This reminds of a good friend. He got a job making six figures at Google straight out of college, and then lived in his van--in the Google parking lot--while saving every penny he earned. He took showers on campus and only ate free Google food. After a few years, he went into a mini-retirement and devoted his time to traveling around the world and volunteering.
I would have loved to save money right out of school, being as frugal as I am, but I was married when I graduated and the first thing my wife wanted after I got my first (low paying) full time job? A house.
Putting money into a house you'll presumably be able to live in rent-free once it's paid off may not be a drastically worse choice than putting your money into savings. Unless it was an impractically huge house, or otherwise somehow not a keeper, I wouldn't consider that a frivolous/non-frugal purchase.
I lived in the van Monday-Thursday while working in London (my home is around 130miles to the east). Not a problem and not uncomfortable. I sometimes used the showers at the office but my van is fully equipped with shower,toilet heaters etc. I wasn't the only one doing it either, and after a while you spot other likely vans.
When people say Maps is a "huge step backwards", are they actually using the product? I mostly use my phone for driving directions, and the addition of turn-by-turn navigation has been a huge step forward. Maybe I'm the one iPhone user in the world who thinks Maps is awesome, but that seems unlikely. It seems more likely that this is just another case of the "vocal minority" being amplified by uncritical journalists. Remember what happened when Facebook first released the News Feed? :-)
When people say Maps is a "huge step backwards", are they actually using the product?
Where do you live? If you live in the Valley, I'm sure it's fine, in fact I'm sure it's great, but elsewhere in the world the map data is pretty bad, much worse than Google Maps. People aren't all complaining about turn by turn directions in the US, they're complaining about basic flaws in map data around the world. So yes, they are using it, and it is not great.
Both the satellite data and the map data is woeful in some areas, some of it is so bad that I'm surprised they included it at all. Here are some examples which don't compare favourably with OSM or Google:
"Brighton, UK", Satellite - a big UK city is so blurry you can't see streets.
"Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands" - ends up in the middle of the sea, and no roads on the islands at all.
"Colchester" - satellite shows clouds, in B&W over a UK city
"Senkaku Islands" - compare satellite with standard to see actual duplicates of these disputed islands in the vector map data.
"Puno,Peru"- in lake Titicaca
"Central St Martins" - a major London college which relocated last year is still shown at its old address. The new address, which has been a warehouse for many years, is shown as a park named 'King's Cross Central' which doesn't exist. If their data on major cities is this bad, consider how bad the rural areas will be.
This is a really hard problem, and frankly I'm surprised Apple tried to without an extensive beta and data collection period in order to bring their data up to scratch. Just to give you an example of the sort of advantage this hands Google - Last weekend I tried to find a postcode in central London, and it wasn't found (N1C 4AA, a relatively new postcode for a major new development, but visible in Google and OSM with lots of detail). A colleague with an SIII found it no problem. That kind of comparison is a big problem for Apple.
I think this is their "extensive beta and data collection period". Just using the entire iOS 6 customer base as the experimental set.
I think it would be kinda cool if they'd push the new maps as an app available for iOS 5, and if Google had their native iOS maps app ready, and the transition weren't so abrupt. I realize the mapping subsystem is baked in more deeply, with various APIs and libraries available to all apps on the system, not just a standalone app, but it would still be helpful to have the standalone apps. (If Apple Maps were available as a standalone app, that would facilitiate the "extensive beta period" you suggested without all the ire that they've attracted this way; and I really hope that Google Maps is coming back to iOS at some point real soon now.)
I think this is their "extensive beta and data collection period". Just using the entire iOS 6 customer base as the experimental set.
If so that's an unfortunate abuse of their customers' trust, and will hand a big advantage to Google.
As you say there were many options like releasing a standalone test first to run in parallel with the google app, but perhaps because of hubris they were not explored, and so customers have had an unexpected downgrade on an app which is widely used.
It is obvious that they have better data for certain parts of the world.
The problem with maps is that if your data is, say, 10% bad or inaccurate (whatever that means) and you are serving two billion searches per week you have to contend with tens of millions of unhappy users. Bad problem to have.
Will they fix it? Probably. How long? Someone far more knowledgeable of the challenges in mapping will have to answer that one.
For me and those close to me it is about the potential to break something that works very well right now. That alone is keeping us from upgrading software and hardware. It's the old "if it ain't broke don't fix it" saying.
