mind this - by Lars Plougmann

Assisted serendipity and the digital side of travelling

Twelve years ago, on a trip to San Francisco, two friends of mine passed by a one-hour photo shop and stopped to marvel at the photo printer in the window. The printer was spitting out freshly printed photos in plain view and that is how Rodney recognised his uncle in a series of photos, posing in front of famous San Francisco landmarks. Rodney did not know that his uncle was in San Francisco but after the discovery they managed to meet up. Small world.

What is the probability of somebody you know being in the same city as you at the same time? What is the Bayesian of finding out about it or actually meeting up?

The familiar anecdotes about the world being small are about to go out of fashion if a new fusion of social networks and the geographic web takes of.

Dopplr is a web based tool that allows you to publish your travel plans to people you trust. Log in, and the main page will show you who will be at any of the future destinations you are planning to travel to.

For years, Plazes has enabled you to find out who is close to your current position. In the new version launched this week, you can also input your future travel plans and see friends' future locations.

Whether boosting serendipity or just lending a helping hand with the logistics of a meeting, services like this would come in handy both for social purposes and business (of course, business is a social activity too).

The same way sharing a physical location ties people together, assisted serendipity makes sense in other dimensions as well. Adoption of social tools within organisations would, say, help a team in Finland find the people in China with an idea that solves a problem they are grappling with, and identify the influencer in Turkey who will sponsor the project to apply the idea. Without any of them ever having heard of the others before. Big companies like a smaller world too.

Tags: Dopplr Plazes serendipity geographic+web social+tools

Access to online apps and storage from behind political firewalls

Switching between different computers is easy when many of your applications and most of your data are accessible online. An obvious concern about this approach is availability of applications and data: How good are the providers at maintaining their infrastructure and keeping it available to users. A trip to the Gulf begs highlights another concern: Censorship.

The censorship policy of the United Arab Emirates received world wide attention when access to flickr, a photo-sharing service, was blocked. Flickr is again available from within UAE and some other sites previously blocked for political reasons are back (such as the Secret Dubai diary). But other websites and services suffer. One example is Skype - and any other service, e.g. Jajah, that the local telecoms monopoly, Etisalat, sees as a threat to their revenues. For an suggestion on how to use Skype in the UAE, see this explanation (although the site is not accessible from the UAE).

Before traveling to the UAE, I had a friend set up a Psiphon proxy service. Although it meant enduring a slower connection, Psiphon enabled me to access most of the censored sites I tried. Access to Typepad, the hosted software I use to publish this weblog, did not seem possible though, probably due to Psiphon still being in development. Now that I am in Oman, Typepad and Skype are again accessible but other sites remain blocked.

As if dealing with state or monopolists' censorship was not enough of a challenge, some sort of inverse censorship seems to be practiced as well. For example, it doesn't seem to be possible to access Digg from the UAE and there is a discussion going on about web-based services blocking access from entire countries.

Offline access to your data and a few proxies are a sensible way to prepare for maintaining productivity while on the go. Or in general protecting yourself from anybody trying to regulate what you can access on the internet.

Tags: censorship psiphon skype flickr offline Oman UAE Dubai monopoly

The future of air travel?

When the latest air travel scare led to harsh restrictions on carry-on luggage, I feared that the day wouldn't be far off when passengers are not allowed to wear their own clothes on flights. For security reasons. Airlines would supply standardised suits, a bit like what you have to don if you go on the Sydney Harbour Bridge climb.

But in a recent podcast, Cory Doctorow outlined a more extreme scenario (nicknamed Ninja Airlines):

"In the middle of the night, a ninja sneaks into your room and blow-darts you, Saran-wraps you, sticks a routing tag onto you, packs your suitcase for you, ships you to the other side, takes you to your hotel, slips you into the covers, unpacks your suitcase, stands on the windows of your hotel, blow-darts you with the antidote, slips silently out the window while you stretch your arms, yawn and go: “I’ve woken up in Hong Kong”. That would be a perfectly safe airline."

Tags: air travel Cory Doctorow

Phones on planes and how to use a seat belt

You probably think flight safety is important but find it difficult to concentrate on pre-flight safety announcements where much attention is given to how to operate the seat belt and the whole landing-on-water scenario.

For a chuckle, read this week's leader in The Economist which pokes fun at the serious subject of in-flight safety and the safety announcements' often misleading rhetoric. The article, Fear of flying - Welcome aboard is a stab at what an honest pre-flight safety announcement might be like (it is behind a pay wall, so I provide a few quotes):

"The real reason to switch [mobile phones] off is because they interfere with mobile networks on the ground [...] if they were really dangerous we would not allow them on board"

"if [safety] were [our first priority], our seats would be rear-facing, like those in military aircraft, since they are safer in the event of an emergency landing."

