How does this kind of thing leak? When the last company I was at sold, most of us weren't even told for fear our acquirer would get cold feet if the terms leaked.
It's part of the M&A playbook. One way to test whether a company is for sale or willing to buy you is to "leak" that you're currently in talks with your target acquisition or acquirer.
You get a response sooner or later, either in the form of a firm denial by the other party through the press, or in the form of someone picking up their phone (either from the target itself or from a potentially interested alternative).
That's assuming the bus would only be converting drivers and not other forms of commuters.
I have a fifteen minute walk to work. If there was a convenient bus that cut that in half, I would use it. I used to ride the subway to work. That took about 40 minutes. I would definitely consider using a bus instead if the circumstances were right.
> To me, Kickstarter backers aren’t just customers. They’re our friends. They are mavens. They represent our most passionate, most ardent and most enthusiastic customers.
> Yes, that’s it. I failed. We failed. It feels horrible, and it’s the end of Ada. But not the end of Triggertrap.
Uh... if I was your "friend" I would be livid that you weren't going bankrupt to sell off every asset you had to pay me back in full.
*Edit - My post was more about the use of the term friendship to absolve the author of guilt. Seems to have been effective This seems like shady business ethics to me.
In the friend scenario, you gave your friend a hundred bucks so he could try to build his dream widget. Would you really demand that your friend be declared bankrupt over a 100 dollar debt?
(I'm not sure I agree that Kickstarter backers are that kind of "friends" to companies who took their money, but that seems to be the argument...)
> To me, Kickstarter backers aren’t just customers.
No , the people you took money from aren't even your customers, because you didn't give them the service they paid for. So don't even insult them saying they aren't just customers, they aren't even customers to you. If there were, you would have delivered what you promised. They are just easy money with no strings attached.
1) The rewards aren't dependent on project success, or
2) The rewards are dependent on project success, but the project is being Kickstarted to fund something that is prototyped and ready to go into production, and the funding level is set appropriate to pay the production costs for the delivered rewards plus whatever premium the company expects to need to go forward.
Its only unreasonable if the project sets the rewards and funding levels at levels that are unreasonable.
When the project sets the funding target and the offered rewards, its not unreasonable to expect the project to be responsible for actually being able to meet the promised rewards if it meets the funding level it set.
No one forces you to put a project on Kickstarter, or sets the funding target or reward levels for you.
That's why many projects use a bunch of non-product rewards where the costs are unpredictable, like t-shirts, stickers, and other stuff whose costs are completely predictable and which serves a sort-of marketing function, without being dependent on the core technology.
Then every dollar from those rewards can go into development before getting to the manufacturing stage. Those lower-value rewards can easily be fulfilled, and if you realize there's some sort of fundamental problem with the project you have the possibility to shut it down and refund device payments before that pledge money is spent.
I realize that this is a very idealized approach and that in many cases the amount raised from ancillaries isn't that much, the bulk of funds come from potential buyers for the device. But perhaps that's part of the problem. I'm considering doing a crowdfund project myself later this year (for a film) and although I'm months away from making any decisions I am trying to think through contingency situations now.
> Kickstarter does not offer refunds. A Project Creator is not required to grant a Backer’s request for a refund unless the Project Creator is unable or unwilling to fulfill the reward.
> Project Creators are required to fulfill all rewards of their successful fundraising campaigns or refund any Backer whose reward they do not or cannot fulfill.
> Project Creators may cancel or refund a Backer’s pledge at any time and for any reason, and if they do so, are not required to fulfill the reward.
That "at any time" para is possibly going to cause problems to the backers.
Assuming this is a serious question, you can hire whoever you want without worrying about their location. The world is your talent pool.
Or to put it another way, almost every recruiter e-mail I respond to states that I am not interested in relocating (usually to the bay area). Requiring all of your employees to sit in the same building is not just old fashioned, it misses out on talent that chooses to live elsewhere.
The other big one is that the company can save a lot of money on office space. If necessary, a small HQ can still be located in San Francisco or Silicon Valley for physical proximity to investors, but you don't need to worry about getting a big, fancy and expensive space to house all your workers. For a funded startup, this means the burn rate is a lot lower. For a bootstrapped company, it just means the company has a lot more money to spend elsewhere or save; they could even roll the savings into higher salaries to attract better talent (which fits with your point as well).
You're never going to have to worry about whether you need an open floorplan or not, because by default everybody gets a custom-designed private office.
I recall some minigame-esque loading screens in some old Dragon Ball Z games and wondering why more games did do something similar. It's interesting to see there was actually a reason beyond simply missed opportunity.
No. "Dimensions" is the right word, because they are three orthogonal scales along which musical notes can be measured[1]. The author could also have suggested timbre and other possible dimensions, but the three stated apply to all sound, including (importantly) sine waves, the simplest type of sound.
[1] Technically, frequency is a function of time too (and timbre a function of the interaction of multiple frequencies and envelope changes, another function of time) but these are all independent uses of time.
Technically there are two complementary sets of dimensions: time and amplitude vs frequency and phase. Both are complete encodings of the waveform.
The article is extremely muddled from a technical point of view. When dealing with perceptions it is extremely important to distinguish physics and physiology. In optics we have radiometric (physical) vs photometric (perceived) values: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photometry_%28optics%29#Photom...
It appears in the article they are doing some kind of implicit averaging over the ear's response function at each frequency, which may make sense in terms of perceptions but makes very little sense in terms of physics.
A much better visual analog would be a blurred photograph rather than a cropped one. "Turning up the volume" simply increases the brightness of the images, which doesn't do a damned thing to reduce the blurring.
One thing that people with normal hearing don't get is how much information is in the high frequencies, which are where the most loss normally occurs, although there are also "notch" losses that happen to people whose ears are routinely subject to loud noises in narrow bands.
We tend to think of "high frequency" sounds in terms of single notes, but in speech the high frequencies are most important in the unvoiced constants, the "s" and "th" sounds and similar. Losing the high frequencies blurs the edges of speech, often making the shape of it unrecognizable. Frequency-dependent enhancement sharpens the edges and brings it back into useful focus.
> Technically there are two complementary sets of dimensions: time and amplitude vs frequency and phase. Both are complete encodings of the waveform.
Minor note, the "frequency and phase" is actually frequency and complex amplitude, which encompasses both phase and scalar amplitude as we think of it intuitively.
In the mathematical theory there is also provision for complex amplitude in the time-domain, but this is rarely needed in practice (and never found in real-world signals).
Not really. A sound can be described by a one or more [time, volume, frequency] triples. I think the author's use of the word "dimensions" is perfectly suited.
They are complementary. You can fully describe sound with either function of volume in time or complex amplitude (So normal amplitude + phase) in frequency. So you could just as easily say the volume is emergent property of the frequency.
Your intuition is in the right direction, but not quite correct.
Think of a cartesian plot. Now, think of the Y axis "tilted" to the front. With those 2 "vectors" you can still describe the whole plane (for whatever "describe" means =P)
If you tilt it so much the "Y" axis becomes paralel to the X axis, then you lost something.
Instead of "orthogonal" what you need is a mathematical property called independence (as in linearly independent) that basically means "not redundant to express a space"