As for turn-by-turn. I live in SoCal. I rarely need it. When I do, I throw an old GPS I keep in the car on the dashboard and it works just fine. Most of the time (99% ?) I use Google Maps on my 4S.
I've talked to people who have IOS6, and the consensus is that the maps are fine in California, and completely useless everywhere else.
In Finland, a guy I know got directions that told him to go through a road that hasn't existed for 6 years.
Also, most of the market for iPhone users are city-dwellers, and most of those don't own cars. Having good timetable/route planner for public transit is very important. As I understand, Maps doesn't work for that at all.
I have had no issues in Minneapolis/St. Paul. I think you're overblowing things with your statement of "completely useless everywhere else". I've even compared the directions against a friends s3 with google maps and Apple maps did better at some local routing than google maps did for what its worth.
It places my house 150m out to sea, and puts a rehabilitation centre that doesn't exist at the actual location of my house. In my town, a suburb of Melbourne AU, the Apple product is completely useless.
I saw a news story in, I think, the Star Tribune with a picture of the new Maps app locating the Guthrie Theatre at its old location at the Walker. It hasn't been there for 3 years.
Admittedly, I haven't used the new Maps app, but only because I've avoided upgrading my phone to iOS6 solely because I've heard the new Maps is so terrible.
> maps are fine in California, and completely useless everywhere else
Our personal, relatively microscopic sample sizes are the problem with the sentiment on this. I've used them in Florida, South Carolina, and North Carolina, and they worked fine for restaurants, turn-by-turn, etc.
As others have said, a combination of the vocal minority and the human race's love for drama is what's keeping this discussion alive.
I just got back from a 2 week vacation to Ireland. I planned and executed most of the trip on the fly using Google Maps on my iPhone 4S (3G data is cheap in Europe, even for nonresidents on prepaid SIMs!) running iOS 5.
Just out of curiosity, after I got back, I upgraded my iPad to iOS 6 to see whether all the complaints I'd read about Apple's maps were legit. Then I went and looked up a bunch of the places we'd traveled or stayed in Ireland, to see if the new maps would have gotten the job done. Short story, it would have been a lot harder. In the spot checks I did, the roads are there, and in one case the driving directions are better than what Google recommended, but it mostly didn't know what I was talking about when I searched for businesses, like hotels we stayed at.
Google has amassed a huge amount of really high quality data, not just roads but also businesses and places, which nobody else has. I don't know if there's widespread appreciation for how hard this is and how hard Google's been working on it (one example, and I'm sure this article is slightly politicized and the timing of it appearing now is no coincidence, but still, it's mostly fact: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-go...). Hopefully Apple has the staying power to go amass the same data, but it's an uphill battle.
The point here isn't whether or not you had a problem. There might be 100s of people reading that post and not replying because they did not have a problem. Without quizzing a representative sample of users, we can't figure out the size and scope of the problem.
They do that on a regular basis, they did that last year after their pre-order page committed seppuku. They do that based on the scale of the public outrage, not really on the internal/technical merit.
People conveniently forget how Google Map, Nokia Drive, and all others let you down on a regular basis, and how much room there is for competition in that market.
Street layout is mostly right in all apps. POI however is a joke in all of them. In the city of London, Google Map only has a fraction of the shops and there is no logic which one it has and has not. I does not have the Starbuck(!) in front of my job, but it has the clothes shop next to it and nothing else in the street. Nokia Drive keep sending me on farm/field trail when I'm in Spain. At the same place Google Map has random missing road or missing portion of road (those road have been there for 200+ years like the house built on it). I briefly tries IOS Map at the Apple Store and it has the correct layout but only label some of the road, making it equally useless IMO.
We are planning a trip to Japan with Google Maps right now. It is convenient only because of its interface - but really kinrin (something like that) is incredibly better at showing stuff that matters.
When you ask for transit directions, you get presented a selection of 3rd party apps from the app store to give you directions, and those directions are then integrated with Apple Maps.
The app I used, http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/transit-directions-public/id5... was pretty bad on iOS 6 launch day (with instructions like "take a bus", without mentioning the line), but a week later improved to be perfectly usable here in Switzerland.
> the consensus is that the maps are fine in California, and completely useless everywhere else.
I've had no issues since I started using the beta around the Southeast US. I've used it from Tennessee to Florida, with turn-by-turn directions around the Atlanta area, to Orlando, all over Disney World, and more.
