November 2010 - Digital Tool Factory blog November 2010 - Digital Tool Factory blog

The Digital Tool Factory Blog

Suggestions for Gates, Buffett and Turner – Home Insulation Edition

Charity School, Edmontonphoto © 2006 Fin Fahey | more info (via: Wylio)On Sunday I watched Christianne Amanpour’s interview with Bill & Melinda Gates, Warren Buffett and Ted Turner on This Week on Sunday.  All three espoused some form of SpiderMan conservatism.   The only interesting thing that emerged from the interview was that the Gates Foundation funds experimental work in American public schools.

Why?  The rest of the Gates Foundation work seems to be devoted (from what I have heard anyway) to creating one-time, permanent fixes to problems that they can “just do” with no permission from regulators, which is what I have always liked about that foundation.  To attempt to make any changes to public education would seem to involve a long fight with a deeply commited vested interest and a range of lobbyists for a limited reward at best.

That got me thinking of permanent, one-time improvements the foundation could make without coming into contact with vested interests and their lobbyists.  Here is one idea:

Home insulation – The Gates Foundation could sponsor their own research and improve spray foam insulation until it

  • has double to the R-Value per inch (up to R-14) of existing spray foam
  • has half the cost of the cheapest insulating competitor per cubic foot
  • is simple enough so that the average DIYer could resinsulate in a weekend
  • could be sold at  at Home Depot or Lowes, and WalMart.

Once those goals have been met they could open source the patents and let the commoditization begin!  America is horribly under-insulated, and making an R-100 easy to do would result in a permanent, one-time fix to America’s housing stock that would dramatically reduce residential energy consumption.  It would also disproportionally help the lower-income who tend to live in under-insulated houses.

Having said all this I do realize that insulating is not that difficult, nor that expensive, but it is perceived that way by the general public, and if you could reduce the payoff period to less than a year that would surely improve matters.

What do you think, what would you do if you had 50 million to spend and the improvement had to be:

  1. Permanent
  2. One-time (no recurring maintenance or anything)
  3. Mass-Market
  4. Physical, not virtual

Thoughts anyone?  Please leave them in the comments.

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog


30
Nov 10


Written By Steve French

 

Why bother with E-Checks?

monopoly-e-commerceI recently tried to buy The Entrepreneur´s Guide to Customer Development for Tech Startups and was alarmed to learn that the payment method I used (PayPal) uses an e-Check system by default.  My PayPal account is tied to a regular bank account and everything comes out of that.   Now apparantly I must wait for my check to clear, which won’t be until Friday.  I can’t believe I have to wait till Friday to get a PDF download! I did not see any notice of this on their site, and they did not take credit cards on the site where I bought the pdf.

I don’t begrudge them outsourcing their payment system, taking credit cards is a hard setup with many upfront costs.  However a notice that they will not send me the pdf for a few days would be quite nice, as would the option to cancel my order so I could just download the thing from Amazon.

How has the technology come to this?  Perhaps PayPal has changed their system around, but I have bought many, many things with my linked PayPal account and this has never happened before.

Creative Commons License photo credit: danielbroche

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog


22
Nov 10


Written By Steve French

 

Free Biz Idea – profile people via their online content

Epic Profilephoto © 2009 Jac Culler | more info (via: Wylio)I recently thought of an online profiling service for sales people and business development people.  To use the service, a client enters the FaceBook Profile URL/Name/Email/Twitter/Blog Account/LinkedIn profile of a sales prospect into the service.  The service then spiders that person’s user-generated online content and draw psychological profiles based on word choice, photo to word density, passive vs active sentence use, number of adverbs per sentence, sentence length, and so on.

Once the service finished gathering the data the client would proceed with their sales and development duties as normal, while taking notes and measuring their success so the service could create and refine the algorithm.  Do people who write in the passive voice decide faster than those who write in the active voice?  If you post a lot of photos do you reject everything at first, but then comply with further requests?  Do people who have long LinkedIn profiles like new products, or an established products?

The service would aggregate the data to draw useful information, and I’m sure people would object on privacy grounds, but this service would improve the sales profiling and qualification process.  After all, user-generated content was generated by the user, so there must be some useful data to be gathered from it.

Thoughts anyone?  I might work this idea into Stronico at some point, but not in the next year or more.  I would use this service now if I could.

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog


15
Nov 10


Written By Steve French

 

Quacks, Business Coaches, and useful advice

Kill all real estate agents, lawyers and life coachesphoto © 2008 Alec Vuijlsteke | more info (via: Wylio)I recently came across this post about the phenomenon of Life Coaching and I’m in the rare case of disagreeing with the specifics while agreeing with the general theory.  The book in question, Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long by David Rock I have actually read and find to be well sourced, valid and useful.

That being said, I would recommend a sixth tell tale sign that the speaker just wants your money or attention, to wit the use of the Apple MacIntosh as an illustration of their theory.  I’ve heard this a couple of times, usually as it relates to the importance of focus, design, R&D, Marketing, knowing your customer etc.  Far too many companies are successful with the opposite of all of those attributes but they never get mentioned by the speaker.

