3 ms·
There are a bunch of laundry startups: * https://www.rinse.com/ https://www.rinse.com/ * https://cleanly.com/ https://cleanly.com/ * http://www.washclubnyc.c
by est31 8y ago
There are a bunch of laundry startups:
* https://www.rinse.com/ https://www.rinse.com/
* https://cleanly.com/ https://cleanly.com/
* http://www.washclubnyc.com/ http://www.washclubnyc.com/
These startups employ people to do the laundry of their customers. If they get big enough, those startups might invest into automation.
Your dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, etc. is sitting around most of the day being idle, with its utilization being really low. Industrial laundry robots don't need to be mass produced in order to be profitable, they can be hand manufactured. This allows lower capital expenditures and allows for faster iteration. And you could pay some person to watch 5 robots and correct them when they do something wrong, something similar isn't possible outside of the industrial setting. So those services will greatly help with the invention of automatic laundry robots I think.
- dv_dt 8y agoI feel like it was a disappointment that some of the brightest engineers of a generation went into ad tech, and next they're going into how to make the masses into part time servants with even fewer benefits than full time low-wage employees.
- gingerbread-man 8y agoMost ad tech companies (Google, FB) likely devote well under 10% of their engineering might to work directly related to the advertising that forms their revenue stream. Newspapers and magazines are ad-funded, too, but few would consider the work of journalists to be wasteful.
- dv_dt 8y agoI would be curious to see an article, presentation, or quarterly report where that's written down because that's quite surprising. Maybe my gut is thinking ad-tech and all the support infrastructure, when the 10% is direct assigned engineering to ad-tech. And to be fair, the "support infrastructure" can and has other purposes.