Parking at airports seems a terrible waste — expensive parking and your car sits doing nothing. I first started thinking about the various Car Share companies (City CarShare, ZipCar, FlexCar — effectively membership based hourly car rentals which include gas/insurance and need no human staff) and why one can’t use them from the airport. Of course, airports are full of rental car companies, which is a competitive problem, and parking space there is at a premium.

Right now the CarShare services tend to require round-trip rentals, but for airports the right idea would be one-way rentals — one member drives the car to the airport, and ideally very shortly another member drives the car out of the airport. In an ideal situation, coordinated by cell phone, the 2nd member is waiting at the curb, and you would just hand off the car once it confirms their membership for you. (Members use a code or carry a key fob.) Since you would know in advance before you entered the airport whether somebody is ready, you would know whether to go to short term parking or the curb — or a planned long-term parking lot with a bit more advance notice so you allocate the extra time for that.

Of course the 2nd member might not want to go to the location you got the car from, which creates the one-way rental problem that carshares seem to need to avoid. Perhaps better balancing algorithms could work, or at worst case, the car might have to wait until somebody from your local depot wants to go there. That’s wasteful, though. However, I think this could be made to work as long as the member base is big enough that some member is going in and out of the airport.

I started thinking about something grander though, namely being willing to rent your own private car out to bonded members of a true car sharing service. This is tougher to do but easier to make efficient. The hard part is bonding reliability on the part of all concerned.

Read on for more thinking on it…  read more »

There’s a great tragedy going on in the Sudan, and not much is being done about it. Among the people trying to get out the message are hollywood celebrities. I am not faulting them for doing that, but I have a suggestion that is right up their alley.

Which is to make a movie to tell the story, a true movie that is, hopefully a moving as a Schinder’s List or the Pianist. Put the story in front of the first world audience.

And, I suggest with a sad dose of cynicism, do it with whitebread american actors. Not that African actors can’t do a great job and make a moving film like Hotel Rwanda. I just have a feeling that first world audiences would be more affected if they saw it happening to people like them, rather than people who live in a tiny poor muslim villages in a remote desert. The skin colour is only part of what seems to have distanced this story to the point that little is being done. We may have to never again believe that people will keep the vow of never again.

So change the setting a bit and the people, but keep the story and the atrocities, and perhaps it can have the same effect that seeing a Schindler’s list can have on white euro descended Jews and non-Jews. And the Hollywood folks would be doing exactly what they are best at.

I’m pleased to see that more of my photography is getting licenced for ads and web sites these days. I like the job that this PDA ad does with my 360 degree view of Shanghai People’s Square. Of course I can’t read the text very well.

By the way, I learned the hard way how valuable the feature I proposed earlier for digital cameras — where they would notice if they’ve been set in an unusual state after a long gap between sessions — while on my trip this month to Edmonton, and one of my favourite spots on the planet — the rocky mountains in Banff and Jasper. Just before the trip I had put the camera into the “small” image size mode because I was shooting some stuff for eBay, and you really don’t need 8 megapixel shots for that. Alas, I left it there, and this is one of those mode switches which is not at all obvious. You won’t notice it unless you pay careful attention to the tiny “s” on the LCD panel, or if you download the photos. Alas, on my 4gb card I can go a long way without downloading, so a full days shots, including a lovely snow dusted Lake Louise were shot in small size, high compression.

The other way you would spot this is the camera shows you how many shots you have left. My 4gb card shows 999 when it starts even in large mode. But after shooting for a short while it eventually starts counting down. I only noticed I was in small mode when the 999 didn’t start counting down with hundreds of shots.

So this is definitely a case where the camera should notice it’s been days since I shot, and warn me I’m shooting with this unusual setting. I will still get quite serviceable web photos from that day, but not the wall sized prints I love.

It’s always reported how low US voter turnout is in midterm elections. 2006, at about 40%, seems pretty poor, though it was higher than 2002.

However the statistic I would like to see is “Voter turnout in districts where there is an important, hotly contested race.” This is the number we might want to monitor from year to year.

Virginia, it turns out, which had the Webb-Allen “Macaca” race, had the highest voter turnout in its history. You wouldn’t think that after hearing about the low turnout of a typical mid-term. Of course it will also go down as the first time a major U.S. politician was taken down due to blogs, the web and YouTube. Since it was so close, almost any factor can be given credit for Allen’s loss.

