Disqus - Latest Comments for jakehow

Re: The HTTP OPTIONS method | zacstewart.com

Jake Howerton — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 18:33:34 -0000

Interesting, we are headed in this direction as well. Paired with some of the HATEOAS ideas it can be particularly powerful. We are currently generating documentation (which can be used for this type of output) with our project here: https://github.com/zipmark/...

Re: The 15% Tax Rate

Jake Howerton — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 13:59:52 -0000

Glad to see you supporting an idea like this Fred. It is a much clearer position than previous arguments made by yourself and Chris Dixon. The "wealthy investors shouldn't pay less than firefighters" argument works much better when you are advocating that the firefighters pay less, instead of arguing for the wealthy to pay more.

Instead of having multiple rates like some have suggested in this thread, I would prefer having a cliff where all income under the cliff is tax free. That could be somewhere in the 15-50k range, and everyone will get their first $x of income tax free.

Re: Stop Building Apps and Start Disrupting Industries

Jake Howerton — Mon, 16 May 2011 12:49:15 -0000

Gotcha, comparing it to the questionable societal value of current investment banking practice is what made me think you were making a moral distinction.

Defining a market is a fun place to be and what I am most interested in, but filling one out for the common citizen is important also. The clones are around because the need for disruption extends beyond restaurants and spa treatments in NY and SF.

Re: Stop Building Apps and Start Disrupting Industries

Jake Howerton — Mon, 16 May 2011 12:38:04 -0000

And how does that qualifier change the moral distinction?

Re: Stop Building Apps and Start Disrupting Industries

Jake Howerton — Mon, 16 May 2011 12:18:08 -0000

I agree with your main point, but the moral distinction between Groupon and Uber is lost on me.

Re: Deficit Reduction

Jake Howerton — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 15:36:43 -0000

Definitely, if MITD was the first thing you killed you might be in trouble.

Luckily, we have an entire year between tax dates. You could easily leave all the payroll deduction hooplah in place on people's paychecks for the first year. Nearly everyone with a paycheck would still be getting a refund when tax day came around.

Re: Deficit Reduction

Jake Howerton — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 15:27:00 -0000

This is a really weird myth and logic error. The savings for the average person in a mortgage would far outweigh any benefit they were getting from MITD, making it possible for more people to stay current, keep their homes, making mortgages more profitable.

Re: Deficit Reduction

Jake Howerton — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 15:06:50 -0000

Glad you have pointed out the elephants in the room but why are people fixated on the Bush Tax Cuts? It would hardly make a ripple in tax revenue. Income tax reform is desirable but we need more honest thinkers around this issue.

My proposal: 15% flat income tax. NO deductions. 0% on first $10k(or similar)to protect low income individuals and still be a fair system.

Benefits:
* Same revenues
* automate the entire system and save billions (probably 100s of B)
* everyone can understand it.
* nobody is subsidizing normative relationships or other tax credits they might disagree with

Cons:
* out of work tax accountants
* citizens will have a clear understanding of how much of their money their govt is wasting

Assumptions: $1Trillion income tax revenue, Per capita income of $33k

Re: Guns

Jake Howerton — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 13:07:51 -0000

I guess my question is what was better about it? Did it actually improve our society along some metric? Crazies like Loughner will always find a way to do damage whether they are in a repressive society(suicide and car bombings?) or a free one, and I personally would rather not live in a repressive one.

At the very least I would rather spend resources dealing with root causes of issues like this before hand rather than using these events to punish political foes and the 99.9999% non-crazies who want to own weapons after the fact.

Re: Guns

Jake Howerton — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 12:22:13 -0000

Also for a little reading about rifle technology in the times of the founders see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

Re: Guns

Jake Howerton — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 12:18:36 -0000

"which should encompass semi-automatics"

If you are actually familiar with guns, why not just say handguns should be banned? All modern handguns are semi-automatic including the majority of production revolvers.

