Feature List Convergence — Becoming Big to Eat the Other Guy
Mercury in Fish
Mercury is present in only very small concentrations in seawater. However, they are absorbed, usually as methyl mercury, by algae at the start of the food chain.
This algae is then eaten by fish and other organisms higher in the food chain. The older that such fish become, the more mercury they may have absorbed. Anything that eats these fish within the food chain also consumes the higher level of mercury that the fish have accumulated.
This process explains why predatory fish such as swordfish and sharks or birds like osprey and eagles have higher concentrations of mercury in their tissue than could be accounted for by direct exposure alone. Species on the food chain can amass body concentrations of mercury up to ten times higher than the species they consume.
Waze
The map app which was acquired by Google has a list of fascinating features. Real time locations of speed traps, red light cameras, and where cops are hiding are reasons for drivers to keep the app open. The ability to send a person an ETA and have them see your location in real time is amazing; it is even a better acquisition tool.
Their acquisition features as beautifully masked as driver features.
Having the ability to sync with your calendar events so you can pre populate driving locations saves the driver a lot of time copying and pasting. In addition, it gives the app access to your calendar so it can scour events and locations and possibly make recommendations proactively (and in the interest of the company).
It’s not too far fetched to think that if Waze sees that you have a coffee meeting, they might recommend Dunkin Donuts, a longtime advertising partner.
A feature that they rolled out, a few months back, is called “Planned Drives.” It allows Waze to send you an alert about when to leave. You can add your journey (aka “Planned Drive”) manually into the app or sync your calendar and Facebook so that your appointments automatically become a Planned Drive. Once everything is set, you can add stop-offs/pit-stops to your road trip.
Waze will then factor stops and more into your timings. In fact, according to Google, Waze’s Planned Drives features will “illustrate peak traffic hours along your route, and take into account expected traffic conditions based on smart algorithms, traffic history and predictive analysis”, all with the purpose of “taking the guesswork out of finding the optimal route for every journey”.
And just launched is Waze Ridesharing. The concept is as follows: anyone who wants a ride opens up the Waze Riders app. They plug in their destination, and are then matched with any regular Waze user who is already going in that direction.
Lyft
The ridesharing app, Lyft, just launched a “Schedule Ride” feature. Basically it’s predetermining a pickup time in advance. The benefits of this is:
- Locking people into Lyft for this ride, instead of their competitors.
- Seeing where to send drivers before hand, to make sure to minimize wait times.
- Push their Lyft Line (UberPool competitor) so that it’ll have more matches.
Wrap Up
Lyft has the mindshare of “I want to go somewhere, and I don’t want to drive there, let me fire up this app to get me to location B.” Waze has an engaged community of drivers which keep the app open on a daily basis during their commutes. So we can say that Lyft already has the supply (drivers) and demand (riders). What they seek is more frequency of rides by both. Waze only has the supply (drivers), even though they are not the “for profit” drivers. They are just normal people. Waze’s challenge will be to create mindshare (or rebrand) for itself to create the ultimate ridesharing app and monetize the 50M+ users it has on its platform.
If you liked this post, you might also like:
If you liked the overall message of this post, feel free to get in touch with us. We do speaking engagements — http://www.citadinesgroup.com/#contact
