Excerpt from the article:
It all started as a simple barter: a couple hours of my time in exchange for a couple hours of Eric’s time. Eric would help me develop Tourtoise, an idea I had for a bicycle-touring app. And I would help Eric with his sensor project.
Eric Jennings and I recently celebrated our company’s first birthday. Today, we refer to Pinoccio (pinocc.io) as “a complete hardware + software ecosystem for building the Internet of Things.” Looking back though, we didn’t start this journey with such a clear vision of the product. This is the story of Pinoccio’s first year — the blind alleys, missteps, insights, and epiphanies. Let’s go back in time.
4 thoughts on “The Tale of Pinoccio”
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I’m a fellow entrepreneur and enjoyed reading about the “birth story” of your Pinoccio venture. Thanks.
But I was troubled by a couple of the things you mentioned. Like,
“turns out, giving them data that compares their usage with their neighbors works well”.
Why would a client authorize you to share their water usage data with nosy neighbors? Would you want your neighbors to be able to check on your usage of electricity, water, food etc.? Have you seen the movie “The Lives of Others”? Yikes.
You also kind of scared me with your offhand reference to climate change as getting you “so fired up”. As you are aware, anthropogenic climate change is a controversial topic. It is also a convenient excuse for monitoring the usage of others’ resources.
Just to get another point of view, perhaps you might be interested in investigating the idea of strong private property rights as an alternative plan of attack to combat environmental damage. https://mises.org/daily/5978/The-Libertarian-Manifesto-on-Pollution.
The tale was “PINOCCHIO” readed as “penoukkeo”