The High Velocity Edge had a lot about this subject.
The most memorable example was at a hospital, nurses would occasionally pick up the wrong vial. They always noticed before injecting, but there were lots of close calls that didn’t get tracked anywhere. Once they started tracking that as a leading indicator, it became pretty obvious that the vials needed a better design to prevent even the possibility of grabbing the wrong one. Also, if the hospital never realized this problem and someone got hurt, they would’ve ended up with a much worse solution like “double check really close”
Maybe Spotify didn't put enough effort into it? And besides, listening to music was nothing special, people had portable music players for decades before Spotify. Uber opened up a completely different way of transport. I don't doubt that they would have success with their own device.
Amazon have been extremely successful with their dedicated book reading device, the Kindle. So thank you for that example. That really shows that Uber could have had success with their own device, better than I can argue for it.
Kindle was pre-smartphone popularity (same year as first iPhone) so it had a chance to become established before it was competing directly. Alexa and other smart home devices are better examples now that I think about it more. Also, looks like they already make some hardware for drivers
If you used taxis before Uber, you'd know. Taking taxis used to be dreadful, except for in a few cities, because taxi drivers were/are rouges, always looking to scam their customers in any way conceivable. On top of that it was insecure in other ways. In places were they were not scamming their customers, it would be very expensive. The person who has to take a taxi is generally a visitor to a new city, who is not familiar with public transit and doesn't have their own vehicles. Uber has been a blessing for taking a taxi in unfamiliar and unsafe locations.
There are many cases of Uber and Lyft drivers beating or robbing or raping their passengers, including some victims known personally to me. They’re still potentially dangerous, ridesharing apps did not solve this problem.
If you have 10+ items it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll need an attendant at some point. Also why lock out the whole system when you scan alcohol? Let me keep scanning and I’ll show ID when the person gets here.
Wow! I'm embarrassed I didn't know this since 2020. Too bad we can't allow certain super popular libraries of whose project maintainers we trust to still be cached across domains.
AI concierge for my parents’ vacation rental. Mostly just pulling info from the guest binder, but I’ve also started using some local guides to give better suggestions. Built with NextJs and deployed on Vercel (was really easy and they have a generous free tier).
There’s been some research showing the effect you’re seeing is real.
> We estimate that CGB [carryout grocery bag] regulations lead to an average increase in purchased plastics of 127 pounds per store per month, ranging from 30 to 135 (37–224) pounds for 4-gallon (8-gallon) trash bags.
I made this extension fully using chatGPT to diagnose some layout issues. It’s super simple but chatGPT was definitely useful setting up the chrome boilerplate (and commenting what each option meant). Make sure you ask it to target the most recent version, they recently changed (to v3?) and it seems chatGPT prefers writing for the old version.
