

Why my favourite person to discuss startups with is my 80 year old Grandma - adamfletcher
http://venturevillage.eu/grandma-tech-hype

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nathan_long
I'm a programmer who tends to agree. When I see jobs at companies who say crap
like "we're revolutionizing the taco space by making it social!", I roll my
eyes.

Yes, what the world needs now is more data streams about individuals' taco-
eating habits, produced by people who are distracted from their tacos by their
smartphones.

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GuiA
We're all someone's "social taco space".

I don't know what you do exactly, but you work in programming and I'm sure
there are people out there who would dismiss what you do as being pointless
and say:

"Yes, what the world needs right now, as every day people are starving, cancer
is killing thousands and children are forced to fight in wars, what we need is
more virtual ones and zeros that make the upper middle class richer".

If there are people out there who like taking pictures of tacos, and that it
brings them joy and delight in any way, then how is it more stupid than
anything else in the entertainment business?

Being condescending is easy, but not very constructive.

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nathan_long
+1. My comment was really about my personal feeling of what is useful and
interesting.

I would dismiss the "social tacos" job, but would happily write code to
control toy robots. :)

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simonbarker87
I love talking to my 76 year old grandma about tech - i once explained my
semiconductors energy harvesting phd topic to her and she sort of got it. She
does the crossword, she uses the phone book but she also plays scrabble online
a few times a week with people all over the world (apparently the Chinese are
very good in her opinion). It's a nice balance for her to have a appreciation
of the current technology and the older stuff (although she thinks facebook is
evil and twitter pointless)

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JTxt
Good article; learn from our pre-internet-age elders while we can; google
spoiled us.

(I had to hide the left edge of the browser window, the animated sliding
social buttons were very distracting as I scrolled. Perhaps I'm getting
elderly.)

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pbaehr
It was the fact that they jump that bothered me. If they were just fixed in
place it wouldn't have been so distracting.

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ahc506
The ticker here really is that most of us can't speak layman terms. If we
practice our pitch and our grandparents roll their eyes, it only means that
most probably wouldn't understand our product or service we are trying to
sell. They would appreciate it when we are able to tell them what to
appreciate, in pure English form minus all the technical jargon.

