More likely someone at Microsoft hit the wrong button, or failed to set something to private, or whatever. This even happened to Apple with some iPad Air 2 documentation not so long ago, so obviously this stuff happens.
Not surprising with all its features, but for wearables, that's a killer. My Fitbit can do 5-6 days, and I would consider that on the shorter end of decent battery life.
The overall quality of the fitbit (both as a band and a clip) is complete crap. My wife, hardly a heavy user of such, has had the clip die within two months, the band (a replacement) started acting up within about 3 months. Bought at two separate times from two different places. Friends have similar stories.
I haven't delved into wearables yet. I mostly have used my iPhone 5s (now 6) for the motion tracking, but it certainly doesn't catch everything (let alone doesn't catch vitals) since I don't carry it everywhere.
I haven't had any issues, but my wife's Fitbit battery wouldn't stay charged for more than 2 days, within a month of getting it. Since her replacement came in, we've had no issues.
My biggest complaint with the Fitbit is the lack of any battery meter on the device itself. Unless you sync frequently, you wouldn't know when your battery is running low.
That's very impressive - my iPhone 5, with "GPS Tracks" (my favorite waypoint tracking device), with the screen off for most of the time, gets a little over 4 hours before the battery dies out.
They are chasing after slightly (but not completely) different markets. This is a (very capable) fitbit competitor. Apple is definitely targeting fashion. Microsoft is marketing a < $200 band. Apple will be selling a $5K+ Gold Watch amongst its offerings.
In some ways, the Microsoft watch is actually much more capable than the Apple Watch (Hello, untethered GPS!) - but nobody is going to put it on the front page of vogue.
Looks interesting and good on Microsoft for finally getting in front of a new hardware trend. I kind of wonder if all these health trackers are just going to be a fad though. Do you really need to micromanage every calorie and heart beat with a $200 gadget? There's a ton of hand waving about combining all the data, synergies, etc. but what are the actual benefits of these devices over just regular checkups with a doctor?
Yep definitely a fad. I used up band religiously for a year couple of years when it came out. After a while I got sick of one more thing to keep track of, was just too overbearing.
I see a counter trend where technology becomes invisible, fades into background and still works for us instead of being in out faces all the time.
Smartphones, smart glasses, smart watches everything that wants a piece of our attention is going away soon.
I want to learn the routes around my neighborhood and not need a map in my eyeglasses. I want to talk( or not talk) to friends in real life not text message them. I just want to come home an play my piano not read a twitter battle on my phone. I want fall asleep talking to my partner/dreaming about future, not obsesses about my deep sleep rem cycles. I want wake up when I am done sleeping not by a smart alarm keeping track of my sleep cycles. I just want to eat eggs and toast for breakfast not powdered rice from a plastic bag.
I don't want any of this smart* shit. Please make it stop.
Yes, such a backslash is quite possible, and if one has lived through several decades of similar on/off stages in trends will know (those involved in the sixties culture wouldn't expected young people would turn into apolitical consumerists a mere decade later -- "Family Ties" style).
Unfortunately a lot of conceptually challenged people don't understand anything about social norms, peer pressure etc, and think that using or not using this technology is just "individual choice" ("noone is forcing you", etc). Then again some think that you can get out of a depression just by trying to think more positive...
As an engineer it's fun to work with data. Having data about my own life (heart, sleep, eating, etc) is fun to play with, learn from, and optimize. No, I don't need every calorie or heart beat, but it can be interesting to work with what i've got.
I completely agree with you, I like the concept of "disappearing technology" because just about anything I want to do is somehow stupidly tied to a device with a screen. It's annoying.
With that said, one of the main things I wish I could have during my workouts is something to track what I do without me having to manually input it. So, if it can count the number of reps I do, sweet. If it can count how many steps I took within my 3 mile treadmill run, awesome. If i can see my heartbeat at a glance, great! Because treadmills fucking suck at that.
HOWEVER, and one of the reasons why I'm not considering the band, I don't want tweets, or messages, or updates, or any of that shit even more in my face. I don't want another touchscreen vying for attention. The new Fitbits do that but (luckily) not with WIndows Phones. I have one, and I see this as a FEATURE rather than a detriment. Why the fuck do I need to see stupid notifications while I'm trying to run?
Then why would you complain about getting alerts if they can be disabled? Or are you complaining about the idea of other people being able to get alerts because you don't approve of the concept?
This is going to sound silly but here's my thing: the Band is built around receiving notifications, that means that even if you disable them, you'll still see text message icons, emails, etc. even if you can't use them.
I want to look at my watch and see "hey, you've walked 30,000 steps today", not "you know, you can check all this crap on here!".
It's the concept, and it's also that mental reminder that you MAY have notifications. I hope that makes sense!
Actually, I think the psychological weight of both notifications and infoglut in general is a very valid concern, but I think making crazy assumptions / rants is silly.
Case in point, what if I told you not only can you turn off the notifications completely (which we established earlier), and that no notification icons show up on the main screen (which is obvious from the video/screen shots - we're not talking about old-school LCD stencils, after all), but that you can further manage the tiles so even if you can't control yourself from actively swiping around you won't see anything?
Because now that I have the device on my wrist and the app on my phone, that's exactly what you can do.
I have very little skin in this game (it annoys me slightly to see rants w/o any basis necessarily in reality, but life's too short for arguing on the Internet), but maybe it can be better to be more reserved about a product critique until having seen how it actually works?
I totally get what you're saying and am happy to hear that it works that well but, I haven't seen anything like that in the shots. The only thing I've seen is the "do not disturb" mode which is probably what I'll do when I get it.
I'd love to hear more about what you like about it and how it is. My main concern was basically not having yet another phone-like device that will annoy the crap out of me. And the Band is begging for it.
very useful! So I saw that you said it's uncomfortable? That's a major concern for me. I spend the entire day typing. I wonder if my strangely-shaped wrists will alleviate that though.
When you're on an active weight loss plan these devices can help a lot. You don't even need it to be perfectly accurate in its calorie estimates as long as it is consistent.
The benefits over regular check-ins with a doctor are consistent daily feedback. Combined with tools like MyFitnessPal (which is mentioned on Microsoft's page) it simplifies the overall process of weight management.
I have Garmin devices, but I expect the process is similar to what Microsoft hopes to offer. The fitness tracking device keeps track of movement. My GPS watch and heart rate monitor estimate running and cycling effort. That all goes into Garmin's online system, and produces a relatively consistent and realistic estimate of calorie burn. That data is shared with MyFitnessPal, where I track my food intake. When I open MyFitnessPal's app I can see how things are going for the day, and adjust my behavior according to how active I have been.
It sound complex, but it's mostly automatic. And 45 pounds later I'm a believer in the potential of these tools.
At first, the $199 pricepoint seemed high, but it seems to be a cross platform high end fitness tracker with basic smartwatch functionality. Incidentally, this puts the price point right in-between FitBits and Android Wear watches (and also the iWatch).
Furthermore, 2 day battery life is a very welcome addition. I wouldn't mind putting one of these on my wrist.
The price actually seems low to me. The built in GPS and HRM make it compete with higher end endurance watches that cost $300+. I'm considering dumping my TomTom Multi-Sport Cardio for this if the real time stats during running are good enough.
It looks like the display is meant to be facing outward from the bottom side of your wrist (i.e., down, if you put out your arms straight in front of you). A lot of the videos show people just flipping their wrist around to correctly orient the display. It's a little unusual but doesn't really seem like it'd be any sort of issue to me.
What is the software running on this? Interestingly, MS is mum on it. What a change.
Also, can the microphone connect to Siri, Google Now? I know Cortana is running on it.
Well, I took the person saying "MS is mum on it" as "they are keeping it secret." If they are keeping it secret, that's interesting. But I'm possibly reading into this something that isn't there.
We are using a single threaded lightweight runtime based around call backs. We are completely non-blocking on all IO (including all sensors), and our CPU spends the majority of its time in a very low power mode. Every microsecond of CPU time is accounted for and justified!
I cannot wait until people look at our battery size in mAh.
That sounds cool! Can you disclose/admit what language it was written in? I'm very tempted to try this out instead of getting a fitbit (not at all impressed with the Apple or Android watches so far).
> single threaded lightweight runtime based around call backs
Sounds like Javascript to me, or maybe something like Erlang. I wonder if we'll be able to install apps on the device or just build external apps for cell phones. What about hooking it up to your desktop/laptop for notifications and stuff? I'm thinking there could be some cool features there.
