Sorry, but I don't understand this message, so I can't really respond to it.
It sounds like you're saying a cable service is more analogous to Tap
Tap See than TiVo is, but I actually see TiVo, NetFlix and a cable
service as all being pretty similar. TiVo does have a monthly service
charge option, which I'm sure is more the normal for TiVo subscribers.
I don't get the emergency room analogy at all. If hospitals offered an
option where I could pay a one time fee and then get medical care at no
charge after that then I could see the analogy. I don't think I ever
even implied though that paying for the costs surrounding one's birth
entitles someone to free medical care for the rest of their lives.
I agree, and have always agreed, that if you can't sell enough of your
product or service to off set the cost of ongoing expenses then you need
to come up with another model, such as charging a subscription fee or a
per use charge. I think it's obvious that with Tap Tap See's relatively
low volume of sales and relatively high cost of image identification
they need to pursue such a model.
One thing I realized, and I think this came from reading one of David's
messages, is that a lot of companies in house ongoing expenses and hire
staff or pay for infrastructure upgrades to do this. So for example, a
company would hire staff to monitor the phones, emails and instant
messages to provide support. they'd buy servers, storage, network
adapters and so on to provide for the necessary bandwidth. With existing
resources they could handle an increasing amount of demand until they
reached a tipping point and had to hire another support person or buy
another server. My understanding, like I said from one of David's
messages, is that Tap Tap See is not hiring staff to sit around and
identify images as they come in, so that with one person they have a
certain amount of bandwidth and with a second person that bandwidth
would double. Instead, because of how they're farming out this image
recognition to another supplier or through crowd sourcing, they're
literally paying for each and every image they receive and identify. I
can see where this stretches any analogies I was making past the point
of being useful, so if you want to say I'm comparing apples to oranges
or tomatoes to eggs, I am OK with that, and I agree.
On 11/11/2013 03:49 PM, Joanne Chua wrote:
Again, you are missing the point. you are again, comparing eggs and
tomato, and deciding what will cost a farmer more, to have chickens or
to grow tomatos.
You got to compare service against service, goods against goods.
From my understanding, TiVo does not only serve blind people. TiVo is
for everybody and anybody that is interested in streaming and
recording. The closes you may compare TiVo is perhaps with Apple TV.
But, that beside the point. You pay for TiVo upride, or, in some case,
you get in to a contract with 3rd party vendors, however, the
maintainant cost of such service is relatively slow. Yes, they provide
after sales customer support, yes, they provide upgrades, but that is
part of who they are, and part of customer service and after sales
support. It is rather, different, than on-going on the clock support.
An example, if you go to emergency room, and try to see a doctor, will
you then, tell the doctor something like hey, when my mother have me
my parents already pay thousands of $$$. So, all my life time medical
expends should be free, and will be free. Is my right to get free
after born service from the medics for my entire life."
Is also supply and demand. The company will sell 1,000 TiVo against 1
install on Tap Tap See. TiVo may have upgrade ones a year or so, but
Tap Tap See may process 1 image in every 1 minutes or so.
If you insist to compare something like that, compare service against
service, a cable TV provider that charge you by monthly usage to Tap
Tap See, instead of comparing a goods to a service.
Joanne Chua
The flip side of Inclusion is Exclusion.
Leaders For Tomorrow 2013 Candidate
Send from my iPad
On 12 Nov 2013, at 6:52, Christopher Chaltain <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
True, and you're not the first person to tell me how clear it is that
I miss the obvious.
A few subtle distinctions though. I was responding to people who were
making blanket statements that you can't support on going costs with
a one time fee business model. DVD Audio Extractor does provide me
upgrades and customer support at no charge. Obviously, they incur a
request every time I contact customer support.
TiVo does much more than provide the chance to record a movie. They
provide access to an ever changing variety of streaming content. I
would assume they have incurring costs with respect to interfacing
with the various sources of content they provide. They also have
incurring costs when it comes to keeping up with new users signing up
for their service and accessing newly available content, such as
maintaining the necessary network bandwidth, keeping up with server
storage and so on. I'm sure if I watch TiVo for 100 hours a week, I'm
putting more of a strain on their infrastructure than if I just watch
TiVo 1 hour a week. I also wouldn't be surprised if they have to make
licensing payments to their content providers based on customer
usage. TiVo traditionally has a subscription service, like NetFlix
for example, but they do or at least used to offer a lifetime flat
price option.