It is not surprising that when there is no contested race, that turnout is low. The U.S. for various bizarre reasons, has most incumbents always safe in their seats. This switch of 30 or so seats in the house and 6 in the senate is considered a major upheaval, nigh a revolution, by Americans. With seats so safe, there is no suprise there is little incentive in voting. U.S. ballots are very complex compared to many countries, and there are often long voting lines, and you don’t get official time off to vote.

Contrast that to Canada, where a public upset with the Conservative party’s introduction of the visible Goods and Services Tax (a 7% VAT) took the party from having a majority of parliament to having TWO seats. 2, as in 1 plus 1. There’s no such safety zone for incumbents, no cry for term limits in much of the rest of the world. There, if the public gets upset it throws the bums out, or drops them back to a minority position due to the fact that there are more than 2 parties.

I hope one of the major statistical agencies starts tracking voter turnout modulated by how motivated the voters are in particular districts. Of course voter turnout is the final metric of how motivated they were, but there are other, earlier indicators in most cases.

Ok, this is a silly idea, but it would make a great baby shower gift. Crib sheets — which is to say sheets to go on a baby’s bed — printed with small notes on your favourite subjects of choice — math, physics, history, as you would need for taking an exam. And who knows, maybe you can pretend if the baby sleeps surrounded by Maxwell’s equations she’ll become a genius.

I’m not a gamer. I wrote video games 25 years ago but stopped when game creation became more about sizzle (graphics) than steak (strategy.) But the story of the release of the Playstation 3 is a fascinating one. Sony couldn’t make enough, so to get them, people camped out in front of stores, or in some cases camped out just to get a certificate saying they could buy one when they arrived. But word got out that people would pay a lot for them on eBay. The units cost about $600, depending on what model you got, but people were bidding thousands of dollars even in advance, for those who had received certificates from stores.

It was amusing to read the coverage of the launch at Sony’s own Sonystyle store in San Francisco. There the press got bored as they asked people in line why they were lining up to get a PS3. The answer most commonly seemed to be not a love of gaming, but to flip the box for a profit.

And flip they did. There were several tens of thousands of eBay auctions for PS3s, and prices were astounding. About 20,000 auctions closed. Another 25,000 are still running at this time. Some auctions concluded for ridiculous numbers like $110,000 for 4 of them, or a more “reasonable” $20,000 for 5. Single auctions reached as high as $25,000, though in many of these cases, it’s bad news for the seller because the high bidders are people with zero eBay reputation who obviously won’t complete the transaction. In other cases serious sellers will try to claim their bid was a typo. There are some auctions with serious multiple bidders that got to 3 and 4 thousand dollars, but by mid-day today they were all running about $2,000, and they started dropping very quickly. As I watched in a few minutes they fell from $1,500 to going below a thousand. Still plenty of profit for those willing to brave the lines.

It’s interesting to consider what the best strategy for a seller is. It’s hard to predict what form a frenzy like this will take, and when the best price will come. The problem is eBay has a minimum 1 day for the auction, so you must guess the peak 1 day in advance. Since many buyers were keen to see the auction listing showing that the person had the unit in hand, ready to ship, the possible strategy of listing the item before going to get it bore some risks. Some showed scans of their pre-purchase.

The most successful sellers were probably those who picked a clever “buy it now” price which was taken during the early frenzy by people who did not realize how much the price would drop. All the highest auctions (including those with fake buyers) were buy-it-now results. Of course, it’s mostly luck in guessing what the right price was. I presume the buy-it-now/best-offer feature (new on eBay) might have done well for some sellers.

However, those who got a bogus buyer are punished heavily. They can re-list, but must wait a day to sell by auction, and will have lost a bunch of money in that day. If they can find the buyer they might be able to sue. If they are smart, they would re-list with a near-market buy-it-now to catch the market while it’s hot.

Real losers are those who placed a reserve on their auctions, or a high starting bid price. In many cases their auctions will close with no succesful bidder, and they’ll sell for less later. Using a reserve or high starting bid makes no sense when you have such a high-demand item. Those paranoid about losing money should have at most started bidding at their purchase price. I can’t think of any reason for a reserve price auction in this case — or in most other cases, for that matter. Other than with experimental rare products, they are just annoying.

