Don’t Tell Me What’s Impossible!

 There was a time when the only people who ever wondered if comic book technology would be possible in the real world were dyed-in-the-wool science fiction geeks, like me and my friends, and in fairness we also wondered if super powers were possible, if psychic powers were possible, if faster-than-light travel was possible, if magic was possible, if cloaking devices were possible, if artificial intelligence was possible, if cloning was possible, if time travel was possible, if alien life forms actually existed, if Big Foot really existed, if any of the cryptozoology critters you read about really existed, if adult women who actually like geeks (like us) really existed, and if it was actually possible to talk with one without spontaneously combusting…

Fortunately for all of us – including that significant portion of the world’s population that had never considered any of those questions until now – some of us geeks grew up with the talents, education, wealth, or simple chutzpah to investigate these questions. Consequently, computers more powerful than anything NASA owned when we went to the Moon fit into the back of your cell phone, robots are now exploring the surface of Mars (and building all manner of consumer products right here in Michigan), there has been an honest-to-Buck-Rodgers space station orbiting the Earth for the past twenty-two years (as of 2021), and a team of brilliant lunatics have not only build 3-D printers that can print things made out of titanium, they also allowed Adam Savage from Myth Busters to build a flying version of the Iron Man armor with it…

I found the video on YouTube, but you can probably get more information off the Science Channel website, since the project was part of Adam’s new series airing on that network. Although, according to the linked file, producing this particular episode seems to have consisted of asking Adam if there was any project he felt like doing and then getting out of his way, since he already knew the people who had invented the titanium 3-D printer and the jet pack system necessary to make the suit fly. The result is every bit as amazing as you would probably expect, especially when you consider that in addition to taking off and flying around the hangar complex under its own power, the suit also turns out to really be bullet-proof and capable of shrugging off an explosion from three feet away…

Now, by this point I’m pretty sure that anyone reading this post (assuming I have readers) is asking why I’m geeking out over mad science and/or bewildering technology instead of just making notes on a business page. And I have to admit it’s a fair question; I have no idea what the commercial possibilities of a flying suit of bullet-proof and bomb-proof armor might be, or even what the business implications of being able to 3-D print materials as hard and rigid as titanium might turn out to be. What I do know is that when I was a kid both the 3-D printer and the Internet itself would have been considered comic-book fantasy, no more realistic than transparent airplanes, super-powered aliens who grew up in Kansas, or the Norse God of Thunder fighting crime in New York City…

For as long as I can remember, one of my pet peeves has been people telling me that things about which they know absolutely nothing are impossible, particularly when some of those things were already happening. When I grew up and realized that people were destroying perfectly good companies the same way, with all of the ill effects for the world and all of humanity that such destruction implies, it became more than just a simple irritant. Finding out why people do these things, and getting them to stop, has been the focus of my life for most of the past two decades, and the motivation for my misadventures in academia in the first place. Because the truth is, I have no more idea what weird, wonderful, and completely insane technological developments will pop up the next time I go wandering around on the Internet than anyone else, let alone what the commercial implications of those achievements might be…

But I’m quite certain that we all need to be more careful about saying things like “That’s Impossible!” Before more of us end up having to eat our words…

Overlooked

Every so often you may find yourself reading an interesting story, in whatever medium you prefer, when you suddenly realize that the authors have just made a casual reference to something far more amazing, surprising, or completely game-changing than the original topic of the article. This may indicate that your understanding of the topic, the industry, or the world itself is out of date; alternately, it may indicate that the authors are taking something for granted that isn’t general knowledge, just because it isn’t novel to them. But in the case of the Lockheed-Martin “Speed Racer” unmanned aerial vehicle, I think it’s possible that I just have a different perspective than the technology writer who authored the original article…

I got the story from the Popular Mechanics website, but only because it was picked up by the News app on my iPhone. Apparently, when they say “There’s an app for that!” they aren’t kidding. The new vehicle called the “Speed Racer” UAV is an interesting piece of technology in its own right, a drone that can be used both as a reconnaissance platform and as a cruise missile. If you load it up with sensors it can penetrate contested airspace and send information about the battlefield back to its carrier vehicle, and if you load it with an explosive warhead it becomes an extremely stealthy missile that can find and destroy anything you tell it to look for. Even better, it can apparently be launched by any aircraft big enough to carry it, without the need for any added equipment – Lockheed is apparently testing it with a Beechcraft model 1900, a light transport airplane called a C-12 in military service…

The possibilities for launching both advanced reconnaissance drones and advanced cruise missiles from a common, off-the-shelf transport craft are already extraordinary. If this article is correct, not only could the drones be fielded at a fraction of the cost of building a new carrier vehicle (let alone the cost of a new manned airplane for the same purpose), but the US could also deploy them from widely-dispersed platforms that would also be indistinguishable from a common commercial transport. The implications of Lockheed’s “StarDrive” design system may be even more amazing, however, especially from a business standpoint…

The details of the system are highly confidential (and probably classified, as well), but the technology involved allows the company to move from conceptual drawings to a working prototype aircraft in months, not years, using computer-aided design (CAD) and robotic manufacturing equipment. For example, the company was able to produce the first prototype for its new advanced fighter in less than a year from the completion of the first concept drawing. This doesn’t quite match the 173 days North American Aircraft needed to produce the first P-51 Mustang prototype, but the long-term possibilities in the face of the military and commercial Cold War now ramping up are intriguing…

Imagine the possibilities if the US was able to field new military aircraft ten or twenty times faster than any foreign adversary, and implement upgrades and improvements to the design even more quickly. For that matter, imagine if Lockheed (and whatever corporate partners they deside to take on) were able to produce new commercial offerings for sale in the time it usually takes to decide to start a new design project. This technology has the potential to change not only the aerospace industry but any other industrial sector where the “StarDrive” system can be used in a cost-effective manner beyond recognition, and the authors of the linked article barely even mention it in passing as they discuss one of its recent accomplishments…

I’d like to think that the people who follow such developments have only just gotten around to telling the rest of us about it, and that they already realize the incredible competitive advantage this technology would offer to any company that could get permission to use it. And I certainly hope that anyone who might see their company wiped out by a competitor with this kind of tech is already talking to Lockheed about licensing possibilities. But either way, it’s a good example of why you should always consider the broader implications of what you are reading…

Electricity in the Air

Some time ago I was reading through the Smithsonian’s Air & Space magazine when I found a small blurb about NASA testing an all-electric airplane. The design wasn’t quite ready yet; there were still issues with the weight and storage limitations of the batteries, which gave the experimental craft a small payload and a very short range, but apparently they were working on the concepts involved. On the plus side, the electric airplane had many of the same advantages than an all-electric car would have had: zero emissions, low engine noise, and the ability to charge directly from renewable energy sources rather than guzzling fossil fuels. I remarked at the time that we were going to need this technology, and more likely sooner rather than later, so I was very interested to see a story on the Reuters site this week about Norwegian authorities testing a two-seat all-electric aircraft…

You can pick up the original story – including some cool video footage of the plane in operation – here if you’d like. Apparently the craft is built by a company called Pipistrel, in Slovenia, and so far hasn’t got either the power or range for more than a few test flights, but both the officials and Alister Doyle at Reuters agree that the concept, at least, has potential. For the moment, the problem is all about energy density. For all of the problems for which they are (justifiably) famous, fossil fuels do have the advantage of containing/storing a relatively large amount of energy in a relatively small mass and volume. Battery technology has improved a great deal in recent years, but a bank of batteries big enough to propel an airplane of any size is still too heavy to get off the ground, and even if it could take off it couldn’t stay up for long…

