fun stuff Archives - Page 4 of 13 - {5} Setfive

I was catching up with a friend of mine recently and she was asking what I “wanted” to build. As we started talking about it, I realized I didn’t really have a “go to” list of what I’d love to try building. At this point, web apps have become a bit boring, I mean how many times can you really write:

Inspired by Y Combinator’s Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund and more recently Spotify’s Design Lead on Why Side Projects Should Be Stupid here’s a list of projects we’d love to build.

Bitcoin Hardware Integration

Inspired by Bitcoin: How would you build a parlor game?, I think it would be awesome to build some sort of hardware Bitcoin integration. Any interesting angle would be to take something familiar like a casino game, jukebox, or vending machine and then make it “Bitcoin powered”. Also, with the MIT Bitcoin airdrop in the Fall it seems like Central Square and Kendall Square are the perfect places to roll something like this out.

Real Time Stream Processing

From NodeJS to Websockets, “real time” seems to be all the rage but most applications aren’t really dealing with processing streaming data at scale. Processing data streams, even at moderate scale, seems like it would be a fun challenge and would open up the development of interesting solutions. In the last few years, projects like Apache Storm and Akka have significantly lowered the barriers to development so it seems like the perfect time to jump in. We’d love to leverage these tools to analyze click streams, sensor data, or financial “tick” data.

Badass Visualizations

As the price of storage has decreased, organizations are recording and retaining more data than ever before. Unfortunately, most companies are hesitant to experiment with different visualization options and end up with a handful of charts and tables. I’d love to have the opportunity to really take d3js out for a spin and build some awesome visualizations. From visualizing multi-modal data to helping uncover patterns, I’d love to help organizations get the most out of their data.

Anyway, if anyone wants to build any of these definitely get in touch! Would also love to hear everyone else’s ideas in the comments.

As has become tradition, Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins published her anual “Internet trends” report a couple of days ago. As always, its a great read and you should check it out here. Digging through the slides, a couple of things jumped out to me personally:

Tablets are far from dead

Over the past few months, there’s been a slew of blog posts bemoaning the death of the tablet. Arguments basically ranged from the point that tablet hardware is too immature to the fact that most people don’t have a strong table usecase. Looking at the report though, the # of shipped tablets is clearly exploding and is trending upwards. That said, the report doesn’t break out what kinds of tablets are being shipped – we’ll have to check in with Ben Evans for that.

Print media spend is heavily over indexed

If I worked in print media, slide 15 would be giving me some serious heartburn. Compared to other channels, print is receiving a disproportionate percentage of ad spend compared to how much time consumer spend consuming print media. Obvious outcome here is that advertising dollars are going to continue to shift digital, with mobile picking up the biggest chunk. The buying spree around mobile ad networks is already signalling this shift with the clear example being Twitter buying MoPub.

Music is changing

There was a flurry of attention and armchair quarterbacking around Apple’s acquisition of Beats and slide 50 highlights how music is changing. With consumers favoring streaming over purchasing, the market opportunity for “winning” music is certainly shrinking. Couple that with streaming services being available on multiple devices and the Apple/Beats deal looks even stranger. In any case, the future will definitely be streamed.

The battle for the living room is heating up

Looks like the hotly anticipated “battle for the living room” is heating up. With the proliferation of set top boxes like the Roku and AmazonTV along with release of next gen game consoles, consumers are changing how they consume traditional TV. Coupled with “apps” like HBO Go, there are fewer reasons to avoid “cutting the cord” and abandoning traditional cable TV service. Obviously the content owners still hold the keys but as Netflix proved with House of Cards, making awesome TV as an outsider isn’t impossible.

Anyway, as always would love any thoughts or comments!

I was catching up with a friend of mine yesterday who’s looking to build a company in the wearables space and we started chatting about fast the wearables has been growing. The conversation stuck with me and as I left lunch I started wondering what the next big “tools” markets were going to be. The “tools” metaphor is referring to the observation that during a gold rush it’s usually more profitable to sell the pickaxes, wheelbarrows, and other supplies that miners need versus prospecting for gold yourself. Chris Dixon has an interesting post describing this phenomenom that’s worth a read, Selling pickaxes during a gold rush. Some recent examples would include the growth of collaborative open source development fostering GitHub and the shift to “cloud infrastructure” spawning PaaS companies like Heroku. Anyway, so what areas might end up creating $1bn+ tools markets?

