time high.

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giarc
Ironic that their solution to reduced quality time with family is to put them
on a bus with a Mercedes employee instead of driving them to x practice.

I don't know what to think about this app in general. They've identified the
problem that parents don't have time to drive their kids to all of their
activities. However I think they are missing the other problem that kids don't
have time to take a "school bus" to all of their activities.

I imagine once you hop on that you will make many stops along the way picking
up other kids and dropping some off. So instead of a 15 minute drive to the
soccer field, it is now a 35 minute ride. I think that if kids have so many
activities that parents can't drive them around, that the kids themselves may
not be able to squeeze in these extended trips either.

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dalanmiller
Disclaimer: I'm not a parent. But is driving kids around really quality time?

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DLarsen
It's all what you make of it. A ton of life is spent doing relatively mundane
tasks, and I think there's a great opportunity to redeem that time. It all
adds up.

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hrktb
I think the main difference is that driving is a dangerous activity. You won't
be playing with your kid while driving, you won't look at the wonderful
drawing he/she did in class, and you can't engage any discussion that make you
think or feel too much.

It's not like you're doing the dishes.

~~~
giarc
I would disagree. If you can have a discussion with your adult passenger, you
can have a conversation with your kid. Ask them how their day was, do they
have homework, are they excited for soccer tonight? It all goes a long way to
making your kid feel special, developing communication skills etc.

~~~
hrktb
>If you can have a discussion with your adult passenger

To give a frame of reference, I don't believe that driving is so easy that
most people can do it competently on a daily basis.

I find the experience extremely broken, and it seems difficult for a lot of
people to drive 100% correctly; signalling before turning would be an obvious
one: It should be simple, but the fact that otherwise competent people don't
do it hints at a problem with the system itself. People commute and don't
scratch their car everyday, but I think for the majority it's more a
combination of luck and tolerance of the system than pure skill and mastery of
the art.

In this respect, I think most drivers are not OK having a discussion with
their passengers. They can, because they don't devote 100% of their brain
power to driving (it's more of a chore than anything else, and no one wants to
focus on chores), but personally I think they shouldn't. Eventually we should
find a driving system more centered about user safety, better designed and
less taxing for the driver, but I'm not holding my breath.

I guess it's obvious now, but I think most people should live in urbanised
areas with good public transports, and/or high tolerance to
walking/biking/kick boarding. Walking my kid to school is a nice experience,
like you describe it; Driving my kid would be stressing at best, I'd be more
focused on the brake light of the car in front of me than the soccer match
tonight.

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jmathai
I wish as a child I had activities that filled my days and parents too busy to
take to them.

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pcurve
Sucks to be a child these days. I played with neighborhood kids doing hide &
seek, soccer, baseball, ditch digging, crayfish-fishing, arcade, nintendo,
bookstore, etc.

Generations of kids grew up that way and they all turned out fine.

What's the point of all these stupid activities we put our kids through these
days. I find the very existence of this kind of service very depressing given
how rich we are as society.

~~~
johan_larson
I guess it depends on what you consider normal. I could easily see myself
enrolling my kids in, say, martial arts (3 sessions per week), music (1), and
swimming lessons (1). That's less than one activity per day, making it very
reasonable by my standards.

If there are no overlaps in times and nothing is within walking distance and
the local buses aren't an option, that would be 5 trips per kid per week, so
10 or 15. I'd be looking to organize some sort of car pools with the other
parents, at a minimum.

~~~
pcurve
I know parents do these things with hope of raising well-rounded children, but
I do wonder about their value when all parents are doing the same thing.

There used to be more leeway to do other things before, but now many upper-
middle class families are basically prepping their young kids for college
admission, some without even realizing it.

~~~
jmathai
I wish we hadn't come to a point as a society where we try and eliminate any
amount of unstructured time for children.

I'm not sure any of us know what the point of all these "activities" are.

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omarforgotpwd
New venture from Mercedes Benz: Put your kids in our van. Schedule 3 days in
advance. What's an uber?

I'm sure it will be a hit.

~~~
trentmb
Uber is on-demand, and costs more because of that (convenience tax). Spending
15min on a Sunday evening to book your kids activities for the week isn't
awful, and it gives MB a chance to pick optimal routes.

Convenience has a cost, planning ahead reduces it.

~~~
igul222
According to their "About" page, a one-way ride costs $22. Even if you buy 50
rides at once, the price is still $17.6 per one-way ride. That's comparable to
what a typical UberX ride around Palo Alto costs, in my experience.

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iaw
Neat concept, Uber for kids. But what happens when a kid with a bad attitude
creates problem for the driver? What happens when the kids start fighting?

Finally, what happens when nefarious individuals realize it's super easy to
pick up rich people's children by pretending to be a Boost driver?

This is going to be a fun liability experience.

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cloakandswagger
>Finally, what happens when nefarious individuals realize it's super easy to
pick up rich people's children by pretending to be a Boost driver?

This is where my company's app, Mooble, comes in.

Mooble is a breakthrough anti-molestation app built for modern, on the go
kids. By simply pressing a button or speaking a programmable safety word,
Mooble broadcasts an emergency alert through all of the child's linked social
networks.

Brief product video below:

[http://youtu.be/2svVkkNuSq0](http://youtu.be/2svVkkNuSq0)

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cloakandswagger
Not sure why I'm being downvoted; yes it's self promotion, but highly relevant
to the discussion

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rsweeney21
I don't think the link you posted is correct.

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dylanz
Another startup in this space is [https://shuddle.us](https://shuddle.us)

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fieldforceapp
And another... [http://snapridesapp.com](http://snapridesapp.com)

(These all seem to be "Uber for the 'burbs" basically)

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hrrsn
> Please note that rides must be scheduled 48 hours in advance.

I'd say this right here is a killer.

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notatoad
for kids activities? they're all scheduled more than 48hrs in advance anyways.

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bennetthi
Disrupting busses!

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a_gentle_autist
LOL yes, the poor poor kids and parents in PALO ALTO really could benefit from
this!!!

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a_gentle_autist
Here comes the down vote brigade.

Seriously, tell me why the most privileged people in the bay area need this
service.

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stevewilhelm
I can think of a couple: the bus service in the area is very poor, the
students have quite a few of extra-curricular activities that are not located
at their schools, their parents can afford to pay for the high cost of a
prototype service, and (I am guessing here) that this project is being
spearheaded by a Mercedes R&D group that is located in Sunnyvale. [1]

1 - [http://www.mbrdna.com/about.php](http://www.mbrdna.com/about.php)

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whymsicalburito
I like that mercedes is trying something new with this, but I feel really bad
for the kids who's parents sign up for this regularly. You demonstrate what
you care about by how you spend your time and money. This is just one more way
for parents to ignore their children.

