Dronestrikes over US Soil?

Flying into LaGuardia (NY) this weekend, at probably 2000 feet, I looked out the window to see the sun glint momentarily off a tiny metal object just a few feet below and a few hundred feet to our port side. It was a drone being flown by some idiot in some backyard in Queens.

If birdstrikes can bring down a passenger plane (remember "Sully"?) what do you think a hobbyist drone would do to an aircraft engine?

We have the technology to prevent that, and it would be criminally negligent to delay implementation of systems to protect our planes and people. Airports have radar monitoring of their column or airspace. It's probably not accurate enough to find a small hobbyist drone, so it needs to be improved. Once they are identified, the airports need lasers or laser-focused electro-magnetic pulses strong enough to disable a hobbyist drone. These weapons wouldn't be strong enough to hurt a plane (or even a military drone), but could prevent a dumb or malicious hobbyist. 

Buy!/Sell!: Uninformed Stock Picks

Long:

+ Um... Well... There's... No, wait. I know this one ... 

Short:

- Research In Motion. How's this for a losing strategy: Happen onto a temporary natural monopoly. Underinvest for a decade. Let Apple and Google (et al) blow you away in the market. Ignoring your lack of expertise or differentiating value, throw millions at trying to flank these titans. Discover you've created a product nobody wants and sell it at cost (less marketing). Justify this by saying you are going to sell your old products in emerging markets at a high margin. Discover emerging markets are even more sophisticated than mature markets in this industry, with Apple and Google (et al) already dominating.

They will get bought by Google or one of its suppliers for pennies. RIM's customers will be ported over to the buyer's platform and products. The end.

(note: this is not investment advice!)

Breaking News: Market Share Stolen by Hackers!

A Wall Street Journal article today carries the following quote:

Chinese state television has broadcast footage of what two experts on the Chinese military say appears to be a military institute demonstrating software designed to attack websites in the U.S.

DailyTech blog captured screenshots including the image below.

This further supports my prediction in a January 2010 blog post What Will Tomorrow (Today?) Bring: Virtual War.

"Make no mistake, this is
Cyber Warfare."

It is now undeniable: we are engaged in a new Cyber Cold War which represents the most unconventional and asymmetric war the world has ever seen. Control is extremely decentralized. Weapons are easily acquired. The risk of retaliation is low. Battles are waged remotely. The prosecutors and victims of the war can be anyone or any group of people. Governments, individuals, and businesses are all players, like it or not.

The WSJ article shows, however, that more conventional power structures are now on the battlefield. Many in the LulzSec group may have simply been bored, over-caffeinated students who wanted some celebrity. However, security insiders increasingly see hard evidence to support the WSJ's case: governments, particularly those of Russia, China, and the US are quietly backing attacks.

Many people would laugh at the notion that a foreign military might wage an online attack on a US financial institution. Consider, however, two factors which might give them motivation:

1. Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) increasingly own debt and equity of governments AND businesses. This gives them a financial interest in the success (or failure) of certain companies as well as economies. Hack a bank, leak a headline, and watch the share price drop until a buying opportunity has emerged.
2. Many emerging market countries have discovered that they don't have to create an economy as big as the US in order to have companies which compete on a global scale. These companies can be jump-started with some quiet government support. As a result, it has become common policy to support "national champions" which successfully compete against the largest and most mature global (though still mostly US-based) companies. Government-sponsored hackers might help these champions by hacking the competition and stealing trade information or by creating bad headlines.
   

Like it or not, we have to acknowledge that certain governments have the means, the motive, and the opportunity to commit cyber attacks against financial institutions. In all likelihood, this has been going on for at least several years. Consider a March 2009 Telegraph.co.uk article:

"A vast Chinese cyber-espionage network, codenamed GhostNet, has penetrated 103 countries and infects at least a dozen new computers every week, according to researchers ... [GhostNet] is the latest sign of China's determination to win a future 'information war'... In 2003, the Chinese army announced the creation of 'information warfare units'."

Fox News added to the story:

"The Chinese government on Monday denied it was behind GhostNet"

Banking has the notion of security at its core. Think of a bank branch and you'll instantly visualize vaults, armed guards and video surveillance. Behind the scenes, banks all have hardened ATMs, teller stick-up procedures, passwords and permissions. In other words, security is tightly integrated with their physical channels.