Let's not contribute consensus where consensus isn't due.
I recently had a family member (who doesn't use a smartphone) call me up to ask if I could recommend a brand of print map to her. After just one instance of getting lost due to a mislabeled road in her atlas, she was ready to jump ship on a brand that she had probably been loyal to for decades. All over an error that was probably insignificant in the grand scheme of things. But to her it meant an hour's worth of lost time, confusion and wasted gasoline, and it was very significant.
That may have just been because they want to emphasize a native mobile app rather than HTML5-based mobile experiences, and Google has not yet released their own native maps app for iOS.
Actually, the open letter also recommends Google and Nokia maps, via their websites (because native apps don't exist).
BTW: Am I the only one that thinks it's fishy that Google's claiming (a) they only had 3 months notice of this change and (b) 3 months isn't enough to produce their own iOS maps app? I don't believe either of those claims.
> the consensus is that the maps are fine in California
I'm in So. Cal., we happened to be visiting friends in Valencia. We were going to meet at Valencia Mall. I searched for "Valencia Mall". I sent us a mile or two away from the true location.
Google Maps got it right.
Based on this single data point I would venture to guess that, no, things are not fine in California. If it can't find the major shopping mall in a city like Valencia I don't even want to know what else it might screw up.
One of the issues with maps is that people have come to rely on them for all sorts of things, even emergencies. Nobody uses the yellow pages or print maps any more (well, some do). Imagine searching for the local hospital in an emergency and being sent to the wrong spot. This stuff is important. It's not a toy any more.
When it works, it's better. However, it does not work as often.
I was stranded at O'Hare earlier this week, and United put me up at the "Crown Plaza", according to my hotel voucher. I searched for "Crown Plaza" in iOS6 maps, and was suddenly transported to Vancouver. In Google Maps, it correctly surmised I was actually looking for the nearby "Crowne Plaza".
iOS6 maps is 95% as good as google maps, but the missing 5% really hurts.
Your experience also represents the bulk of the problems I've had. I'm in the Chicagoland area, and the POI data and roads have been pretty good. But the search doesn't seem to prioritize nearby locations. If your search string exactly matches the name of some town, anywhere in the world, it tends to give you that result.
Echoes my experience as well. I searched for a nearby street and ended up getting the same street further away. It directed me away from Manhattan and into another borough.
As an aside, that is one of the coolest functional tests I've ever seen. It's thorough, well-documented, and includes nice visualizations (the table at the bottom, not the pie chart up top).
The title is wrong. Québec is Canada's largest province, bigger than Ontario by about 500K km^2. Nunavut is the biggest land mass of the country, considering territories and provinces.
In Germany you pretty much have no data as soon as you leave the streets for cars. While driving directions might actually be okay, as soon as you walk around and leave the city roads it's getting bad. And even if they have the data, it's displayed in a horrible color palette, a lack of contrast and a very low information desitity:
http://i.imgur.com/Dktjo.jpg - This is the view of a nearby wood in Apple Maps. Take a look at those thin grey lines in the big green area. I'm not sure if I could see them on the map walking there in bright sunlight. If you zoom out just a little more, the trails vanish completely from the map and the whole screen is just a big green area. To actually see a trail well enough you have to zoom in so much that you lose the overview and don't know where you're actually looking.
http://i.imgur.com/DDx7R.png - This is the same are in Google Maps. Great contrast, good color palette and you can distinguish the larger from the smaller trails and roads. There's also a lot more information.
I can't speak for others, but switching to Apple Maps would be more than a huge step backwards for me, it's pretty much 90% of the way to useless.
My primary use of maps is public transit directions. Not having turn-by-turn is an inconvenience that is fixed, but losing public transit isn't just an inconvenience; there is no work around to get the directions I need at all.
For any feature there is going to be some subset of users that pretty much only use that one feature, so I can't really say how common of a user I am in that regard.
Lack of public transit map information is what's keeping me on iOS 5. Not upgrading until I have confidence I can use iOS 6, as public transportation is all I use.
It seems like in Europe and especially UK, it's truly bad. In the SF Bay Area, it's reasonably functional for me, but there are enough mistakes (from my own usage, not looking for problems) that I don't fully trust it.
And that's the problem - if I don't fully trust it, it loses a lot of its utility. I downloaded the Bing app as a backup. I still like the new UI and the turn-by-turn.