Our software was completely written from the ground up. We started with an empty main.c file. :)
A number of us lead software engineers are on hacker news and we all love the latest programming languages. We got a bunch of really super cool stuff in here, but all in straight C and running in very little memory space. We're dying to start an engineering blog, we believe some of the lessons we learned about applying modern software engineering techniques to an embedded device are very valuable. (Fun fact! Embedded Engineers have been avoiding dynamic allocation well before it was cool!)
We're hoping to get proper continuations in sometime soon. :) Our main problem is saving/restoring the stack without losing too much performance! (Cycles equal battery life, I cannot justify pushing for a move to continuations if the battery life hit is noticeable to the user!)
Must have been very cool to be bit-saving and over-optimizing in our "era of plenty". Almost nobody cares about a couple extra MB nowadays. And starting from a blank main.c? Gutsy.
I looked several times for the battery life but couldn't find it. Actually, for me, the 2 day battery life is the killer feature - it means I'm almost certain to get a full 16 hours out of it - which is pretty damn hard to believe given it has a GPS radio in it. That's something the Apple Watch won't have - which means if you are going out for a run - Microsoft Band will be there for you, but you won't be able to track with the Apple Watch.
The specs on the main page say "48 hours of normal use; advanced functionality like GPS use will impact battery performance." There's also a in the support section talking about extending battery life: http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-band/en-us/support/hardwa...
As much as I agree with you the same thing is often said about weather apps. However the really accurate ones (e.g. Dark Sky) that can predict to the minute and give intensity are really useful. For example I was able to plan my lunch break using it yesterday so I was out of the office in the 30 mins of dry weather between rain showers. The the UV sensor you could probably work out what strength suncream you need and if people apply the correct strength maybe in the long term skin cancer rates will fall. Small change in behaviour due to better information, big improvement for society.
(Thanks for highlighting Dark Sky, that looks like an interesting app!)
Don't your arguments (and app recommendations) point against a UV measure as being useful? If you want to know whether or not to put on sunscreen now, for a day out, knowing the current UV strength is no use since the conditions will be different later. That's where weather prediction comes in and makes your one little watchband UV datapoint useless. Looking up at the sky and observing weather conditions will always be better than that, and better weather prediction will beat looking up at the sky.
Ah, very good point I didn't think of that. I suppose it could function as a warning system. You're go out in the morning and it's cloudy and suncream isn't required. As the day goes on the UV levels increase and your fitness band can warn you that you should think about applying suncream as the UV levels have increased.
In an area that reaches extreme UV indexes I would find it useful to know for a for a given start time in the morning and the afternoon how much time I have before burning for the conditions on the day.
UV forecast graphs take some of the guesswork out of location and time, but I find that it hard to judge how much cloud cover is needed to drop from a high to a low index range. Sunscreen is great but it's not much fun to have to be covered in goop every day. Getting burnt when it's cloudy isn't much fun either. Knowing your exposure would limit the amount of cream.
Maybe. If they were already including a photocell, it might have been more or less free to use one that enabled this feature.
UV levels can also be counter-intuitive, where the type/amount of cloud plays into how much is blocked, or where a partly cloudy sky actually increases UV levels. Or where, using my dumb experience as an example, you forget to consider that the spring sun in Florida is more powerful than the summer sun in the north.
This was the first MS product that I ever wanted to buy. Seems to have everything I want in a fitness tracker/smart watch, except the barometer and water resistance. I'll hold on to my Suunto watch for a while longer.
The battery life is obviously dependent upon what services are enabled. For such a versatile device, MSFT should have a table for battery life for different usage cases.
For example, for Joe the jogger who wants to use it a purely health gadget companion, he may not want the microphone, UV sensor and ambient light sensor on, but for Jane the office worker who wants to take her steps around the office and have some office notification, the GPS and gyro is turned off. These two use cases could have vastly different battery life.
Better than Basis Peak... except it's missing the galvanic skin response sensor. I'm really happy about the UV sensor (although I already backed SunSprite, which is a disaster)! Best of all, Microsoft Band will have APIs unlike the data-stingy Basis!
Yes, I thought so, too, but they suck at material choices and ergonomics. Also, they don't have an API. Since Intel bought them, Basis Peak seems to look and feel better, but where's the API? Anyway, Microsoft just made a no brainer to decide - they offer everything that everybody else has (except pulse oximetry that Amiigo was supposed to have - not sure if they delivered it) and much more at the same price.
I've had a B1 for 1.5yrs. They've promised a public API since before that time, but it still doesn't exist. In fact, I have a hard time thinking of any features they've added this entire time (in fact it's terrible as a watch since you can't set the time/time zone except via the web and after a full data sync, making it often useless if you travel much).
I finally got the Amiigo a couple months ago - I didn't see SpO2 stats detailed. It was actually pretty underwhelming - the Amiigo doesn't have the promised API/SDK either. The MS Band's sensor suite is better (GSR, skin temp), it's just too bad it's not waterproof.
Wow, this actually looks fantastic. Microsoft has always killed it in the hardware department. Looks like it connects to their cloud service as well. Will probably consider getting one.
One of the bestselling game platforms ever with a library rivaling the PS2?
Yes, the RROD was a huge debacle and too many lost money on broken Xboxes. That doesn't change the fact that people bought 70 million of the things, and generally seemed to love them.
You're absolutely right if the discussion was about the business success of the game console, but it's not. It's about Microsoft always having 'hardware that's killing it', which is made pretty untrue by the consoles' faulty reliability in the past.
A whole cottage industry of aftermarket console cooling apparatus was spawned due to the first Xbox's history, and it didn't help whatsoever in staying the problems that the second one had.
It was a business success regardless, but that's not the topic at hand.
There's an old Microsoft joystick (the Sidewinder 3D Pro) that hasn't been made in at least a decade, but several friends of mine still use them (with custom gameport-to-USB converters specifically designed for that stick.) Yet another quality piece of Microsoft hardware.
With my RMBP, I use a Microsoft wired mouse that would be about 15 years old. I want to get a wireless mouse, but I don't want to lose the feeling of this one!
So, Surface won't be replacing Windows/Office any time soon, but nearly a billion in revenue for what a lot of people try to frame as a failed product is not too shabby.
For Surface, Microsoft made $908m in sales, but spent $839m to make the devices. Compare that to last year, when they sold $2.13b worth of Surface devices but spent $2.87b to make them.[1]
I wouldn't say it's a key profit area for them yet, and we also can't call it a success yet (as they haven't reported the total retail purchases).
Seconding this. I used one for a few years and while I loved the device itself and everything about its interface, it was hampered by the poor software (a reskinned version of Windows Media Player, basically) required to sync anything to it, and the fact that no one cared enough about Zunes to reverse them like they did with the iPods :( I might still be using it if it had drag and drop file management.
I still use my Zune-hd, kinda amazed the battery has lasted as long as it has. It is still a beautiful piece of kit. Fits in the hand so well. No updates to the OS, but the music player was so good it isn't necessary.
My only wish was that it didn't have a proprietary charging port.
If you had actually used one as a real phone, I doubt you would be saying that the "hardware" isn't good. The core components are as good as the competition. The amount of sensors available to developers is ludicrous. Not only that, if the build (phone body) forms part of what you would call "hardware" - it truly lives up to the Nokia reputation.
Past performance is not indicative of future results.
While MS has built a reputation for solid build quality on its peripherals, they are not immune to the race to the bottom. If you liked your old MS Intellimouse, for instance, it would be wise to check the date of manufacture before buying another.
This affects more than just Microsoft. Other brands have changed ownership, or changed manufacturing facilities, but kept the same trademarks. Or items with the same advertised model number could now be manufactured in multiple facilities, to the same nominal minimum standard, but widely varying actual performance. I'll leave it to you to do your own research, but LCD display panels and SD cards are a particularly obvious example of this.
If Microsoft wants me to trust its hardware like I once did, it doesn't need to actually open a new manufacturing facility in Washington under the burning eye of its QC employees, but it would at least have to be embarrassingly open about it manufacturing process. I simply don't trust anyone to build quality for the mass market any more.
I'm not saying companies don't build quality anymore, but you can't just trust a brand. You have to do your research on each new model, every time.
All the sensors + apparently a very lightweight OS + small form factor = I like it.
The killing feature is the integrated GPS. As mentionned on the website, you can go without your phone. That alone could make it a buy if it supports wireless charging (I don't want to bother with wires in 2014)
Also, it is multiplatform, which is a big plus. I do not want an android watch or an iwatch, but something that will work regardless of the cellphone I chose.
