Views of a Modern World

Everything else Rick writes

Credit card purchases of tickets on LIRR trains

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Radio this morning said that some LIRR passengers will get a chance to buy a ticket on the train with a credit card rather than cash as is currently the option.

Two interesting tidbits: first, the “penalty” fare still applies, which is some bump to the price of a ticket at the machine if you get on and there were machines wherever you were. (For NJ Transit, I think that’s $5 extra.) The second thing is that the LIRR bought 37 card readers for $1200 each! I can’t believe they got suckered into that deal, plus paying a discount rate on the charges. They should have been able to negotiate the hardware costs to zero. Because you can bet there’s a maintenance fee, some recurring service charges, repair and warranty issues, and a whole lot of other mess that might have been resolved by some wifi iPod Touches and a Square device at, you know, a much lower cost. And when the processing companies take their 2-3%, giving the hardware away to subsidize that recurring revenue stream isn’t a flat-out silly idea.

I guess no one wants SMS ticket purchases when there’s a hardware contract to be had!

Great SMS idea for public transportation

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Here’s a great SMS (text message to the rest of us) idea that uses your phone to buy one-off tickets.

This would be a huge timesaver for people in heavy public transportation areas, like New York City, reducing time, expense, and just about everything for commuters and the various transit authorities and private companies.

Evidence-based diet – in a box

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This fancy meal in a box gives me an interesting idea about how to launch the idea in a simpler version. Rather than go whole-hog to the full meal preparation and individualized diet => menu route, you could streamline the development and start with a launch of semi-specialized menus, such as heart-healthy, cancer risk, or longevity.

It would still be evidence-based but not personalized. It shouldn’t be too complicated to create some sort of scoring mechanism or other way to allow customers to keep track of the total nutrients they’ve ingested and even recommend next best choices for achieving the health goals of the customer.

I’ve got another post to come on this; the attention makes me wonder if I’m more interested in this idea than I thought.

Follow-up: evidence based diets

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This visualization (far less interactive than the word “interactive” implies, IMHO) attempts to display the quality of evidence connecting various nutritional supplements to the ailments they’re supposed to affect.

The list is pretty random, and there’s probably a need to investigate or at least share how the evidentiary grades are assigned.

But, I can see there being some value to this type of easily understood distillation of typically complex research papers. (Certainly the autism community could use this if only to collect the research in one place.) I see this as a neat add-on to the orphan idea proposal for evidence-based diets, one that ties to other diet-related projects.

Combining either the diet idea or this supplement one (and supplements makes more sense as an initial project because of the money actually involved) with some cost measures would facilitate integration with the benefits to be perhaps presented with a mindset like that in this predictive health intervention tool  (again, fairly simple in this iteration but certainly susceptible of increased complexity).

Why sharing orphan ideas works

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This BoingBoing post by Cory Doctorow briefly introduces a site/tool created as a result of a tweet he sent just a few months ago.

Mekki and a friend ran with an idea I tweeted last October: “Who’s got a web-based service that will take a huge pastebomb (300K of text) and smarten all quotes, turn — into em-dash, etc?” They created something called Cleantext. I just pasted in the entire text of my next short story collection (written as plain ASCII in a text editor) and out came something that was beautifully formatted and ready to be pasted into a layout program for further massaging. I’m delighted by this — how useful!

I’m really excited by this: it shows that there are people who can execute on an idea and create something. I’m also very encouraged that Cory doesn’t seem interested in getting his “piece of the action.” Of course, given his writing and his recent approach to publishing his books as free ebooks, that’s about what you’d expect.

Congratulations to Cleantext and a hearty well-done to Cory for providing inspiration without no strings attached. Even better, he just gave this site scads of good great word of mouth.

Maybe I’ll finally break out my comp (fka Senior Comprehensive Project) or my not-quite-finished note from law school and give this a try.

I started the orphan ideas category of posts because I wanted to accomplish three goals: first, get these ideas out of my mental baggage list, second, maybe give someone else a little spark, and third, maybe, just maybe, see something get built or done.

Create personalized stock portfolios for savings or profit

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One of my favorite sources for inspiration is Springwise. The latest issue spat out a few interesting ideas.  Mybrandz (perhaps seeking to be the “Bratz” of the investment world) is a stock portfolio (not an actual mutual fund that you can invest in but rather a faux fund) of “brands people love.”

Basically, these folks made a list of “cool” brands and decided to report the performance of this “stock portfolio.” Now, in fact, they’ve morphed this into a contest where brand fans can post content, get “hearts” awarded by the other users, and win a share of stock in that company. So, the underlying idea is really about marketing and getting people to engage.

But to me the more interesting idea is one that creates stock portfolios like this, personal tracking funds, for various reasons.