Project teams at NASA, and apparently several other agencies and companies around the world, are working on smaller, lighter, more-efficient battery designs and also trying to come up with lighter airframes. There has also been some additional work on solar panels; NASA has flown at least one experimental drone that is basically a wing made out of solar cells with a series of small electric motors driving propellers along the leading edge. Called Pathfinder, and built by the same company that build the original Gossamer Penguin solar-powered aircraft, the most recent version can stay in the air for up to 15 hours (depending on day length and other conditions) and may be able to reach altitudes as high as 100,000 feet…

Why does he tell us this? I hear some of you wondering. After all, this is a business blog, and I have no credentials as an aerospace engineer, or even an electromechanical engineer. Because the folks in Norway are talking about introducing an entire fleet of electric-powered aircraft by 2040, with commercial flights potentially starting much sooner. I’ve been speculating for some time that the key technology of this century, or at least the one that will impact consumer products and services the most directly, isn’t going to be electronics or software applications, but rather battery technology. Not because there is any indication that these new energy storage methods are under development, or that I would understand them if they were, but because the demand for such products is growing…

I’m not saying that battery-powered airplanes are going to appear any time soon; unlike the advances we’ve gotten used to seeing in processing power, memory storage, or software sophistication, battery technology will require advances in our understanding of energy density and transmission efficiency, and can’t just be tweaked by hackers in a basement in Menlo Park, or thrown together using stock parts by two rogue geniuses in a garage in Palo Alto. I can’t even tell you where or when the technical breakthroughs are going to happen; as previously noted, none of my degrees are in engineering. But ignoring the potential of this technology over the next few decades would be very much like ignoring the potential of microprocessors, packet-switching software, or microwave telecommunications back in the 1960s…

The Robots Strike Back!

Oddly enough, I have history with the much-reviled automatic dialer machines that goes back well before the appearance of the “Do Not Call” list that was supposed to have killed them off. Back on my first management job out of college, before the invention of the MP3 protocol or predictive dialing, my boss issued me one of the then-current generation machines (it used a cassette tape I had to record myself) and told me to use it to canvass the people in my district. I can still recall telling him it wouldn’t work for a service business that most people weren’t even aware was a thing, and some of the threatening messages I got from people who hated robo-calls back before that was popular. I can’t remember that we actually got a single client from the automatic dialer before I managed to convince the boss that the whole thing was a waste of time…

Over the years since, people have come up with a number of measures to fight these robotic sales calls, not all of them legislative in nature. A friend of mine once developed a gizmo that played the three-tone signal you hear when you call a phone number that is out of service just when he picked up the phone – causing the automatic dialers to think his line was out of order and disconnect. I’ve also known people who kept an air horn by the phone and would just blast the sound down the phone line until the thing disconnected, and people who made a hobby of tracking down the companies that were calling and pranking them in various fashions…

Over the years I’ve worked a number of cold-call jobs, mostly for non-profit organizations (which are exempt from the “Do Not Call” registry), during which I found out that the idiosyncratic pause you here before a modern automatic dialer starts playing its recording isn’t so much the machine waiting to see if the line is out of order as it is a side-effect of the dialing software. When one of these systems is working, each of its outgoing call nodes will be placing a dozen or so calls at once, and as soon as one that isn’t connected picks up it will select that one and start playing. This is how my old friend was able to spoof them into hanging up; it’s also the point at which I usually just hang up the telephone. But those tactics may no longer be enough…

Last week my phone rang, and when I answered it there was a short pause, and then a woman’s voice said “Hello? Oh, I’m so sorry; I was having a problem with my headset.” The voice then went into a pitch I’ve heard many times before, both from automatic dialers and from live telemarketers, telling me that because I had stayed at one of their “resorts” in the past, I had won a “free” four-night stay. This is the point at which I usually just say “Sorry, not interested,” and hang up the phone. If you actually go through with this scam “prize” you will generally end up having to buy something (typically transportation or more nights at the “resort”), assuming it’s not just an old-style phishing scheme in the first place. I did this and didn’t think any more of it until yesterday…

Shortly after lunchtime yesterday my phone rang from a local number, and when I answered it there was a brief silence, and then a woman’s voice said “Hello? Oh, I’m so sorry; I was having a problem with my headset.” It was the same voice, too. I tried interrupting the message, just to see what it would do, but there was no indication that whatever was reading me the program could hear me, even when I said several unpleasant things about its mother…

I’m not sure how many people are still using disruption devices to foil the automatic dialers, or for that matter how many people just make a practice of hanging up the phone before it starts playing the message. But there’s no question that the computers that run this class of program can store multiple outgoing messages, which means there’s no telling how many times it could make someone hesitate before slamming down the receiver. It’s just their bad luck that it didn’t realize I had heard that specific outgoing message before…

I don’t know what the next phase of this war will be like. But it seems clear to me that no amount of legal or legislative action will ever be able to take out all of the illegal automatic dialers that remain in use – and as of today, the robots seem to be getting smarter than ever…

EDIT: A week or so after I brought you this story, KTLA-TV in Los Angeles broke the news that some versions of this scam are actually recording YOUR voice if you reply to the robot, in attempts to use that recording to con you into believing that you have some verbal contract with the scammer. Which means that, among other things, saying unpleasant things about the robot's mother may not have been a bad response after all. It you get one of these calls you're probably still best off just hanging up, though...
 

Start Paying

People my age who are reluctant to dive into new technologies and new products are frequently accused of getting more conservative and/or cautious with age, but the truth is that I wasn’t a particularly early adopter of new products or technologies when I was young. Today, after witnessing any number of new ideas that looked wonderful right out of the box but took years to fully mature, it has become second nature to me to wait and see what happens to a product before I consider buying one. The first few generations of mp3 player had issues, for example; it wasn’t until three or four years later that an iPod version appeared that was actually reliable, and the same could be said for most types of smart phone, tablet, or even laptop computer. So when Apple Pay came out, offering to provide you with a revolutionary new way to buy things (“Store all of your credit cards in your phone!”) I was immediately skeptical of the idea. Now it appears that Bank of America, Citigroup, Capital One, American Express, Chase, and several of the other “Launch Partners” who got in on the ground floor with Apple’s new service are wishing they’d been a little more skeptical, too…

You can find the New York Times article here, if you want to, but it appears that thieves have been stealing credit card numbers and using Apple Pay to charge things on the linked accounts at an amazing new rate – estimates go as high as 6% of all Apple Pay transactions, compared to 0.1% for traditional credit cards. Or, to look at it another way, $6 out of every $100 on Apple Pay versus ten cents per $100 on traditional credit accounts; more than sixty times the “usual” rate for identity theft. One might reasonably expect all of the affected banks to be screaming bloody murder at Apple, or at least demanding that the company do something about the situation. But the really interesting thing about this case is that not only are the various financial institutions bending over backwards to avoid angering Apple, but it might not be Apple’s fault this fiasco is occurring…

As near as I can tell, all of the financial institutions in this story were so worried about being left out in the cold under Apple Pay that they failed to require anything more than basic credit card information (the kind that identity thieves steal every day in job lots) before allowing a user to upload credit card information onto their phone. Even the sort of security questions, billing address and telephone information, or passwords normally used for online transactions would have made a difference, but none of those measures were used. Even worse, when the issues with Apple Pay began to emerge, several of the banks detailed general customer service call centers – rather than actual fraud prevention teams – to deal with the situation. As a result, there have been numerous reports of thieves actually calling in themselves to tell the banks not to flag an account that is being used in another state or country (the old “we’re on vacation this week” scam repurposed for a new generation)…