Additionally the way assault weapons were defined is ludicrous. Often you can get the exact same rifle with minor cosmetic changes legally, because the term is just an arbitrary rule regarding the cosmetic appearance of a gun(present tense b/c NY still has assault weapons ban).

Re: Talent and Bandwidth

Jake Howerton — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 12:23:42 -0000

"i am suggesting they wire every home, office, and institution"

What do you think being an ISP business is? Who is going to maintain the fiber, provide tech support, dispatch technicians to make repairs? Using the subway system as an example of what our internet infrastructure could be like is horrifying.

I am all for community owned fiber, but the only way it could realistically work in NYC is if block associations were formed to build it and have multiple medium haul providers come to the edge of a block or neighborhood to provide service. Then the community actually owns it instead of a newly formed "Metropolitan Fiber Transit Union" or some such BS. There could be competition for maintenance contracts, etc. There are many commercial ISPs(100s) in NY who have essentially done similar things within buildings by utilizing Verizon's fiber infrastructure already.

Re: Open ID Is A Nightmare

Jake Howerton — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 15:46:13 -0000

1password has also negated the need for openID for my typical use case. Mobile access is still a pain because of this decision though.

Re: Some Happenings In Our Portfolio

Jake Howerton — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 09:04:58 -0000

Hey Fred,

Right now the product they are selling (or at least pricing around) is minutes. This means they abstract the actual price away from users and mark it up. Twilio picks all the upstream providers, termination points, etc, and adds a healthy markup(still) on top of what they are paying to these wholesalers and carriers. They also limit your outbound routing to PSTN only.

I will paint picture for you. There are billions of minutes flowing through SMB phone systems, and even the smallest of these accounts is paying only a half a cent per minute(domestic) if they have negotiated it in the past 3 years.

To address these potential customers, Twilio could provide SIP trunks so that people could connect their existing phone systems, or IP handsets to a simple programmable cloud PBX (developers could provide solutions for specific verticals). On the other side of the equation, Twilio could have open market competition for the routes that are served to customers. Customers could choose based on price, performance and availability who they wanted to route traffic to. Pricing could be based on resource usage(EC2 model) or by continuing to use minutes as the metric and charge a small 'tax' for using the platform.

This could be rolled out slowly to large customers first( hosted VoIP providers who are consolidating rapidly right now and looking to ditch clunky Broadsoft or homegrown Asterisk systems).

-Jake

Re: Some Happenings In Our Portfolio

Jake Howerton — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 11:21:34 -0000

The problem with @twilio, and what I and others have complained about is not just that they were charging an order of magnitude over market prices, but that they are restricting routes to their choosing. They need to become a platform, or someone else will.

Re: Twilio Slashes Prices As It Looks To Further Boost Growth

Jake Howerton — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 13:13:38 -0000

Their rates are still ridiculously expensive compared to the market if you were going to buy minutes from a traditional carrier.

Re: Behind The Bidding War: The Real Reasons Why HP And Dell are So Desperate For 3Par

Jake Howerton — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 11:51:02 -0000

The actual truth: "of" in mathematics means 'times'. Percent means divided by one hundred. So you just repeated what Steve stated above using different terms. 300% of the original price == 3x the original price. Thanks for playing.

Re: Regulation Strangulation

Jake Howerton — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 17:52:42 -0000

Sorry Fred, you just broke the entire internet. It is made of individual actors making decisions in their best interest. Company A and B are paying company X to route between their two networks. The traffic grows to the point that this no longer makes sense and they want to connect networks directly, they do it, then they build rules that make the most sense to route traffic between them.

This is how the internet works, why it exists, and how it has been improved over the last generation. To change this is to stop it.

Re: Regulation Strangulation

Jake Howerton — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 17:19:41 -0000

Sorry, this notion is silly. Verizon could just peer directly with google prioritize all traffic bound for their network and bill google for the service. Same result as application layer filtering, besides which equipment gets purchased.

