Tech Idea: Taxi Tracker

It’s a simple solution really.

Taxi cabs, especially in New York City, are a very convenient mode of transportation. Until you leave something in the taxi on your way out – at which time the veritable plethora of cabs in the city becomes a detriment.

We live in the technology age. Why not place a reader, just inside the rear doors of the cab. As passengers enter, they hold their card up to the reader, and it registers that the passenger was in this particular cab. Then if something is forgotten, or the cab driver gives a bad cab experience (intentional wrong turns to raise the fare, dangerous driving, etc), the passenger has it on record that they were in the cab, and can easily rectify the situation.

There are downsides, such as the cab that gets in an accident. Usually, passengers just walk away and don’t pay the driver. That’s reasonable. But not if you’ve sent an electronic stamp that you were in the car. But seriously, would you rather be forced to pay $5 or so after an accident, or would you rather be without your cell phone for an extended period of time?

Here’s a name for it: Taxi Tracker

MSN to launch Mobile home

MSN is launching a Mobile presence intended to be a web homepage for mobile devices. It sounds like they want users to use this as a Mobile Web starting point, rather than the carrier portals that are currently used in that capacity. Remember, this is what happened with the browser wars – Internet Explorer came with MSN.com as the default home page – and MSN is trying to find a way to control a user’s navigation flow. If anyone can wrest that power away from the carriers, it’s MSN. And once users realize they don’t need to have a carrier portal as their home page, they will start to set their home page to other sites, based on the content they desire…

I think you can guess what I am getting at.

Mark Cuban embraces technology (again)

In addition to maintaining his own blog, called Blogmaverick.com, wherein he extols (and represents) the virtues of modern technology, Mark Cuban has taken another step. The Dallas Mavericks have launched Mavswiki, a wiki that allows users to read and create content related to every aspect of Mavericks’ history, including every game of the 2006-07 season. While the site runs a bit slowly, and the first page could use a bit of organization (adding a “players” link, to start), this is clear a great step in documenting the history of the Dallas Mavericks franchise.

As with Wikipedia, it won’t be perfect. Content of this magnitude is rarely perfect. But let’s remember Chris Anderson’s comparison to Britannica in The Long Tail: In time, Mavswiki will be more correct, more current, and more complete than anything you could find in a media guide.

Good work, Mr. Cuban. Keep on the cutting edge!

That’s the ticket: EBay buys Stubhub

In a transaction involving two “reselling giants,” EBay bought Stubhub for $310 million. This should definitely help the Ebay Sports brand, which is positioned quite well already. For me, Stubhub has given me a real feeling of safety with my purchases, and I struggled for that with EBay. I wonder what other niche market EBay is going to get into next.

Books: The Long Tail by Chris Anderson

I just finished reading The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson. The Long Tail concept is simple; the sum of “non-hits,” despite their lack of sales or success, can often equal or exceed the sum of the “hits.” Let’s use music on iTunes as an example: the top 50 songs of a given year generate a lot of money. But there are thousands of songs each year, and they all sell. Since iTunes is able to put most of these songs on its virtual “shelf,” it can reap profits from both the head (top 50) and from the long tail (all the other songs).

Anderson’s book deals with ways to profit from the tail. For example, iTunes has (relatively) infinite shelf space compared to, say, long tail. So while the hits still sell, there is a very long tail available to consume. As filtering and search improve, users will be able to buy further down the tail. And as methods of production become more accessible to the general public, the tail itself will grow. For iTunes, that means more music to sell, and as people become more and more happy with the personalized music they are buying, they will buy in greater bullk.

The Long Tail itself is an interesting concept, but Anderson does a great job keeping it interesting. He constantly uses real-world, current examples such as Google, Amazon, Netflix, the LEGO company, and Wikipedia using the Long Tail to further profits. Wikipedia is the best example; Anderson likens it to Encyclopedia Britannica. The end result is a more accurate, much more timely, and much, much, much more in-depth encyclopedia than Britannica could ever hope to offer.

I recommend this book highly. The concept is interesting by itself, and Anderson covers it well. The Long Tail is now part of our culture and anyone who wants to stay ahead of the curve should be familiar with it.

Anderson would be proud that I am offering up this link to the Long Tail Wikipedia entry. Go there to learn more about this important idea.

A robot’s place is in the kitchen

Now you can get even lazier, when you have a robot that can open the fridge and retrieve a beer. One of these days I’ve got to make it out to CES.

My Hands Are Bananas

I am not quite sure why this hasn’t become a national phenomenon yet. There are a lot of trippy videos out there in internet-land, but this has to be the trippiest of the trippy.

We get it. His hands are bananas, his friend doesn’t like chili, and he’s the milky pirate. The milky pirate? Warning: this video is very catchy. The first time I watched it, I fell out of my chair. It’s a real high quality production – I could imagine seeing this on MTV in a regular rotation.

Clearly, I am not the only one who found this funny. Here is a video of two girls covering the song in a dorm room. It’s a terrible recording, but they clearly appreciated the song.

It’s interesting how things get profligated out to the public. In The Long Tail (more on that later), Anderson talks about internet phenomena like Octopus Eats Shark, GOATSE, and The Star Wars Kid, but the reality is that these things are really funny to follow, and keep us from normal things like going to movies and watcing network television.

When galactic domination goes wrong

Say what you will about Youtube. Even Mark Cuban thinks there is a lot of garbage out there. And he’s right. But you know what? There is a lot of good stuff out there in the Long Tail.

The fine folks at Blame Society have created a new online video collection called Chad Vader, Day Shift Manager. In addition to being very well produced and very funny, this is also pretty large. This no 20 second clip of people being funny; there are five six-minute episodes, and a plot that can be followed. Clearly, this is no Star Wars or even the original South Park short that started it all. But it’s definitely watchable. Remember, 30 minutes spent watching Chad Vader’s adventures is 30 minutes spent not watching the latest prime time network hits, even on TiVo. In the last ten years, video production has become more and more accessible to the common man. But in the last two years, video distribution has followed suit. And a person’s time spent on entertainment can now be so diverse that the stand-out blockbuster successes are becoming more and more obscelete.

But meanwhile, you can relax: it’s just some people poking fun at Darth Vader.

Skybox SMS: Order and pay for food via Mobile device

Investor’s Business Daily has an article about Skybox SMS, a company that intends for fans to order and pay for stadium concessions via Mobile device. Now that is great use of Mobile technology. It takes an existing problem (long lines at the stadium causing missed game-viewing time) and implements a very specific and direct solution.

Now if only they could figure out a way to shorten the bathroom lines…

Welcome to the Blog-o-Sphere

This blog is still clearly in its infancy. However, I finally have about a week’s worth of data to analyze. Most of you are my friends (or my parents), but it appears that my posts have been showing up on search engines. My most popular post has been the one about the NFL.com bandwagon game. People have found the post through searches like these:

- my nfl band wagon
- bandwagon game
- brat pack nfl

Interestingly enough, that was also my shortest post. Now, I’m not going to start posting about Jessica Simpson or Iraq or pornography, but it’s interesting to think that some strangers out there are stumbling onto this space I call home. I wonder if they stick around and read other posts or if they Google me and stumble upon other stuff I’ve written. I doubt it – they probably just say “Thank goodness he’s actually got a link to the page I really want.”

Bloggery is an interesting technology, and definitely represents a significant upgrade from the Prodigy message boards I frequented in 1991. It’s utterly difficult to become a famous blogger these days, but if I stay interesting, perhaps I can establish a stable readership.