I'm in the UK. It's also useless for finding things - it has petrol stations in places they don't exist near my house, and restaurants that closed down years ago. It also sucks for anything but driving - I don't have a car so I walk everywhere and its coverage of pedestrian zones in my city is woeful (unlike google maps). Also, public transport options are nonexistent (unlike google maps). Pretty useless for me really.
In the UK the address database and driving directions seem fine. The search and the POI database are awful (although better than last week). The satellite data is great in major city centres with the 3D view working well. Have similar resolution to Google for much of the country but many areas have very low resolution.
The satellite resolution isn't much of a problem because I can use the Google Earth app for that. In most cases where I don't have an address Google search can provide that and then the maps work fine. Overall it is quite usable but as the data improves it should become pretty good.
Walking directions locally aren't great but neither are Google's. Neither know about a bridge across a motorway.
Last week when searching for hospital it didn't have any POI for my closest hospital and the thing it did come up with was a local business called 'PC Hospital'. Now with the same search in the same location the appropriate hospital is shown.
The Maps.app itself is a lot better. The sad thing is that Google has the best mapping data out there, they have been investing, collecting and tweaking it for years. Now everything that isn't Google Maps is substandard by default.
Nokia has also very good maps, some claim they are even better. Amazon switched recently from Google to Nokia for their Kindle maps. Perhaps Apple could have made a better deal with Microsoft/Nokia.
I live in a remote rural area in the UK, I just tried it again and the routing and postcode information that was wrong the day it came out is now corrected. Google maps had the same problems 2-3 years ago. I remember because they once directed me the wrong way and I missed a ferry.
As for business listings, its not like this is a solved problem. Everyone knows that google maps is not perfect for that. It's not as bad as apple maps but it's wrong enough of the time that I don't trust it, every now and then I forget it doesn't work and find myself standing outside a delivery bay, late for an appointment... I suspect most people google for a store/company/whatever, check the website to see if it offers what they want then copy paste the zip/postcode from the contact page into the maps app to get them close enough.
Apple's biggest problem is that they botched the PR, even if they fix the zip/postcode data quickly, no one will believe its fixed for a long time now.
Well I am, upgraded my iPad to iOS 6 and that leaves me with Apple Maps in the maps app. A number of places around San Carlos California aren't in their maps "by default", if you search for them it can find the Yelp reviews and then put down a push pin. So before when I was 'searching' for a place to eat I could look at the map and see all the restaurants and find what I wanted, now I see some but not nearly a representative batch. Actually searching for something like Pizza or Mexican food will drop down a dozen pins and more than half of them land on what is drawn as blank space on the map.
So perhaps Google was just better at guessing the kinds of queries I might be making when I opened maps.
I feel the same way. However I also live in California. I feel like its extremely accurate here, but it is also where it was essentially born. So it is not surprising it needs more work in other places. For everyone I know that lives here and uses it with normal habits, it seems to work just as good.
In time, and I suspect shorter than people estimate, the data quality will vastly improve. No software is perfect on the first release, and apples software is no exception. iTunes used to be glitchy in its early days, me.com was terrible when it first came out, but these issues have been rectified for the most part.
Google maps once led me 18 miles into the middle of nowhere for a dentist appointment. Sure, this error is fixed now, but the dentist office shows up correctly on maps. So It seems like here (in California) the data is better than it was when google maps was new.
I suspect by end of year, the majority of use-cases will work fine in many more places than california. Who knows, but if I were betting.. :)
I would just like to point out that the lack of turn by turn nav in Google Maps on iOS was an Apple decision, not a Google one. Nav has been available in Google maps on Android for a long time now. Hell, they have decent biking turn by turn.
No, the existing license Apple had for Google's map data specifically forbade turn by turn. According to the Verge, Google wanted a few more things before giving Apple turn by turn:
"For its part, Apple apparently felt that the older Google Maps-powered Maps in iOS were falling behind Android — particularly since they didn't have access to turn-by-turn navigation, which Google has shipped on Android phones for several years. The Wall Street Journal reported in June that Google also wanted more prominent branding and the ability to add features like Latitude, and executives at the search giant were unhappy with Apple's renewal terms. But the existing deal between the two companies was still valid and didn't have any additional requirements, according to our sources — Apple decided to simply end it and ship the new maps with turn-by-turn."
I don't see how that disagrees with my point. Apple deciding not to allow Google to add in turn by turn in exchange for Latitude is an Apple decision and not a Google one. Google isn't just going to give them more for free.
