all vc-supported , with huge money. not exactly the "indie studie that made it big" type. But more importantly, those are a decade ago (and TikTok reportedly bought its users).
At this point it doesnt seem there is any potential for making a profitable app company, the profit would be to be acquired
I never really thought about it, but could online shopping + delivery actually be much more environmentally friendly? i.e rather than having everyone drive do to their own shopping.
This is with the assumption that a single delivery truck can hit multiple customers on their route, and in the context of more rural\suburban areas.
I think the problem with that is how many cold foods won't do well outside of the freezer for more than 30 minutes, so any combined delivery would have to be purely opportunistic (eg. The delivery destinations being within a few miles of each other, and ordered/scheduled close enough together as to still meet delivery windows) and/or filtered so that people with cold items get their items first.
That’s why I brought it up. Our internet services are worse than most industrialized countries. It’s both slower and more expensive. To my knowledge only Canada’s internet services are worse
Currently, Ookla ranks the US's average fixed broadband speeds as 11th globally. This outranks Sweeden, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan, Portugal, Israel, Poland, Germany, Finland, Belgium, Russia, Estonia, the Netherlands, and so many others. It might be more expensive than many other countries, but its definitely not the slowest average internet out there.
I used to live in both Taiwan's and Japan's major metros. I have doubts that they are slower and more expensive than the US's metros unless their fiber network was somehow destroyed.
Depending on the time frames in question, it easily could have been that Japan and Taiwan had massively faster internet on average. Ten years ago, a 10Mbit connection here in the US seemed to be pretty dang fast.[0] However, speeds in many metro areas in the US have massively caught up to the rest of the world. Rural areas are still often left in the cold, but in many cities its not uncommon to find 200Mbit+ residential internet connections available. And like I've mentioned elsewhere, gigabit is available in literally hundreds of towns in the US. The average AT&T internet user these days has ~99Mbit, the 90th percentile having 323Mbit.[1] I doubt that was the case even five years ago. So its not a case of Japan or Taiwan's major fiber metro areas getting destroyed, but more of the US finally getting good metro fiber deployed to more customers. Maybe the internet hasn't changed in the last decade where you're at in the US, but its very different in many other areas.
Of course this speaks nothing to the average prices these consumers pay. However, its probably a lot cheaper to wire up an area less than the size of California (Japan + Taiwan) with a much more massive population density. If everything else was equal (its not) it would have surprised me for internet to have been more expensive in Japan or Taiwan than in the US.
I played PUBG on stadia with users on consoles. It shows a little gamepad next to their name, whereas mine had the stadia logo. I never actually encountered another stadia player.
Maybe the time is ripe for change. Time to start a Airbnb competitor that doesn't follow the mantra "growth at all costs", and doesn't put its own revenue stream above the good of society.
I wonder how the world would've looked like if companies with valuation greater than 100 billion (adjusted to inflation) just wouldn't be allowed to purchase and\or merge with other companies.