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that the original oversight wasn’t completely understandable; new technologies and methods for separating consumers from their money that actually work don’t come along every day, and if Apple Pay ends up being as pervasive as some of their other products and services then any financial institution would have to be crazy not to try to get in on the ground floor. What is less excusable is failing to implement industry standard security measures at the same time, or at least devote appropriate anti-theft and anti-fraud support, although both would have been better. It seems highly unlikely that Apple would have objected to greater security, given that they also have a vested interest in getting as many people to use Apple Pay as possible. And, in fact, now that this story has gotten out and people are having second thoughts about the whole concept, Apple has started working with the banks to provide more account information and security measures…

Maybe once the technology companies and financial institutions get all of the bugs worked out, I’ll look into Version 3.1 or 4.3 of Apple Pay, or however many iterations it takes before the risks involved are no higher than any other form of credit card account. In the meanwhile, I may still be coming off as a grumpy and conservative old man, but at least I’m not having to call my credit card provider and demand to know why I am being billed for $12,000 worth of kumquats purchased in a country into which I have never set foot…

Already on the Street

In an amusing follow up to my Apple Watch post from earlier this week, CNN Money is reporting that cheap knock-off versions of the Apple Watch are already on the street in several major Chinese cities. Literally cheap, in this case; some of the knock-offs have been observed selling for as little as $40 US compared to a starting price of $349 for the cheapest model from Apple. The fakes aren’t that sophisticated yet; they’re mostly Android-based devices that don’t look anything like an Apple product or come anywhere near the performance level the Apple Watch is supposed to have. It’s hard to believe that these products are fooling anybody, especially considering that the real Apple Watch isn’t available for sale yet, but it does illustrate just how much of a problem knock-offs are becoming…

Traditionally, when you mention knock-offs, people will assume that you are talking about clothing or fashion accessories that have been made to look like a designer label but are actually just cheap copies made using inferior materials and/or workmanship. Depending on the complexity and quality of the original, it can take months or even years before the knock-off products achieve a fully convincing copy, but eventually many of these items will reach a point at which only an expert will be able to tell the real thing from a sophisticated copy. Knock-offs of electric or electronic products can work the same way, with black-market companies churning out cheap versions intended to fool the customer into believing they are getting the real thing, but there are also cases in which a competitor in the same industry will purchase the original product, take it apart, and then develop their own version of the same technology under their own brand…

How often this happens, and to what extent one product is an unauthorized copy of another, are legal questions that have kept battalions of lawyers busy over the years, and complicated international trade between countries that have strict laws against theft of patents and intellectual properties and nations that do not. What I find remarkable about the story linked above is the speed with which this seems to have happened, and the related factor of how easily the counterfeiters (called “shanzhai” in Chinese) have managed to produce a fake version of an Apple product. Even granted that the counterfeit products don’t begin to have the functionality or style of the real thing, it can no longer be denied that they have gone to market over a month before Apple will be ready to do the same…

Any time a large and powerful company takes forceful action to protect its designs, inventions, or brand image, there always seems to be some amount of push-back, as people assume that the company is being greedy and using its legal power (and money) to destroy potential competitors. And while, at least to some extent, that is probably true, it seems worth pointing out that sometimes the company really is being ripped off by small-time operators who know full well that they are stealing somebody else’s property. I don’t know what Apple is going to do about this rising trend in counterfeiting, or how it is likely to affect their sales in the future – but it does seem as though they should consider getting their products to market a little faster, or at least leaving less time between the introduction and the date the product is made available for sale…

Who is the Customer?

I was reading about the new Apple Watch product in the Los Angeles Times over the weekend, and wondering if Apple knows something we don’t, or if they’re just getting ahead of the market again. The truth is that the company has made the right call a number of times in the last two decades, but not always; Apple has had their share of ideas that didn’t fly or just weren’t ready. Their introduction of the first real smart phone changed the telecommunications industry, not just the cell phone industry, forever, and they were also right about the tablet computer. But at the same time, they introduced the Newton PDA well before such devices achieved common usage, and never really did compete effectively with Palm Pilot for that market. The question here is whether there is anyone out there who wants a remote display and control node for their smart phone that you wear like a watch – and, more to the point, if anyone is willing to pay $349 USD and up for such a device…

If you’re not familiar with the Apple Watch – and you may not be, since the things are not for sale as of this writing – the descriptions of it that we have seen so far suggest that it really is a watch; you wear it on your wrist and you can use it to tell what time it is. You can also use it to get weather reports, stock quotes and reminders from your calendar, or to send and receive text messages and play music. The units will have a limited ability to tie into health-related applications on your telephone, and can monitor the number of steps you take during a workout and similar factors. Naturally, you will need to have a functioning smart phone on your person for any of these functions to work; the watch itself will not have cell phone or Wi-Fi connectivity. In fact, it’s really more of a peripheral for your phone – and, in the case of the gold-plated ones, a fashion statement – than the two-way wrist communicators beloved of some science fiction settings. The real question is who is going to buy the things?

As the Times reporter correctly notes, a lot of young adults today don’t even wear watches anymore; you will generally see them checking their phones for the time. But older customers, who do wear watches, are far less likely to see a use for a remote/peripheral device for their phones. One of the true advantages to an old-fashioned analog watch is that it will continue to function even if your cell phone’s battery is dead, the local cell network is down, or you happen to be an inconvenient distance from the nearest cell tower. And unlike certain markets and segments Apple has invaded in the past, in this case there is no population of users for them to take over, because this product category has never existed until now…

Now, I don’t want to sound like I’m beating up on Apple. Every company has to find the ideal balance between how much of their time they spend making money off of products and properties they already own, and how much of their time they spend exploring new products or technologies that will help them to make money. Apple has gotten this question right more often than not; there’s a reason they are still around and still profitable after nearly 40 years. They’ve got a lot riding on the new product category this time, though; the Apple Watch is the first major new product type to appear under their new CEO’s leadership, and if it fails badly enough this could cost the company in terms of investor confidence and cost of capital, not just money wasted on developing, producing and marketing a product no one wants to buy…

If Apple has guessed right, then wearable computers (and peripherals) really are the next big thing, and we can probably expect to see an increasingly sophisticated array of wrist-mounted computing platforms appearing over the next few years, some of which may eventually replace the smart phones they are currently just connected to. If they are wrong, the Apple Watch may be about to join the Newton, the Lisa, and the Apple TV system as ideas whose time just hadn’t arrived yet. And if Apple is able to leverage the development of the Watch system into a new product line or category that they can sell, then the actual success of the Apple Watch is irrelevant; the company will make back its money through later developments of the same technology – just as they did in all of the above cases…

We’re Going to Need a Bigger Printer

There are times when I worry about some of the crazy ideas people get about technology. Of course, I worry about people in general, and given some of the things I have seen in my travels – people who actually believe that you could use a fax machine to send someone three-dimensional objects, for example – I’m not sure you can blame me. Technically, I suppose, it might be possible to fax 3-D objects, if you had a sufficiently powerful scanner on one end and a 3-D printer capable of working in some medium that could duplicate the original object on the other. However you still couldn’t transport an actual object, and you certainly couldn’t send someone a hot meal or a cold drink using such a method using the current printer technology. Moreover, given how expensive most of the 3-D printers are to use, there’s very little point in trying to make larger constructs using such a method. After all, as one of the designers behind the Star Trek franchise put it, if you can create starships at the push of a button, you probably don’t need to…

