Category: Innovation (page 4 of 8)
I watched the following video earlier this week and was blown away. The basics of what’s described (kind of a mobile computer/projector/app device) are not that complicated; as a matter of fact, the mock up is made from off the shelf components. Imagine when these are combined into one sleek pendant hanging on a stylish chain…
The video shows some of the more fun uses (draw a temporary watch on your wrist with your fingertip, take a picture by holding up your hands to frame an image, “see” social media key words associated with anyone you meet… in real time, the list is amazing), but I was struck by how powerful this can be for real estate agents. I listed a few ideas below – watch the video first though.
Imagine walking your clients through a home with this device. Want to look at the neighborhood comps again? Why crowd around my Pad when we can just sit down in the dining room and see everything laid out on the table itself. Curious how a room would look if it weren’t painted Jimi Hendrix purple? Go ahead and stand back while I bathe the room in light close to the color you prefer. (Foam green? Really?) Don’t know if your entertainment center will fit on that wall? No problem, I’ll project a 3D image and we’ll check it out while we’re here. Prefer a guided tour of everything that’s right with this home (and maybe some of what’s wrong)? Great, the owners themselves are here virtually and will discuss each room as we walk into it. Want to write an offer? Great, let’s just step over to the living room wall here and sign your name using your finger.
Those are just a few ideas from a non-tech guy. What would you do with this device?
Good Jobs reading:
- What we can learn from Steve Jobs… by Eric Blackwell here at BloodhoundBlog
- “Capitalism makes better people — and you are living proof” — me at Splendorquest.com
- Steve Job’s most inspriational quotations
- Vodkapundit: Steve Jobs: A Legacy
- Andy Kessler: How Steve Jobs Changed The World
- The Amazing Steve Jobs Story
- What Makes Steve Jobs Great
- Steve Jobs Reigned in a Kingdom of Altered Landscapes
Ann Coulter gets a bad rap, I think. She is a demagogue, a dirty-pool artist, a Menckenesque presence in the public prints. But she is not a rhetor, a champion of pure debate. Rather, she is a satirist, and she is damn good at it. The shrieking she incites seems like so much group-glowering to me, whipped up, I expect, by people who know that a chorus of grievances, no matter how loud or plaintive, is not an argument.
Tonight she brings us a problem near-omnipresent video can easily solve: False accusations of rape:
Having showcased Jones’ original, false accusation in a 1,500-word article splashed across its front page, as soon as her story unraveled, the Times stared at its shoes and said nothing. In another six months, liberals will once again be citing Jones’ case as evidence of the “troubling trend” of sexual assaults among military contractors.
If only Jones had accused Bill Clinton or any member of the Kennedy family of rape, the mainstream media might have treated her allegations with a little more skepticism. But she accused employees of a company with a tertiary, long-ago, six-degrees-of-separation relationship with Dick Cheney. This was no time for journalistic integrity.
Still, wasn’t it the tiniest bit suspicious that Jones claimed KBR management responded to her rape claim by locking her in a shipping container?
Why would a company that already had a PR problem stick its neck out to protect accused rapists? Isn’t it more likely that a corporation would sell out even innocent employees accused of rape? Wouldn’t it have occurred to them that she’d eventually get back to the U.S.?
None of this could happen if there were video cameras everywhere and on everyone, and if the captured video were stored forever. No need for visual interpretation or database mining. Just a permanent record of everything that happens, for anyone to view in real time or review later. This is the omniscience we have always wanted from our gods, the irrefutable information necessary to correct injustices. But by making it an omni-omniscience — everyone has the capacity to observe anything they want to see — Read more
I’m kicking this back to the top from February of 2010, when the iPad had just been announced. In another of the posts in this series, I wrote: “The implication of a computer that can train its end-users how to use it is that teaching as a profession is dead. All teaching, at all levels. Just imagine what the iPad could do for you if you really wanted to learn a foreign language…” Technology is giving us the power to disintermediate vast numbers of state employees. No telling if we will actually do it, but it is by now eminently doable. This essay addresses that kind of disruption in the Rotarian Socialist marketplace. –GSS
I don’t know if I’m ready for this yet, but I need to get it out there where I can take a look at it. Discursive prose is thinking, first, not communication, and this is a big idea. It’s possible I’ll have to return to it again and again to make it completely pellucid, but I promise to do my best today.
So: One of the events the introduction of the iPad foretells is the death of mediocrity in the marketplace, and, along with it, the death of the kind of endemic contempt for the consumer that results in mediocre products and services.
Why would this be so? We’ll get to that, but indulge me long enough to discuss what is — the world as we live in it now — before we take up what is to come.