I wonder if there's a devkit to read the data. If some HN is from Microsoft, I'd love some links to the devkit page (simple stuff, like retreiving GPS log, heartrate log, etc)
Based on this interview/article on the verge [0], it sounds like there are plans to open up to devs eventually (not surprised, considering microsoft's current trends), sounds like they are just taking this one step at a time.
Hey, I'm an Open Source Engineer with MSFT (and the msft dude for YC) - there isn't anything out yet, but we have always released SDKs for pretty much anything we build.
Looks like it supports data relay to MapMyFitness Suite of Apps, which I would think could then relay it to HealthKit if there is not already a direct export from MS's iOS App.
Companies like AWS, Google, and MSFT have representatives that consult with YC founders to help them with engineering goals. I suppose to up-sell them on scaling with their platform.
> Person scaling with Azure here. It's pretty awesome and easy.
And it's pretty expensive.
Now, if your competitor is on an open stack and on real computers they will eventually run rings around you because they get more control and lower costs. The initial boost you're experiencing will turn into a straightjacket with a hefty pricetag over the longer term.
Because I have fairly extensive insight into a very large number of companies and can see their license bills as well as their cloud bills if those are applicable. Compared to that doing a startup on an open source stack using dedicated machines eventually turns out much cheaper. It's like getting hooked on drugs.
The most cost effective way as far as I can see is to hire a sysadmin on a freelance basis until you need one full time, own your own hardware (or lease it by the month until you can afford your own hardware) and pay flat rate for bandwidth. Anything else will sooner or later come to haunt you and then you will need to migrate to some new platform. At that point in time you will learn the true value of the words 'lock-in'.
Now, if your competitor is on an open stack and on real computers they will eventually run rings around you because they get more control and lower costs.
Obviously it depends on what you're actually doing, but for a straightforward SaaS app (a few servers, a db server, a queue and a load balancer in a few datacentres around the world) one good sysadmin/devops guy costs far more than a set of AWS instances that essentially scale themselves.
Having dedicated people necessary for that 'control' is beyond the budget of the majority of startups.
Exactly plus at scale AWS doesn't do everything either, a sysadmin or at least consultants are still needed to navigate the gotchas and help with how to better provision the stack. AWS instances don't just scale themselves.
There is one specific case when I recommend AWS instead of dedicated servers and it's for customers who have widely varying traffic with predictable peaks. In that case having the flexibility afforded by cloud providers to increase the number of instances temporarily to deal with the peak makes sense.
The only good use-case I know for AWS and it's ilk is if you need a 10,000 node cluster for a few hours to do some heavily compute intensive work which does not require a very large amount of data to be imported and exported afterwards. This is a pretty limited number of use cases but for those situations it absolutely rocks. Anything else I'd run the numbers very carefully.
I don't think that is correct. There are thousands of startups on AWS (an IAAS cloud) that don't run 10K node clusters. While they cost may be high, it is pay as you go. I have a rack full of computers at home and I still have some things served by AWS. The PAAS model (e.g. Heroku, Bluemix) is becoming popular today but those are often hosted in IAAS clouds.
I think there is a case for an open stack, but I think unless you pick a real dog of a platform good people can make it work well. It comes down to a "can I get good people for stack X?" as much as "Does stack X work or cost too much?"
Just like in the case of Trello if you already have the experience you can probably save money if you use what you already know how to use. In almost all other cases open source stacks are cheaper.
Stackoverflow and Trello are always held up as the shining examples of how the Microsoft stack is able to hold its own. That's great, I even know people that insist on running their web servers on Apple hardware. Whatever floats your boat. But if you're running a competitive business, if you're going to be using a lot of CPUs and if you will eventually (or already) be faced with lean and mean competition then you are probably better off on an open stack.
Try to imagine Google, Amazon, Ebay, DropBox or AirBnB on the Microsoft platform. And note that two of the above are re-selling their linux based platforms to other users at a profit.
Btw stackoverflow uses plenty of CentOS, I guess licensing from RedHat was too expensive?
Big names mean nothing. You are not Google, they have very different requirements to you and their scale is much larger than your startup will ever be.
Microsoft aren't stupid - the costs they charge for Azure are largely competitive, and the benefits it provides are tangible.
Picking what technology will run your business is something that really needs to be done on a case by case basis, based on your knowledge and your business. Certainly I don't think it's desirable to make a permanent choice when you are still a startup.
Of course you'd use CentOS, unless you had need of the specific features that licensing it gave you.
> Picking what technology will run your business is something that really needs to be done on a case by case basis, based on your knowledge and your business.
We're definitely in agreement there. The main criterium is: use what you know how to use. So if you're comfortable using the MS stack then go for it, otherwise, probably better to avoid it.
> The main criterium is: use what you know how to use. So if you're comfortable using the MS stack then go for it, otherwise, probably better to avoid it.
So, would it be fair to say "So if you're comfortable using the Linux stack then go for it, otherwise, probably better to avoid it", or was that your parting jab against MS?
This will factor in, but you can't make such sweeping statements - many parts of different stacks have their own intrinsic advantages.
Certainly, a silicon valley company of 10-20 employees will likely have costs of over $1000 a day - any software or hardware licensing will pale in comparison to this until the product is big.
Yes, it is possible (and common) to run Linux or one of the BSDs for free. But at large scale, a lot of people opt to pay one of Red Hat/Oracle/SuSE/Canonical/etc. for their free Linux ANYWAY. Buying Windows also means buying support. How much of this cost advantage goes away if you're paying Red Hat et al support fees?
The fact that you guys are even talking about "buying windows" and "buying support" when talking about buying into the Windows Azure stack shows that you most likely haven't used it much, if at all, and aren't quite sure what you're talking about.
I haven't used it much; I have used AWS a bit more, and there I recall you had to pay more if you wanted an instance on Windows or on RHEL proper rather than using CentOS or Debian. Those costs probably do add up to a lot more as you scale up (although it's silly to look at that in isolation). But he's comparing using Azure to self-hosting on your own hardware, I think.
Yeah, you don't pay extra for Windows itself on Azure, costs the same for a 2012 R2 DataCenter VM as it does for a small 2008 worker role, as it does for a Linux VM. You would have to pay for software like Oracle or SQL Server though, obviously.
Also, we don't have to worry about managing VMs at all so we don't generally think about those sorts of things except for a couple of very niche uses like our chat bot or QA testing VMs.
I read it as saying that the benefits of not basing your business on a proprietary platform are lower than the benefits of going with a stack that you already have some expertise at. You may read differently.
Even Apple was running iCloud off AWS and Azure before they ramped up their own data centers. I don't think you can get any more competitive than Apple in the tech world.
Trello is based on Node and Mongo on Ubuntu; there's no Windows in it. Kiln and FogBugz are based on C# and SQL Server on Windows and Java and Python Debian. Stack is based on C# and SQL Server on Windows and Redis and infrastructure on CentOS. This isn't about saving money or not; its about using the right tool for the right job, factoring in cost of tooling and cost of development. I think you're oversimplifying in your analysis
eBay's frontend is mostly Java on Windows. Many thousands of servers running Windows. Their search grid was on Solaris but has migrated to Linux in the last year or so (2013?).
StackOverflow isn't running on Azure: if anything, that article should make it obvious how much they're saving by not using cloud, with OS being unrelated.
>Now, if your competitor is on an open stack and on real computers they will eventually run rings around you because they get more control and lower costs. The initial boost you're experiencing will turn into a straightjacket with a hefty pricetag over the longer term.
From another post by you:
>Because I have fairly extensive insight into a very large number of companies and can see their license bills as well as their cloud bills if those are applicable.
Since you claim to have a lot of info on this can you give any, even one, real world example of you just said happening?
Otherwise I am going to call BS on it.
Perhaps you're starting something that is going to take down NewEgg.com ? You're clearly missing the forest for trees here. At work we run a large mix of Windows Servers, SQL servers, Linux, Drupal, MySQL, Moodle etc. running fairly traffic heavy and top ranking public health sites and all said our licensing and hosting costs are about 2% of our annual budget.
Are you actually asking me to disclose customer information and taking my (obvious) refusal to do so as calling BS? Interesting. Look, I have no skin in the game, if you're happy forking over tons of money for stuff you don't strictly speaking need then more power to you.
All I note is that MS thinks YC is important enough to designate a person to sway them to the MS stack and SAAS products, this is a tried and true strategy (get them while they're young) and it will likely cost you dearly in the long term if you aren't able to oversee the long term disadvantages of such a move. If you have a long history of using microsoft products and switching to open operating systems and stack components would mean lost time due to re-training then by all means stick to what you know.