One is definitely vanity/marketing. The idea that mybrandz, which seems to be some sort of branding consultancy (there’s probably a Madison Ave. term for it, but here on the outside I’d call it that), creates a portfolio that is designed to draw attention to their underlying business. How about someone like Flextronics creating a portfolio of their customers, or at least of large electronics companies that rely heavily on outsourced manufacturing?

Another goal might be to double-down or indulge in your personal spending. AmericanExpress could probably create such a portfolio automatically from my statements of the companies where I invest spend the most money each month, or that have the highest number of transactions. What do I get from that? Well, if “my” companies are doing well, maybe I interpret that to mean that I’m good at identifying quality or value.

I could take that same information that “my” companies are doing well and I interpret that to mean that I’m feeding these expectations of growing corporate profits that are feeding the stock price increases and –whew–therefore should shop somewhere else. Indeed, instead of doing namby-pamby personal balance sheets for their clients, perhaps Ameriprise could just suck in account information from the other side of the house to identify quantifiable improvements in spending. Admittedly it’s a bit abstract, but that’s where we started.

Sales professionals always talk about customer results as a means of convincing new customers, with everything from 17% reductions in postage to airport terminal ads that say “Nike runs SAP.” Those are different methods of saying the same thing: we helped these folks — we can help you. Maybe if your sales target is the CEO/CFO of a publicly traded company, you should simply post the “McKinsey Portfolio Index” and let the chips fall where they may. The CEOs who won’t be impressed by this won’t even notice it, and the ones who will be impressed will, well, be impressed. The concept works best when you do all the work for a particular company so that you can claim the credit.

Do companies who use only FedEx do better than those that use only UPS? Well, the samples aren’t likely to be equivalent, but if you’re on the winning side of that argument, wouldn’t you post the data? Let the other side complain that their customers are in low-margin businesses and so the comparison isn’t really fair, blah blah blah. Hint: no customer wants to sign up to be part of the “low-margin business” crowd.

What other benefits or use cases do you see to creating your own stock portfolio like this? What would make you do it for yourself? Or for your company or business?

Snacks compete by selling less

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One day at the grocery store, I was thinking about competition and marketing while walking down the cookie aisle. I saw the 100-calorie snack packs (a section that is now surprisingly large for a segment that didn’t exist that long ago). I told my wife that someday we’d see a 99-calorie snack pack. In fact, not too long ago, we spotted something like this product.

This very funny tweet triggered my memory and got me to put this post together:

Idea of the day: 100-calorie workout packs to work off those 100-calorie snack packs.

Code-word plugin could increase webapp usage

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I just got this cross-selling email from Basecamp today. I was thinking about it in the context of providing great outsourced workflow management in a package that is easyto use because it’s controlled and relatively narrow: you can customize it a bit but you can’t really build it out or add features and you certainly can’t deploy it on your own server.

This model, of course, works for most people. However, there are organizations where privacy and security are more important for any number of reasons, from client promises to competitive pressure to regulatory requirements. These groups can not easily use webapps like this because the security and data privacy issues are fuzzy at best, in the absence of particularized licensing agreements, which is pretty much antithetical to the concept of webapps! (Perhaps this post will uncover some completely specialized services that are built to solve these problems, like garbage companies that agree to keep your garbage private, in part so that you have an expectation of privacy and the police can’t legally go through it without a warrant.)

One way to resolve the dilemma, in a way that would work for someone using a single computer to access the webapp, would be a plugin, perhaps using something like Gears to maintain some level of persistence, that encodes certain of your data that you enter into the webapp as a layer in-between your keyboard/browser and the http packets going back and forth.

Aside: I do specifically mean encoding here, substituting a whole word or sign (like “ketchup”) for the plaintext (like “Rick Colosimo”). This practice would allow you to not worry about the security at the webapp, or even of the traffic after it leaves your browser (both things hard to control) in favor of having to secure your laptop (maybe not easy to do but certainly easier to control).

Example: I type in, on my Basecamp page, something like “Buy 1000 shares Illumina for Rick Colosimo.” The plugin turns that into “buy rabbit shares of denver for fox.” That is what gets sent to the webapp and what it stores. Anyone else accessing the data, either through the servers directly or via the web, gets my encoded message. Using the plugin, though, I get back my correct message and should never, in fact, even see the coded version. Just like on-the-fly translation, I never see the other words. But this doesn’t require AI or huge amounts of processing power because the code structure (vs encryption) is a relatively static set of substitutions.

So now I can keep, for example, student records from my son’s school on a webapp, easily accessible by parents, while not worrying about whether I’m violating FERPA or HIPAA (or even whether I have to comply!).