Why doesn’t the caps-lock key work properly on any Windows keyboard? When you have the caps-lock key down and you then type the “a” key while holding the shift key down, why do you get an “a” instead of an “A”? Surely when you typed shift-“a”, what you wanted as an “A”, not an “a”. Why has this always been broken on all Windows machines, and on all DOS machines before that?
The answer to those questions is quite simple. It’s because Microsoft has never once cared enough to get this right. It’s been wrong for decades in Windows, right for decades on Read more
The pitch…
That’s a sweet offer in the headline, don’t you think? It’s like Batman meets Ironman, but it’s all real — achievable now, no super-human powers required.
Not enough? You want more?
How’s this?
I can show you how to all-but-eliminate every sort of street crime.
I can show you how to protect any real estate or personal property you own from theft, mayhem, mishap or from simple maintenance oversights.
I can show you how to resolve almost every kind of civil dispute — without courts, without attorneys — and usually without rancor.
I can show you how to perfect your sales praxis to an amazing state of efficiency.
Hell, I can even increase your chance of successfully hooking-up at the singles bar.
I can cut your commute time, maximize your work-day productivity and save you from getting Aunt Whatshername’s name wrong when you see her.
Watch me: I can show you how to create a brand new trillion-dollar industry that will spin off dozens of start-ups as it is aborning and hundreds more later on.
I can show you how to mine an incredible new source of vast, uncountable wealth, a source no one has ever thought of before. I can put you there, at the dawn of a new age of human productivity — a pioneer, a prospector, and ultimately a tycoon in a brand new way of making money.
As you gaze upon that incredible motherlode of riches — knowing that there are unfathomable trillions more buried within it — I have one simple question to ask you:
To gain access to those riches — no fear of crime, no more petty lawsuits, better closing skills on and off the job, plus hundreds of new businesses, each one throwing off astounding new opportunities — would you be willing to correct one simple error in your thinking?
Are you willing to consider the proposition? Stay tuned…
The moth, the cat and the ontological nature of error…
Oh, good grief! Was there a fifty-cent word in that subhead?
There was, alas.
The good news is that, if you can hang in there, and if you have the guts to change a fundamental error in your thinking, I Read more
Here’s a true fact of life: Not-for-profit “businesses” suck. Don’t believe me? We’ll discuss it after you get back from the Department of Motor Vehicles.
To be fair, I’m willing to regard the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service (ARMLS) as something of an exception, at least as administered by Bob Bemis. Under the last guy, it was run like the Mayberry Jail. This was not entirely a bad thing for me at the time, but it was nothing at all like a business. And the Bemis ARMLS is no business, even now, even if it is significantly more efficient — which is not entirely a good thing for me now, alas.
But: ARMLS is a sleepy not-for-profit fiefdom that has been thrust by fate into the data-processing business. As an MLS, it’s not awful. But as a data-processing business — it sucks!
Why? For the same reason every other not-for-profit “business” sucks: Profits and losses are the guideposts to customer satisfaction in business. Without them, a not-for-profit “business” cannot ever hope to achieve customer satisfaction — which is not to imply that most of them are even trying.
Here’s the news, by way of Inman: ARMLS, now owned by four Phoenix-area Realtor associations, is to be sold for $4.75 million to the Arizona Association of Realtors instead.
First, metropolitan Phoenix Realtors will be robbed of an extremely valuable asset, and then all the other Realtors in the state will subsidize us hotshots in Phoenix, but that’s all just good old-fashioned Rotarian Socialism, to be expected from any crime syndicate with “Association of Realtors” as a part of its name.
And, as you might guess, the grand plan is to create a statewide Arizona MLS, so every neck can be conveniently strangled with one noose. ARMLS über alles.
But that’s all just the garden variety stupidity we expect from any not-for-profit “business”. We know from organizational theory that every sort of “service” organization comes to be a force of evil deployed against its own supposed “masters”. Do you disagree? Clearly you’re not spending enough time trying to renew your driver’s license.
I like Bob Bemis, along with the people I Read more
The question comes from a comment to a post at Seattle-based start-up blog, GeekWire. The news? Zillow.com is bumping the per-share price on its forthcoming IPO to as high as $18, up from the $12-$14 range it started with when the public offering was announced.
I like that question, because it parallels one of my own: What, precisely, can Zillow hope to do — other than provide big paydays for its VCs and founders — with $71 million in new funding? Which parts of the site will require that much build-out?
My take: The web-tech IPO craze that’s going on right now is just the next phase in the rape-the-rubes strategy Wall Street has pursued since internet start-ups came on the scene in the late ’90s. There is plenty of money to be made churning the stock of “businesses” that, in the end, all amount to MySpace.com — all hype, no actual value.