It's funny how in one subthread here people are arguing that hosting and bandwidth are the major expenses for any start-up and now it's hosting and costs are 2%. In the end every situation is different and every situation has a different cost analysis for the workload envisioned. Seeing the guts of many companies has shown me that if you're doing something that requires large numbers of expensive licenses or metered bandwidth / cycles / storage then you're probably going to regret that choice at a later point.
Except you're not forced into using Microsoft SOFTWARE when using Azure. Like many others have pointed out, you are free to use Linux variants as well.
The biggest problem for a startup is getting out there, and getting transaction and revenue. Not penny pinching over what servers your going to use. You want to use as much pre-made stuff to give you the biggest head start as possible.
When you take off, you can raise money to pay people to move you over anyway.
Choosing your tech stack with care is one of the more important choices. You're locking yourself in for years to come and mistakes can be very costly to fix.
Getting transactions and revenues are obviously also important, the whole trouble with doing a start-up is that you have to do so many things right.
If you're worried about lock-in then design for portability. Portability means using open standards rather than open source. The neat thing is that with a well-designed site or service you can switch vendors easily. Cloud is a commodity - who cares who the provider is?
If YC has shown us anything, it's that companies can successfully pivot at nearly any point of their lifecycle and still be successful. It's also shown us that they can fail at pivoting and have it be nothing to do with the stack they chose.
You do realize that Azure has about as much to do with windows as AWS, right? I use Azure to run a completely open source stack based on node, postgres, and python. I also have a long term windows server in AWS. Azure is every bit as open as any other "cloud" based stack
It means: try to get companies that otherwise would not go for Microsoft products to give it a try through free product samples, and talking down companies not microsoft.
I really wished that companies like Microsoft, Google and so on would not have a 'HN guy' (and would not have non-disclosed HN guys either, Felix is at least above board on that), it can make it a lot harder to figure out what is a genuine user experience and what is product placement.
Unless the Microsoft stack is something you already have experience with you're much better off using non-proprietary stack software. Anything coming out of Microsoft will sooner or later cause a bunch of licenses to be sold somewhere down the line or monthly invoices for metered usage to appear so make sure you know exactly what you're getting into. $50K in freebies will have to translate into $50K more profit somewhere along the line.
The "much" better off is an assumption. If I remember correctly, Fogcreek primarily uses a Microsoft stack; so did lot of people who used to hang around in the Business of Software forum run by Joel Spolsky. Most of them had bootstrapped companies rather than use a lot of VC money to buy expensive tools. Most of them did quite well making money with their business. Using open tools is not a criterion for both technical or business success.
Fogcreek is run by ex microsoft people that had extensive experience with the stack before starting fogcreek, it made excellent sense for them to use what they already knew how to use.
Joel Spolsky - former Microsoft Product Manager? Yes, it's not particularly surprising that they would use Microsoft Products - their incredible familiarity with the product would offset any downstream licensing costs.
Small business usually get everything for free (or nobody bothers to check in on their licensing status, at the very least, they run on a massive discount using "developer editions").
Very large businesses have so much bureaucratic overhead, that unless their core business is Software/service (I.E. Amazon, Facebook, Google, Dropbox, etc...) - the cost of software licenses is minor, and anything they can save by going with something "Standard and Supported" is worth the offset.
But, anybody interested in trying to run their small-medium business on something like Oracle Enterprise edition on their 16 Core Server will quickly start taking a second look at Postgress/MariaDB once they see what the annual licensing costs for Oracle are. Partitioning and Optimizer are only worth so much...
I assume that these days MS is mostly pitching Azure which pretty happily runs Linux VMs. It feels like any YC team (the guy said he's the "the msft dude for YC" not HN) worth their salt will need to learn how to navigate evaluating vendor promises sooner rather than later anyway (not to mention the mentoring/advice they should be getting from YC if they're not so experienced, or the fact that $50K is what, only 25% of a fully-loaded FTE cost anyway?).
I'm not talking about their consumer arm at all. No idea where the Zune came from, I was talking about their $50K credits for using their cloud platform.
Great job on completely derailing the topic here with unrelated flamebait by confusing HN with YC.
Hint: HN is a message board, YC is a startup accelerator. They are NOT the same. And yes, there are plenty of startups that do quite okay on the MS stack and for many it may not be a good fit. Your post adds nothing new to the discussion.
>It means: try to get companies that otherwise would not go for Microsoft products to give it a try through free product samples, and talking down companies not microsoft.
But luckily we have you to talk down Microsoft.
>$50K in freebies will have to translate into $50K more profit somewhere along the line.
And paying $50K for hosting when you have no money can just shutdown a startup instead of increasing its costs by 1% down the line. Hosting is the biggest cost for a startup most of the time, it can't be "free" like founders time.
Every third or so link you posted has 'microsoft' in it.
As for me confusing HN and YC, I'm quite aware of the difference between the two and as far as I know I didn't confuse them in the least. Lots of start-up people frequent HN, YC related founder or not they are better off using what is most cost effective for them. This will rarely translate to 'microsoft'.
Hosting is almost never the biggest cost for a start-up, but it can be the biggest cost for a larger company, which is what most start-up aim to become.
$50K for hosting through 'Azure' or some other cloud company typically translates into a few grand from a dedicated hosting provider, by far the most cost effective hosting solution available to start-ups and successful companies alike.
>As for me confusing HN and YC, I'm quite aware of the difference between the two and as far as I know I didn't confuse them in the least. Lots of start-up people frequent HN
Felix said he's the MS person for YC. You misrepresented it as HN a couple of times. Please read your post again.
>Every third or so link you posted has 'microsoft' in it.
But we do have you to counterbalance me.
>Hosting is almost never the biggest cost for a start-up, but it can be the biggest cost for a larger company, which is what most start-up aim to become.
What? What is the biggest cost for a startup in the initial phase when founders are not taking salaries? Rent for sleeping? Ramen noodles?
Which large company has the biggest cost as hosting? Even 50k/yr is like 1/3rd of a Silicon level salary. It's like you got it completely backwards.
Anyway, all this unrelated to the topic at hand and does not belong here. There were numerous HN threads with this discussion and please write your thoughts as a blog post and you'll have my upvote.
Again, got any thoughts on the Microsoft Band? If not, /thread, I am out.
It's a shame there's no way to communicate feedback to the Band team that I can see on the website! I picked one up and like it so far, but it'll be a real disappointment if I can't ever use the mic for Google Now. Not expecting Cortana-level integration, it would just be silly for the mic to go to waste.
Is there any way to make iOS integration work better? I know that Apple Jails things and limits the BT. I am just hoping that a tweak will allow iPhones to use Siri with the cortana integration, and allow canned responses for SMS.
Also, my notifications have been spotty, but I may reset and start over, because my friend with a band is not having that issue.
Several Android and Windows phones support wireless charging or can be modified to do so. (E.g., the Nexus 6 supports it and with the Note line you can just swap out the back panel for a special one). Devices like the Moto 360 also support wireless charging.
It works exactly as I expected it too though. I don't look at it every day and think "wow, this is amazing"; it just works and I don't really think about it at all, which is how it should be. I'm not sure that I would buy a phone without wireless charging now.
I've been using wireless charging for nearly two years on my Lumia 920. And for the past year, my wife's Lumia Icon has been doing the same. I picked up a couple more charging plates when she switched to Windows Phone.
Now that I've used wireless charging, I'll never go back. Connecting wires to charge is so 2012. I want my Surface Pro to charge wirelessly. And my Tesla Model S (well, that is, if I had one).
One benefit of old-school wired charging is that I can still use the device in a normal orientation whilst it is charging, so long as the cable is long enough.
Do you find that wireless charging prevents that? I assume the fevice has to lie flat on the plate somewhere near a power outlet.
It does prevent that but it also prevents my device from ever being dead because whenever I'm at my desk I just put it on the charger. With the wired chargers in the past it was a paint to plug and unplug so my phone was always low but with the wireless stuff my device is naturally juicy all the time.
Almost all Li(Ion|Poly|FePO) batteries currently don't have “memory effect” when you charge them repeatedly. The only problem happens when you drain the battery below minimum voltage, then it will lose its capacity.
LiIon batteries do suffer from wear from normal usage. The more change/discharge cycles, the lower the capacity. If it is exposed to heat, that damages it. I'm told that leaving it fully charged a lot is also bad for it, because that allegedly puts more stress on the battery than when it is at 90% full.
There is a lot to be desired from current battery technology.
