Apps for the riches

A list of the best apps and services you probably can’t afford to use...

 Happy window shopping!

BlackJet
It doesn't get much more 1 percent than an on-demand private jet service. And, well, that’s what BlackJet is. Ostensibly, the company hopes to bring the cost of private air travel down by making it more efficient. That might be true, but with a $2,500 membership fee and one-way flights that run thousands of dollars a piece, BlackJet is still priced out of range for most of us used to flying coach. But if you’re used to flying private jets, it’s supposed to be, like, a really good deal.

Inspirato
Even before American Express took a stake in luxury destination travel site Inspirato, it was positioned to be out of reach for the hoi polloi. Even just the name — Inspirato — sounds like it was translated from some foreign language to mean “you can’t afford this.” Anyway, this is a company that specializes in offers on exclusive vacation homes and resorts. But what do you care? You’re never going to use it.

Onefinestay
Onefinestay is a site for people who are so rich that they’re like, “Damn it, I don’t want to stay in a hotel. I want to stay in another rich person’s house.” It’s like some bizarro Airbnb, where you actually pay more to sleep in someone else’s bed and raid their fridge. That said, you know the sheets are clean — they bring in their own linens — and you get a free iPhone during your stay. How baller is that?

Boatbound
You know what’s more personal than a car? A boat. Seriously, if I ever had a boat (and here’s betting that’ll never happen, because boats are expensive), the last thing I’d do is let some stranger off the Internet borrow the damn thing. And yet, there are people in the world who would do just that. I don’t understand how they can live with themselves.

Sotheby’s Catalogue
Yes, an app for perusing all the fine art stuffs that you can buy at auction  !

Tiffany & Co. Engagement Ring Finder
Damn you, Tiffany & Co.!  Need nothing else to say...

VIP Black
At first glance, iVIP’s VIP Black just looks like the next version of the “I Am Rich” app. You pay $1,000 and then what? Discounts, I guess. Only for those who have $1,000 just lying around to find out.

Operator
Would any list like this be complete without Dave Morin’s “custom-designed, one-of-a-kind bespoke app” to communicate and collaborate with his assistant?

                                             

So, all you need now is a solid gold or diamond encrusted iPhone/iPad to install them on !

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, The True Heros of Tech Industry

In 1998, 2 Stanford graduate students launched a company in a garage in Palo Alto, California. They made a search engine far superior than the previous search engines like Yahoo, Excite or AltaVista that completely changed the world forever "Google". Today Google has become a part of our daily life, have a problem "Google" it and without Google imagining life is impossible. These 2 Stanford students are Lawrence "Larry" Page and Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin  (I am not going into their personal details that is on Web, "Google it") . They met each other in 1995 at Stanford, Both were Ph.d students of  Terry Winograd a pioneer in Human Computer Interaction. Somewhere around 1995-1996 Larry had a dream to download all the websites and do something with it. He woke up, took a paper and started writing about it. Soon his research with Brin led to create PageRank, a method that is used to rank web page according to the citations made to that web page by other web pages. The first version of Google was hosted on the Stanford network as Google.stanford.edu. Soon the website got traction and there was a point when just 1 computer was using the half of the bandwidth of the Stanford network and was brought to its knees regardless of it sophistication because of this Stanford had to ask Larry and Brin to take their system off campus. They took a garage in Palo Alto near Stanford and started their own company but the company needed investment. Andy Bechtolsheim was the first person who wrote a check of 100,000$ right at the spot to Google inc. before Google was even registered as a company. Larry had to keep the check in his pocket until they registered the company.

Company was growing gradually but there was a problem, the website was not generating any money but it required lots of money to keep it running. They both were reluctant in using the traditional flashy ad business but they had no other choice but again their geniuses worked and in 2001 Google AdWord was introduced which is basically a text based ad business which shows you ads related to the searches you make. Soon the company started to earn tons of money. The investors wanted a professional CEO to run the company so in 2001 Eric Schmidt was hired. After that the company grew like a fission reaction and kept on introducing new products like Gmail, Google Books etc etc. In 2004, the company went public and made Larry and Sergey billionaires overnight.

Larry and Sergey both had a vision to organize world's information and make it accessible easily. These guys have done something for the world that has become a vital part of our daily life but these guys are not that much well known outside the tech world. Probably if you go and ask a high schooler about the inventors of Google, he won't be able to answer about it but on the other hand if you ask the same guy about Steve Jobs he might be able to give you details about him. Well this is quite an issue for me at least because on 1 side there are 2 genius guys who made something from scratch that has completely revolutionized the world and which is free to use of course and on the other side there is a guy whose company make fancy stupid meaningless expensive gadgets which almost 1 in 50 people can afford. This could be possibly because of the fact that people spend so much money for buying a phone or a fancy "i" gadget and Google is free and the one that distributes the free stuff never gets that much fame.