Why Drone Regulations Are Taking Forever
Amazon is arguing that the Federal Aviation Administration took so long to approve its test drone, the model in question has become obsolete. It said as much during a Tuesday testimony before a Senate subcommittee.
"While the FAA was considering our applications for testing, we innovated so rapidly that the [drone] approved last week by the FAA has become obsolete,” said Paul Misener, Amazon's vice president for Global Public Policy. “We don’t test it anymore. We’ve moved on to more advanced designs that we already are testing abroad."
See also: Amazon's FAA Exemption Doesn't Make Prime Air Any More Real
The FAA took a year and a half to approve Amazon’s particular drone model, which is a lengthy amount of time in the technology world. According to Misener, it’s only the U.S. that has given Amazon this amount of hassle.
“Nowhere outside of the United States have we been required to wait more than one or two months to begin testing, and permission has been granted for operating a category of UAS [unmanned aircraft system], giving us room to experiment and rapidly perfect designs without being required to continually obtain new approvals for specific UAS vehicles,” he said during the hearing.
See also: Why Commercial Drones Are Stuck In Regulatory Limbo
Commercial drones have been locked up in regulatory limbo in the United States ever since their invention. It’s a far cry from other countries, where drones are being deployed and tested at much faster rates. According to an FAA spokesperson speaking to ReadWrite, this is a response to the especially complicated U.S. aviation market, which includes both commercial carriers and a vast number of private aircraft:
We recognize industry’s urgency and understand the many amazing applications for UAS technology. However, the United States has the largest, most complex airspace in the world with—unlike other countries—a large general aviation fleet that we must consider when planning UAS integration, since those aircraft and small UAS may occupy the same airspace. Also, different laws and regulatory structures in other nations may allow them to act more quickly to approve certain UAS operations.
The spokesperson went on to say it was necessary for the FAA to have knowledge of exact makes and models of commercial drones in order to correctly assess them. That’s why the FAA claims it can’t approve a category of drones, just individual models.
Everything we do is safety-oriented, and we base our approvals for unmanned aircraft operations on an assessment of the risks to other aircraft and to people and property on the ground. To make that risk assessment, we need sufficient information on a company’s planned operations and aircraft, and we have been working diligently with Amazon to get the information we need.
The FAA is fighting against the tide of public opinion to correct “misconceptions and misinformation about unmanned aircraft system (UAS) regulations.” In an article published last year, the organization responds to assertions such as “Myth… The FAA is lagging behind other countries in approving commercial drones.”
Responses from the FAA don’t seem to be placating drone advocates. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) is the latest lawmaker to suggest introducing temporary legislation to speed up the commercial use of drones. He aptly calls it the “Commercial UAV Modernization Act.”
Photo via Amazon
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10 Things That Might Unexpectedly Spike Your Startup's Churn Rate
Guest author Scott Gerber is founder of the Young Entrepreneur Council.
Gaining new customers is always a priority. But that doesn't mean keeping your existing clients happy isn't also high on the to-do list. Keeping your startup's churn rate steady—and low—is critical.
So what's going wrong when those numbers take a turn for the worse? I polled 10 entrepreneurs from YEC about the surprising things that could negatively effect a company's churn rate, so you can learn how to up your game.
Slow Website Loads
How fast your website typically loads will negatively impact your churn rate if it's slow. People don't like to go to a slow site or app. If it takes longer than a second or two to load, I'm going to ditch your app for another one. It's not worth my time.
Pro tip: Speed up your Web server so that you have a lot more RAM and it can process the requests faster. Have solid state hard drives to make everything go faster. A CDN is required to handle loads in different countries, have fast connections, etc.
The goal is to have a fast website/app. This will help customers not get frustrated when using your service.
—John Rampton, JohnRampton.com
Expired Credit Cards
Most credit cards expire every few years, which will cause recurring transactions to fail. Using a service such as the "account updater" tool in your merchant account can go a long way towards fixing this problem. Additionally, proactively emailing customers prior to the expiration date can encourage them to manually update the card before the transaction fails.
No Clear Guidelines For Major Features
Having easily accessible, clear guidelines and FAQs about how to use the main features will help customers understand how to properly use your product. Otherwise, customers will churn as they spend a long time trying to figure out how to use your site but are not able to experience the full value of the product.
Customer Apathy
When a product is new, customers are excited. But they can become apathetic if there is no change or improvement. People remain interested in Apple’s iPhone because new versions come out each year. Give your customers something to look forward to by sharing your development roadmap. They will feel connected to your company and excited about the future.
Too Many Clicks
Customers are lazy (you know you are, too). So spend energy simplifying everything throughout the customer funnel—not only how they buy your product, but also how they communicate with your team. No matter how strong your brand is, you will lose customers if interactions are painful or slow.