Sure, this solution in the way I’ve described it doesn’t replace a fully secure, private, webapp. But it does so better than the non-secure, non-private webapp does today! Could it be extended, or tweaked to allow for online access to code cheatsheets? Sure. It might be very easy to include the code words within a series of obfuscated plaintext or html files, or even inside a photo on a website using steganography to protect it.

Please share your tips for increasing webapp privacy & security in the comments.

trendwatching.com: FOREVERISM

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trendwatching.com’s June 2009 Trend Briefing covering FOREVERISM.

I like the trendwatching briefings: they’re actually insightful rather than wishful thinking; they seek to recognize trends rather than create them. (I’ve always wondered about that particular issue in the fashion world — do designers discover hot colors or try to make a color hot?)

In this discussion of foreverism, which is a little broad, there is a subsection on Forever Beta. Maybe that’s the world’s new take on planned obsolescence. After all, if the software is regularly upgradeable on my phone, maybe you don’t have to make the phone break after all. This approach could clearly be more consistent with improving free cash flow, since software typically has a higher gross margin and, for a company in the marketplace today, they already have to expend the capital to create competitive software in the first place. Sales to people with older phones really exist on the margin, and they can therefore deliver even higher profitability. (Of course, this is one example; tell me how it would work for your field in the comments.)

Another way I think of this is in terms of companies using their brands to create value for customers rather than to take or destroy value for customers. I’ve long said that there are two types of companies: those that make money by giving more to customers and those that make money by giving less to customers. (Put your matched pairs in the comments!)

If you stop breaking your products but let customers use what they have, you’re at least not destroying value (Dell, you failed me when you changed the power connector on the same model number laptop AFTER I bought your extra charger!, and Fujitsu, when you changed the main battery design on your T4xxx series convertible tablets). Companies that use nonstandard power connectors, chargers, interface cables, and so on are showing us exactly what they think (revealed preferences: Economics-speak for “actions speak louder than words) about customer: suck them in with low price main object and charge more than value for accessories.

What companies don’t seem to grasp is that it’s this strategy that creates markets for competitive/knockoff/third-party accessories such as chargers, cellphone batteries, headsets, and so on. Who wants to pay $100 for a single-purpose Fujitsu laptop power cord when I can buy an iGo and extend it across all my devices? Heck, Fujitsu — if you made the universal charger, I would probably invest in your brand since I’m already springing $3-4k for the tablet!

In the olden days, i.e., when I was still in high school, information costs were far too high to undertake the sort of product searching that is now virtually automatic with, e.g., Amazon’s “people also bought…” section on product pages. Companies don’t seem to grasp that consumer behavior is changing rapidly because of the huge drop in costs.

The response from companies is that “our customers are searching on price, not value, and so we have to keep the price of X low like our competitors and make up the difference somewhere else.” Not only am I unsure of whether this is really true (as opposed to, for example, a rational response to high information costs of comparing products), but my sense is that it’s an effect, not a cause, of the fuzzy price-gouging that I’ve described. If customers aren’t seeing the value of your product, I have two questions: 1, do you know what the value of your product is TO YOUR CUSTOMERS, not to you, and 2, are you really communicating the value to them or hiding the ball with easy to sound important lists of specifications that don’t mean anything (like iLink (r) or FireWire (r) as branded names for a standard 1394 port)?

Apple has spawned a big ecosystem of people selling accessories for the iPod. But none of those people are really competing with Apple. I’d have to look for some numbers to justify my conclusion here, but I don’t think that Apple’s pricing policy is built around being able to sell Apple-branded chargers for iPods vs charging a healthy price for an iPod and looking elsewhere for something to sell that adds more value. Say what you will about iTunes, but it provides a lot of value to me, and the Amazon MP3 store doesn’t really match up quite as well, even at a (now-floating and fuzzy) 20% discount to a $0.99 song. In this respect, at least, I think the iPod and its relationship with accessories is a good example of how companies can compete where they want to compete and leave the extraneous stuff to others, deliberately.

Logo contest on crowdSPRING

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We’re running a logo contest on crowdSPRING for a social network-based site serving the ASD (autistic spectrum disorder) community.

Besides wanting to see a greater variety of designs from different people rather than a number of variations on a theme from one person, I wanted to see how the original “thoughtstorm.com” might have functioned. My friends know that the genesis of “thoughtstorm” for me was a play on “brainstorm” as part of my C2B business idea.

So, please feel free to spread notice of the contest to folks who should design an entry. Also, you can vote on the entries yourselves at the project page.

If there are designers who want to improve the project pro bono but don’t like crowdSPRING or others on principle, send me a design (I obviously won’t use unless we agree to a deal), post a link here as a comment (and then everyone else may get to coment), or enter and you can agree to donate the money to REED Academy, Alpine Learning Group‘s Outreach Program, or Autism Speaks. If you agree to that and do it, I’ll match the donation myself.