"True memory effect is specific to sintered-plate nickel-cadmium cells, and is exceedingly difficult to reproduce, especially in lower ampere-hour cells. In one particular test program designed to induce the effect, none was found after more than 700 precisely-controlled charge/discharge cycles"
I have a Qi charger for my Nexus 5 and I run into this issue sometimes, because eg. I come home and my phone is almost dead but I still want to use it. The solution is pretty easy though, I just unplug the micro USB from my charging pad and plug it directly into my phone if I want to do that. At least when I'm at home I just leave it on the charger most of the time so I don't have to worry about charge.
The charger I have props the phone up at an angle. You can interact with it in a limited sense, but of course if you pick it up you'll take it out of range of the charger. So good for things like swiping to see how many messages you have and so forth, but not for making calls, playing games, etc. But if you do, you just set it back down on the charger when you're done -- no need to fool with a cord, or stay within cord-length.
Seriously, I hate everyone who bought an Android phone instead of a Palm Pre in 2009-2010, because if they did, we would still have the incredible things they came up with. Not only did they have C++/Javascript/HTML as their programming stack and not only did they provide directions on their site on how to root their devices and boot custom kernels over USB, they had wireless charging built in and had a great wireless charging stand that I used on my HP Touchpad for years until it finally gave out. You can have the tablet standing at any angle you want, working on it (boot into Ubuntu with a wireless keyboard, why not? It's a Palm) while it's wirelessly charging.
But no, Google was cool and Palm was old hat, so now they're gone and we are using Java to make apps and charging by laying our phones flat and plugging our tablets into the wall.
Although battery swapping has obvious disadvantages such as requiring a power cycle and fumbling with the battery and a battery cover (as well as your external charger), it certainly beats wired/wireless charging in this aspect in that it provides immediate usage, not tethered to a wire or a charging plate.
I have a couple flat charging plates and on my desk, I use the angled plate [1]. That said, I don't actually use my phone all that much while it's on a charging plate.
But as others have pointed out, when you have wireless charging plates at your home and office, you'll routinely just drop your phone on a plate just as peers will drop theirs on a their desk. You'll find your phone is more often at full charge. I've only fully-drained the battery a handful of times (much use while away from any charging, wires included) and observed it in battery-saver mode another handful.
I would say a wireless-charging device with ample charging plates (say, 3 or 4) gives you a blissful ignorance of battery life. It's analogous to the bliss I had when I drove an electric car—contrary to conventional wisdom I found that electric cars create range bliss rather than range anxiety. Every time you leave your home for the day, the car is at full capacity. You never have to plan a visit to a refilling station. With a wirelessly-charged phone, I scarcely look at my phone's battery indicator; it's just not an issue.
And just to be as clear as possible, you can still connect a traditional micro USB cord to charge these phones if that's all you have handy.
The one thing I dislike a bit is that the phone seems to heat up a bit more than via normal charging, so if I have to take a call after it's been sitting on the charger it's a bit uncomfortable. Otherwise, it's pretty slick.
Depends on the method, but you can be sure that you're losing at least 10% to inductive/RF losses, and more typically 20%.
Reasonable for a phone, batshit insane for EV charging, which is why Magne Charge never took off. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magne_Charge) 20% of 6 kW for every car, times millions of cars...
When I had a L920, I noticed the charging plate and phone would get really hot, even after the phone is charged to 100%. Through the wire, the heat is minimal like every other phone. So, base on heat dissipation, I would say yes.
well invested in the apple ecosystem but this seems very good. I am very intrigued and may well end up with a few of these in my family. If the reality matches the marketing, I'm in. For a fitness accessory the on device GPS is the killer app.
I wonder if you can ping the MS Band's GPS similar to Apple's Find My Friends feature? If so this would be an awesome feature. My parents, who are older, don't like carrying phones. This would be really convenient safety wise.
Apple and microsoft have a permanent patent deal since the 90's. They can use each other's patents for free as long as they don't make direct competitors. Hence why this is a fitness band and not a smartwatch ;)
Ugly? For me it's one of the best designs for a smartwatch (I think Samsung or Sony also have this "band" design), not the big clunky watches that were released this year.
And they embraced their difference. It's not a luxury e-watch. Very little to no skeumorphism. And the vertical layout fitting the tiles list... very very nice derivation of the Metro language. Felt right at first sight.
I actually see this as a great fitness tracker (that is why I might buy it) but I don't see it as a smart watch (and I'm not complaining about that).
In order to be a smart watch it would need to do more "smart" things such as showing notifications, interacting with third-party apps, etc. If you have a Windows Phone you can talk to cortana so it's the closest thing to a smart phone you can get on that OS, but still it's clearly not as powerful as what Android Wear and probably Apple Watch can do.
Neither does MS. I read an interview with one of the product leads on The Verge and he said it is not a smart watch. He envisions you continue wearing your watch on one are and this primarily as a fitness tracker and productivity device on the other.
The thing is that this seems to have all of the most useful features of nearly all current smartwatches. If it can deliver text, Hangouts, email, and calendar notifications to your wrist as claimed, then that alone accounts for the majority of smartwatch usage. The Cortana integration accounts for nearly the rest, though unfortunately that's only available with a Windows Phone. Here's to hoping that it will be possible to add Google Now support for Android phones.
> but still it's clearly not as powerful as what Android Wear and probably Apple Watch can do.
What do you mean? What is it that they do that this will not do? I think Microsoft should have just marketed it as a watch. To me it seems to have everything I will need in a smartwatch.
I think trying not to fall into the category of "smartwatch" is the point, marketing tactic if you will. The smartwatch is the new wave, and the companies you would expect are jumping on board. By not marketing as a smartwatch they set themselves apart, yet have some of the key functionality people are looking for
I completely disagree too. I'd be curious as to what you would consider good-looking for a product like this. Chime in with your thoughts on a good-looking design - thanks!
Barometer can be useful to accelerate a GPS fix or to have some sort of weather forecast. But for altitude, once GPS is fixed, you have reliable enough altitude, hence it wouldn't be that useful.
My only beef with these "fitness bands" is their lack of being able to tell you how accurately you sleep at night. Without a heart rate monitor, there's really no way to be accurate other than to say you were restless versus laying still.
AFAIK the only product that does this is Polar's fitness band. And only because you can link their heart rate monitor to it to give you additional fitness information. I could be wrong to think they're the only one combining the two.
Finally a Microsoft product that isn't stupidly handcuffed to their ecosystem. Microsoft has amazing engineers still, and they must be frustrated that they aren't allowed to produce the best device they can, regardless of os. I hope for their sake this thing does well.
COM is horrible to write code for (although not THAT bad), and is tricky to troubleshoot (hurray for TLBs and massive hex registry strings) but it is a very handy feature of the system!
Does anything exist on other platforms like Mac OSX and Linux? CORBA was written all over the place GNOME1 / 2 time as I recall but I don't actually know if anything like COM exists anywhere?
Gecko uses XPCOM extensively (though less than it used to). XPCOM is basically a cross-platform implementation of the same principles as Microsoft COM.
In particular, XPCOM allows easy binding with the Spidermonkey JS runtime so you can expose things to scripts.
But then again I use OneDrive to back up my photos natively on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. I use OneNote on all platforms. I use Microsoft Office on all platforms (including the web). I play Wordament on all platforms. I use Xbox Live Music (formerly Zune Pass) on all platforms.
How many Windows Phone apps does Google have? Zero. What about Apple? Zero. In fact, Google has even refused to allow Windows Phone to access Youtube and Maps on the web. They specifically blocked the user agent for their website.
But no, that one example from Microsoft is totally relevant. Their competitors are much more open.
> If you're using Windows Phone 8.1, ask Cortana to take notes or set reminders with your voice. She'll give you driving directions and keep you on top of traffic, sports, stocks, weather, and more. She is ready to help whenever you need it.
It sounds like Cortana only works with a Windows Phone though. However, it seems like this is mainly a fitness tracker with light smartwatch features on the side, so I'm not sure if I'd consider this a dealbreaker or anything.
I agree to the extend, that it sounds like Microsoft is in any way special here. Actually, for some time it's opening up pretty much. Apple is even worse, Google will certainly not support MS products in any way if they don't benefit massively.
It's important to understand that all companies are big machine-like systems that have only one purpose: Make as much money as possible. Microsoft have been (and Apple is still ... or is the Apple watch usable with Android?) trying to lock vendors in. Totally OK. Those tech companies are no better than Kellog's who is selling sweets to our kids as cereal. As we all love tech so much, we tend to forget :-)
So I guess I can finally talk about building the iOS version of this app back during the prototype phase. The team that built this was totally skunkworks and honestly seemed to care little about the OS it runs on. What they do care is that this device+app works as a good showcase for the Azure platform. they want part of the story to be that the data generated by this device is completely accessible to anyone who wants it, and their app is just the reference implementation.