The same may not be true of buildings, however, if an article that turned up on the Wall Street Journal site last week is correct. According to the article, a Chinese firm called Winsun had developed what appears to be a very large version of a 3-D printer; one with nozzles that spray concrete instead of ink or sugars (or whatever), and which uses glass fibers for reinforcement. Using this giant printer, the company was able to pre-assemble enough parts to build 10 houses of 200 square meters each (about 1,460 square feet, if I’ve done my math correctly) in only 24 hours. The company is working on other applications for the system, including commercial properties, office buildings and so on. So far there is no word on how long it will take them to generate larger prefab elements, or how large a structure can get before this method will lack the structural strength to stand on its own…

Now, we should probably note that Winsun isn’t exactly putting a template for a house into a three-D printer and just pressing the “go” button. What they are assembling are effectively prefabricated sections for a building made entirely out of reinforced concrete, and there are definite limitations to how useful an all-concrete structure is going to be for residential/non-industrial applications. It’s also worth noting that anything you could actually call a “house” will also require glass for the windows, wiring for the outlets, doors that you could actually open (as opposed to ones made exclusively out of reinforced concrete), plumbing and fixtures made out of porcelain (or the equivalent), lighting, kitchen appliances, and a host of furnishings. Having the structure spring up in matter of hours – or however long it takes the concrete in the prefab sections to cure, anyway – would speed up the process, but it is debatable how much it would lower the cost. Despite what the article would have us believe, this is more “advanced prefab building technique” than it is “super high-technology magic…”

On the other hand, it is hard to deny that there are lots of useful things you can build out of reinforced concrete – and that if Winsun is actually successful in adapting the printer to use whatever salvaged materials come to hand in building its prefab sections, they might be able to overcome the cost issue. You’d still need the rest of a construction company to finish off the buildings, but there is some real potential here. And if someone applies the same technology to other building materials (there are already smaller printers that work with composite laminates, for example) there doesn’t appear to be any reason why you couldn’t fabricate all of your building components this way. Maybe we should keep an eye on this story going forward…

Business From On High

In the classic historical account The Right Stuff author Tom Wolfe details the phenomenal rate at which the luster came off the U.S. space program after the Apollo 11Mission landed on the Moon. Although manned space flight remained (and remains) a hot topic in other parts of the world, by the time the ill-fated Apollo 13 Mission launched the only thing that retained the interest of the American public was the malfunction that almost killed the entire flight crew – and the brilliant improvisations that brought them home safely. This continues to lead to some unflattering (and probably deserved) comments on the attention span of the American people, but the unfortunate truth is that by 1971 most people in this country were only paying attention to our space program when something extraordinary happened (e.g. Skylab, the first Space Shuttle launch, and two Shuttle disasters). This seems particularly unfortunate at the moment, considering that one of the most significant developments in the history of manned spaceflight and business is taking place somewhere over our heads this week…

If you missed it on your local news, you can pick up the most recent Forbes article about the Space-X Dragon spacecraft docking at the International Space Station with 5,000 pounds of supplies last week direct from the link. It may not seem that important at first – it is the fourth time the Dragon capsule has docked with the station, after all – but once you consider that price and convenience are the two major factors that have limited the commercial exploitation of space, this even becomes very significant. As exciting as the sound and fury of a rocket launch is, the critical aspect to any transportation system is reliability. A vehicle that can go someone once (or even six times) is at best a curiosity, at least from a business standpoint. A vehicle that can go somewhere whenever you want it to is a business asset. The Dragon has made the flight to the ISS four times already, as opposed to the single-use launch vehicles of the last century, and there is reason to believe it could do so indefinitely – or, at least, dozens of additional times. Assuming that you could find a cost-effective way of launching it…

This is what makes the other part of the linked article so interesting. The successful use of a privately-funded, privately designed launcher means that it is now possible for private companies to launch profit-seeking enterprises into Earth orbit without needing support from NASA or our national government. But even more potentially important is the successful test of the reusable Falcon 9 rocket. In theory, a reusable orbital launch vehicle would enable Space-X to lift payloads into space at a lower cost than any other entity in history – effectively opening up the commercial use of space to a huge range of companies that could never have afforded to place payload on a Space Shuttle or a Russian conventional rocket. A mass-produced reusable launcher would lower the costs still further. And if the company can produce a version of the Dragon – or one of their other designs – that is safe enough to be certified for human use, they could lift people to orbit for a fraction of what the so-called “Space Tourists” have been paying…

Now, even I have to admit that there are still a lot of “ifs” in that description, and a corresponding number of developments that we still have to await. It is possible that another company, or even another launch technology (such as the winged rockets being developed for Virgin Galactic) will become this century’s answer to Pan Am, leading the way into space and on across the cosmos. It is also possible that none of these things will pan out, commercial space travel will remain on hold for another century or two, or that humans will succeed in destroying our planet’s biosphere before we can get off of it and effectively exterminate ourselves. If I had all of the answers I’d be a multi-billionaire financial advisor and philanthropist, not a scruffy blogger nobody ever reads. But all of that said, I can’t help but think that what may be the most important technological development since the wheel may be taking place in the sky over our heads this week…

And, apart from a few space-mad history wonks like yours truly, no one is paying any attention…

Car of Tomorrow?

I do wonder sometimes if people from other professions get as fed up with conspiracy theories, popular beliefs, and idiotic fiction and screenplays as I do. Certainly, I’ve seen lawyers and paralegals of my acquaintance get annoyed when movies and television programs misrepresent the law and portray behavior so grossly incompetent and completely unprofessional that if any real attorney did them being disbarred would be the least of their worries. I’ve also known healthcare professionals who get infuriated by the idea that all diseases could be cured in an afternoon if a sufficiently brilliant doctor had to save his love interest in time to end the movie on an up note, and public health researchers who get outraged by claims that such cures are being suppressed by various power blocks. For my money, the defeatism is even worse than the paranoia – saying that we will never have vehicles capable of driving 300-plus miles on a gallon of gas because the Oil lobby and politicians who take money from them will never allow it to happen, rather than working to bring the Volkswagen XL1 to North America…

I’m not going to link to the original far-left ranting site; you can go to the Volkswagen site and download the brochure and press package for yourself if you want to. One quick glance over the specifications will help to dispel all of the ranting, although it may also disappoint the reader (assuming I have readers). It turns out that the XL1 isn’t a magical supercar that gets its power from the mad genius of Volkswagen engineers; it’s a one-cylinder diesel-electric hybrid with an 8.4 horsepower engine and room for two people and a bag of groceries. Two relatively small people, and a very light bag of groceries, at least. The fuel economy is very impressive, although it’s closer to 250 miles on a gallon of diesel than 300, but none of this changes the fact that this vehicle is closer in size and concept to the old EV-1 electric car or the Honda Insight hybrid, and I can’t use either one of them…

The payload data isn’t included in the download from the VW site, but in the case of the Insight, its payload is so small that while it would be able to transport me (assuming I could fit in the driver’s seat, which I can’t) any theoretical companion travelling with me would have to weigh 80 pounds or less, or the car would not be able to move. And that assumes that neither of us had a small bag of groceries – or a briefcase or purse – with us. Clearly, there will be a limited market for such a vehicle in the U.S., where we like our cars to be powerful and roomy – or at least able to leave the curb when loaded. Even worse, at least from a consumer standpoint, the price given for the production model is in the $150,000 range, or about twice what a Tesla roadster (which is street legal in the U.S.) costs. In fact, it’s almost three times what the much-maligned Chevrolet Volt or the beloved Toyota Prius cost…

As to why they aren’t available for import, Volkswagen is only building 250 of these things, exclusively for sale in Europe, and has not made them available for safety testing anywhere else. Given the limited supply and high price point, it seems likely that the company is using this small fleet as a proof of concept. That many units will provide enough data to determine if the machinery is reliable, if the car is safe on the road, what happens to the vehicle (and the passengers) in the event of a crash, and so on. If the company can prove that the product is safe and reliable, they will probably be able to bring it to North America – where it won’t sell, until and unless they can bring the price down by a factor of at least four or five, and double or triple the payload. For the moment the XL1 is basically a concept car right out of an auto show, and conspiracy theories about this vehicle are completely asinine…

If Volkswagen can overcome those technical problems, however, it isn’t hard to imagine this “Super-Efficient Vehicle” (or SEV) doing to all of the current American car companies exactly what its beetle-shaped ancestor did to the industry in the last Century. If that happens I expect we will be hearing about a lot of new conspiracy theories – and a lot of unemployed auto workers. I’m not sure our domestic companies can survive another fiasco on that scale…

They’re Everywhere!