IoT and Wearables

2014 might well go down as the year of The “Internet of things” (IoT), everyone is buzzing about it, everyone wants to leverage it, and everyone is a bit confused by it. The market is still immature but there’s already a flurry of competing standards and technologies. Looking just at connectivity, developers could potentially dealing with NFC, RFID, and Bluetooth LE. Given this early fragmentation and the wide range of potential applications, I think it’s a good bet that the IoT tools market will grow quickly over the course of the year. Locally, ThingWorx has already had a succesful exit and the Boston Business Journal is already throwing around nicknames.

On the consumer side, wearables is already a large market and its only projected to grow larger. Currently, the “activity tracker” space is fairly consolidated but that’ll certainly change as devices emerge to track different metrics through different technologies. The net result of this is that anyone looking to aggregate data from a heterogeneous set of devices will face an uphill battle. To combat this, we’ll definitely see tools emerging to help manage this complexity and create uniform interfaces. RunKeeper’s Health Graph is an early player here and they’ll certainly continue to innovate.

Cryptocurrencies

Bitcoin (and *coin) baby! Even though an $8bn market cap isn’t enough to buy WhatsApp, it’s certainly nothing to sneeze at. At this point, it’s still to early to declare that Bitcoin is “here to stay” but it’s definitely going to hang out for a bit. Given its immense disruptive potential and the archaic nature of existing financial infrastructure software, it’s almost a certainty that hugely successful “tool” companies will be built in the cryptocurrency space. From the “Bitcoin” version of payment processors like Braintree to electronic brokerage software like Interactive Brokers I think we’re going to see dozens of interesting cryptocurrency companies.

SaaS cloud wrangling

In the last few years, the number of SaaS products a typical company uses has grown exponentially. Nearly every function in a typical company has been influenced by SaaS products, from marketing and sales to accounting and strategy planning everyone’s data is now “in the cloud”. Despite the the availability of APIs, it’s become increasingly difficult to extract, manipulate, and analyze all the data stored within cloud services. Ad-hoc reports that used to involved combining a few Excel sheets now might require costly custom development. Tom Rikert of a16z has a great post describing the early stages of companies addressing this market and more will certainly follow suit. After the groundwork is laid, we’ll certainly see Google Now style “smart insights” to help companies discover new opportunities and insights.

Making predictions is always risky business and hopefully I don’t look back with these and facepalm. Anyway, would love to hear what anyone thinks in the comments.

Earlier this week, a buddy of mine reached out asking for a good solution to programmatically taking screenshots of a few thousand URLs. For whatever reason, this question seems to come up ever so often so I pointed him towards PhantomJS and figured he’d be on his way. Wrong. Not one to pass up free beer and the opportunity to learn something I agreed to write up the script to generate screenshots from a list of URLs.

Looking at PhantomJS, it seems relatively straightforward but it’s clear you’d really need something “else” to orchestrate this entire process. After some poking around, NodeJS, everyone’s favorite hipster runtime, seemed to be the obvious choice. There’s a handful of node modules that basically “bridge” node with phantom and allow a node script to asynchronously manipulate a PhantomJS instance. Based solely on the funny description I decided to run with phantomjs-node and was off to the races.

Getting everything setup was straightforward enough but then as I started looking at the phantomjs-node examples I started realizing this was a one way trip to callback soup. I’ve been doing some PhoneGap work recently and using jQuery’s Deferreds has significantly help keep the project from becoming a mess of callbacks. On the NodeJS side, it looks like there’s two functionally equivalent implementations but I decided to run with Q since the “wrapper” function names are shorter.

The Code

Anyway, the main problem we’re trying to address is that with multiple nested callbacks code becomes particularly difficult to follow. It’s hard to read, hard to trace control flow, and obviously hard to debug. Take for example, the phantomjs-node example:

It’s already THREE callbacks deep and all it’s done is initialize PhantomJS and load a page. Imagine layering on a few more asynchronous operations, doing all of this in a loop, and then some post-processing. Enter Deferreds. How To Node has an eloquent explanation of what deferreds are and how Node impliments them but in a nutshell they’re useful for making asynchronous code easier to follow.

The main issue I ran into using Q was that “Q.ninvoke” and “Q.npost” wrapper functions kept causing exceptions while using them with phantomjs-node. What I ended up doing instead was creating my own Deferreds in separate functions and then resolving them inside a normal callback.

My PhantomJS-node code ended up looking like:

It’s without a doubt easier to follow and would also make it much easier to do more complicated PhantomJS related tasks.

