I was seduced by Google’s bribe of $20 per $50 or greater order to try their new Checkout service, and did some Christmas shopping on buy.com. Normally buy.com, being based in Southern California, takes only 1 or 2 days by UPS ground to get things to me. So ordering last weekend should have been low risk for items that are “in stock and ship in 1-2 days.” Yes, they cover their asses by putting a longer upper bound on the shipping time, but generally that’s the ship time for people on the other coast.

I got a mail via Google (part of their privacy protection) that the items had been shipped on Tuesday, so all was well. Unfortunately, I didn’t go and immediately check on the tracking info. The new interface with Google Checkout makes that harder to do — normally you can just go to the account page on most online stores and follow links directly to checking. Here the interface requires you to cut and paste order numbers and it’s buggy, reporting incorrect shipper names.

Unfortuantely it’s becoming common for online stores to keep things in different warehouses around the country now. Some items I ordered, it turns out, while shipped quickly, were shipped from far away. They’ll arrive after Christmas. So now I have to go out and buy the items at stores, or different items in some cases, at higher prices, without the seductive $20 discount — and I then need to arrange return of items ordered after they get here. And I’ll probably be out not only the money I paid for shipping (had I wanted them after christmas I would have selected the free saver shipping option of course) but presumably return shipping.

A very unsatisfactory shopping experience.

How could this have been improved (other than by getting the items to me?)

1. When they e-mail you about shipment, throw in a tracking link and also include the shipper’s expected delivery day. UPS and Fedex both give that, and even with the USPS you can provide decent estimates.
2. Let me specify in the order, “I need this by Dec 23.” They might be able to say right then and there that “This item is in stock far away. You need to specify air shipping to do that.”
3. Failing that, they could, when they finally get ready to ship it, look at what the arrival date will be, and, if you’ve set a drop-dead date, cancel the shipment if it won’t get to you on time. Yes, they lose a sale but they avoid a very disappointed customer.

This does not just apply around Christmas. I often go on trips, and know I won’t be home on certain days. I may want to delay delivery of items around such days.

As I blogged earlier, it also would simplify things a lot if you could use the tracking interface of UPS, Fedex and the rest to reject or divert shipments in transit. If I could say “Return to sender” via the web on a shipment I know is a waste of time, the vendor wins, I win, and even the shipping company can probably set a price for this where they win too. The recipient saves a lot of hassle, and the vendor can also be assured the item has not been opened and quickly restock it as new merchandise. If you do a manual return they have to inspect, and even worry about people who re-shrinkwrap returns to cheat them.

Another issue that will no doubt come up — the Google discount was $20 off orders of $50 or more. If I return only some of the items, will they want to charge me the $20? In that case, you might find yourself in a situation where returning an item below $20 would cost you money! In this case I need to return the entire order except one $5 item I tossed on the order, so it won’t be an issue.

Jolly December to all. (Jolly December is my proposal for the Pastafarian year-end holiday greeting, a good salvo in the war on Christmas. If they’re going to invent a war on Christmas, might as well have one.)

Last week, I wrote about new ideas for finding the lost. One I’ve done some follow-up on is the cell phone approach. While it’s not hard to design a good emergency rescue radio if you are going to explicitly carry a rescue device when you get lost, the key to cell phones is that people are already carrying them without thinking about it — even when going places with no cell reception since they want the phone with them when they return to reception.

Earlier I proposed a picocell to be mounted in a light plane (or even drone) that would fly over the search area and try to ping the phone and determine where it is. That would work with today’s phones. It might have found the 3 climbers, now presumed dead, on Mt. Hood because one of them definitely had a cell phone. It would also have found James Kim because they had a car battery, on which a cell phone can run for a long time.

My expanded proposal is for a deliberate emergency rescue mode on cell phones. It’s mostly software (and thus not expensive to add) but people would even pay for it. You could explicitly put your phone into emergency rescue mode, or have it automatically enter it if it’s out of range for a long time. (For privacy reasons you would want to be able to disable any automatic entry into such a mode, or at least be warned about it.)

What you do in this mode depends on how accurate a clock you have. Many modern phones have a very accurate clock, either from the last time they saw the cell network, or from GPS receivers inside the phone. If you have an accurate clock, then you can arrange to wake up and listen for signals from rescue planes at very precise times, and the planes will know those times exactly as well. So you can be off most of the time and thus do this with very low power consumption. It need not be a plane — it’s not out of the question to have a system with a highly directional antenna in some point that can scan the area.

If you don’t know the exact time, you can still listen at intervals while you have power. As your battery dies, the intervals between wakeups have to get longer. Once they get down to long periods like hours, the rescue crews can’t tell exactly when you will transmit and just have to run all the time.

If you know the exact time a phone will be on, you can even pull tricks like have other transmitters cut out briefly at that time (most protocols can tolerate sub-second outages) to make the radio spectrum quieter.

At first, you can actually listen quite often. The owner of the phone, if conscious might even make the grim evaluation of how long they can hold out and tell the phone to budget power for that many days.

When the phone hears the emergency ping (which quite possibly will be at above-normal power) it can also respond at above normal power, if it feels it has the power budget for it. It can also beep to the owner to get input on that question. (Making the searcher’s ping more powerful can actually be counterproductive as it could make the phone respond when it can’t possibly be received. The ping could indicate what its transmit power was, allowing the phone to judge whether its signal could possibly make it back to a good receiver.)

Of course if the phone has a GPS, once it does sync up with the picocell, it could provide its exact location. Otherewise it could do a series of blips to allow direction finding or fly-over signal strength location of the phone.

In most cases, if we know who the missing person is we’ll know their cell phone number, and thus their phone carrier and in most cases the model of phone they have. So searchers would know exactly what to look for, and whether the phone supports any emergency protocol or just has to be searched for with standard tech.

I’ve brought some of these ideas up with friends at Qualcomm. We’ll see if something can come of it.

Update: Lucent does have a picocell that was deployed in some rescue operations in New Orleans. Here’s a message discussing it