So I’m getting into the line at the Hertz counter to pick up my rental car, when one of the employees working the floor tells me I can do all of that using one of the kiosks. Looking around, I notice a line of small machines, a little smaller than a bank’s ATM, each of which appears to include a touch-screen computer interface, a second monitor mounted at about eye level, and a telephone handset like the one on an old-style payphone. After a moment, I realized that there was a video camera mounted just below the upper monitor, like you sometimes see in a teleconferencing or video phone setup. The line in front of me was about 20 people, and there were only four live agents working the counter, which struck me as a rather silly way to spend an hour or more, so I decided to give the kiosk a try. I walked over and touched the “Start” icon on the lower screen…

It took a few minutes, but eventually the upper screen lit up, showing me the face of a woman and a nametag that gave her name and said she was working in the Oklahoma City call center. The conversation went about the way renting a car usually does, including the agent on the monitor trying to sell me on various upgrades and add-on services that I didn’t need (this wasn’t a driving vacation, it was a business trip, and I don’t need GPS navigation to find my way around the city in which I grew up). The kiosk had a card-reader which proved capable of reading the magnetic strip on my Driver’s license as well as the one on my credit card, and after a few more attempts to enhance my bill the printer built into the kiosk came to life and spat out my rental car documents. All I had to do was go find the numbered parking space the agent on the screen had mentioned and drive off…

I didn’t really have time just then to start interviewing my rental agent – and it can be really difficult to get someone to answer your questions when they can just press a button and disconnect your video call. But from what the agent told me the company maintains a very large call center at their Oklahoma City complex, and the agents working there may find their workstation linked to a Hertz kiosk anywhere in the world as needed – presumably assigned according to the language choice selected by the customer when they log into the kiosk screen. This means that instead of having a large crew of rental agents standing around in each airport and rental location waiting for customers to assist, the company only has one large group of rental agents standing around in the middle of North America, who can help our wherever they happen to be needed at the moment. With a couple of extra shifts this one call center could take care of customers in rental locations all over the world, all without leaving their cubicles…

Now, I’m not sure this idea would work in all industries. Most companies with equivalent business models have either build completely automated systems – telephone and website – that allow the customer to take care of his or her own business as desired, or have retained live personnel at their customer service locations, or occasionally both. The airline I was flying that day, for example, handles all of the check-in and seat-assignment tasks using automated kiosks, but has live agents standing by (one for every five to twenty-five automated terminals, depending on the location) to handle anything too complicated for the automated system. Since those duties do occasionally involve handling or moving baggage, an agent calling in from a remote location couldn’t handle them. But there are any number of other businesses that could use such a system…

I suspect that as telecommunications systems (and bandwidth) become cheaper it will become economical for more companies to use this sort of remote live agent system. Whether this is ultimately good for the customer, or for the employees, remains to be seen. But there is something appealing about the idea of a team of customer service representatives being stationed at every company location in the world simultaneously…

Some versus All

Every semester when I begin the first day of my class, I like to tell my students that before the term is over I’m going to learn things from them, and I will do my best to teach them at least as many things. This is actually the case for any teacher, given that it’s not possible to teach anyone anything without learning more about the subject yourself in the process, but it’s probably even more correct in the case of business teachers. As I like to point out, I probably know more about business, or at least management, than any one member of the class – I’ve had twenty years of experience and two Master’s degrees; I would hope I know a few things about my subject. But there is no way I know more about business than the entire class put together; even allowing for just a few years of work and consumer experience for each person, the 40 of them have several times more years of business experience than I’ve been alive…

This makes cases where the people who run school systems assume that they are smarter, cleverer and more knowledgeable than all of their students combined seem all the more preposterous. Collectively, your students possess an amazing amount of knowledge, and a frightening mutual ability to solve problems, work out puzzles and generally outthink you. In the case of a security protocol or a lockout code, you are essentially betting that you (or whoever wrote the code) are smarter than the collective intelligence of hundreds or thousands of bright, curious, imaginative people – and that’s just counting the smart kids. Which makes the fact that students in Los Angeles required only a matter of days to hack the iPads they were issued by the school district an event so obvious it’s hard to imagine why nobody saw it coming from the beginning…

You can read the NPR story about it here if you want to, but the facts seem clear enough. The Los Angeles Unified School District signed a $30 million deal with Apple to provide iPads to all of their students for use in a variety of digital and distance learning applications, and then equipped the devices with software to both allow the schools to track the location of each iPad and also to restrict what web sites each unit could access. Less than a week later over 200 units had been “hacked” to get around the restrictions, and unless the software patches introduced this week are better than the original programming, there is reason to believe that all of the rest of them will be before much longer. As a teacher myself, I can’t even think of a bad metaphor for how obvious these events are. A much better question, at least from a management standpoint, is what are we going to do about it?

Keeping our students off of restricted web sites isn’t really possible. If the government would allow us to jam all wireless transmissions into and out of the classroom we might be able to keep our students from updating their Facebook page while we’re actually talking to them, but the FCC won’t even consider such an action, and just asking nicely (or threatening to lower grades) does not appear to be of much use. And, as the linked story makes very clear, if we take away the official iPads our students will just turn to smart phones, tablets and other devices they already have. It’s possible that if the District were to invest enough money in encryption software they might be able to make the restriction stick, but I can’t help thinking that’s just throwing good money after bad…

In a broader context, of course, this whole situation mirrors the conflict between all managers (who want to see more work getting done) and all workers (who want to get paid as much money for as little work as possible). The District can’t compel the students to spend all of their time, or even the time they are supposed to be spending, in approved fashion, any more than a manager can. What they can do is borrow the same standard most line managers use, which is simply that if you work is completed (correctly) in the time required, then I don’t care what else you’re doing or how you are spending your remaining time. It may not be the authoritarian method of which the District seems so fond, and it certainly won’t help them to establish or maintain discipline. But it’s probably more effective in the long run than just giving all of the pads back to Apple…

So They Must Change Me…

It has been said (by people wiser than me, let me hasten to assure you) that the world’s only constant is change; that the only thing we can be sure of going forward is that we can’t be sure of anything going forward. This has certainly been true in my experience – if you had asked me, twelve months ago, to tell you what I would be doing now, preparing lesson plans and exercises for the four sections of Management 409 I am scheduled to teach at Michigan State this coming semester would have landed somewhere between walking on the moon and being elected dogcatcher. Which is to say, rather less likely than winning the Nobel Peace Prize or finding a cure for the common cold. But when I reflect back over the past year, and a few of the ones that came before that, I can’t help thinking that generation gap that results from civil, cultural, or technological change is almost as universal…