What’s the name for that phenomenon…? Oh, yes — a bubble.
The good news: Cynthia Pang Nowak, formerly Redfin.com’s queen-bee PR geek, is now signed on with Zillow. While she may be both the smartest and most breathtakingly beautiful woman on the Puget Sound, it remains to be seen if she can answer the BloodhoundBlog question: What would David Gibbons do?
Meanwhile, GeekWire.com deserves your daily attention. Run by Todd Bishop and John Cook, formerly the start-up reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and a long-time friend of BloodhoundBlog, it’s kind of like TechCruch in the rain — but without the bluster and hyperbole. The daily email digest is quick way to keep up with the wired side of our world.
But: Am I all wet? Does Zillow.com look like a buy to you at $18? Can it go to $36? To $180? To $0.01? I like the people who work there, and the founders have been very good to us from the beginning. But I’ve never seen the value of Zillow.com, except as an advertising play, and I still don’t. As with the comment quoted above, am I missing something?
A fascinating story about open source programmers deploying Microsoft’s Kinect hardware in amazing off-label applications.
For 25 years, the field of robotics has been bedeviled by a fundamental problem: If a robot is to move through the world, it needs to be able to create a map of its environment and understand its place within it. Roboticists have developed tools to accomplish this task, known as simultaneous localization and mapping, or SLAM. But the sensors required to build that map have traditionally been either expensive and bulky or cheap and inaccurate. Laser arrays cost a few thousand dollars and weigh several pounds, and the images they capture are only two-dimensional. Stereo cameras are less expensive, lighter, and can construct 3-D maps, but they require a massive amount of computing power. Until a reasonably priced, easier method could be designed, autonomous robots were trapped in the lab.
On November 4, a solution was discovered—in a videogame. That’s the day Microsoft released the Kinect for Xbox 360, a $150 add-on that allows players to direct the action in a game simply by moving their bodies. Most of the world focused on the controller-free interface, but roboticists saw something else entirely: an affordable, lightweight camera that could capture 3-D images in real time.
Within weeks of the device’s release, YouTube was filled with videos of Kinect-enabled robots. A group from UC Berkeley strapped a Kinect to a quadrotor—a small helicopter with four propellers—enabling it to fly autonomously around a room. A couple of students at the University of Bundeswehr Munich attached a Kinect to a robotic car and sent it through an obstacle course. And a team from the University of Warwick in the UK built a robot that had the potential to navigate around post-earthquake rubble and search for trapped victims. “When something is that cheap, it opens up all sorts of possibilities,” says Ken Conley of Willow Garage, which sells a $500 open source robotics kit that incorporates the Kinect. (The previous non-Kinect version cost $280,000.) “Now it’s in the hands of just about anybody.”
Robot freaks weren’t the only people to explore the Read more
Steve Jobs is going to do the keynote presentation at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference tomorrow. Surely part of his motivation is to show Apple’s shareholders that he is still in charge. But Jobs wouldn’t be doing this if Apple didn’t have some cool new toys to show off.
Systems designer Kevin Fix speculates about what might be on the agenda:
I get the feeling that the announcements at next week’s Apple WWDC are going to represent the same kind of fundamental shift in Apple’s offering that the iPod did in 2001.
I don’t have any inside info, and I make a point of not trying to pry secrets from my friends who work at Apple, but the rumblings are huge. ‘iCloud’ could mean anything, but given the complete failure of MobileMe over the last decade there’s no way Apple would introduce it on such a pedestal unless it’s incredible. My guess is that iCloud is to MobileMe as iPhone was to Newton: a complete, deep, polished solution after an underwhelming market failure.
Apple took a long time to get the Internet. Geeks were still installing FTP clients and web browsers for years after Apple belatedly included TCP/IP and PPP to their OS and, when Apple finally did integrate the Internet into Mac OS, it was in a very tacked on kind of way. A browser, an app for making web pages, eventually a few vertical online stores. I think that’s all about to change.
The scene has been building for a long time: The iPhone blurred the line between using a local device and being online. Chromebooks propose to eliminate the line completely by using an OS that expects to be online all the time (though still has limited functionality when the wireless cord is cut). Dropbox is a huge hit because it provides the most seamless way to use native apps while still writing to the cloud. Google and Amazon are tripping over each other (and the music labels) trying to roll out virtual music lockers.
My guess though is that these vertical solutions will seem pretty thin by the end of next week.
What, specifically, Read more
Steve Jobs in Forbes. One of the most hateful precepts of socialism is the idea of existential equality. We are all equal politically, but in the things we do with our lives we are very different. The world we live in is much richer because Jobs is alive now, too. We will be poorer when he shuffles off this mortal coil. The best thing we can do — for ourselves, for our businesses and in tribute to the best the human mind can achieve — is to learn to think as Steve Jobs thinks.