Addendum: On the whole I favor coaching in general, self-awareness is essential to success and coaches usually provide that.   It is the systems that are suspect.

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog


10
Nov 10


Written By Steve French

 

Atlanta Streetcars, the Beltline, and my own solutions

St. Louis, Missouri Mail Streetcarphoto © 2008 Smithsonian Institution | more info(via: Wylio)Somehow I’ve come across two infuriating Atlanta Transit articles in the past two day.  First was the Pricey streetcar won’t ease traffic articles from the AJC.  The second was Ryan Gravel’s speech on the Beltline at TedX Atlanta.   For more information on the Beltline check out the Wikipedia article.  I’ll let you draw your own conclusions on the worthyness of each venture, but bear in mind, my beloved hometown has no money, and neither venture solves a problem the current Atlanta residents actually have.  The Beltline seeks to change development patterns in the future to make us more European in some of our transit ways (not necessarily a bad thing), and the streetcar would

The city’s grant application said the project’s benefits would outstrip the original investment two and a half times over, largely by raising real estate values along the route.

which for some reason is not called blatant graft.

Large projects always bring to mind Donald Rumsfeld’s adage “If a problem seems insoluble, enlarge it” which was the sort of thinking that got us into the Iraq war.  Urban planning has struck me as rife with that sort of thinking lately.

And now you ask, what you you do to improve life in the city of Atlanta for it’s current residents?  Here are my top picks:

Short Term/Mostly Free

  1. Cap the number of traffic lights at it’s current level.  If new developments need more they can be taken from somewhere else.
  2. Prohibit the use of police officers directing traffic for private office buildings, this slows down intown traffic to an unneccesary crawl in many areas.  The lawyers can wait for the light like anyone else.
  3. Actually enforce jaywalking laws, this slows down traffic and leads to more accidents than one might think

Medium Term / Some Cost

  1. The problem with our current road system is not necessarily the cars, but rather the widths and lengths of the vehicles, which cause the chokepoints.  Solution: move everyone over to smaller vehicles, specifically motorized scooters (max speed 35) and bicycles.   Convert rarely used lanes lanes and sidewalks to bike and scooter only lanes.  Build overpasses over traffic lights  and allow no traffic lights or stop signs on any of these new lanes (see the Dutch experience in safety and taking away traffic signals).    Use these lanes for intown commuter traffic to replace the highways and major surface streets (such as Ponce, Moreland, North, Marietta, Northside, et al.)

Long Term – None!  We’re not that sort of city.

Thoughts anyone?

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog


07
Nov 10


Written By Steve French

 

Semantic improvements for news coverage that should be in the html 5 spec

With all of the recent political news stories I thought it would be useful to filter out the wheat from the chaff, and what better way to do that than by introducing new tags to refine the semantics of the news?   Surely these are as important as H1, Strong and EM tags for news stories.

I propose that all news stories use the following tags:

  • Factual
  • Conceptual
  • Expert Prediction
  • Expert Speculation
  • Implicit Prediction
  • ImplicitAnalysis

For example, the following paragraph

The unemployment rate hit 9.3 last month as factories laid off 40,000 workers.   This news is expected to hurt incumbents in the mid term elections.   Economist Rollo Tomasi of the University of North Dakota predicted that unemployment would stabilize at 9.4% before falling to 7.2 next year.  He also said that weak seasonal demand is to blame for the slump.

There is only one bit of real news (defined as an event)  in the above paragraph, namely that factories laid off 40,000 workers last month.  Here is how the story would actually look if it were properly marked up with the new tags

<conceptual>The unemployment rate hit 9.3 last month</conceptual> <factual>as factories laid off 40,000 workers</factual>.   <ImplicitPrediction><ImplicitAnalysis>This news is expected to hurt incumbents in the mid term elections.</ImplicitAnalysis></ImplicitPrediction>   <ExpertPrediction>Economist Rollo Tomasi of the University of North Dakota predicted that unemployment would stabilize at 9.4% before falling to 7.2 next year.</ExpertPrediction>  <ExpertSpeculation>He also said that weak seasonal demand is to blame for the slump.</ExpertSpeculation>

With these tags we could filter out all of the non-news (predictions, speculations, analysis) or fine tune the level of detail to our heart’s desire.

What tags have I missed?  Thoughts anyone?  Please leave feedback in the comments below.

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog


03
Nov 10


Written By Steve French

 

I just added a toll free number with VoiceNDo.com

Stronico has reached the big time in a way by adding the toll free number of (888) 491-3066 with the help of VoiceNDo.com.  So far I’m pretty impressed with the service.  VoiceNDo is a bootstrapped startup, just like us, with a great price on a needed service.  The administrative and signup process was simple and direct.

My intention with this is not to spend more time talking on the phone, but a way of offering credibility to Stronico, as well as offering another avenue for people to reach us.

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog


02
Nov 10


Written By Steve French

 




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