Consider, if you will, the people who persist in the belief that e-commerce is a passing fad, and that if we all stick our fingers in our ears and yell “LALALALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!” loudly enough it will all go away. It may seem unique to this current time – and indeed, it would be difficult to name anything quite as dramatic as the sea change that our society has undergone over the past two decades. But if you think back (or ask your tribal elders, in the case of you younger geeks), you may recall that VCRs were another “passing fad” that turned out not to be. Recording television programs and movies and viewing them when YOU wanted to see them led directly to current technology such as DVRs, on-demand cable programming, downloadable audio and video files, file-sharing sites and even things like You Tube and Twitter – not exactly ephemeral trends…

If we go back a little further, cable television was considered a fad when it first appeared – who would pay for television when you could get it for free over the airwaves? In the 1970s (and into the 1980s) there was (briefly) a generation gap between those who loved having dozens of entertainment choices and wanted their MTV, and those who longed for the days of Masterpiece Theater and newscasters who were more widely trusted (and respected) than any government official…

I wasn’t around for the appearance of television itself, but my parents told me about the time when the first sets came onto the market, and the people who disdained the new medium sneered about how a broadcast program you could see would never live up to the imaginary landscape created in their generation’s radio dramas. My grandparents told me about a similar gap that appeared between fans of the original motion pictures and those with synchronized audio tracks – the so-called “talking pictures” or “talkies” that changed everything following World War I. And my grandfather, who was born in 1904, told me about the disdain his parents’ generation had for moving pictures, which would never live up to the power of live performance…

This is not to say that every new technology will evolve into something that changes our world forever. Digital Audio Tape (DAT) never really caught on as a mass-media format, and neither did DVX (single-use DVDs that self-destructed after you watched them). More to the point, perhaps, audio CDs are on their way out, slain by the iPod and downloadable content, and the iPod itself is showing signs of being made irrelevant by its own descendent, the iPhone. People who cling to the CD will most likely end up in the same role as those who cling to vinyl records, reel-to-reel tapes, and wax recording cylinders, what is less obvious is that people who insist on clinging to the current technologies will most likely end up in that same place…

As we move forward into the New Year, the only thing we can be sure about is that the world will change, and we will have the choice of changing with it or wondering why none of the products, services or media we want to use are still available and why everyone keeps referring to us as “Luddites.” I can’t tell you where I’m going to be on New Year’s Eve 2013, or what I’ll be doing at that time; the only thing I can more or less guarantee you is that whatever happens next won’t be anything like what we expect it to be, and that no protest we make is going to matter. In the end, it doesn’t matter if you believe in change; change believes in you…

In a few hours it’s going to be 2013. Let’s be careful out there…

3D or Not 3D: That Is the Question!

For at least the past fifty years, people have been debating the usefulness of three-dimensional effects in the movies – and whether this represents the future of the medium or an occasionally annoying novelty. The recent versions have been much more impressive than the old-fashioned red and green 3D glasses, with images that really do appear to be extending off of the screen and into your personal space, but even the best of them still have issues, such as making the picture noticeably darker and murkier. The new “glasses-free” technology is promising, but they still don’t have the bugs out of it, and even if they did, there are very few movies (and even fewer television programs) which were shot in the right format to make any use of it – which makes the fact that several companies have been trying to market television sets with the glasses-free 3D feature all that much harder to explain…

A story which ran this week on the New York Post website explained how the relative failure of these 3D television products is contributing to the failure of the ESPN 3D service, and may ultimately lead to the disbanding of the channel. It turns out that most of the companies who have been paying for ad time on the new network have been ones that manufacture the 3D television sets – which makes very little sense, since anyone watching ESPN 3D would already have a 3D television set, and anyone who doesn’t have such a television set wouldn’t be watching the new ESPN in the first place. Moreover, since the 3D televisions aren’t selling all that well, the companies that make them can’t afford to keep buying up prime time advertising on ESPN 3D, and may pull their funding – which would leave the network with no revenue to keep it going…

Exactly why anybody thought that either the television sets or the channel that catered to them were worth spending money on in the first place remains unclear. The new 3D movie technology has brought in a lot of money (since theaters charge more to see the 3D versions of movies), but unless a lot of broadcasters and cable companies started investing in 3D cameras, the cable and pay-per-view versions of those same 3D movies would be the only things you could watch on such a device – and those few movies would still be “edited” by most channels, making them an inferior copy anyway. But even if we can somehow account for why the management teams of these companies felt that home-use 3D systems were a good idea, that still doesn’t explain why they didn’t realize that the consumer market wasn’t ready for such products. Even the most basic focus-group research should have revealed that most people have no use for a very expensive piece of home entertainment electronics that they can’t –as of yet – use for more than a single cable channel and a few specific movies…

The ironic part of all of this is that eventually 3D cameras probably will become standard – or, at least, no more expensive than any other video systems – and increasing numbers of television productions will start using them. If the price of the 3D-capable television sets drops in the meanwhile (or if similar products are introduced at a lower price later on) this technology might be a real winner. The question right now is when that will happen – and if it was worth getting in on the new technology wave right from the beginning. Personally, I can wait…

Non-Story

I was wandering around on some of the online news sites this week when I came across a story from Reuters on the MSNBC site about how Americans are getting fed up with poor customer service according to a new poll conducted this past March. In particular, the study noted that 64 percent of respondents reported having walked out of a retail store because of poor customer assistance, and 67 percent reported hanging up on a customer service call before their problems were even addressed by the company. It struck me as a complete non-story – all of the problems people are complaining about on the survey have been with us for decades, if not generations, and the fact that people hate having to spend half an hour working their way through a computerized phone tree before getting a live person on the telephone can’t possibly be news to anyone. A much better question is why so many companies are still failing to correct such basic failures in their business model…

To begin with, let’s consider how these things are actually supposed to work. In retail, the primary duty of the sales clerks is to keep the shelves full of product (whatever it is the store sells) and neat; the two primary tasks that make up their day are stocking and straightening. Naturally, this puts them at odds with customers, who love to take things off of shelves and redistribute them at random around the store before buying a few of them. Nor does it help that customers will ask for products you don’t have, inventory you can’t get, or products your company has never carried in the first place, and then ask if you have anything hidden in the back room – and this doesn’t even consider people who will let their children run wild rather than discipline them, shoplifters who believe they’re putting one over on “the man,” or people who do things in the Incontinent Supplies aisle that you really don’t want to hear about. You can combat some of this by hiring the right people, paying and training them well, and rotating them through different tasks and assignments each month, but it’s still going to be impossible to make every customer who passes through the store happy every time they come in…

Automated phone systems have two basic issues: they do not handle anything but routine calls well, and everyone believes that their call is special, important, and not routine at all. If you try to make an automated phone system complex enough to handle all situations people will complain that it’s too complicated, and if you try to make it simple enough to get through quickly, people will complain that it doesn’t have the option they need. You can cut through a lot of this by having the “Agent” option (you can speak with a live person anytime by saying the word “agent”), but this will drive up your costs, making your entire company and all of your products/services less appealing. And unless you’re willing to hire three shifts worth of telephone representatives, you’re going to have people going berserk just because your customer service department is closed and they can’t speak to a live person at 3:00 in the morning…

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t bad retail clerks or idiotic voice systems; I’ve had to confront both over the years – and oddly enough, I’ve been responsible for managing both over the years. But I’ve also encountered outstanding examples of both kinds of customer service (Nordstrom for the first, and American Express Travel for the second come to mind), and there is no reason that all businesses can’t live up to those standards. It’s just that doing so will require the investment of significant amounts of time and money on the part of the company, and doing so will not always result in any significant improvement in revenue, especially when the company has no strong competition or is attempting to follow a low-cost strategy. The bottom line is that consumers will always complain about bad customer service and poorly-designed automated telephone systems, regardless of how good or bad the company’s service actually is, but the real deciding factor lies in the importance that the company places on good customer service – or the lack of it. And that will always remain a matter of strategy…

