We Are Sooooo Uber Worthy

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Last week I was in Denver on business and needed to get a ride to the convention center from an area that didn’t have a cab within miles. One of the people I was with arranged a ride with Uber after I revealed that I didn’t have the app on my phone because we didn’t have the service where I lived (Piedmont Triad region of North Carolina). For the first time in a long while I felt like a backwoods Luddite.

Guess what? Uber’s coming to the Triad starting today:

The California-based company is expanding to Greensboro, Winston-Sale, Durham, Chapel Hill, Fayetteville and Wilmington, according to the newspaper. The company connects riders and drivers and has mostly been available in larger cities. It is already in use in Charlotte and Raleigh.

The mobile app is linked to a credit card and replaces hailing a cab or arranging for a car service. Customers download the app and the nearest available driver picks them up. A base fee of $2.43 is charged, and the customer is charged $1.46 per mile and 30 cents per minute. Uber gets a 20 percent cut and the driver keeps the remainder.

Does Google Glass + Livestream = Trouble for Event Planners?

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There’s an article in the Wall Street Journal about Google offering the Livestream app in its MyGlass store for Google Glass users. The article focuses on some of the privacy and copyright concerns that this raises:

On Tuesday, Google Inc. officially began offering the Livestream video-sharing app in its MyGlass store. The software lets Glass wearers share what they are seeing and hearing with other Livestream account holders free of charge by using the command, “OK Glass, start broadcasting.”

Users who want to broadcast to non-registered Livestream viewers can pay up to $399 a month to stream their video to the Web…

But privacy advocates worry that Google’s Internet-enabled, camera-outfitted glasses already make it too easy for wearers to quietly photograph and film other people…

Livestream’s terms forbid video that is unlawful, obscene or pornographic. The company addresses copyright concerns as it does with footage shot on conventional cameras: A video shared with a few friends might not cause problems, but Livestream would act to take down an illegal broadcast to thousands of viewers.

We could all probably come up with our own unique concerns related to this, but as someone who’s made a living selling professional education services the first thing I thought about was, “What would we do if someone walked into one of our conferences or seminars wearing Google glasses?” I mean, what if they had Livestream loaded and had arranged to have their coworkers watch the live video of the session? We’ve always faced the issue of having one attendee take all the materials back and share with their colleagues, but their colleagues would miss out on the interaction with the instructor and other attendees, not have the opportunities to ask questions, etc. With this technology one person could attend and provide a live video stream to colleagues who could then text their own questions to the attendee and get a truly “almost good as live” experience.

Of course my knee jerk reaction was that we’d simply ban the things from our sessions. But is that the right thing to do? As with most things the answer is “it depends.” There are lots of factors at play here: whether or not the instructor is okay with it, the nature of the material, the purpose of the class, etc. For example I currently work with a trade association and one of our primary functions is to provide education to our members. We have to balance the cost of providing the education with the budgetary constraints of our members – in other words we need to be careful that we don’t price our members out of the very classes their employees need, but we still need to cover our costs. In that scenario would we be hurt by a member sending one person rather than ten and thus paying $100 for the seminar versus the $1,000 they would have sent otherwise? Actually I think there could be opportunity there.

What do I mean by opportunity? Well, we could have a situation here where our members would be saving us the expense of creating our own streaming video service, which I think is going to become the norm in professional education. I think people will become comfortable with experiencing education sessions that aren’t professionally produced, that they’ll be satisfied with less than perfect video, and might actually prefer the experience since it will be more like sitting in the back row of a class than watching a professional webinar. So, how do we make sure it doesn’t cut our education revenue to the point that we can’t afford to put on these classes?

Here are a couple of ideas:

  • Create an upcharge for allowing wearable devices. If an attendee wants to wear Google Glass then they pay x% more to do so. If they don’t pay the fee then they can’t wear it in. We’re assuming they’ll share it with colleagues which means we could be losing out on additional revenue, but on the flip side we could pitch it as a member service – “Sure we’re charging you to wear your Google Glass, but we’re saving you money and your employees’ time away from the office.”
  • Because we aren’t having to provide seats to ten people from one company we could have seats opened up to more attendees from other companies. In the long run we might be able to reduce our overhead because we could downsize our training space and embrace a blend of in-person and remote learning.
  • We might be able to create sponsorships that take into account the increased exposure from the live streams and help offset the lost attendee revenue.
  • We could sell education by subscription. Companies can pay a flat fee to allow all of their people to attend any session. That removes the incentive to try and game the system and might even create a more predictable revenue stream for the organization.

That’s just a few ideas. Would love to hear from others how they see this type of technology will affect their businesses, whether or not they have anything to do with training. The possibilities in all businesses seem staggering to me.