I have every intention of talking about the paradigm shift in software engineering that is being ushered in by the iPad. The iPhone pushed us half the way there with “apps” — dedicated client interfaces into server-based databases. The iPad pushes all that much further, with interesting implications for real estate marketing.
Meanwhile, I’d like to use a very simple example to illustrate how a small change in the way software operates can result in big changes in the way we live our lives.
Consider the alarm clock: Big, clunky and loud, a magnificently useless dust magnet. One alarm, one time a day, set it and regret it. The digital age brought us the snooze alarm, and micro-electronics gave us the his-‘n’-hers alarm clock with a weekend override. But still very dumb technology, guaranteed to fail — partially twice a year at daylight savings time and completely every time the electricity goes out.
Enter the iPhone:
What you are seeing are my early-morning alarms: I get up early to deal with my email and to work out, then I get back into bed with Cathleen to snuggle for fifteen minute before we both get up to walk the dogs and get our days started.
The point is, I can have as many alarms as I want. It’s useful for software engineers to replicate analog tools in digital form. End-users already understand the concept, and so the new software simply seems to replicate the familiar analog functionality.
But this is not true, all appearances to the side. By enabling you to set up — say the word: to program — as many alarm clocks as you might need, the iPhone’s implementation of the alarm clock idea permits you to shift the way you have always thought about that wretched noise that greets the dawning.
This is an extremely simple example, but a useful one, I think. Software, at a minimum, permits us to do a better job at the things we’ve always done. But if we stretch our minds and use the tool as it can be used, and not simply as we have always used it in the Read more
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
–Oscar Wilde
Like the kitschy “antique” phones at Restoration Hardware, this is decadence.
Nothing but a coy little pomo trick of the mind, but this is how it starts: You have no reason to prefer our product over any other, so we’ll tease you with nostalgia and cool-geek chic, instead. There’s a laptop that praises itself on the strength of its Unique Selling Proposition: Interchangeable “skins.”
You heard it here first: Computers is dead.
But despair you nothing: Particle physicists have caught a glimpse of an unseen aspect of our world, unthought of just a year ago. These are the first days of understanding mass as subatomic physics. Very cool.
The implication? Clowns to the left of me. Jokers to my right. But that says nothing about where I can take myself. The human race is Fortune’s treasured pet, obviously, and with luck we will continue to outrun outright predation, the terminal stage of cultural decadence.
Which side are you on? Are you just another gelatinous face in the mob, grasping for some way to trick people into doing business with you? Or do you have the character to bring real value to the marketplace?
This is a response to a comment from Robert Worthington. I’ve turned it into a post because I talk too much.
> On average how many visitors are you getting monthly to your site?
I have no idea. I’ve never been fastidious about analytics, and by now I’m useless. I have no idea which pages are tickling Google (known to my stupid soul as Urchin — that’s how long it’s been since I bothered with any of this) and which are not. Most everything is new, so most pages, presumably, are not even hitting my Analytics account, which I have not visited in years, in any case. I suck at SEO, too. And my CRM-life is CRM-free, still, after years of kvetching about it.
I need a high-C to bring order to my life, clearly, but there’s more:
I don’t do Twitter or Facebook. I don’t write much on my real estate weblog and I never go off topic. I don’t get many comments from normal people, I don’t unmoderate comments from real estate professionals, and I don’t encourage comments in any case. The calls to action are email or phone. I write here and there and nowhere else.
I do not believe my clients need me to be their buddy.
I do believe they need me to be an expert on residential real estate and how to go about buying, selling, renting, leasing, improving and profiting from it.
So: I have written tons of content over the years, and I deliver it all on my real estate blogsite. I have no idea how many people see it, nor how many dig in and read it. But I know that the people I hear from are almost always pre-sold on working with us, and most of those contacts turn into closed transactions — many of them multiple transactions, some with multiple-transaction referral trees.
On top of that, we deliver tons of dynamic content, mostly in the form of MLS listings. Every dipwad in town has search, but we have the best MLS search available from any Phoenix real estate brokerage, and we’ve optimized it in ways that other brokerages Read more
…but that was before I saw the new Smart Covers…
Minor upgrade to the product. Major upgrade to the experience. The video samples Extraordinary Machine, and that’s just exactly right.
This is egoism in action: Steve Jobs is a spectacular genius at satisfying himself. Not everyone loves what he loves, but he never releases a product that is not perfect in his estimation. Bill Gates and all of the CEOs of the kleptocracy can say that about not one thing they do in their whole benighted lives…