Free now, Ads Later vs 69p model

If I were lucky enough to create a website, mobile app or similar that had a large user base and successful, I believe I’d employ the following model:

Free for all users for a year

After a year the application would give the user 3 choices:

1. Continue to use as free, but with advertising
2. Continue to use as free, but open to sell their data to third-parties
3. Charge an annual fee of 69p

I am very interested to see what people would choose. Personally I’d go for the micro-payment option (option 3), what would you go for?

Help!…Book

and now for the obligatory apology for not blogging for a while (how many blogs contain a similar apology!)… my excuse? read on.

The saying goes “Everyone has a book in them” but the more I think about this, the more I find that I dispute it.. Perhaps the quote should become “Everyone has a book in them, but it probably isn’t that good”!

That said, I thought to myself – why not give it a go? I might learn something in the process – so I have written a rough outline for a book and started filling the chapters.

Ok, so now as my blog title suggests.. I need some help. If you fit the following criteria and you are a kind soul, please would you consider giving me some constructive criticism?

• Enjoy reading sci-fi books
• Can spare 10 or so minutes (no time constraint what-so-ever)
• Can provide constructive criticism and advise me whether to continue

If you can do the last point in-particular, please leave me a comment with your email address (I’ll make sure it is not published to the world) and I’ll send what I have so far

Thanks, hoping for at least 1 person!

Brown-white!

After a lunchtime discussion with fellow colleagues Jack and Syd.. I think I may have invented a new product for Hovis (and the like).

Jack explained that his partner liked brown bread, but not white – and because she was away at a conference he was going to enjoy a tasty white sandwich… (usually if they bought one of each, half of each loaf went moldy)

Now I’m sure many people have thought of this idea, but why don’t bread makers supply a half and half loaf – and by that I do not mean a compromise in which you get white bread with health benefits of brown….
….I mean literally half a loaf of sliced white bread and half a loaf of sliced brown bread

Hey presto: white-brown bread.

And the worst drivers’ car of choice is/are…

Black Vauxhalls!

As part of my quest to utilise my commuting time, I decided, for 1 week, to start voice recording and tracking the make and colour of cars that either; didn’t indicate when changing lane (or roundabouts etc), were driving in the middle lane with no reason not to pull in (I did give benefit to some drivers), and fast lane drivers.

Some stats for you:

• 17% of the incidents I recorded involved Vauxhalls (of any colour).
• Fast lane drivers only seem to drive black or grey coloured cars!
• Mercedes were the 2nd worst and Peugeot 3rd.
• I saw 57 counts of bad driving in 710 miles
• White, Yellow and Green cars seem to have the safest drivers (admittedly there may be less of these on the roads)

Obviously the data is not conclusive as I may be subject to bias (region, commuting time, car make or colour).
The data was captured after 710 miles of driving, including the m40, m25 and a40 (Oxfordshire) traffic.

Which…

My Inventions (I think!)

#1 – Life Tracker

A few years back I started thinking about my travels, data collection and visualisation of it.

I started to wonder… in my past had I perhaps come into close proximity to  my partner/friends etc before we had officially met?

The recent revelations about iphones tracking an owners location/travels, has re-ignited my idea from the dusty depths of my memory banks.

My idea was that from birth (or at consenting age if more suitable) people could buy a device (or perhaps tag) that tracks their whereabouts (realtime). They would then be able to see their travels on a world map (much like the app that was created to read the iphone data). My thoughts about this pre-dated the widespread usage of GPS enabled devices, so it was much more radical back then.

The specific usage I would be interested in, is finding out how close I had come to other individuals… so if I were to overlay my travel map (that contained timeline functionality) against my partner’s map – we could find out how close we had come to meeting before we actually had met… we could also discuss the places/items we had both visited (separately) in the past.

#2 – Reusable packaging

I am fairly confident that this is not my original concept, in fact – the very birth of the concept in my head was as a direct result of another companies idea. What I do know is that the idea hasn’t been implemented like my vision..

I’ll give you a very, very quick background story – I was listening to the radio on the way to the shops and commercials started playing- it was an advert for ‘Cartridge World’.
If you haven’t heard of ‘Cartridge World’ the concept of the store is that printer ink is expensive, so you can take your old cartridge back and get it re-filled for a reduced cost.

It got my brain-a-ticking, here I was – about to do the weekly shop and re-buy a heck of a lot of plastic packaging, when (predominantly) all I wanted were the products, not the containers.

So my idea… When I go shopping I can re-use/re-fill milk bottles, cosmetic packaging; toothbrush tubes, shampoo bottles and the like. I could walk up to the ‘re-fill’ section in my local waitrose/sainsburys/tesco etc and just re-fill the packaging and just pay for the product (or buy new – if I don’t have that product or the container needs replacing), This would mean I am not re-purchasing the container.

Even if that only saved pence – it would soon mount up, plus the environmental impact would be massive.

I see this as a win for a fair few parties:

1. The user: discounted products and also doing their bit for the environment (+ emptier house hold bins)
2. The supermarket: they are doing their bit for the environment and also offering choice (refill or new) and discounted prices to customers that want to recycle.
3. The suppliers: they can (in part) just send lorries of the product (saving packaging and therefore cost and space) meaning they are also being ‘green’. I would also foresee quicker unloading and placement of products into stores.

#3 – Theme park cueing

This idea has been in my head for a long, long time – and with ‘little-to-no knowledge’ of the theme park industry economics/workings – it could easily be flawed.

The worst thing in my opinion about theme parks is the cueing. My idea is to have a conveyer belt with seats on that take people to the ride, each seat would have a little screen on the back showing ride information and theme park info (and probably adverts!). So in essence it would be a ride to get to the ride, lazy perhaps – but I’d like it!