I Agree With Dilbert-Man on This Topic

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Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, recently wrote a blog post claiming he’d roughly doubled his IQ while on some meds because those meds killed his libido. From his post:

The first thing you need to understand is that when your sex drive disappears you don’t miss it. You can’t miss what you don’t want. Rather than feeling irritable about losing the core organizing principle of my life, I felt relieved. It was like crossing off half of my to-do list with no effort whatsoever. My mind was clear. I was focused. I could go deep.

Losing my sex drive felt like a superpower. I had some of the best ideas of my life that week…When you have the option of putting all of your energy into one function – in my case my brain – it makes a huge difference.

My IQ as a eunuch was sizzling. In fact, if a eunuch applied for a job with me I wouldn’t even ask any other questions. I would hire him on the spot. It would be like hiring Superman to move your furniture. I would know that guy was focused.

So I’m closing in on 50 and while I don’t feel like a eunuch just yet, I do feel like a eunuch on more occasions than I could have ever imagined a few years ago. Unfortunately since my eunuch-ness is related to age I don’t think I’m experiencing any kind of IQ boost, but just so you ladies understand where Adams (and I) are coming from let’s continue with his post:

I should pause here to explain a few things to the women reading this blog. The typical male brain is a computer that has to reboot every 30 seconds. Men can think about non-sexual topics for half-a-minute, tops. But we know we’ll die if we don’t sometimes think about food and shelter and whatnot, so we’re continuously bouncing between sex and non-sex thoughts. It never ends.

Sometimes we game the system by merging our sexual and non-sexual thoughts. During the workday it looks like this: If I get this new job, I’ll make a lot of money, and that will increase my odds of sex. On our own time, it looks like this: If I exercise hard enough, my body will look attractive and that will increase my odds of sex. 
  
And if you’re married it looks like this: The news says there will be a meteor shower tonight. I hope my wife doesn’t get hit by a meteor, but if she does it will increase my odds of sex.

I believe that last paragraph explains why most women have no problem with their mate’s eunuchness. Hell, I wouldn’t be shocked if most of us (married men) have been eating food laced with saltpeter since the day our wives figured out they were done having kids and our essential function for them had concluded.

Update on Williams Road Bridge Repair in Lewisville

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From the Town of Lewisville’s Facebook page:

**UPDATE ON THE WILLIAMS RD BRIDGE CLOSURE**

The NCDOT now plans replace the bridge as a part of the necessary repairs that are needed due to a vehicle striking it some time ago. While work will start sometime around the month of January 2015, the bridge is not expected to be closed the until next March (2015).

The bridge will continue to be two lanes, but there will be added width to allow for a sidewalk to be added in the future.

The bridge is expected to be closed between March and August, 2015. Please share this with friends and family that may be effected.

NCDOT had said that the construction would begin this summer, so the delay is a bit of a bummer, but the expanded width to accommodate a sidewalk is very good news.

Best Argument I’ve Seen for Changing the Name

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Let me say this from the get-go: I’m a lifelong, avid Washington Redskins fan. Some of my favorite childhood memories come from games I attended, particularly the Skins NFC championship game victory over the Cowboys before moving on to beat the Dolphins for their first Super Bowl ring. My initial reaction to the name-change argument was typical of most fans’ – I thought it was an overblown, PC reaction to a few protesters’ complaints. Over time, however, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s really no good argument for the team keeping its name and this article offers the best reasoning I’ve seen for changing the name:

To a greater or lesser degree, the casual denigration of Native Americans sullies all the professional sports teams with Indian mascots, including the Braves, the Kansas City Chiefs, and the Cleveland Indians. But only the Washington team incorporates that denigration in its very name. When you a pronounce a slur, you affiliate yourself with the attitudes and actions of all the people who have used it before you, whatever your personal feelings about the group it refers to. There’s no exemption for good intentions, or even for ignorance. “Nigger” stings even in the mouth of a child who doesn’t know it’s offensive…

But everything changes when you come to realize that Redskins is genuinely offensive to some. A lot of fans react by getting defensive, decrying the whining oversensitivity of the complainers, railing about PC and the thought police. At that point, though, the game is already up. Once that testy or belligerent note creeps into the chants and songs, they can’t be innocent fun anymore. Best give it up, so the conversation can return to football.

As Terry Bradshaw puts it, “Finally I’ve given it some thought, and if it’s really offending people … Everybody loves the Washington Redskins but they can be the Washington something else.” This was never about PC, just manners.

I recently had someone tell me that he’d like to see the team name changed to the Washington Senators. My reaction to that was, “Well, these days that’s a term that would be denigrating to all but 100 people in this country.”

Back and Better Than Ever

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Lucy’s been writing the last couple of years, just not on her (in?)famous blog, Life in Forsyth. Now she’s back and better than ever:

You see a boy riding a bicycle.