Re: Regulation Strangulation

Jake Howerton — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 11:26:24 -0000

While @andyswan explained the problem of involving the government in this pretty succinctly, there is a practical issue with the Net Neutrality argument as well. All of the Net Neutrality jingoists are attacking a symptom instead of a problem. Remove last mile franchising and monopoly and the need for this debate goes away.

Re: How To Pitch A Product

Jake Howerton — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 15:33:32 -0000

Twilio is an awesome concept but they seem hamstrung by their pricing model. Right now they are charging 600% above fair market rate for minutes, so most applications on their platform have to be really high value interactions, IVRs or robocalls.

Are they making the bet that these calls are going to outweigh human-to-human calls in the future? Hopefully not. Ideally they would create a marketplace where any provider can provide DIDs, terminations and routing through the other side for their API customers, but then they would have to pivot on their pricing model.

If they do this, they could kill it. If not someone will solve this problem and all their existing customers will flee the price gouging because the solution is the same for both segments of the market.

Re: Internet Freedom

Jake Howerton — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 18:01:09 -0000

BINGO! Now what does Net Neutrality have to do with fixing this problem?

Re: Internet Freedom

Jake Howerton — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 17:21:45 -0000

Hey Fred,

I commented on Albert's post about this yesterday also, but I think you guys are dead wrong on this issue.

When you look at the list of other issues that you put on your policy list above (most of which I agree with), they all have a similar thread (removing bureaucracy) except for this one. If Net Neutrality actually has value to people, we need the people behind it to explain it in clear and decisive terms.

To me, the arguments posited by Net Neutrality backers are straight up jingoism and paranoia. The Comcast case perfectly illustrates a situation where the action was beneficial to the vast majority of their users. For most residential broadband deployments are on a shared network currently, and your behavior has a real effect on the experience of your neighbor.

What it comes down to for me is the ability of these businesses to address the needs of (all of) their customers and business legitimately. As I asked Albert, what if we had Venture Capital Neutrality, and you had to fund any business that met a specific criteria?

There are real issues, like last mile monopoly/duopoly that need to be addressed, but so far the proposed solutions (Net Neutrality) do not even come close to dealing with these root causes of the issue.

Re: The Price of Internet Freedom Is?

Jake Howerton — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 00:16:14 -0000

Wireless broadband is a solution for some use cases, community/municipal fiber is another (if it is open access).

Yes, there are a few big, bureaucratic, slow moving semi-corrupt corporations that control most of the access to bandwidth in the US. There are also thousands of small businesses who control a little sliver. Giving control of our routing tables to the biggest, slowest, most contradicted organization in the land is not a solution. We are playing with fire, and potentially creating the 'interstate commerce clause' of the internet. A simple read of the proposed legislation/rules to date reveals just how broad and ambiguous the terms that may be put into place would be.

Why should we not also have Venture Capital Neutrality? You guys have to check off a bunch of boxes and then you are required to invest if an entrepreneur meets the requirements. I admit it doesn't have the sexy alliteration, but seriously, business is about making decisions. Making decisions can otherwise be stated as 'discriminating' between choices. Hog tying a certain class of business from doing this will result in disaster.

If we as consumers(or other stakeholders) decide we don't want application layer filtering or QOS on our upstream networks, or if we decide every bandwidth provider should peer with Google, or some other crazy necessity arises in the future, there are better ways to achieve these goals, even within the status quo (in which contrary to popular belief most Americans have more than one choice for broadband).

Re: The Price of Internet Freedom Is?

Jake Howerton — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 12:14:17 -0000

Hey Albert,

You correctly identified the real problem in regards to bandwidth.

"Here there is much less of a market force at work as a potential corrective because in many local markets there is only a single broadband provider available and at best most markets have a duopoly."

The concepts behind legislative net neutrality are nonsensical jingoism, and "success" legislatively would be disastrous for internet freedom going forward. Let's start working on the real problem.