"Your life-jacket can be found under your seat, [...] do not bother to look for it [...] in the history of aviation the number of wide-bodied aircraft that have made successful landings on water is zero."

Some of these points were raised by Freakonomics co-author Steven D. Levitt in June. This sparked a debate on their blog, primarily about the use of electronics on aircraft and the land-on-water scenario. (I contributed a comment that I rarely go sailing without a parachute.) Yet the Wikipedia article on water landings lists six incidents of commercial aircraft ditching on water and passengers surviving.

As for the cell phone discussion, The Economist article predicts airlines' stance will change in the next few years:

"when we introduce in-flight calling [...] the prospect of taking a cut of the sky-high calling charges will miraculously cause our safety concerns about mobile phones to evaporate"

[Update: JP Rangaswami wrote about the same Economist article yesterday. He mentions that it was the subject of a blog experiment by The Economist's editors and points us to Michael Seaton who shares the full text of the article. My suspicion is that somebody at the newspaper is putting together a case for lifting the pay-wall that bars non-subscribers' access to most of the content on The Economist's website but they want to measure the linking potential.]

Tags: The Economist airplane ditching water landing Freakonomics safety

Peeking into the mind of Charles Darwin in New York

If you live in New York, or if you are passing through, make plans to visit the Darwin exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History before it ends on 20 August. Pre-booking is essential.

For me, it was interesting to learn of Darwin's family history (his grandfather wrote about how species could evolve over generations), see original notebooks from the Beagle expedition and some of the samples gathered. Via artifacts and ample text, the exhibit conveys a sense of being inside Darwin's mind during the years when he formed his theory of evolution.

When you arrive at the museum, go see the halls of geology before heading to the Darwin exhibition. Specifically, study Charles Lyell in some detail as well as the timeline of how science arrived at an estimate of the age of Earth. On the Beagle voyage, Darwin made more notes about geology than about plants and animals.

Tags: Charles Darwin New York museum evolution natural selection Charles Lyell

Disrupting ForEx profit margins by aggregating and matching supply and demand

The internet's power of aggregation is already matching lenders and borrowers: the main players are Zopa in the UK and Prosper in the US. A recent article (behind a paywall) in The Economist compares the new person-to-person finance services to banks.
    But what about the internet's traditional border-crossing potential? I would be interested to know if any person-to-person foreign currency exchanges are out there and operating successfully. As the UK has chosen to stay outside of the Euro zone, it  means that we have to buy foreign currency whenever we go overseas.
     There are profits being made in the forex markets so the potential for disruption should be great. Large cross-border transactions tend to stay close to the interbank rate and financed by transparent fees but travel money is an area plagued by large spreads and non-transparent fees (witness the many outlets offering "no commission" or "zero commission" currency exchange).
    A quick round-trip to get quotes for 100 pound sterling exchanged into foreign currency (US dollars, Egyptian pounds and the Estonian kroon) reveals the margins charged by some "zero commission outlets (Natwest, the Post Office, Travelex and OnlineFx). When buying US dollars, Natwest and the Post Office will pocket 4 to 5% of your money; the forex specialists will charge you around 3%. Look at currencies with higher fluctuations and lower volumes, like Egyptian pounds, and all four outlets will skim 10% compared to the interbank rate. Some currencies may be classified differently by the different organisations: If you want to exchange your sterling to the Estonian kroon, Natwest and the Post Office will charge a bit more than 10% whereas Travelex will make 5% from the transaction.
    Use your debit card at a cash machine at your destination and you will often end up paying around 4% or more to your bank.
    A person-to-person forex market between the UK and the US, say, would exploit the fact that people travel both ways. Setting up a bank account in a foreign currency is probably too much work, even for frequent travellers. In an aggregated model, US citizens who travel frequently to the UK would set aside a dollar sum for travel money. UK members of the scheme would then be able to withdraw from the dollar fund in the US - up to an  amount equivalent to what they have contributed to the Sterling fund in the UK. And vice versa. Because members only contribute in their own currency, exchange rate risk is eliminated.
    The system depends on a bunch of assumptions, and not all would be easy to satisfy (one is about balancing the amounts needed of different currencies). This suggests that forex is not going to be free. But even at lower margins there is a probably a nice profit for the people who get it right. Who would be best positioned to launch such a service? Banks or existing forex vendors cannibalising their own business? Or the likes of Paypal? Or VC backed new start-ups?