I see four years of finding parking at CompRehab. I see a special chair in the lunchroom because he collapsed on little, round stools. I see a child laying on his belly over a giant ball and being gently rolled to learn balance. I see therapeutic pencil grips and modified desks. I see the little room where casts were made of his feet. I see IEPs and testing modifications. I see stair exercises with someone behind him for safety. I see adaptive technology.

I see strength and ferocity and determination.

I see a boy at long last riding a bicycle.

Hopefully she’ll forgive me for sharing an entire post.

Tennis Mecca in the Making in Greensboro?

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Could Greensboro’s Spencer Love Tennis Center become the region’s tennis mecca? From the Triad Business Journal:

The city has committed $175,000 to the project, with the management company that oversees all of Greensboro’s staffed tennis centers contributing another $175,000.

That would allow the center to add five or six courts. But if private fundraising is successful, the expansion could add as many as 18 courts.

Doing so would create one of the biggest clay-court centers in the South and make the center a destination for national and sectional tennis tournaments.

As for Winston-Salem, it’s great to have the Wake Forest tennis complex, but what should be our signature courts at Hanes Park could use some serious, well, love. Those things are a hot mess right now and someone should do something about them. Winston-Salem is hosting a bunch of USTA state tournaments this weekend and the out-of-towners who play at Hanes are going to wonder why we our primary downtown courts are a sandbox.

Digging Its Own Grave

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Some property in London is so valuable that it has become more economical to bury excavation equipment after it’s been used to dig new basements than to retrieve it:

The challenge of adding new subterranean floors to London houses has become a highly lucrative business. The heavy lifting – or, in this case, the heavy digging – is usually contracted out to basement-conversion specialists. These firms discovered that it was reasonably easy to get a small digger (occasionally two) into the rear garden of a house on an exclusive 19th-century square. Sometimes they simply knock a hole in the wall and drive the diggers straight through the house. In other cases, the windows are so large that a digger can squeeze through without dismantling the bricks and mortar.

The difficulty is in getting the digger out again. To construct a no-expense-spared new basement, the digger has to go so deep into the London earth that it is unable to drive out again. What could be done?

A new solution emerged: simply bury the digger in its own hole. Given the exceptional profits of London property development, why bother with the expense and hassle of retrieving a used digger – worth only £5,000 or £6,000 – from the back of a house that would soon be sold for several million? The time and money expended on rescuing a digger were better spent moving on to the next big deal.

The new method, now considered standard operating practice, is to cover the digger with “hardcore”, a mixture of sand and gravel. Then a layer of concrete is simply poured over the top. Digger? What digger? The digger has literally dug its own grave – just as the boring machines that excavated the Channel Tunnel were abandoned beneath the passage they had just created.

This sounds like a circa 2006 story which is kind of nerve wracking.

Four Health System Fixes Neither Party Will Touch

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Here’s an interesting article at Vox that outlines four ways the US health system could be improved, but neither political party will dare touch.  They are:

  1. Let in more immigrant doctors
  2. Curtail pharmaceutical monopolies
  3. Let non-doctors treat patients
  4. All-payer rate setting

Those first three are fairly self-explanatory, but the fourth is a little more complex. This excerpt helps explain it:

In Germany, the Netherlands, and the exotic foreign land known as Maryland they practice what’s calledall-payer rate setting. That means that instead of each insurance company negotiating separately with each hospital group on prices, a government commission sets a price that everyone pays. And it works. Maryland has curtailed cost growth without inducing any noteworthy shortages of health care facilities

Another advantage to all-payer rate setting beyond the simple ability to set low rates is that it would eliminate some of the necessity of doing everything through an insurance company middleman. Right now, one of the services your health insurer provides is a real insurance function that helps you hedge against risk. But for many people, the insurer’s most important practical role is as a negotiator. Since the insurance company has a lot of scale, it can get a good price from a doctor or a hospital. An uninsured person would have to pay at a much higher rate.

Reducing the insurance company’s role as a negotiator would let insurers focus more on the insurance function, and allow routine care to be handled in a more consumer-focused way. And by eliminating some of the advantages to sheer scale on the insurance side, it could also promote more competition in the health insurance industry.

Dear Lewisvillians, Roundabouts Work

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When I was on Lewisville’s planning board we had a couple of recurring debates, one about roundabouts and the other about cyclists. I always fell on the pro side of the roundabout debate and I’m happy to see that the MythBusters have shown they are indeed superior to four way stops.

BTW, Lewisville is slated to get more roundabouts in the future so we might as well get used to them.

http://seven.of.nine.wimp.com/loadvideo/d7fe763b17ae760fef524c658c476d20/53932a13/mobile-videos/9c609c887ee3f1c5991919a4bb979641_test.flv.hq.mp4