—Aaron Schwartz, Modify Watches
Lack of Focus
It is fairly common knowledge that a startup's best weapon is focus, but focus is also your best weapon against churn.
The most common answer to high churn is to keep adding new features. However, the real solution is to cut out features and make your product or service more focused. Do one thing incredibly well and you'll stand out from the pack. In addition, focusing on one thing makes it much easier for customers to "get it" it before they churn.
—James Simpson, GoldFire Studios
Neglecting Client Communication
Most people are so focused on trying to get new clients they forget to promote their brand with the clients they already have. If your clients are consistently getting messages from competitors, they could be lured away. Maintaining communication and promoting your brand to current clients can help ensure they aren't poached by the competition.
—Nicole Munoz, Start Ranking Now
Lack Of Relatability
It's important that in your client relationship they occasionally hear your voice instead of only reading your emails. Changing providers/vendors is a pain, so give them one more reason not to: Because they don't want to break up with you!
Poor Interface Design
To most customers, the user interface is the product. A poorly designed website, or structure that is not coherent and easy to understand, will create additional hassles for your users. Those hassles will turn into frustrations, and those frustrations into cancellations.
Communication is important, but most customers aren't going to submit a ticket about their ignorance over your product when a plethora of competitors also exist in the market. Every founder needs to take a course in UX Design to better understand the fundamentals of customer interaction with their products.
Failing To Cultivate Loyalty
Your efforts to come across as personal and approachable—to let your customers know you care about them and that their business is important to you—will be one of the hidden factors that can impact your churn rate. If a customer feels zero loyalty to you and a competitor offers a similar service with a lower price, they'll have no motivation to continue giving you business.
You know that you work hard to continually improve your business, but unless you communicate this in a way that lets them know you care, they'll never know. Even just a simple email reaching out to them and giving them suggestions based on their account will let them know you've been working hard for them, and they'll have more reason to prefer you to an unknown competitor.
Lead photo by Neil Bird
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Amazon's FAA Exemption Doesn't Make Prime Air Any More Real
The Federal Aviation Administration just granted an experimental airworthiness certificate to one of Amazon’s delivery drone designs. However, this doesn’t make Prime Air any more realistic than it’s been up to this point.
The FAA’s certificate grants Amazon the ability to test its drones, but it's too restrictive to allow that testing to take place in a realistic environment. The drones must always be operated within line of sight. Tests must take place during daylight hours, at 400 feet or below, during clear weather only. Also, all test operators must have a private pilot’s certificate.
Furthermore, Amazon will be required to report no small amount of data to the FAA on a monthly basis, including “number of flights conducted, pilot duty time per flight, unusual hardware or software malfunctions, any deviations from air traffic controllers’ instructions, and any unintended loss of communication links.”
See also: Amazon Tells The Feds It Really Wants To Test Drone Delivery
Amazon has been waiting for the FAA to make a decision since last July, when it first petitioned the federal government for a Prime Air testing exemption.
With this approval, Amazon joins a mere six organizations cleared to test drones in the U.S.: the University of Alaska, the state of Nevada, Griffiss International Airport in New York, the North Dakota Department of Commerce, Texas A&M University's Corpus Christi campus, and Virginia Polytechnic Institute.
See also: The FAA Finally Suggests Drone-Use Rules—And They Don't Allow Much
The FAA’s restrictions aren’t picking on Amazon in particular either, but continue the agency’s track record of extremely limited drone-use rules. In its February proposal for the regulation of unmanned aircrafts 55 pounds and under, the FAA required line of sight visibility and a pilot’s license as mandatory for all flights.
The agency is expected to bring this proposal to a vote later this year.
Photo via Amazon
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What Did We Just Learn About The Apple Watch? Not Much
We were expecting Apple's media event to answer all the questions we had about the Apple Watch — but in the end it mostly covered old ground and a few non-wearable announcements. Much of what was said on stage we'd heard six months before, though there are a handful of new details to pore over.
For starters, there's the simple matter of availability and pricing. Apple will take preorders for its smartwatch starting April 10, and will begin actual sales in nine countries on April 24. It will debut with a range of designs that range in price from $349 to more than $10,000.
The ability to make calls from your wrist is something Apple hadn't previously mentioned—and which you can't yet do on Android Wear. Watch owners can use the device's integrated microphone and speaker to initiate and receive calls—though whether you'll want to walk down the street talking to your watch is another question.
It sounds like it's going to be the same as using your iPhone in loudspeaker mode, except you'll have both hands free to carry groceries or cling on to a subway train pole. With the limited range of the smartwatch's internal components, you might need your wrist pretty close to your face for it to work—but we'll know for sure when the first review units arrive.
