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Wednesday
6/14/2006 11:53:51 AM
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Michael Wells
Relegated to the long list of things I'll never never never have time to build...
It seems to me that someone could take the last 20 years of Multiple Listing Service (MLS) data, and compose a time-based valuation map. This would be extremely valuable to property investors, because you could instantly see where the wealth is, where it's moving, and how fast.
I imagine it would look alot like those weather maps on the evening news--fronts moving in and out; some dissapating, some gathering strength, but the general mood of the market, and the areas of concentrated effect are easy to see.
All it would take is a good database of sale events, with date, amount, and geocode; the rest is just data processing and visualization over a map. There's a billion-dollar service for ya...
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Friday
4/28/2006 5:17:57 PM
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Michael Wells
I wonder if kid-sized shopping carts would be a hit at the local grocer. Kids who have passed the happy-to-sit-still-in-the-cart stage, but who aren't yet at the pre-teen I'm-not-with-these-people stage, get to tag along with Mom and Dad, but with their own little cart to assist with.
Kids would love it, and Mom and Dad can actually keep them occupied with the lower-shelf tasks... "no, the yellow mustard."
It has the effect of encouraging parents (who have the bigger grocery budgets to begin with) to prefer the kid-supporting grocer, but it also is likely to increase shopping frequency. If it's a smash with the kids, they're likely to see it as a form of entertainment and then shopping becomes an event rather than a chore.
There's another huge benefit. Because traffic cycles in grocery stores are quite huge; you only allow the use of the kids carts during certain hours of the day. This helps protect the kids from a thousand frantic shoppers, but it also encourages parents to schedule their grocery tasks during those off-peak periods, which means thinner queues at dinnertime.
Nice.
Maybe someone should even do a kid-sized checkout lane. Now that would be cool.
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Wednesday
7/6/2005 12:09:00 AM
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Michael Wells
Commentary on Seth's blarticle, "The seduction of 'good enough'";
Seth, my sense is that the situation is worse than you portray. Consider these examples;
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Monday
6/6/2005 7:52:06 PM
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Michael Wells
It continually frustrates me that the simplest of information stores have yet to offer widespread access via the web. For instance, despite almost 10 years of public Internet access, it seems that only a small percentage of libraries have card catalog systems which can be searched online.
Why would any library not have this capability? Why would any card catalog software vendor not offer this capability? It seems a bit fantastic that any organization with the goal of increasing public knowledge and education would cripple the library system so severely by forcing you to visit the facility just to find out whether that copy of Roald Dahl's A Piece of Cake has been returned yet.
One would argue that it's a question of cost; most libraries don't make money, so a software upgrade -- even one that can show significant benefit for its patrons, just won't make it into the budget for awhile; but in my view that argument falls on its face;
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Monday
9/15/2003 10:33:03 PM
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Michael Wells
Branding has always facinated me. The process of taking an idea, and assigning symbolic, phonetic, and emotional aspects to it is much like the process of defining a language.
Truly successful brands actually become language, like Kleenex or a Crock pot, they are adopted by the public as generic terms.
Recently I became aware that the decision to create a brand involves a very clear knowledge of what you want the brand to represent (what images, emotions, and meaning you want it to conjure in the mind of a person) and where you want it to evolve.
For example, I might want my new car model, the "Silver Eagle" to be known for a unique attribute. It can fly. But in the future, I want that association to broaden. Eventually I want the term to be associated with broader concepts, like "safe, reliable transportion", or "high value", or "environmentally friendly".
This combination of a fixed idea and a evolutionary path take the form of a vector. Though it would be difficult to graph, I think that the concept of a brand vector is useful for considering which brands compete most directly, which brands are diverging, and which brands are converging.
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Tuesday
8/26/2003 3:04:03 PM
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Michael Wells
Once in awhile a past event pops up, bringing with it a lesson learned. This one gets filed under, "things aren't always what they seem..."
In 1998, I was working for a telecommunications company, managing their mass-marketing systems. These systems captured orders from telemarketing agencies, cleaned them, reported on them, rejected bad data, etc, and fed them into the order processing system.
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Wednesday
8/13/2003 7:07:33 PM
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Michael Wells
Although I prefer raw, old-style innovation to gimmicky approaches, the modern focus on innovation is turning up some interesting approaches.
Two notable efforts...
BIOLOGICAL IDEA COMPETITION
In this approach, the principles of evolution are used to help weed out the myriad ideas that result from a group "brainstorm", identify the meaningful ones, and understand better what makes them meaningful.
This approach is also interesting in that it forceably "mates" ideas with each other in an effort to produce better more suitable "offspring". This encourages the group to examine the areas around and in-between ideas, rather than just the limited idea itself.
MYHRVOLD'S INVENTION FACTORY
Another effort is being spearheaded by Microsoft's previous CTO, Nathan Myhrvold. With his personal earnings, Nathan is assembling a company with the sole purpose of innovation; generating revenue from consulting projects and patents that its company creates.
Unlike the venture capital incubators that sprung during the bubble, Myhrvold is looking to put most of his innovators on the payroll... from may angles a very good move.
One of the many failings of the dot-com incubators is that they sought people with a combination of business and technical acuity -- an especially rare combination. This thinned the innovation pool, and created many a one-legged company. By employing innovators, Nathan encourages pure innovation without the immediate constrains of finance (i.e. a short-term revenue-generating business), and allows the geekiest specialists to thrive in his environment.
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/schwartz0502.asp
http://www.intellectualventures.com/RecentNews/
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Wednesday
8/13/2003 11:06:54 AM
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Michael Wells
I encountered a great, fun article on "creative destruction"--a topic that I've long been aware of, but never seen as clearly as I do now.
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