Particularly sad was one auction where the seller claimed to be a struggling single mom who had kids that lucked out and got spots in line, along with pictures of the kids holding the boxes. She set a too-high starting price, and will have to re-list.

Another bad strategy was to do a long multi-day listing.

It’s possible the rarity of these items will grow, as people discover they just can’t get one for their kids for Christmas, but I doubt it.

The other big question this raises is this: Could Sony have released the machine differently? Sony obviously left millions on the table here, about 30 to 40 million I would guess. That’s tolerable for Sony, and they might have decided to give it up for the publicity that surrounds a buying craze. But I have to wonder, would they not have been better served to conduct their own auctions, perhaps a giant dutch auction, for the units, with some allocated at list price by lottery or for those willing to wait in line so that it doesn’t seem so elitist. (As if any poor person is going to buy a PS3 and keep it if they can make a fast thousand in any event.)

Some retailers took advantage of demand by requiring customers to buy several games with the box, presumably Sony approved that. With no control from Sony all the retailers would be trying to capture all this money themselves, which they could easily have done — selling on eBay directly if need be.

I predict in the future we will see a hot Christmas item sold through something like a dutch auction, since being the first to do that would generate a lot of publicity. Dutch auctions are otherwise not nearly so exciting. When Google went public through one, the enemies of dutch auctions worked to make sure people thought it was boring, causing Google to leave quite a bit of money on the table, but far less than they would have left had they used traditional underwriters.

On a side note — if you shop on eBay, I recommend the mozilla/firefox/iceweasel plugin “Shortship” which fixes one of eBay’s most annoying bugs. It lets you see the total of price plus shipping, and sort by it, at least within one ebay display page.

Differential pricing occurs when a company attempts to charge different prices to two different customers for what is essentially the same product. One place we all encounter it a lot is air travel, where it seems no two passengers paid the same price for their tickets on any given flight. You also see it in things like one of my phones, which has 4 line buttons but only 2 work — I must pay $30 for a code to enable the other 2 buttons.

The public tends to hate differential pricing, though in truth we should only hate it when it makes us pay more. Clearly some of the time we’re paying less than we might pay if differential pricing were not possible or illegal.

So even if differential pricing is neutral, one can rail if it punishes/overcharges the wrong thing. There might be a better way to get at the vendor’s goal of charging each customer the most they will tolerate — hopefully subject to competition. Competition makes differential pricing complex, as it’s only stable if all competitors use roughly the same strategy.

In air travel, the prevailing wisdom has been that business travellers will tolerate higher ticket prices than vacation travellers, and so most of the very complex pricing rules in that field are based on that philosophy. Business travellers don’t want to stay over weekends, they like to change their flights, they want to fly a combination of one-way trips and they want to book flights at short notice. (They also like to fly business class.) All these things cost a lot more in the current regime.

Because of this, almost all the travel industry has put a giant surcharge on flexibility. It makes sense that it might cost a bit more — it’s much easier to schedule your airline or hotel if people will book well in advance and keep to their booking — but it seems as though the surcharge has gotten immense, where flexible travel can cost 2 to 4 times what rigidly scheduled travel costs. Missing the last flight of the day can be wallet-breaking. Indeed, there are many arguments that since an empty seat or hotel room is largely wasted, vendors might be encouraged to provide cheaper tickets to those coming in at the last minute, rather than the most expensive. (And sometimes they do. In the old days flying standby was the cheapest way to fly, suitable only for students or the poor. There are vendors that sell cheap last minute trips.)

Vendors have shied away from selling cheap last-minute travel because they don’t want customers to find it reliable enough to depend on. But otherwise it makes a lot of sense.

So my “Solve this” problem is to come up with schemes that still charge people as much as they will tolerate, but don’t punish travel flexiblity as much.

One idea is to come up with negative features for cheap tickets that flexible, non-business travellers will tolerate but serious business travellers and wealthy travellers will not. For example, tickets might come with a significant (perhaps 10-20%) chance of being bumped, ideally with sufficient advance notice by cell phone that you don’t waste time going to the airport. For example, the airline might sell a cheap ticket but effectively treat the seat as available for sale again to a higher-paying passenger if they should come along. You might learn the morning of your trip that somebody else bought your seat, and that you’ll be going on a different flight or even the next day. They would put a cap on how much they could delay you, and that cap might change the price of your ticket.

