May 31, 2008
Posted in Ideas at 00:38 by Graham King
When you send a parcel by air, the price depends on the volume and weight of that parcel. Volume, because you are buying a certain amount of space in the plane. Weight, because the heavier the plane’s cargo, the more fuel it takes to get it off the ground. You pay for the fuel to fly your parcel.
The pricing structure for air mail / air freight is closely linked to the costs faced by the airline.
When you travel with your parcels, a disconnect appears. You buy a certain amount of space - typically a seat for yourself, a small bag and one or two big bags. A bigger seat (’business’, ‘premium’, etc) is more money. Extra bags is more money.
Currently you get a fixed amount of weight for your bags, and an unlimited amount of weight for yourself. A 120lb (55kg) waif with no luggage pays the same as a 260lb (115kg) behemoth with their full complement of luggage (2x 50lbs in the hold plus 40lb in the cabin, on American Airlines). That’s the same price for 120lb as for 400lb! Try convincing an air freight company (UPS, Fedex, etc) to use that pricing structure!
The reason it works is that the 120lb person subsidizes the 400lb one, and the airlines hope it evens out. Now, whenever you see that type of setup, there is an opportunity. Attract only the most valuable customers (the light low-luggage ones, who are over-paying their share of the fuel), split the difference with them, and you have a business.
The reason I think this will happen is that it will only take one airline to switch. The first one to start charging by weight will get a lot of press coverage, and higher profits (from over-charging the light customers slightly less than the other airlines).
Once the high-value customers start using an airline that offers them better rates, the balance stops working everywhere else. The other airlines end up with only the heavy high-luggage customers that are paying less than their share of the fuel. They have to change to survive.
Airline pricing should be a flat rate for your seat (depending on the ‘class’ of your seat), and a price per lb or kg you want the airline to carry. The weight price should fluctuate as often as the price at the petrol pump.
May 9, 2006
Posted in Ideas, Software at 22:37 by Graham King
A web feed is, to quote Wikipedia:
… a document (often XML-based) which contains content items, often summaries of stories or weblog posts with web links to longer versions. Weblogs and news websites are common sources for web feeds, but feeds are also used to deliver structured information ranging from weather data to “top ten” lists of hit tunes. The two main web feed formats are RSS (which is older and far more widely used) and Atom (a newer format that has just completed the IETF standardization process.) Feeds are subscribed to directly by users with aggregators or feed readers, which combine the contents of multiple web feeds for display on a single screen or series of screens
Aggregators and feed readers are widely used, but mainly by tech-savvy individuals. It’s time your company rolled out a feed reader on every desktop PC it owns. Here’s why:
It saves time
Most of your employees visit a certain set of sites regularly. Usually the sites of newspapers, their sports team, their friends site, and probably business specific sites such as financial information pages, industry insider sites, etc. All these sites will provide an feed - imagine the time your staff will save if the information comes to them, without them having to visit all these web sites every day. And feed readers are really easy to use - they make e-mail look complicated.
New business uses
Once your tech guys know everyone has a reader, they can start using it in internal applications. Feeds can include:
- Audit trails - what data is being entered where and by whom.
- CVs of job applicants.
- Human Resources announcements: List of staff changes (hired, resigned, promotions, etc).
- Management information - deal progress (bid, close, etc).
- Internal blogs.
Technology team uses
The technology / IT team can make great use of feeds:
- Version control check-ins.
- Bug tracking system activity.
- Changes to the internal Wiki.
- Logging / Monitoring of machines and applications.
- Reduce support - instead of an alert appearing on the support desk system, and someone being telephoned, the person responsible simply monitors the feed. No-one likes doing support - now they don’t have to !
- New clients - Konfabulator, Google desktop sidebar, probably the Mac dashboard, and most of the worlds programming languages, can consume feeds (RSS or Atom). You can easily develop new widgets or applications to act on your feeds. By having your internal apps expose their data in feeds, you are enabling your IT team to build a whole new generation of applications.
Reduce e-mail clutter
All of the above could also be sent as regular e-mails to internal mailing lists. And they often are. I bet you have a range of filters in your e-mail client to move all that e-mail clutter (internal spam) to various folders. By replacing e-mail with feeds you:
- Empower the users: Individuals monitor the feeds they want and don’t subscribe to the others.
- Reclaim e-mail: All machine generated e-mail becomes feeds; the only e-mail you get is from real people, and as you don’t have to deal with the clutter, you’ll have time to read it !
Much better communication
That’s what it’s all about, By putting a feed everywhere you can, you are opening up your organisation to its employees. Internal staff can go probe any particular part of a business or IT system, and monitor it, learn about it, watch it live. Result: A better informed more pro-active team !
So, what are you waiting for. Evaluate a few from this list of feed readers, pick your favorite, and deploy it !
October 23, 2005
Posted in Ideas at 14:24 by Graham King
In England in 1388 Richard III made a law stating that all men (or only ages 10-18, versions differ) must own bows and practice archery on Sunday’s and holidays. This law was finally repealed in 1960.
An 1888 law encouraging emigration to the colonies of unemployed adults and pauper children from the overcrowded cities of England and Wales was repealed in 2004.
The Internet abounds with weird outdated laws like these. A law is valid until it is repealed. As law makers (an elected assembly) make more laws than they repeal, we get more and more laws. Only a small section of them end up being relevant to the world we live in. There is a simple solution: Laws should expire.
I propose that every law passed should include its expiry date. 1 year for emergency legislation, 5 – 10 years for most laws, with probably a cap of 20 years. Laws forming part of a country’s constitution – i.e. the major ‘basis of society’ laws such as not permitting murder – could have 50 – 100 year renewable periods.
As the laws come up for review they can be modified and updated, for example to take into account new technology and new social patterns. In the case of emergency legislation the country will of had more time to consider the issue.
Regularly updating and revising laws would make them more directly relevant to our daily lives, easier to understand by non-legal professionals, and easier to apply and enforce. There would be less need for interpretation by a judge or jury, which would mean much smaller differences in how different people are treated for the same offense.
The maximum life-span of a law could be tied to how long it has already been in force, how long it was debated for, and how many members of the assembly participated in making it. This would prevent governments rushing laws through ‘in the middle of the night’ (The U.S.A. Patriot Act being a very good example of this).
If the law was only presented (or amended) a few hours before the vote, and only a few people voted, then you are not representing the people. You should not be able to make a long-term law.
If the law has already been in force for some years, or most of the assembly voted on it, then that is a more representative law and should live longer.
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