Nitya's Profile

Very cool concept! I am very excited about smart cities of the future. I hope that companies like Rubicon will be able to scale once they can demonstrate ROI. Is it possible to use private waste companies as a testing ground?

I really hope this technology works out. I was talking to my doctor recently and he was talking about how much of his time he spends on administrative tasks. This could be a real time saver and mean real improvements in patient care.

Super interesting post, Saad. I love the idea that while the original use case was frivolous, it was intended to prove a concept that could eventually serve a higher purpose. I wonder if there was some way to maintain a profit producing arm while furthering the refugee work?

Super interesting, Saad. I knew about Epic (in fact my ophthalmologist was just complaining about it to me the other day), but I had no idea about the platform element. I find it interesting that Epic made this move into facilitating apps. The biggest problem with Epic is that their customers and users are not well aligned. Administrators love it and doctors hate it. So why, when administrators are the gatekeepers, are they trying to help with ease of use for doctors/NPs/etc. I suppose the answer is they have an additional revenue source? I’m also curious about the adoption of the platform. I know you mentioned the number of apps, but are there figures on number of app downloads? How do they assess quality and regulatory compliance of apps?

Thanks for the post, Sultana. This platform is an interesting comparison point to ZBJ. I wonder if they have found anyways to expand their service offerings the way that ZBJ has. Although it seems that they do not have as significant of a disintermediation problem given the one-off nature of the jobs. Your point about platform stickiness is well taken. I’m curious if this platform provides sellers with enough work for it to be their primary source of income? If not, how do they ensure an actively engaged pool of sellers?

This company sounds super interesting! You mention the connection to Amazon logistics but I was also reminded of AWS as a cloud services provider as I was reading. AWS provides similar flexibility for businesses in “virtual warehousing” if you will. I’m curious about the way that network effects can be built for this type of platform. I don’t know much about warehousing but I would guess there is a limited word of mouth component between potential users. This could pose a marketing challenge. Also given the physical/location-based nature of the business, scaling requires building a concentration of users in one location before expanding geographically as opposed to a purely online exchange in which physical location is less important.

Joseph, really interesting post. I appreciated your specific examples of how their data created new and valuable insights for advertisers to better target users. I imagine getting top data science talent is a challenge for TWC given their less than innovative image. The acquisition will likely help with this but given that even tech companies are competing aggressively for talent, I imagine it will continue to be an issue into the future.

Thanks Feifei. Its interesting how Starbucks has been able to leverage data from a small subset of it’s customer base. I wonder if they find any significant consumption pattern differences between loyalty customers and others that could create issues when using loyalty data to extrapolate to the whole business?

I also think it’s interesting how much data is being used behind the scenes given that as a more occasional consumer, I don’t consider Starbucks to be a high tech company.

Thanks for the post Patric. I wonder if the two business models (b2b vs b2c) create any tensions for Flo? Or do the incentives of employee benefits providers actually align with the end user such that product development efforts can be united?