A quarter of a million soccer balls

On a trip to a village in Malawi in November 2005, I shot this photograph of three guys with a home made football.
    Somebody involved with the charity World Vision found my photo on flickr by searching for tags to do with kids and soccer. World Vision is running a gift-in-kind campaign to send soccer balls and pumps to needy children world wide.
    In Malawi and many other places, children start helping their parents with work at an early age, taking away time to play games and the activities normally associated with childhood. World Vision will use my photo in a display at an event at Central Washington University. We are also going to see to it that the guys in the photo and their friends get a new football to play with.
    (This kind of charity only works in tandem with efforts focused on relieving poverty, providing food and treating AIDS and other diseases. For a fresh view on how to support charities [and how not to] read what The Charity Blogger has to say.)

Dober dan Slovenija

A recent visit to Slovenia left lasting impressions of the small country's innovation, energy and willingness to integrate with the rest of Europe.
Slovenia's 2m people was the richest group to be added to the European Union when ten new countries joined in 2004. The government has been busy getting inflation under control allowing adoption of the Euro by January 2007 following an accelerated timetable. The Slovenian tolar (currency code SIT) is already pegged to the Euro and artists have been busy proposing national designs for the Euro coins.

   Our stay also provided the opportunity to connect with local entrepreneurs and learn that their thinking does not stop at the borders of Slovenia - or the EU for that matter.

• Andrej Nabergoj co-founded Parsek, a successful software company with branches in Europe, US and Japan. They are building rapid deployment e-business applications for a number of high profile clients
• Ziga Skorjanc runs Ceris, a company spun out of a government research agency; they specialise in security, software and ID cards. While at the Ceris offices, I saw a cool new vein scanning access security solution. The company is about to launch a promising new product; I will provide more information in due time.
• Joe Rain is investing time and effort in, amongst other ventures, the modelling agency bronz with the stated mission of promoting Slovenia internationally.
• Metod Vidic started branding company Mimikrija (Mimicry). I have rarely come across a more client-focused organisation: Besides the name, Mimikrija has no identity or branding of their own, nor do they have a company website. Their business cards mimic the branding of their clients.
• Barbara Uranjek recently returned to Ljubljana after three years in Paris working for Peugeot and finishing a marketing management degree at ESSEC. She is getting involved in direct marketing and CRM projects in Slovenia.

Can't wait to visit again. It was great to feel the buzz as well as enjoying great food, strolling around in charming Ljubljana and taking in the beauty of the Alps.

Tags: Slovenia entrepreneurs euro ebusiness branding CRM models

OTA is more relevant that OTD

On-time arrival and On-time departure, respectively.
While my previous article about airline punctuality was based on a UK data set, there is also an extensive US data set to study courtesy of the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
Ross Mayfield points to this data set and a related article in USA Today, wondering if airlines employ the wrong metric (OTD) as a quality indicator. One of the comments points to FlightStats as an easy interface to get information about the performance of a particular airline frequency.
The right metric from a passenger viewpoint is not to do with airline performance alone but also airport management and facilities. Gate allocation, immigration processing, baggage handling and effective transport links all enter into the equation determining how quickly you can get on with business at your destination.

Transparency of airline punctuality

A recent flight with Easyjet from Copenhagen to London offered a nice surprise. Soon after check-in, the departures board advised passengers to "Go to gate" and that the departure time had been moved forward by 10 minutes. The flight touched down 25 minutes early.
There is a war on in Europe between traditional carriers and the no-frills airlines. While cutting costs and in-flight services, the traditional airlines are claiming better safety and superior punctuality. Having just read Steven Levitt's book, I know these claims should be analysed by mining authoritative data sets, and I just discovered that the UK Civil Aviation Authority has published 15 years' records of punctuality for flights into and out of the UK.
The latest data is for July 2005 and covers some 65,000 scheduled arrivals at UK airports totalling more than a million minutes of delays (average delay 16 minutes).
Looking at flights from Copenhagen to London airports, the average delay is 16 mins. Specifying the delay by airline we get (rounded to nearest whole minute): Easyjet 5 mins, Scandinavian 16 mins, BA 19 mins and Maersk 23 mins.
The 808 flights from New York to London during July were delayed an average of 30 mins: BA 22 mins, Kuwait Airways 24 mins, United 28 mins, Virgin 33 mins, Continental 35 mins, American 36 mins and Air India 63 mins. The best frequency is BA departing from Newark, the 88 flights were only 8 minutes delayed on average to London.
What criteria do you use when booking a flight? Price and comfort quickly spring to mind but with a dose of pivot tables in Excel you can select by punctuality as well.