We also got a new hint on battery life. Apple CEO Tim Cook said the watch will last 18 hours over a variety of activities, although that doesn't clarify things much beyond the "all-day battery life" phrase he used at the original Apple Watch unveiling last year. And the fine print in the official press release helpful notes that "battery life depends on device settings, usage and other factors." So again until we get to test the watch out we'll have to take Apple's word for it.
Reading Between The Lines
So it's possible that light users will get a whole day's use from the Apple Watch, just as they do with their iPhones. Any kind of serious activity, though—making calls, tracking runs, going on an Apple Pay-powered shopping spree—and you might be looking for a charger by the early afternoon.
That's a big problem for a device designed to be worn constantly, always listening out for input and monitoring your vital statistics at regular intervals. We heard nothing about the rumored low battery mode that some insiders say kicks into action once the battery life dips below a certain level.
Apple VP of technology Kevin Lynch was on hand, as he was in September, to showcase a few different apps, but again this was mostly treading old ground: apps to browse photos, unlock hotel doors and send doodles. We did find out that Apple Watch apps are handled by a separate app built into iOS 8.2, which rolls out from today. If you don't have an Apple Watch, you can use it to see what you're missing.
Aside from prices and shipping dates, there was very little in Apple's Spring Forward showcase that we didn't already know. We'll have to wait until April to get the big questions about battery life and day-to-day use answered.
Image via Apple
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Google+ Is Poised For A Big Breakup
Some major restructuring is going on at Google+, and it looks like it's the end of the social network as we know it—if that label was ever appropriate in the first place. Long-time Google VP Bradley Horowitz has announced that he's taking the management reins from David Besbris and splitting Google+ into separate services called Photos and Streams at the same time.
For the moment, details on exactly what that means are thin on the ground. Photos is fairly obviously the image taking, editing and sharing elements of Google+, but Streams is something new: It's apparently the river of Google+ posts that's going to be left when everything else has been stripped out. (Hangouts will live on as a standalone messaging/video-conferencing service, although Horowitz won't be managing it.)
"It’s important to me that these changes are properly understood to be positive improvements to both our products and how they reach users," Horowitz wrote in his post, which gives you some indication of how Google will spin this when it finally gets around to making an official announcement.
Google+ Falls Apart
In an interview with Forbes last week, Google's senior VP of products Sundar Pichai hinted that Google+ was about to be dismantled into separate parts. It's a theme he returned to on stage at Mobile World Congress today, telling Bloomberg's Brad Stone:
For us, Google+ was always two things, one was a stream and a social layer. The stream has a passionate community of users, but the second goal was even larger for us. We're at a point where things like photos and communications are very important, [and] we're reorganizing around that.
While adding that Hangouts would remain a Google product, Pichai didn't elaborate on how Google+ is going to evolve into Streams, or when it would happen. If the "social layer" is decoupled from the posting, +1-ing and commenting aspects of Google+, as Pichai suggests, then the network is likely to become more insular, not less. It's possible that Google is looking for a more instant, real-time, Twitter-style network that can help augment its search results.
Even the dominant player Facebook has been busy diverging into smaller, more focused areas through the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. The plethora of experimental apps released separately by Facebook—Messenger, Home, Rooms and Groups—are an indication that the future of social networking lies in smaller apps rather than one all-encompassing platform. It seems like Google has gotten this message as well.
Photo by David Nield for ReadWrite
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Take That, Apple! Samsung Unveils Its Own Pay-With-Your-Phone System
Samsung has announced its new mobile payments system, unsurprisingly called Samsung Pay. It will apparently only work at first with the company's latest flagship phones, the new Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge. Those phones launch on April 20; Samsung says the payments system will go live in the second half of this year.
In terms of managing payments in retail stores, Samsung Pay boasts one major advantage over Apple’s competing system. While Apple Pay requires near-field communication (NFC) pads to function, Samsung Pay is already compatible with any terminal with a standard magnetic stripe credit card reader—or with NFC if the business has already adopted it.
See also: What Samsung’s Mobile Payments Acquisition Has That Apple Pay Doesn't
Samsung is building its pay system on technology it acquired when it bought LoopPay, which had a system it said was already compatible with 90% of existing credit card stripe-reading terminals.
At the moment, though, it doesn't sound like Samsung Pay will offer much, if any, functionality inside apps. Apple, by contrast, offers a software development kit and other resources to developers who want to incorporate its payment system into their apps.
For security, Samsung Pay relies on Samsung KNOX, the company’s in-house end-to-end secure mobile platform, as well as fingerprint scanning and “advanced tokenization,” the company said in a press release. “Tokenization” means that transactions will use a one-time-use token instead of your credit card number for identification.
Screenshot via Samsung
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