For a person with a flexible work schedule (like a consultant) or the retired, they might well not care much about exactly what day they get back home. They might like the option to visit a place until they feel like returning, with the ability to get a ticket then, but the risk that it might not be possible for a day or two more. Few business travellers would buy such a ticket.

Such tickets would be of most value to those with flexible accomodations, who are staying with friends and family, for example, or in flexible hotels. Rental cars tend to be fairly flexible.

Of course, if you’re willing to be bumped right at the airport, that should given you an even cheaper ticket, but that’s quite a burden. And with today’s ubiquitous cell phones and computer systems there’s little reason not to inform people well in advance.

This technique could even provide cheaper first-class. You might buy a ticket at a lower price, a bit above coach, that gets you a first class seat half the time but half the time puts you in coach because somebody willing to pay the real price of first class bought a ticket. (To some extent, the upgrade system, where upgrades are released at boarding time based on how many showed up for first class, does something like this.)

Any other ideas how airlines could provide cheaper flexible tickets without eating into their business flyer market? If only one airline tries a new idea, you get an interesting pattern where everybody who likes the new fare rules switches over to that airline in the competitive market, and the idea is forced to spread.

Added note: In order to maintain most of their differential pricing schemes today, airlines need and want the photo-ID requirement for flying. If tickets (including tickets to half a return trip) could be easily resold on the web to anybody, they could not use the systems they currently use. However, the system I suggest, which requires the passenger be willing to be bumped, inhibits resale without requiring any type of ID. A business traveller might well buy a cheap ticket at the last minute from somebody who bought earlier, but they are going to be less willing to buy a ticket with unacceptable delay risks associated with it.

I’ve written before about one of the greatest flaws in the modern political system is the immense need of candidates to raise money (largely for TV ads) which makes them beholden to contributors, combined with the enhanced ability incumbents have at raising that money. Talk to any member of congress and they will tell you they start work raising money the day after the election.

Last year I proposed one radical idea, a special legitimizing of political spam done through the elections office. That will take some time as it requires a governmental change. So other factors are coming forward.

In some states and nations, efforts are already underway to have the government finance elections. The Presidential campaign fund that you contribute to whether you check the box on the tax return or not is one effort in this direction.

I propose that the operators of the big, advertising-supported web sites, in particular sites like Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Myspace and the like join together to create a program to give free web advertising to registered candidates on a fair basis. This could be done by simply providing unsold inventory, which is close to free, or it could be real valuable inventory including credits for targetted ads.

Of course, not everybody reads the web all day, so this only reaches one segment of the population, but it reaches a lot. The main goal is to reduce the need, in the minds of candidates, to raise a lot of money for TV ads. They won’t stop entirey, but it might get scaled back.

Such a system would allow users the option of setting a cookie to provide preferences for the political ads they see. While each candidate would get one free shot, voters could opt-out of ads for specific candidates or races. (In some cases the geography-matcher would get it wrong and they would change the district the system think they are in.) They could also tone down the amount of advertising, or opt in or out of certain styles (flash, animated, text, video.)

It would be up to candidates to tune their message, and not overdo things or annoy voters, pushing them to opt out.

There can’t be too much opting out though, because the goal here is to deliver the same thing that candidates rely on TV for — pushing their message at voters who have not gone seeking it. If we don’t provide that, we’ll never cut the dependency on TV and other intrusive ads. Allowing these ads to be intrusive seems wrong, but the real thing to do is consider the competition, and what its thirst for money does to society. Thanks to the internet, we’ve reduced the price of advertising by an order of magnitude. If the price of advertising is what corrupts the political system, it seems we should have a shot of fixing the problem.

Ads would be served by the special consortium managing the opt-out system, not the candidate, in order to protect privacy. So if you click on an ad for a candidate, the first landing page is not hosted by the candidate, but may have links to their site.

A system would have to be devised to allocate “importance” to elections. Ie. how many ads do the candidates for President get vs. those for state comptroller.

One risk is that the IRS or other forces might try to declare this program a political contribution by the web sites. If applied fairly to all candidates, we’ll need a ruling that states it is not a contribution. This is needed, because otherwise sites will balk at the idea of running free ads for candidates they dispise.