You're right, Tap Tap See incurs a cost every time someone sends them
a picture, and there's probably no flat price that people could
stomach that would give them the revenue from new users to keep up
with the picture recognition demand, which is what I meant when I
said it's not just that they have incurring costs but that those
costs are relatively high and their number of new sales they can
count on is relatively low. BTW, The scenario you point out can also
happen with the monthly flat rate. If I pay $10 a month, Tap Tap See
will incur a much greater cost to support me if I send in 1000
pictures then they will if I send in 100 pictures that month. They
figure $10 a month will work for them though in spite of this. I
suppose Tap Tap See could offer a $1000 price for a lifetime
subscription, but it's probably not worth it to them to come up with
a way to administer such a model for the few people that would
actually pay this much up front for such a life time service.
On 11/11/2013 01:50 PM, Steve wrote:
Clearly, Christopher, you don't understand the difference. You are
comparing apples to oranges.
DVD Audio Extractor nor Tivo incur any costs when you extract audio
from one of your DVD's or record a movie. All that activity takes
place locally, it doesn't matter to them whether you extract one or
a thousand DVD's. They don't have any additional costs whether you
are a light or heavy user of their program. The only thing they are
providing you are free software updates when an update is released.
Provisioning this to an existing user is not really incurring an
added cost to them, except for you getting the program from their
server, I suppose. The update enhances the program and hopefully
makes it marketable to new buyers, which is where they derive their
continued revenue growth.
This is not the same model as TTS App uses. In the case of Tap Tap
See, every time you send a picture to them, they are incurring a
cost to have someone identify it. Therefore, if you recognize a
thousand pictures, you are costing them a hundred times as much as
someone who only recognizes ten pictures with it.
Steve
----- Original Message -----
*From:* Christopher Chaltain <mailto:[email protected]>
*To:* [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
*Sent:* Sunday, November 10, 2013 1:03 PM
*Subject:* Re: Tap Tap See
There are plenty of business models where paying a one time fee goes
towards supporting an ongoing service. I paid a one time fee for DVD
Audio Extractor and now I get updates and support for life. You can
purchase TiVo for life with a one time fee. I paid a one time fee
for my iPhone and now I get updates to IOS for no charge. I don't
use this MLB app, but I'm not sure there aren't ongoing costs, such
as support, upgrades, licensing fees and so on.
I suspect that it's a combination of the high cost of image
recognition combined with the relatively low volume of sales such an
app targeted at the blind would generate.
On 11/10/2013 11:14 AM, Steve wrote:
I wish someone would put a stop to this insanity. This is a free
market, you folks have a choice. Pay the price, or don't use a
very useful app. Only a few people seem to understand that the
developer has to pay the people that recognize the images on a
per-image basis. Therefore, paying a one=-time fee for the app has
nothing to do with a reasonable pricing model in this case. It is
not the same as paying for a season's access on MLB where there are
no ongoing costs once you pay for the app.
Also, I take issue with another comment about other developers
taking the blind into consideration in their image recognition
program. As far as I can tell, that particular program requires
the assistance of a sighted person to set up a database, so this is
in no way at all comparable to what Tap Tap See is doing.
Of course, your other option is VizWiz, but it is all dependent on
the type of quality response you get and how long you are willing
to wait before getting a response from volunteers.
As economist Milton Friedman famously said "There ain't no such
thing as a free lunch".
Personally, I don't use Tap Tap See that often, so I am going to be
paying for 100 pictures because it is responsive and generally
accurate. I do hope they can add either some checkboxes or a
textbox to help us tailor the response we get from the Terks.
Steve
----- Original Message -----
*From:* Peter Logan <mailto:[email protected]>
*To:* Vi Phone <mailto:[email protected]>
*Sent:* Sunday, November 10, 2013 8:35 AM
*Subject:* Tap Tap See
It saddens me that the developers have decided to move to what I
consider to be price gouging, just my opinion. It also amazes me
that this community doesn't seem to mind this time. However, wen
the Seeing Eye GPS came out with their model many on this list were
outraged.
Am I in no way asking for something to be free, however if you are
a heavy user of the product and go with the monthly subscription,
you will be paying $120/year, as far as I know that would be the
highest price of any blindness specific app. I would have rather
they just go with a $4.99 or even $6.99 price for the app and call
it good. My most used app, MLB At Bat only cost $19.99/year and I
use that multiple times every day. I would have rather seen a
yearly subscription in that range.
Hopefully they will reconsider the pricing model in the future. It
is an awesome product, however I believe it could be priced better.
Thanks for listening.
Peter
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