That's a feature I like about my fitbit, but with the Band requiring a charge every two days could result in sporadic sleep data since most people will charge it as they sleep along with their cell phones. Granted, I charge my phone at work at my desk but taking off and putting on something that is supposed to track your activity could get annoying.
That does sound kinda messy. I think that I'll wait until the Fitbit Surge or Charge HR. Wish they'd gotten their act together well enough to get them out before holidays.
I'm really impressed, I was set on getting an apple watch until now, but this may change my mind - great form factor and style, has the sensors I'm looking for, and cross platform. I'm eagerly waiting a review.
in general, I'm a pretty big MS fanboy (win phones since 7, surface 2, etc). And I am suspect of the category as a whole, but the orientation of the screen just seems so dumb.
Also, people keep saying it is so small, it certainly doesn't look like it to me, especially on the sides it looks relatively thick.
I'm going to be out in Redmond soon, hope to see some in the wild.
> but the orientation of the screen just seems so dumb.
I thought this at first but after thinking about it I think it's really intuitive! When you use a watch you have to turn your arm in a non-natural way but when you turn your palm up it's actually easier because of the way the mussels are laid out. Also that's how you always look at your phone.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 269 ms ] threadMore likely someone at Microsoft hit the wrong button, or failed to set something to private, or whatever. This even happened to Apple with some iPad Air 2 documentation not so long ago, so obviously this stuff happens.
Edit: works with iphone and android. http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-band/en-us/support/hardwa...
http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-band/en-us/support/hardwa...
However, this is better than many of the smart watches to me, why have a large circular face?
Plus the price point of $199 isn't bad at all.
I haven't delved into wearables yet. I mostly have used my iPhone 5s (now 6) for the motion tracking, but it certainly doesn't catch everything (let alone doesn't catch vitals) since I don't carry it everywhere.
My biggest complaint with the Fitbit is the lack of any battery meter on the device itself. Unless you sync frequently, you wouldn't know when your battery is running low.
You can bet that is with everything off. Looks like its going to be a 1 day device with GPS/Heart Rate and moderate usage.
A smartphone can go 48 hours if you turn off all the radios too. The 48-hour claim seems mostly meaningless to me.
My Lumia 1520 goes for longer than 48 hours, with all the radios ON.
In some ways, the Microsoft watch is actually much more capable than the Apple Watch (Hello, untethered GPS!) - but nobody is going to put it on the front page of vogue.
"These chicks don't even know the name of my band...my band...my band..."
I see a counter trend where technology becomes invisible, fades into background and still works for us instead of being in out faces all the time.
Smartphones, smart glasses, smart watches everything that wants a piece of our attention is going away soon.
I want to learn the routes around my neighborhood and not need a map in my eyeglasses. I want to talk( or not talk) to friends in real life not text message them. I just want to come home an play my piano not read a twitter battle on my phone. I want fall asleep talking to my partner/dreaming about future, not obsesses about my deep sleep rem cycles. I want wake up when I am done sleeping not by a smart alarm keeping track of my sleep cycles. I just want to eat eggs and toast for breakfast not powdered rice from a plastic bag.
I don't want any of this smart* shit. Please make it stop.
Unfortunately a lot of conceptually challenged people don't understand anything about social norms, peer pressure etc, and think that using or not using this technology is just "individual choice" ("noone is forcing you", etc). Then again some think that you can get out of a depression just by trying to think more positive...
With that said, one of the main things I wish I could have during my workouts is something to track what I do without me having to manually input it. So, if it can count the number of reps I do, sweet. If it can count how many steps I took within my 3 mile treadmill run, awesome. If i can see my heartbeat at a glance, great! Because treadmills fucking suck at that.
HOWEVER, and one of the reasons why I'm not considering the band, I don't want tweets, or messages, or updates, or any of that shit even more in my face. I don't want another touchscreen vying for attention. The new Fitbits do that but (luckily) not with WIndows Phones. I have one, and I see this as a FEATURE rather than a detriment. Why the fuck do I need to see stupid notifications while I'm trying to run?
I want to look at my watch and see "hey, you've walked 30,000 steps today", not "you know, you can check all this crap on here!".
It's the concept, and it's also that mental reminder that you MAY have notifications. I hope that makes sense!
Case in point, what if I told you not only can you turn off the notifications completely (which we established earlier), and that no notification icons show up on the main screen (which is obvious from the video/screen shots - we're not talking about old-school LCD stencils, after all), but that you can further manage the tiles so even if you can't control yourself from actively swiping around you won't see anything?
Because now that I have the device on my wrist and the app on my phone, that's exactly what you can do.
I have very little skin in this game (it annoys me slightly to see rants w/o any basis necessarily in reality, but life's too short for arguing on the Internet), but maybe it can be better to be more reserved about a product critique until having seen how it actually works?
I'd love to hear more about what you like about it and how it is. My main concern was basically not having yet another phone-like device that will annoy the crap out of me. And the Band is begging for it.
The benefits over regular check-ins with a doctor are consistent daily feedback. Combined with tools like MyFitnessPal (which is mentioned on Microsoft's page) it simplifies the overall process of weight management.
I have Garmin devices, but I expect the process is similar to what Microsoft hopes to offer. The fitness tracking device keeps track of movement. My GPS watch and heart rate monitor estimate running and cycling effort. That all goes into Garmin's online system, and produces a relatively consistent and realistic estimate of calorie burn. That data is shared with MyFitnessPal, where I track my food intake. When I open MyFitnessPal's app I can see how things are going for the day, and adjust my behavior according to how active I have been.
It sound complex, but it's mostly automatic. And 45 pounds later I'm a believer in the potential of these tools.
Furthermore, 2 day battery life is a very welcome addition. I wouldn't mind putting one of these on my wrist.
That's impressive. But why does it take 60 minutes to charge the last 20%?
My only concern would be scratching the display.
That doesn't make me optimistic about using the GPS for very long.
[1] http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-band/en-us/support/hardwa...
Optical heart rate sensor
3-axis accelerometer/gyro
GPS
Ambient light sensor
Skin temperature sensor
UV sensor
Microphone
Haptic vibration motor
The 2 day battery life is the one turn off for me. Otherwise this is actually quite nice for $199 cross platform fitness wearable
Must say, looks very very alluring.
Edit:- Sizing:- http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-band/en-us/sizing
From the accessories it looks like it can be wirelessly charged, and has BLE:- http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/buy/productI...
Edit2:- Does not look like wireless charging. It is "Connector: Magnetically coupled connector to USB"
I'd really like to know. No matter what the answer is, it's going to be fascinating. Even if it's Windows but they've decided not to broadcast that.
Obviously not an official MS response!
We are using a single threaded lightweight runtime based around call backs. We are completely non-blocking on all IO (including all sensors), and our CPU spends the majority of its time in a very low power mode. Every microsecond of CPU time is accounted for and justified!
I cannot wait until people look at our battery size in mAh.
Sounds like Javascript to me, or maybe something like Erlang. I wonder if we'll be able to install apps on the device or just build external apps for cell phones. What about hooking it up to your desktop/laptop for notifications and stuff? I'm thinking there could be some cool features there.
I don't think this is enough info, even for an educated guess. What they're describing (single threaded/callbacks) could even be C/libevent, no?
Edit: Also,
> Every microsecond of CPU time is accounted for and justified!
...for me, this rules out any kind of VM contained language
No comment on anything else mentioned:)
Congratulations for this btw. I'm not an MS fan, but I hope this works for you guys!
Our software was completely written from the ground up. We started with an empty main.c file. :)
A number of us lead software engineers are on hacker news and we all love the latest programming languages. We got a bunch of really super cool stuff in here, but all in straight C and running in very little memory space. We're dying to start an engineering blog, we believe some of the lessons we learned about applying modern software engineering techniques to an embedded device are very valuable. (Fun fact! Embedded Engineers have been avoiding dynamic allocation well before it was cool!)
We're hoping to get proper continuations in sometime soon. :) Our main problem is saving/restoring the stack without losing too much performance! (Cycles equal battery life, I cannot justify pushing for a move to continuations if the battery life hit is noticeable to the user!)
I hope you get your dev blog approved :)
Megabytes? That'd have been nice! :)
Thanks :)
I would guess C or C++ too.
add: and if they left JTAG/SWD pads exposed, then you could consider it “arduino on steroids” with some builtin sensors and GCC toolchain available ;)
And I'd really like altimeter for this kind of device.