The March of Commerce

When Phillip K. Dick wrote “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” the idea of display advertising invading public (and occasionally private) spaces at random was still science fiction, but by the time the movie based on the novel (“Blade Runner”) was made it was already starting to happen, and by this point most people will have encountered display ads in some very odd places. Ads on shopping carts make sense, in a way, since the advertiser can try to convince the person pushing the cart to buy their product, but we’ve also seen ads projected or even painted onto the sides of buildings, towed through the air by airplanes, painted onto the sides of cars, trucks and buses, carried on billboards mounted on the back of trucks that don’t carry anything else, transmitted from the screens of giant television sets mounted on buildings, billboards and trucks, and stuck to the walls of public restrooms and the insides of toilet stalls. But there’s a new Clear Channel project that will take all of this to a new level…

According to a story which broke last week , Clear Channel Outdoor is hiring a company called Mirrus to create a new kind of bathroom mirror which is actually a screen for display ads. When somebody approaches the sink, the ad being displayed shrinks to one-quarter size and moves into the upper corner, leaving the rest of the surface to display your reflection; when you step away from the sink, the ad snaps back to full size, covering the space. The system can also keep track of how often the mirror (and sink, one assumes) were used, basic characteristics about who used it and so on; the ads can also be changed, rotated, updated, or whatever remotely. In theory, this should be more interesting and more engaging than a conventional above-the-urinal ad, and also generate useful data about the number of times an ad was seen close-up. In practice, there are a number of questions that remain to be answered…

First of all, how accurate is the information that these smart mirrors can gather? If they’re as reliable as the hands-free sensors you usually find in public restrooms it seems likely that they’ll ignore the user half the time (thus disabling the mirror function altogether), and switch on randomly half the time (thus generating records of thousands of people using an unused sink over the course of a single hour). Then there’s the issue of targeted content. The company that is developing these things claims that they will be able to deliver gender-specific advertisements, which is fine as long as you don’t send the wrong content to the wrong mirror address. However, the comedy potentials of gender-inappropriate ads turning up in the wrong restroom (imagine how some female travelers would react to the sight of strip-club ads, to take the obvious example) alone make this sort of failure a near-certainty. Attempts to target the ads by other demographic categories would create even more opportunities for unwanted mirth, and the question of how they would determine which ads to present has not been addressed…

Now, I don’t have a problem with advertising as such; I’m able to just ignore most of it, and the spread of advertising over every available space doesn’t offend me the way it does a lot of consumers. In business, nothing happens until somebody makes a sale, and it’s much harder to do that if people aren’t aware of your product, its applications, or where to buy it. But I don’t think I’m alone when I say that there are some places which the March of Commerce should really think twice about marching into, and some kinds of void that I’m really not comfortable having stare back at me when I look into them…

Keep the Receipt

This afternoon I was feeling a bit peckish, so I wandered down to the main floor of the Business School complex and bought some junk food (without social, esthetic, or nutritional redeeming values) from a vending machine. What made the experience unusual enough to bother putting on the blog is the way the machine made change: it gave me back $1 bills. We’ve been seeing an increased use of $1 coins lately; several of the centralized parking payment machines give the so-called “gold dollars” in change for amounts over $1, and a number of vending machines on campus take them, but this is the first one I’ve ever seen that can break a ten without giving you back handfuls of either silver- or gold-colored coins. It’s enough to make you wonder what is coming next…

When we were kids – which, in fairness, is not all that long ago – there would hardly have been any need for such things; candy bars were a dime, sodas were a quarter, and even ice cream was rarely more than that. The loose candy machines that today are usually a quarter (sometimes two) were mostly a penny, and rarely more than a nickel, and I remember them as dispensing more candy per turn of the know – although it must be conceded that my hands were smaller back then, and it may just be that the product looks smaller in contrast. But despite increases in the cost of machine-vended products on the order of 800% higher (or even more), there have been very few changes in the technology, and only in the addition of the aforementioned gold dollars has the available currency changed. It would appear that most manufacturers were counting on credit card and smart card readers instead – and that technology remains problematic…

To have either a credit card or smart card reader controlling a vending machine you also need a secure connection to the network that controls the cards or the Internet (in the case of the credit cards). This isn’t always possible, and even when it is, it’s not always reliable; a simple software glitch can put your machines out of action entirely until someone can get to them and reboot their onboard computers (which are no more reliable than any other Internet-based system). This isn’t a big problem in an environment like a University campus, where people are around 24/7 and you’ll need to restock the machines every day or two anyway, but it’s a real sticking point in most vending operations, which are intended to be self-contained. And even granted that you can use the credit card option to sell much larger and more expensive merchandise, this may not always be a good idea, either…

A case in point would be the specialized vending machines called Zoom Stores, which I first encountered about five years ago in Fox Hills. These are actually less hype than a large storage container with a couple of robotic arms that can fetch product off of various shelves and out of different bins, which is hooked up to a computerized inventory and point-of-sale system. I’ve used them a number of times without incident, to purchase antacids at a conference, or a notebook when I ran out of legal pads. But the only substantial purchase I’ve ever made from one of these locations (an iPod I obtained from the machine at the Detroit airport in 2009) turned into a huge hassle when the product proved to be defective, the machine’s printer wasn’t working (hence, no receipt), and the Zoom Store’s return policy turned out to involve a web address and a UPS Store…

It remains to be seen how this will play out; with the rise of wireless Internet communications and the growing sophistication and reliability of printers (and computerized point-of-sale systems in general), maybe things like the Zoom Store really are the wave of the future. Maybe one day you’ll go to the mall, pick up whatever you want, swipe your card, and walk off with it. Or, perhaps, people will continue to demand that a living person take responsibility for their money, guard their credit information, and pay attention to them as customers. All I know for sure is that whoever has the vending machine concession for the business school got my business today because their machines know how to make change for a ten – and they might again tomorrow…

A New World Error

Most of the time when somebody uses the phrase “Wake up, sheeple!” (that is, sheep + people = sheeple) they’re being a douchebag – which is to say, they’re asserting how cool, unique, and not sheep-like they are compared to everyone else. It’s rather like the stereotypical “hipster” who only listens to obscure music, just so they can say “It’s a really obscure band – you’ve probably never heard of it.” But there are times when a news story will come along and you find yourself wondering just how naïve – how foolish and unworldly – someone would have to be to allow such events to happen in the first place. You don’t give a loaded gun to a small child; you don’t turn your back on a mad dog, and you don’t post invitations to an upcoming party where everyone on the Internet can see them…

Unfortunately, we keep seeing cases where somebody does just that – usually because they’re a teenager and don’t understand that the whole world WILL take you up on such an invitation, or because they don’t understand how the privacy settings on Facebook work, or most often both. The most recent case comes to us from Harpenden, England by way of the MSNBC Website , but there have been similar cases elsewhere in the UK and Spain in the last couple of years. In this week’s case the teen’s parent was able to cancel the party and shut down the Facebook page well in advance, and local law enforcement is gearing up to deal with any mobs of drunken revelers (and vandals and thieves) like the ones from February’s incident in Spain . The real question is how could this happen in the first place…

The news account states that the teen in our story did not check the box on her Facebook invitation designating the party as a private affair, and that this lead to it being classified as a public event and made available to anyone who wanted to see it – which, by extension, meant that the whole world was invited. On learning of the mistake, her mother cancelled the party, suspended the account, and revoked the teen’s Internet access, but also said that Facebook itself should have realized that a teenager’s birthday party should not be made available to the public and blocked the public listing. The company, in turn, says that it can’t monitor every invitation sent out by every one of its customers, and that doing so would be a violation of free speech (and freedom of assembly, if you think about it) anyway. They suggest that parents keep a closer eye on what their children are posting online…