At the risk of making a poorly drawn simile, it would be like if I wanted an In N Out animal style burger, but didn't want the calories. So I decide to make my own inferior turkey burger. The decision to not have an awesome animal style burger that also comes with additional calories is my own, not that of In N Outs. The obvious problem with this simile is that In N Out doesn't have a ton of choice about the caloric content of its burgers, nor does it profit from the additional caloric content, but you get my point. If Google had not given Apple a choice, then yes, it would have been Google's decision. But ultimately, it was Apple who decided against giving Google more. As the article says
>The reports were validated earlier today by Google chairman Eric Schmidt, who was quoted by Reuters saying "what were we going to do, force them not to change their mind? It's their call."
> "Apple deciding not to allow Google to add in turn by turn"
I find this wording confusing.
It is more fair and more clearer to break the two sides up: The old "Maps" application and any new feature was done by Apple. It was Google who decided to explicitly disallow the usage of their back-end data for turn-by-turn. Which they are of course free to do. And it was Apple who decided not to allow Google control (and user data collection) in a key app. Which is also understandable.
Your point was worded as if Apple had a free choice, buffet style, of which features to have or not. Say Apple wants A but not B, and Google will only sell A+B. Your wording suggests that Apple turned down A, when really they turned down B, so had no option to get A.
Using Maps in NYC is a joke. Aside from no public trans (not a big deal; that's easy enough to work around), it's totally wrong with POIs. It even places the Met about, oh, 100 blocks south of where it actually is. Absolutely worthless.
Durring launch week I updated my iPad to iOS6 and used to drive from NYC to Washington DC and back. Addition of turn by turn navigation is a big step forward. So I'm pretty happy.
And as a side note I recently switched back to an iPhone after the latest Google Maps update caused my phone to hard lock and reboot. Take a look here: http://support.t-mobile.com/docs/DOC-4703 It affected my previous HTC Sensational device. Basically maps, or mapping services (which is a lot of apps including background ones) randomly caused your phone to reboot.
I'm in London, and I'd say it's a small step backwards. The points of interest from Yelp appear to be consistently off by about 10 metres, and many points of interest are missing altogether. I do like the way you can click on a point of interest, which is something you couldn't do in the old Maps app.
So far, all the addresses I've tried are correct, and the driving directions and speech recognition are a step forward. The tube/bus directions from Google were always inaccurate, so I was already using a dedicated app.
Yelp's points of interest are frequently at the wrong location. I've noticed this using Yelp's native app, which displays things on Google maps, ironically (ironically because Google knows the correct location if you search for the same place by name; I heard that Yelp stores lat/long for each place instead of letting Google look it up by name).
In my experience, this problem with Yelp's data is worse in Europe than the USA.
It entirely depends on your usage. My coworker uses them for turn by turn and that works great for him. I use it for transit, and it's not so great.
I get that they wanted to open up transit for other apps (or couldn't build it in for some reason) but I really do hate the amount of times I have to tap to get bus info now. I would much rather the integration.
For this, Google Maps works great, except when the bus site isn't working properly, which tends to be once a year when we have a massive influx of people come to town.
I've been using WAZE for months and before that GPS Drive. Better turn by turn has been available on iPhone for a while. There's no excuse for Apple's poor offering
So, "worksforme", for a car-driving lifestyle in California?
One of the main critiques has been the removal of transit directions. It was missing Shibuya station. For heaven's sake, that's like missing Grand Central Station. People in NYC would be shorting APPL...
Well, it's a FUBAR on that scale. It's just not visible if you drive a car, especially in California.
I also like the new maps - I can see it turning into a great product. My main issue is the missing public transport information... I still use the mobile web Google Maps for that which is unfortunately slower than the old native app.
Yes I'm using the new IOS maps, and yes it's pretty bad. Searched for a bar I wanted to go to in my city and it wanted to send me to Italy (other end of the earth).
Agreed. The fact that some data is not on par with current Google offering doesn't make the product a bad one. Data issues can be quickly solved, specially when there are so many users to report problems.
For a maps application, the best report is just the location of the affected user. Any lookup on existing maps for that location will show what the problem is.
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For employers wishing to reserve a certain number of seats on specific buses at certain times, RidePal plans to sell subscriptions, starting at $250 a month for companies of up to 50 people. That subscription is credited toward fares, which start at $8 a seat for trips within a 10-mile zone and go up to $589 for a monthly pass within the largest travel zone, which extends up to 75 miles from the pickup location.