If the system got powerful enough, it could even make a bolder claim. It could only allow the free advertising to candidates who agree to spending limits in other media. On one hand this is just what most campaign finance reform programs do to avoid the 1st amendment. On the other hand, it may seem like an antitrust violation — deliberately giving stuff away not just to kill the “competition” but actually forbidding the candidates from spending too much with the competition.

This need not be limited to the web of course. Other media could join in, though the ones that already make a ton of money from political advertising (TV, radio) are not so likely to join.

This won’t solve the whole problem, but it could make a dent, and even a dent is pretty important in a problem as major as this.

I go to many conferences, and most of them seem to want to give me a nice canvas bag, and often a shirt as well. Truth is though, I now have a stack of about 20 bags in my closet. I’ve used some of the bags, typically the backpacks, but when I have so many other bags I don’t feel a strong motivation to walk around with a briefcase or laptop bag with a giant sponsor’s logo on it, or worse, a collection of 10 logos. No matter how nice the bag is. In addition, even if I got logo-free bags I have no need for 20 of them, but I can’t really give away logo covered bags as gifts.

Which means the sponsor wasted their money. And I think this is common, for while I sometimes see people carrying a sponsor bag outside the confines of a conference, it’s pretty rare compared to the number given out. You want me to be your billboard, I want more than a bag for it.

Might some sponsors take the plunge and make a bag with the sponsor’s logo inside the bag? Or perhaps if on the outside, in a more subtle way. This seems stupid at first, but a bag I actually use, which at least reminds me of the company when I use it, is better than a bag that stays stacked in a closet. (Of course, logo-inside bags would be given away more, which may not accomplish much.) Perhaps the sponsors should go in for designer bags, and turn their logos into desirable designer logos?

If your name is Versace, you can get people to pay to carry your advertising, but sorry, not if your name is AT&T. I hope you can get over it. And while a bag is useful for carrying stuff home from the conferences and even storing literature, truth is you can use a $1 bag for that, not a $15 one. We really have to hunt to find better conference giveaways than bags, at least at conferences whose attendees all attend other fancy conferences.

It does get hard to be a privacy advocate when it’s easy to think of interesting apps that make use of tracking infrastructure. Here’s one.

How often have you wanted to talk to somebody in a car next to you on the road? Consider a system where people could register their licence plate(s) with their cell phone account. Then, if they had done this, you could call a special number on your own cell phone, and enter the numeric part of their licence plate.

If both you, and the other car were close by (for example in the same cell, but often the cell companies have much closer tracking information) and both of you were moving, it could then complete the call to the other car. The other car might get to screen the call (ie. you would have to enter the reason for the call and they would hear, “Will you accept a call from about .”)

Sounds like a good product for the cell companies, able to generate minutes. Easy enough to do if both people use the same cell company, lots more work between two different companies where a protocol would be needed. Would be easier to do with texting but you don’t want people texting in cars.

Could have used it last night, was tailing a friend on the road to her house, did not have her cell number but could see her plate.

As I’ve described the system it’s opt-in, nobody calls you unless you sign up for it and register a plate. However it could be made fairly safe to opt-in with a number of protections. As noted, the system could demand the cars are moving (cell network can see that) so that it can’t be used to reach your cell phone while you are not driving. You could have screening.

It should also have a reputation system. For example, if you call me, then after we disconnect I can leave a negative reputation comment on you. Get a few of these and you’re out of the system. This assures people don’t use it simply to express road rage at the next driver or other things that are largely annoying. On the other hand you can use it to tell people their blinker is blinking or their trunk is open. (Mind you, once you are aware of a problem you would want a function to tell callers you are aware of a driving problem and to press 2 if they are calling about something else.)

And sure, for those open to it, it would be used for flirting with the cutie who gave you the eye when you were both stopped at the light.

You can of course just stick your cell number on your bumper to do this, but it would not have the opt-out and reptuation systems. With today’s cheap phone numbers, however, you could get a special number that forwards to your cell and performs the screening/reputation/etc. but is not able to use the location awareness.

If the digits are not unambiguous (or, like me, you have a custom plate that’s all letters) the system would need to offer you the cars close to you that match.