On the one hand, it’s hard not to side with the company on this – nobody really wants Facebook censoring what their users post, and there’s no question that parents shouldn’t expect a social networking site to mind their children for them. On the other hand, it’s a rather naïve and silly policy for the company to take, given the potential for abuse this situation exposes. A common harassment tactic (it goes back to the social unrest in the 1960s) is to surreptitiously post signs indicating that your adversary is having a garage sale at dawn on Sunday, and then watch the resulting chaos; imagine how much more damaging it would be to create a dummy Facebook account and indicate that a wild party will be held at your enemy’s address on Saturday, and invite the whole world to come – especially if they are actually having a party that night…

When we were children, or even young adults, the worst that could happen with a wild teenage party was that a few of the wrong kids might get wind of it and show up to make trouble; today, if you push the wrong button, every troublemaker in the world could get your name, address, telephone number, and the date and time of your party. The truth is that there has never been anything as mindlessly powerful or casually dangerous as the Internet in all of human history, and allowing your children to play with it without supervision is far more insane than leaving loaded weapons lying around. The world has changed around us once again, and it does not care what you or I or anyone else thinks about it. Anyone who does not pay attention to the dangers of this Brave New World might as well be stuffing raw meat down their pants and then going for a walk in wolf country…

Look to the Skies

A story popped up this week about one of the occasional attempts to bring satellite phones to the mass market, and I thought it might be interesting to review the life, death and rebirth of the Iridium system. If you’ve heard this story before you may want to stay with us anyway, because there appear to be a few new wrinkles coming – and the story is still a good one, if one likes cautionary tales about good technology and unproven business models…

The Iridium system was launched during the late 1990s and went online November 1, 1998. It was less hype than a constellation of satellites in geostationary orbits that could send and receive microwave telephone systems, much like a set of cell towers orbiting the Earth at 23,800 miles up. The handsets needed to use this network were heavier and more expensive than the mobile phones of the time, but Iridium offered the unique advantage of being able to make and receive telephone calls to or from literally anywhere on the planet. Unfortunately, the company hadn’t worked out the issues with its sales, customer service or support units; it was also charging significantly more each month for a service that would allow you to call your mom from the North Pole, but would not allow you to make a call from one floor of your office building to another. Despite its obvious potential, Iridium failed in a truly spectacular fashion just 9 months after its founding, with a group of private investors buying up the company’s assets (estimated at $6 billion US in equipment alone) for roughly $25 million US…

At one point it was reported that the Iridium constellation would have to be de-orbited for safety reasons, but the new owners were able to keep it up and operational; today the company has about 300,000 subscribers and was profitable as recently as 2008 (the last year for which I have figures available). It’s available to anyone willing to pay the price, but the general public is largely unaware of it; most of the users are marine shipping firms, aviation companies, oil and other survey/exploration outfits, field scientists, and the U.S. Department of Defense. Still, there’s nothing stopping you from getting an Iridium phone and service contract and being reachable anywhere under the open sky, assuming that you would want to. But now AT&T is introducing a new wrinkle that has the potential to change everything – or leave another big smoking crater…

According to an article on the CNET News service this week, AT&T is introducing a dual-mode phone, called the “TerreStar Genus” which operates as a conventional cell phone when there’s a carrier for it to connect with, but switches to satellite reception when there are no cell towers available. The handset is still expensive, at $800 or so, and the satellite feature is an extra $25 per month plus 65 cents per minute of voice calls or $5 per megabyte of data – above and beyond the usual AT&T cell phone service contracts, which I can tell you aren’t all that cheap to begin with. But with the appearance of cell phones costing $10,000 plus just for the handset, and iPhone and iPad units that are nearly that expensive to begin with, it’s hard to imagine that AT&T won’t get any users; the real question is whether they will be able to sell enough units to make up the costs involved in offering such a service in the first place…

The simple fact is, not that many people really need to be able to make telephone calls from the middle of a national park, the top of an ice floe, or the deck of a ship in the middle of the ocean. Satellite telephone service is a niche industry at the best of times (as Iridium found out in 1998), and the relatively small number of customers who occupy that niche are already being served by the existing provider. Unless AT&T can identify a new market segment for the phone and the service, or just convince enough technophiles that this is the must-have gadget of 2010, they are not likely to see any significant number of sales…

But, on the other hand, if they can expand the market enough to lower the price on both the hardware and the service contracts, they could finally introduce satellite communications to a mass market. For the first time, you might be able to call anyone on Earth from anywhere at all times…

The real question then becomes, is this a good thing, or a bad thing?

“Tea, Earl Grey, Hot”

I wasn’t planning to do a follow-up to the gold vending machine story, but things hit my desk as they will, and this one was just too good to let slip away. I’m sure most of you have encountered coffee vending machines, which will stir up a blend of instant crystals, sweetener, artificial (powdered) creamer, and whatever amount of water is appropriate, and dispense an approximation of your favorite coffee drink. Older readers may just remember when soda machines existed, which would mix your choice of syrup and carbonated water into a paper cup with ice, producing something that might almost taste like your preferred pop. But the new development coming from the Coca-Cola people is starting to look more and more like a Star Trek ™ replicator ™…

According to a story off the Fast Company technology website, the Coke people are planning to roll out a new vending machine that uses the technology from ink-jet printers to combine a set of syrups into any one of 104 different combinations, effectively reproducing just some of the thousands of mixtures the company sells around the world. While it’s expected that most of the sales for these things will come from people mixing up a standard product, the field tests of the system resulted in most customers mixing up very strange combinations, just to taste them and find out what Strawberry-Litchi-Nut Diet Coke would be like. If this behavior translates into regular consumer behavior, the new Coke machines – called “Freestyle” machines – could completely change the way people buy soft drinks. It could also result in massive sales and even more massive profits…

Unlike a bottled soda, where the costs of the bottle, the cap, filling and sealing the container, stamping the sell-by date on somewhere, and so on must all be taken into consideration, the drink you get from a fountain operation costs almost nothing to make. In fact, the most expensive part of a food-service soft drink is usually the cup. In the case of the Freestyle machines, the only significant costs should be depreciation on the machine itself, and whatever the costs of keeping its advanced sprayers and super-chillers working might be; the cost of the syrup is no higher than any other soft drink and the water and electrical costs should be negligible. If the engineers have done their job as well as the Coke people have with their creation of flavor choices, these things should simply be little profit centers…

Of course, Coke doesn’t currently sell any hot beverages. But modifying these machines to produce the flavor of tea – or even coffee – should just be a matter of figuring out how much of which flavor component goes into each cup; heating it would then be a simple matter of microwave or electrical element. It’s not hard to imagine the same technology being used to produce an on-demand source for literally any beverage you can think of, although alcohol would increase both the logistic and political complexities by several orders of magnitude, and should probably be avoided. Still, at that point, all you’d really need to do is improve the voice-recognition software that people are already using on desktop computers and add that option to the touch-screen controls currently on a Freestyle, and you’ve effectively got the machines we all wanted to have in the kitchen when we were kids…

Of course, as with the gold vending machines, this could just be an expensive toy that flashes briefly in the pan before ending up in our “Where are they now?” file. But, if some day in the near future, you find yourself in an airport or a break room walking up to a machine and saying “Diet Coke, twist of lemon, cold” or the equivalent for whatever it is you drink, just remember: you heard it here first…