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I just bought a mattress a few months ago, and I agree whole-heartedly with this post. My solution was to buy a foam mattress from bedinabox.com, which I would say is the Warby Parker for mattresses.
I think describing that linked product as "essentially equivalent" is a bit misleading. It takes 5 hours instead of 2 hours to charge, the top speed is 15mph instead of 20mph, and it weighs 37 lbs. instead of 12-15 lbs.
From the essay: "And since risk is usually proportionate to reward, if you can afford to take more risk you should."
I think I understand the intent of what you're saying here, but it could also be read to mean that you can increase your reward simply by taking on more risk. It might help to clarify that whenever a market isn't perfectly efficient (which is apparently always, unless P=NP), there will be investments that carry more risk without offering a higher return (i.e. that have a negative alpha). Perhaps it's better to state that as the potential reward (or return) of an investment increases, you can tolerate more risk.
Did Dropbox appear to be a bad idea at the time? I seem to recall that the market was pretty crowded when Dropbox launched, and that everyone was expecting Google to announce a "GDrive".
Or does PG mean that the idea can seem bad because the market is already very crowded? I remember talking to William Morgan about the early days of GitHub. He knew the founders from Powerset, and he told me that at the time he thought to himself, "Really? Another hosted version control startup? That seems like a bad idea."
Yes, Dropbox was in the Google category of bad ideas: there were already lots of similar things. Success turned out to depend on execution. Dropbox was the first application of its type that worked sufficiently well. But that sort of thing is hard to predict.
Turns out my memory was only half right. DropBox had many people that loved the idea and thought it would revolutionize filesharing. It also had a large number of people who pointed out all the reasons why it wouldn't work.
I wonder if there's a lesson here in that good ideas that seem bad tend to be highly polarizing. I've recalled Paul Buchheit say here that GMail met a lot of internal resistance, with many Googlers saying it was a distraction and would never work. I also recall Larry saying that there was significant support for GMail at all levels of the company, going up to the founders, and many Googlers loved it.
> I wonder if there's a lesson here in that good ideas that seem bad tend to be highly polarizing.
Yes -- exactly -- and they tend to generate a lot of heat in group discussions. One of the indicators we watch for are people getting visibly angry during the discussion -- either angry that other people aren't "getting it" or angry that other people ARE "getting it".
> It also had a large number of people who pointed out all the reasons why it wouldn't work.
To be fair, it's not actually possible to present a new idea on this forum (or any forum with technical-minded people), without getting a flood of reasons why it won't work.
I asked a similar question of paul down below but it seems to me that big successes can come in 2 flavors:
1) Execution driven success in a winner take all market. The idea seems good, but there is lots of competition so it's hard to see how the startup will break through & win the market.
2) A genuinely "good idea that initially looks bad" like you describe in your essay.
It's hard to think back and decide which, now successful, companies are 1 vs 2 because of the memory distortion effect, but it really does seem to me like #1 is more common. What do you think?
I'd give bonus points to #2 if the idea seems so bad that you go though periods of doubt yourself, but keep on returning to the view that "it's great".
If you're absolutely certain of yourself, chances are that there are others out there who are just as certain, so you will have competition. If you're uncertain, and feeling lonely, there's a better chance that you have the field to yourself.
My experience of this is being involved in the development of the first WiFi (802.11a) system. It was only with hindsight that the significance was clear. The reality at the time was an isolated toil in the dark, not a high flying roller coaster ride.
I've been meaning to do some iOS tutoring for a while now, but unfortunately the site I was planning to use, TutorCloud, shut down recently. Is Tutorspree the best alternative? Does anyone have additional recommendations?
Shameless plug: We recently launched Tutor With Me (http://tutorwith.me) with the hypothesis that there is a need for tutors to tap into a much wider audience than locally. We built it so that the session is hosted directly on our site with video conferencing and other presentation tools. Since we just debuted we only have a tiny user base but I recommend setting up your course and availabilities and you will get pinged if you receive any requests in the future.
thestoicjester, this is one of the funniest blog posts I've ever read. This line is especially good:
"A 'co-founder of a mobile development startup in SF' was a humorous creature I’d read all about on the internet — I may as well have been replying to a hobbit."
What's the name of the company you're working at now?