This weekend I experienced an air travel policy that I had not seen before and which I found quite shocking. I was flying on United Express (Skywest)’s flight from San Francisco to Calgary. As we waited for the early morning flight, they announced this “weather warn.” Visibility was poor in Calgary due to low clouds. Below 0.5 miles they plane would not be allowed to land there. They rated about a 1/3rd chance of this happening, 2/3 chance we would land normally.

The catch was this, if, when they got to Calgary, they found they could not land, they would divert to Great Falls, MT. After dropping the passengers in Great Falls, we would be entirely on our own, with no assistance at all with getting to Calgary via ground or air. (United Express and a few other airlines do sell tickets from Great Falls to Calgary, though all via fairly distant hubs like Denver, Salt Lake etc.) The important point about this is that the diversion is to an airport in a different country from the intended destination. This makes ground transportation particularly difficult, as car rental companies are disinclined to offer economical one-way rentals between countries — not to mention the 6 hour drive. (Hertz will do it for about $320/day.)

I just checked and Greyhound will get you there in 1 day, 14 hours via Seattle and Vancouver. Amtrak doesn’t even go there.

Now the other passengers who had seen this before said that it usually works out, so we got on with a sense of adventure. But it would have been a big adventure had we been diverted, and just seemed to be a rather strange state for the airline to leave passengers. Yes, they did say that if we elected not to get on the flight, we could try a later one (with no assurance there would not be the same weather warning on that flight.) Most of the passengers got on, and we did land OK, but a few backed out.

Some international bureaucracy, they said, forbids them from landing at another Canadian airport, such as obvious choices like Edmonton, or even various smaller airports since this was a Canadair regional jet able to land at small airports. But just about anything would have been superior to Great Falls in the USA — some city with a means of getting to the destination. Indeed, the plane after landing in either GF or Calgary would have headed on to Chicago, which while far away, is at least a city one could find a flight to Calgary from, and from which United could certainly have arranged travel for the passengers.

I’m taking a wild guess that this bureaucracy is 9/11 related, but I could be wrong. But if it is, it’s another secret burden of that day.

(The likely result — passengers would probably have formed up in groups of 5 to rent Hertz cars and drive to Calgary. The cost — $320 plus $50 of gas — would have been tolerable shared among 5 people who would know one another much better by the end of the day. Of course we didn’t know this when making the decision.) There are also some slight cheaper but inconvenient tricks involving an in-Montana rental which drives to an Alberta town near the border, where one of the passengers rents a car there, and both cars drive to a Montana drop-off and then the Alberta car continues to Calgary. You would need a sense of adventure to do that.

I'm in Edmonton. Turns out to be the farthest north I've been on land (53 degrees 37 minutes at the peak) after another turn through the Icefields Parkway, surely one of the most scenic drives on the planet. My 4th time along it, though this time it was a whiteout. Speaking tomorrow at the CIPS ICE conference on privacy, nanotechnology and the future at 10:15.

Idea of the day. I joined Fairmont Hotels President's Club while at the Chateau Lake Louise because it gave me free internet. When I got to the Fairmont Jasper Lodge my laptop just worked with no login, and I was really impressed -- I figured they had recorded my MAC address as belonging to a member of their club, and were going to let me use it with no login. Alas, no, the Jasper lodge internet (only in main lobby) was free for all. But wouldn't that be great if all hotels did that? Do any of the paid wireless roaming networks do this? (I guess they might be afraid of MAC cloning.) It would also allow, with a simple interface, a way for devices like Wifi SIP phones to use networks that otherwise require a login.

Of course, as we all know, the more expensive the hotel, the more likely the internet is not only not included, it's way overpriced. At least Fairmont gave one way around this. Of course I gave them a unique E-mail address created just for them, so if they spam me I can quickly disable them. But once again I, like most of us, find myself giving up privacy for a few hotel perks.

When I’m having a problem with a company, I try sometimes to remind them of a principle of customer service I worked out when I was running ClariNet. Namely that when a company screws up, it should more than fix the problem, even to the point of losing money (for a while) on that customer. The reason, in brief, is that this does more than make the customer happy with the transaction. It signals in the strongest possible way that the screw-up is a rare event, which makes the customer come back for more.

I have outlined it in this page on Brad’s principle of customer service.