Don't your arguments (and app recommendations) point against a UV measure as being useful? If you want to know whether or not to put on sunscreen now, for a day out, knowing the current UV strength is no use since the conditions will be different later. That's where weather prediction comes in and makes your one little watchband UV datapoint useless. Looking up at the sky and observing weather conditions will always be better than that, and better weather prediction will beat looking up at the sky.
UV forecast graphs take some of the guesswork out of location and time, but I find that it hard to judge how much cloud cover is needed to drop from a high to a low index range. Sunscreen is great but it's not much fun to have to be covered in goop every day. Getting burnt when it's cloudy isn't much fun either. Knowing your exposure would limit the amount of cream.
UV levels can also be counter-intuitive, where the type/amount of cloud plays into how much is blocked, or where a partly cloudy sky actually increases UV levels. Or where, using my dumb experience as an example, you forget to consider that the spring sun in Florida is more powerful than the summer sun in the north.
For example, for Joe the jogger who wants to use it a purely health gadget companion, he may not want the microphone, UV sensor and ambient light sensor on, but for Jane the office worker who wants to take her steps around the office and have some office notification, the GPS and gyro is turned off. These two use cases could have vastly different battery life.
I finally got the Amiigo a couple months ago - I didn't see SpO2 stats detailed. It was actually pretty underwhelming - the Amiigo doesn't have the promised API/SDK either. The MS Band's sensor suite is better (GSR, skin temp), it's just too bad it's not waterproof.
Yes, the RROD was a huge debacle and too many lost money on broken Xboxes. That doesn't change the fact that people bought 70 million of the things, and generally seemed to love them.
A whole cottage industry of aftermarket console cooling apparatus was spawned due to the first Xbox's history, and it didn't help whatsoever in staying the problems that the second one had.
It was a business success regardless, but that's not the topic at hand.
So, Surface won't be replacing Windows/Office any time soon, but nearly a billion in revenue for what a lot of people try to frame as a failed product is not too shabby.
I wouldn't say it's a key profit area for them yet, and we also can't call it a success yet (as they haven't reported the total retail purchases).
[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/10/24/a-win-for-microsofts-...
If you had actually used one as a real phone, I doubt you would be saying that the "hardware" isn't good. The core components are as good as the competition. The amount of sensors available to developers is ludicrous. Not only that, if the build (phone body) forms part of what you would call "hardware" - it truly lives up to the Nokia reputation.
While MS has built a reputation for solid build quality on its peripherals, they are not immune to the race to the bottom. If you liked your old MS Intellimouse, for instance, it would be wise to check the date of manufacture before buying another.
This affects more than just Microsoft. Other brands have changed ownership, or changed manufacturing facilities, but kept the same trademarks. Or items with the same advertised model number could now be manufactured in multiple facilities, to the same nominal minimum standard, but widely varying actual performance. I'll leave it to you to do your own research, but LCD display panels and SD cards are a particularly obvious example of this.
If Microsoft wants me to trust its hardware like I once did, it doesn't need to actually open a new manufacturing facility in Washington under the burning eye of its QC employees, but it would at least have to be embarrassingly open about it manufacturing process. I simply don't trust anyone to build quality for the mass market any more.
I'm not saying companies don't build quality anymore, but you can't just trust a brand. You have to do your research on each new model, every time.
Of course trust is easily lost, but they haven't disappointed me yet.
The killing feature is the integrated GPS. As mentionned on the website, you can go without your phone. That alone could make it a buy if it supports wireless charging (I don't want to bother with wires in 2014)
Also, it is multiplatform, which is a big plus. I do not want an android watch or an iwatch, but something that will work regardless of the cellphone I chose.
I wonder if there's a devkit to read the data. If some HN is from Microsoft, I'd love some links to the devkit page (simple stuff, like retreiving GPS log, heartrate log, etc)
[0]: http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/29/7118533/microsoft-health-...
But dear god, the XML! They've started making more and more stuff code-configurable though, so that's good.
And it's pretty expensive.
Now, if your competitor is on an open stack and on real computers they will eventually run rings around you because they get more control and lower costs. The initial boost you're experiencing will turn into a straightjacket with a hefty pricetag over the longer term.
Nice blanket statement there. How can you claim it's expensive when you have no idea what or how he uses it?
The most cost effective way as far as I can see is to hire a sysadmin on a freelance basis until you need one full time, own your own hardware (or lease it by the month until you can afford your own hardware) and pay flat rate for bandwidth. Anything else will sooner or later come to haunt you and then you will need to migrate to some new platform. At that point in time you will learn the true value of the words 'lock-in'.
Obviously it depends on what you're actually doing, but for a straightforward SaaS app (a few servers, a db server, a queue and a load balancer in a few datacentres around the world) one good sysadmin/devops guy costs far more than a set of AWS instances that essentially scale themselves.
Having dedicated people necessary for that 'control' is beyond the budget of the majority of startups.
The choice is definitely not between going for a cloud platform versus hiring a bunch of people full time. There are other options.
There is one specific case when I recommend AWS instead of dedicated servers and it's for customers who have widely varying traffic with predictable peaks. In that case having the flexibility afforded by cloud providers to increase the number of instances temporarily to deal with the peak makes sense.
I think there is a case for an open stack, but I think unless you pick a real dog of a platform good people can make it work well. It comes down to a "can I get good people for stack X?" as much as "Does stack X work or cost too much?"
Stackoverflow and Trello are always held up as the shining examples of how the Microsoft stack is able to hold its own. That's great, I even know people that insist on running their web servers on Apple hardware. Whatever floats your boat. But if you're running a competitive business, if you're going to be using a lot of CPUs and if you will eventually (or already) be faced with lean and mean competition then you are probably better off on an open stack.
Try to imagine Google, Amazon, Ebay, DropBox or AirBnB on the Microsoft platform. And note that two of the above are re-selling their linux based platforms to other users at a profit.
Btw stackoverflow uses plenty of CentOS, I guess licensing from RedHat was too expensive?
Microsoft aren't stupid - the costs they charge for Azure are largely competitive, and the benefits it provides are tangible.
Picking what technology will run your business is something that really needs to be done on a case by case basis, based on your knowledge and your business. Certainly I don't think it's desirable to make a permanent choice when you are still a startup.
Of course you'd use CentOS, unless you had need of the specific features that licensing it gave you.
We're definitely in agreement there. The main criterium is: use what you know how to use. So if you're comfortable using the MS stack then go for it, otherwise, probably better to avoid it.
So, would it be fair to say "So if you're comfortable using the Linux stack then go for it, otherwise, probably better to avoid it", or was that your parting jab against MS?
On top of that, SO's search feature is (IMHO) loads better than Reddit's.
Certainly, a silicon valley company of 10-20 employees will likely have costs of over $1000 a day - any software or hardware licensing will pale in comparison to this until the product is big.
Also, we don't have to worry about managing VMs at all so we don't generally think about those sorts of things except for a couple of very niche uses like our chat bot or QA testing VMs.
From another post by you: >Because I have fairly extensive insight into a very large number of companies and can see their license bills as well as their cloud bills if those are applicable.
Since you claim to have a lot of info on this can you give any, even one, real world example of you just said happening?
Otherwise I am going to call BS on it.
Perhaps you're starting something that is going to take down NewEgg.com ? You're clearly missing the forest for trees here. At work we run a large mix of Windows Servers, SQL servers, Linux, Drupal, MySQL, Moodle etc. running fairly traffic heavy and top ranking public health sites and all said our licensing and hosting costs are about 2% of our annual budget.
All I note is that MS thinks YC is important enough to designate a person to sway them to the MS stack and SAAS products, this is a tried and true strategy (get them while they're young) and it will likely cost you dearly in the long term if you aren't able to oversee the long term disadvantages of such a move. If you have a long history of using microsoft products and switching to open operating systems and stack components would mean lost time due to re-training then by all means stick to what you know.
It's funny how in one subthread here people are arguing that hosting and bandwidth are the major expenses for any start-up and now it's hosting and costs are 2%. In the end every situation is different and every situation has a different cost analysis for the workload envisioned. Seeing the guts of many companies has shown me that if you're doing something that requires large numbers of expensive licenses or metered bandwidth / cycles / storage then you're probably going to regret that choice at a later point.
When you take off, you can raise money to pay people to move you over anyway.
I really wished that companies like Microsoft, Google and so on would not have a 'HN guy' (and would not have non-disclosed HN guys either, Felix is at least above board on that), it can make it a lot harder to figure out what is a genuine user experience and what is product placement.