It is also tightly integrated into their physical products through watermarks, microdot printing on checks, serial numbers on other financial instruments, signature specimens, etc.

Ironically, banks have been dangerously slow to understand how this relates to the online world. Today's banks are dot-coms. Online banking is now a core product. Moreover, it is the "face of the bank" for many customers. It is the gateway or channel through which all other products and services are offered.

Dot-com execs have an advantage in the realm of security and fraud inasmuch as their core product is a piece of technology which intrinsically has a set of permissions and security controls built in. The tools their engineers use also have permissions and security controls at their core. Bank execs need to think like dot-commers. Online security and fraud prevention are just as intrinsic to their core products as signature cards, credit scores, personal relationships, and armed guards once were.

The logical conclusion is that banks need to be organized, staffed, and run more like dot-com businesses to survive in the current Cyber Cold War. Security must be "baked in" to everything they do, just as credit scores and ratings have been baked into lending and trading decisions for decades. Executives should make no mistake: on the current battlefield, market share is not stolen by a bank down the street who might lure customers away with better rates and free toasters. Market share is "stolen" by hackers who ruin the bank's reputation or steals clients' identities and thus causes customers to flee.

It is no longer a sci-fi fantasy that these hackers may be shadow agents of a competitor or even a government intent on manipulating markets, economies, or even specific businesses.

Take THAT Paranoid Saudi/UAE/India

(ad placed by the government of Bahrain in the August 19th Economist)

What Will Tomorrow (Today?) Bring: Private Spaceflight

Conservative gut-check. Can you stick to your conservative, limited-government guns, even for the "cool" stuff? Apparently Dick Shelby goes all bedwetty at the prospect:

"The president's proposed NASA budget begins the death march for the future of U.S. human space flight," said Sen. Richard Shelby (R., Ala.). - WSJ.com 2/1/2010

Maybe Dick should read January's Popular Science cover story, "Who needs NASA? This Year Civilian Space Indusrty Finally Takes Off."

What Will Tomorrow (Today?) Bring: Virtual War

Given China's love for child labor, these guys may be teens, but it's not idle curiosity that is motivating them. Nor individual malice. Make no mistake, this is Cyber Warfare.

Researchers identify command servers behind Google attack

The cyber-assault came to light on Tuesday when Google disclosed to the public that the Gmail Web service was targeted in a highly-organized attack in late December. Google said that the intrusion attempt originated from China and was executed with the goal of obtaining information about political dissidents ...

"The source IPs and drop server of the attack correspond to a single foreign entity consisting either of agents of the Chinese state or proxies thereof," the report says ...

http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2010/01/researchers-identify-command-servers-behind-google-attack.ars

What Will Tomorrow Bring: Moving Magazines

Right out of the pages of Popular Science: Entertainment Weekly will pilot embedded video screens in some of its magazines next month.

Sadly, its only for ads not articles right now, but hey - somebody's gotta pay for it ... might as well be those evil corporate world dominators over at Pepsi. Too bad we haven't nationalized the magazine industry yet ... I'm sure Barney Frank coulda seen to it that such essential live-giving technology would be used for more worthy causes like subliminally convincing inner-city youth to save less and consume more ... in the name of national progress, of course.

Oops ... did I go politico again? Damnit, I keep doing that.

Photo Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET

What Will Tomorrow Bring: Death to Paper Dinosaurs!

On Chris Matthews this morning, a bevy of career journalists held a pity party. Boo hoo, the world is coming to an end! We're headed off a cliff!

Were they talking about the economy? Politics? Healthcare? Afghanistan? No, all that was over on Meet the Press.

These highbrow muckrakers were singing the dirge of the whole "all the news that's fit to print (and most of it that isn't)" industry. RIP Rocky Mountain News. RIP Seattle Post-Intelligencer. RIP New York Sun.

The quotes were just so ridiculous to me:

"The Internet doesn't have the fact checking."
"The Internet dumbs people down because it's so targeted." "You'll never get that out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye story about haircuts in Cambodia."
"We're losing the group sensibility that creates stories."
"We'll just never have those good ole days of newsroom collaboration. Blogging is very solitary."
"Everyone loses when a newspaper shuts down."
"There's just something special about freezing your butt off going outside in the morning to get the paper in your jammies."

Puh-leaze. I won't rebut line-by-line; I have enough windmills. I would write it off as a generational gap, but sadly, even some younger journalists bemoan the change.