De-words, anti-phrases and plane wrong!

Personally, I am not fantastic at spelling and grammar – I consider myself condemned to be an eternal student of the English Language.

In fact, I am sure that if this blog post is read – glaringly obvious mistakes will be found. It’s probably a bad choice to blog about spelling and grammatical inconsistencies and errors – when my own writings surely contain the very thing I am blogging about! (blogging comes up as a spell check!)

That said, I wanted to raise a couple that I see day-in, day-out that frustrate me.

First up, re-iterate / reiterate.

I hardly ever hear anyone say “He iterated his point”.
The term ‘reiterate’ crept into the language through what’s known as ‘hypercorrection’: correcting something which is already right.

‘Iterate’, on its own, already means ‘to say or perform again/repeat something’. However, many people do not know this, so they add ‘re’ to the word, thinking that this will give them the ‘again’ element.

So, you would use ‘reiterate’ only if you were iterating again, for a second/third time.

Next, one that I constantly battle with, and get pulled up (rightly so) by my colleagues: ‘its or it’s‘:

its – this can mean only one thing: the neutral possessive – something which indicates belonging to

• This car and its doors are painted red.

it’s – this can mean only two things: ‘it is’ and ‘it has’

• It’s twenty-five to three. It’s been raining.

The confusion often arises (for me included) because we assume that we must have an apostrophe when talking of something belonging to someone or something. However, this is not always true.

Future Perfect (which these examples come from) shows us a simple rule to use for clarification: when you see ‘it’s’, say it in full, to check whether it is right.

• The computer and it’s screen.
• check 1: The computer and it is screen. WRONG
• check 2: The computer and it has screen. WRONG

So, this must be: The computer and its screen. (mental note… remember this!)

For a list of other grammar tips et cetera, see: http://www.future-perfect.co.uk/grammartips/index.asp

Passwords!

Just a quick blog posts about security…

A colleague yesterday mentioned that just to switch his computer on, he had to memorise 5 (or so) passwords/combinations, at first I thought he was being stupid, but he is right;

1 – Parking
2 – Office alarm (and another if lost key)
3 – BIOS
4 – Windows password
5 – Server password (to access work)

On top of this I personally have to enter my private key password (for ssh access) plus other various combinations to begin work (site passwords) etc.

Now, obviously I understand the rationale behind needing each password, and the alternative of no passwords is not an option.

Many promote password managers, but to my mind – they create a single point of failure, which I think is just as much of a flaw as having to remember them.

I feel I have a pretty good system for setting my passwords, so they aren’t “easily” guessable – but should I have to remember so many… I wish I knew the answer!

I guess I do know the answer, as it’s always the same: http://arniie.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/balance/

Interesting reading: RISK

I don’t read many books – to my own discredit, but recently I read:

risk – by Dan Gardner

It was recommended by my boss – Syd Nadim.

It is a superb book and I’d also recommend it unreservedly, Gardner cleverly and with good citation, strips bare the very shaky assumptions upon which much risk assessment is based – in the world.

It also highlights to the user with practical and working examples of how we are hard wired to react to given situations, and how the hard wirings are sometimes  flawed in the new societies and situations we find ourselves with surprising results.

He talks about how our so-called ‘gut vs head decisions’ influence many parts of our lives, and shows us that we may not be always using the best metric to form our opinions and answers.

I especially liked the little challenges he has aggregated, showing the reader evidence – such as:

A Cricket Bat Costs £1 more than a Ball.

Both Together cost £1.10,

How much Does the Ball Cost?

hint: it’s not 10p

It is well worth the invested time to read, and I urge you to give it a whirl.

A brain cleanse

The passing of a year end, brings the usual thoughts of a clean slate and a chance to cleanse one’s self.

This year I thought I’d embark on a mental cleanse, inspired by an XKCD cartoon – I read this list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions

So that I can remove the junk from my head that I thought were true, but now know to be incorrect.

Some key ‘misconceptions’ that I ‘suffered’ from were:

- There is no evidence that Vikings wore horns on their helmets.

- Mussels that do not open when cooked may still be fully cooked and safe to eat.

- The discovery of the spherical shape of the Earth does not date to the modern era or to the Middle Ages. It was wellknown throughout the Hellenistic period. See Myth of the Flat Earth.

- It is commonly claimed that the Great Wall of China is the only man-made object visible from the Moon. This is false. None of the Apollo astronauts reported seeing any man-made object from the Moon, and even earth-orbiting astronauts can barely see it. The misconception is believed to have been popularized by Richard Halliburton decadesbefore the first moon landing. Shuttle astronaut Jay Apt has been quoted as saying “…the Great Wall is almost invisible from only 180 miles up.

- Sugar does not cause hyperactivity in children

- Prolonged exposure to cold weather such as rain or winter conditions does not increase the likelihood of catching a cold

- The notion that goldfish have a memory of only three seconds is false

- The flight mechanism and aerodynamics of the bumblebee (as well as other insects) are actually quite well understood, in spite of the urban legend that calculations show that they should not be able to fly. In the 1930s a German scientist, using flawed techniques, indeed postulated that bumblebees theoretically should not be able to fly, although he later retracted the suggestion. However the theory became generalized to the false notion that “scientists think that bumblebees should not be able to fly.”

- Bulls are not enraged by the color red, used in capes by professional matadors. Cattle are red-green color-blind. It is not the color of the cape that angers the bull, but rather the movement of the fabric that irritates the bull and incites it to charge

- Thomas Crapper did not invent the flush toilet

- Guglielmo Marconi did not invent radio, but only modernized it for public broadcasting and communication.

But there are many more!!

I guess my head isn’t now cleansed – I have just added information to each of the so called ‘facts’