Unless the Microsoft stack is something you already have experience with you're much better off using non-proprietary stack software. Anything coming out of Microsoft will sooner or later cause a bunch of licenses to be sold somewhere down the line or monthly invoices for metered usage to appear so make sure you know exactly what you're getting into. $50K in freebies will have to translate into $50K more profit somewhere along the line.
Small business usually get everything for free (or nobody bothers to check in on their licensing status, at the very least, they run on a massive discount using "developer editions").
Very large businesses have so much bureaucratic overhead, that unless their core business is Software/service (I.E. Amazon, Facebook, Google, Dropbox, etc...) - the cost of software licenses is minor, and anything they can save by going with something "Standard and Supported" is worth the offset.
But, anybody interested in trying to run their small-medium business on something like Oracle Enterprise edition on their 16 Core Server will quickly start taking a second look at Postgress/MariaDB once they see what the annual licensing costs for Oracle are. Partitioning and Optimizer are only worth so much...
... for now. :-(
(Remember that people's problems with MS is that they are infamous for monopolist strategies.)
To the best of my knowledge, no-one who bought the Zune ended up paying $50k to MS for it.
The regular Bizspark is 100USD/month.
Hint: HN is a message board, YC is a startup accelerator. They are NOT the same. And yes, there are plenty of startups that do quite okay on the MS stack and for many it may not be a good fit. Your post adds nothing new to the discussion.
>It means: try to get companies that otherwise would not go for Microsoft products to give it a try through free product samples, and talking down companies not microsoft.
But luckily we have you to talk down Microsoft.
>$50K in freebies will have to translate into $50K more profit somewhere along the line.
And paying $50K for hosting when you have no money can just shutdown a startup instead of increasing its costs by 1% down the line. Hosting is the biggest cost for a startup most of the time, it can't be "free" like founders time.
Anyway, got any thoughts on the Microsoft Band?
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ntakasaki
Every third or so link you posted has 'microsoft' in it.
As for me confusing HN and YC, I'm quite aware of the difference between the two and as far as I know I didn't confuse them in the least. Lots of start-up people frequent HN, YC related founder or not they are better off using what is most cost effective for them. This will rarely translate to 'microsoft'.
Hosting is almost never the biggest cost for a start-up, but it can be the biggest cost for a larger company, which is what most start-up aim to become.
$50K for hosting through 'Azure' or some other cloud company typically translates into a few grand from a dedicated hosting provider, by far the most cost effective hosting solution available to start-ups and successful companies alike.
Thanks for not making this personal.
Felix said he's the MS person for YC. You misrepresented it as HN a couple of times. Please read your post again.
>Every third or so link you posted has 'microsoft' in it.
But we do have you to counterbalance me.
>Hosting is almost never the biggest cost for a start-up, but it can be the biggest cost for a larger company, which is what most start-up aim to become.
What? What is the biggest cost for a startup in the initial phase when founders are not taking salaries? Rent for sleeping? Ramen noodles? Which large company has the biggest cost as hosting? Even 50k/yr is like 1/3rd of a Silicon level salary. It's like you got it completely backwards.
Anyway, all this unrelated to the topic at hand and does not belong here. There were numerous HN threads with this discussion and please write your thoughts as a blog post and you'll have my upvote.
Again, got any thoughts on the Microsoft Band? If not, /thread, I am out.
Also, my notifications have been spotty, but I may reset and start over, because my friend with a band is not having that issue.
Now that I've used wireless charging, I'll never go back. Connecting wires to charge is so 2012. I want my Surface Pro to charge wirelessly. And my Tesla Model S (well, that is, if I had one).
Do you find that wireless charging prevents that? I assume the fevice has to lie flat on the plate somewhere near a power outlet.
There is a lot to be desired from current battery technology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_effect
"True memory effect is specific to sintered-plate nickel-cadmium cells, and is exceedingly difficult to reproduce, especially in lower ampere-hour cells. In one particular test program designed to induce the effect, none was found after more than 700 precisely-controlled charge/discharge cycles"
But no, Google was cool and Palm was old hat, so now they're gone and we are using Java to make apps and charging by laying our phones flat and plugging our tablets into the wall.
But as others have pointed out, when you have wireless charging plates at your home and office, you'll routinely just drop your phone on a plate just as peers will drop theirs on a their desk. You'll find your phone is more often at full charge. I've only fully-drained the battery a handful of times (much use while away from any charging, wires included) and observed it in battery-saver mode another handful.
I would say a wireless-charging device with ample charging plates (say, 3 or 4) gives you a blissful ignorance of battery life. It's analogous to the bliss I had when I drove an electric car—contrary to conventional wisdom I found that electric cars create range bliss rather than range anxiety. Every time you leave your home for the day, the car is at full capacity. You never have to plan a visit to a refilling station. With a wirelessly-charged phone, I scarcely look at my phone's battery indicator; it's just not an issue.
And just to be as clear as possible, you can still connect a traditional micro USB cord to charge these phones if that's all you have handy.
[1] http://www.microsoft.com/en/mobile/accessory/dt-910/
[0]: http://theairdock.com/
Reasonable for a phone, batshit insane for EV charging, which is why Magne Charge never took off. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magne_Charge) 20% of 6 kW for every car, times millions of cars...
http://www.microsoft.com/Microsoft-Health/en-us
http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/iwatch-i...
https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTtB7RX...
The Moto 360 looks better because it's round but the UI is made for a square device.
Whereas this appears to be a reimagination in an authentically digital and modern format. The iWatch is already looking outdated IMO.
Apple's wrist worn product is not called iWatch, and that linked picture is not of an Apple product.
As I find myself saying more and more, I love this new Microsoft. It's insane how much harm a single man can do.
EDIT: No idea why I am getting downvoted - it's a serious question!
In order to be a smart watch it would need to do more "smart" things such as showing notifications, interacting with third-party apps, etc. If you have a Windows Phone you can talk to cortana so it's the closest thing to a smart phone you can get on that OS, but still it's clearly not as powerful as what Android Wear and probably Apple Watch can do.
Neither does MS. I read an interview with one of the product leads on The Verge and he said it is not a smart watch. He envisions you continue wearing your watch on one are and this primarily as a fitness tracker and productivity device on the other.
What do you mean? What is it that they do that this will not do? I think Microsoft should have just marketed it as a watch. To me it seems to have everything I will need in a smartwatch.
AFAIK the only product that does this is Polar's fitness band. And only because you can link their heart rate monitor to it to give you additional fitness information. I could be wrong to think they're the only one combining the two.
I guess this means I won't be switching back to Android for a while now, just to see how my WP8 and this work together.
This isn't 'finally'. This 'new Microsoft' has been doing this for a while.
COM is not only proprietary but also a horrible thing. I don't see it ever being on any Linux list of things to do.
It will never install on Linux.
If you want something as good as Visual Studio on Linux, write it.
Does anything exist on other platforms like Mac OSX and Linux? CORBA was written all over the place GNOME1 / 2 time as I recall but I don't actually know if anything like COM exists anywhere?
Thanks.
In particular, XPCOM allows easy binding with the Spidermonkey JS runtime so you can expose things to scripts.
(Put differently: The argument is nonsense)
Perhaps you were installing an older version?
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity
How many Windows Phone apps does Google have? Zero. What about Apple? Zero. In fact, Google has even refused to allow Windows Phone to access Youtube and Maps on the web. They specifically blocked the user agent for their website.
But no, that one example from Microsoft is totally relevant. Their competitors are much more open.
It sounds like Cortana only works with a Windows Phone though. However, it seems like this is mainly a fitness tracker with light smartwatch features on the side, so I'm not sure if I'd consider this a dealbreaker or anything.
It's important to understand that all companies are big machine-like systems that have only one purpose: Make as much money as possible. Microsoft have been (and Apple is still ... or is the Apple watch usable with Android?) trying to lock vendors in. Totally OK. Those tech companies are no better than Kellog's who is selling sweets to our kids as cereal. As we all love tech so much, we tend to forget :-)
Is this not feature comparable with others in its class? What don't you like about it? Is something not worthwhile if it's not first?
Aaaaand you've convinced me to again eliminate my HN account and spend time elsewhere.
Idiots are the best productivity measure -- they make me not want to be on HN.
Timer & Alarm Time your laps around the track or set an alarm to wake you silently.
Also, people keep saying it is so small, it certainly doesn't look like it to me, especially on the sides it looks relatively thick.
I'm going to be out in Redmond soon, hope to see some in the wild.
I thought this at first but after thinking about it I think it's really intuitive! When you use a watch you have to turn your arm in a non-natural way but when you turn your palm up it's actually easier because of the way the mussels are laid out. Also that's how you always look at your phone.
I wouldn't mind trying one out.