So how did screenshotting a few thousand domains go? Well there’s a story about that as well…

Note: I have zero real estate experience beyond renting apartments in Boston/Cambridge so obviously this is all just hearsay.

I was grabbing drinks with a buddy of mine earlier and we started chatting about “brick and mortar” businesses that for whatever reason weren’t being disrupted by technology. As we were throwing out ideas, one of the business that really captured both of us was rental real estate brokerages. Specifically, we were talking about those typically scummy brokerages that constantly post on Craigslist, show you a few apartments, and then follow through by putting you through a painful experience to actually rent the place. I’m admittedly no expert, but out of the four apartments I’ve rented every experience has been terrible to a varying degree.

What makes them so bad?

The entire process of finding an apartment is pretty terrible but ultimately most of the frustrations boil down to dealing with brokers being lazy or incompetent, inaccurate or incomplete data, and then the absurdity of having to drop of paper forms…in 2014. Venturing into specifics gripes wouldn’t be useful since they’re anecdotal but my general sense is the majority of Boston/Cambridge renters aren’t thrilled with their broker experiences.

A playbook for a better brokerage

At a high level, being successful at this will be driven by building a company culture of excellence and customer service. You’ll have to take Tony Hsieh’s playbook from Zappos, adapt it to running a brokerage, and then feriously build a culture to support it. Concretely, that’ll translate to hiring individuals with high emotional intelligence, trusting them to make decisions, and then buying or building the right tools to make it happen. Ok great, we’re knocking off a famous management philosophy and hiring “awesome people” how are we actually running this thing?

Don’t just pay on commission: This is entirely 2nd hand but my understanding is that most of the brokerages in Cambridge/Boston pay agents entirely on commission. It seems like the net result of this is that agents spend a lot of time chasing crappy deals, and have no incentives to actively help the brokerage. We’re going to pay an hourly rate along with a lower commission based on a combination of factors beyond just the number of deals closed.

Pick a price tier and own it: At all the brokerages I’ve interacted with, they were trying to move apartments throughout the entire pricing spectrum. From $800/mon studios in sketchy neighborhoods to premium 2 bedrooms at $3200/mon in desirable locations. From the brokerage’s point of view it makes perfect sense, since they’re paying on commission they really don’t care if their agents burn hours on low margin apartments – a rental is still money in their pockets. We’re doing it differently, pick a price range and own it. Intuitively, it seems like the best range to focus on would be moderately high priced multi-bedroom apartments in order to optimize both demand and fees captured.

Qualified lead gen: As an outsider looking in, a significant challenge for the strategy we’re outlining is going to be how do you keep a pipeline of qualified leads? Instead of waiting for people to “drop in”, we’re going to be pro-active and be identifying, meeting, and connecting with potential renters before they’re actively renting. From attending startup events to sponsoring events for graduating seniors, we’ll be top of mind for potential renters that certainly will have a future need.

Social and email: None of the brokerages I’ve used ever asked for my email address, guess how many got repeat business? It’s 2014, social and email are critically important channels for winning customers, driving referrals, and building a brand. We’ll start small, with Twitter and Facebook to connect with potential leads and then leverage email to send follow up emails, ask for potential referrals, and then hopefully win repeat business. After that, start experimenting with Faceook ads and display ads.

High quality photos and accurate data: Photos matter, a lot. We’re going to source our own, high quality photos of every apartment that we show. After a year or two, we’ll end up with the best sets of photos for some of the most expensive apartments in the city. On top of that, we’ll be gathering clean, structured data about all of the apartments we’re showing and renting. With this data, our listings will be the most attractive and we’ll also be able to place clients using only our own internal datasets.

Make the paperwork not suck: We’re going to end the frustration of dealing with paper forms. Renters will be able to pay their deposit with a credit card (+2.5% fee) online, fill out the MA renters agreement online, and we’ll actually have them credit checked before they get this far. Close faster, less deals fall apart, and everything is digital. I know companies like RocketLease are already playing in this space and they’d be a perfect partner.

Access better inventory: Unfortunately, this is an exercise for the reader. Beyond hooking into the public MLS feed and tapping into syndicate services like You Got Listings I’m not familiar enough with the real estate market to speak to how to get better listings. Would love to hear any ideas in the comments though!

Anyway, there’s obviously more to running a successful brokerage but looking at my experiences renting and techniques that have worked in other industries I think it would be possible to build a customer focused, technology powered brokerage that was extremely competitive.

Tag: fun stuff

Three projects we’d love to build!