I feel almost silly making the following self-evident statements. The Internet is the salvation of journalism. It puts news on steroids, going wider AND deeper. It enables new levels of cost efficiency and simultaneously new levels of democratization/decentralization. It's vastly lower bars to entry increase entrepreneurial participation. The spectrum of available viewpoints is broader, and can be communicated more effectively via richer multimedia. Rather than damaging credibility, democratization actually ensures that sharp minds and good ideas gain much better (and quicker) visibility. They are self-propelled by the level of interest they generate. No need to support the massive old "launch" infrastructure.

These journalists need not worry. Democratization does not erode their credibility ... as long as they continue to earn it ... and invest some new synapses in figuring out what's going on.

This guy, certainly gets it. He's an Ivy League math/econ major who calls print media "the dead tree and typewriter industry." Yet he's the Web Editor-in-Chief for The Daily Pennsylvanian and is avidly pursuing a career in journalism. Why would such a smartypants peg his future to such a dinosaur? He's not afraid. He understands the new business model. Why does it not surprise me he's a first generation American?

He's not alone. Fellow Ivy-leaguer Jason Kilar is closer in age to the talking heads on Chris Matthews, yet he's not scared either. He's dragging print and TV into the 21st century kicking and screaming ... and making big bucks at it.

Sam Altman, a poster child for a bright future, and Inc. Magazine's #4 "coolest entrepreneur", told Charlie Rose that when he wants to know the most important thing going on right now, he checks Twitter. "It always scoops traditional media."

Even Al-Jazeera isn't complaining ... and in this case, that's a good thing.

What Will Tomorrow Bring: Concrete Ideas for Improving Healthcare

I'm sure hard on the healthcare industry (cough, cough, Land that Time Forgot, cough). Call it constructive criticism. But I'm not just full of nay-say. Allow me to offer a few very concrete, actionable recommendations to go with all the high-falutin' principles I've been throwing out lately.

On medical records and privacy:
It goes without saying that medical records must be put online. Period. Now. There is NOTHING technologically standing in the way (see here, here and here for just a taste of what's already out there). That isn't to say that all the rocks have been removed from the road of course. But we're smart, right?
Ideally, one should be able to control which individuals can see which pieces of their health record by setting policies ahead of time. For example, one might say that, in an emergency, EMT staff can see all current health info; hospitals can see more; a radiologist can see less; a pharmacist can only see current medicines and allergies.

At a national level, health data must be irretrievably separated from identifying info and then aggregated for statistical research.
On prescriptions and drugs:

Doctors should write up prescriptions on a secure iPhone/Blackberry/Palm/Android app. This isn't dreamware. The foundations already exist.

Contra-indications, genetic red flags, and bad interactions with other current meds should all be checked automatically via an online service accessing a national database (perhaps run by the FDA?). The doctor should be immediately notified of issues.
Controlled substance notifications and approvals should be automatically taken care of as necessary.
Insurance approval should be automatically collected and the billing process should be launched.
Then, the 'scrip should be sent electronically to my "pharmacy" (this is no more technologically complicated or insecure than direct-depositing a paycheck). I put pharmacy in quotes, because it would bear a closer resemblance to Amazon.com than your the local chemist of yore.
An automatic "broker" looks at my urgency as well as current drug supply to determine where the order gets filled.
Urgent orders go to the closest local drug warehouse which currently has the drug in stock. Non-urgent orders go to a national fulfillment center. Again, think Amazon.com ... come to think of it, maybe we should just let them do it.
In either case, a robot distributes the right number of pills into the right bottles. It then marries that with the right instructions and documents. A human quality control might be performed before the robot packages the whole thing up, and hands it off to the delivery system (either via local same-day delivery or simply UPS).
An email is automatically sent to me confirming fulfillment, and providing links to all the usual legal-ese, warnings, indications, and stuff required by the FDA.
If required by the FDA, a pharmacist should call me to explain the required mumbo-jumbo. If this gives lawyers fits, an alternative would be to provide this info face-to-face before the patient leaves the doc's office.
Then the 'scrip should be put in my medical record, the doc's files, and, anonymously, in national databases available for research. For one thing, this prevents me from double-dipping. For another, it provides drug companies with a much deeper source of usage and efficacy data.
If the 'scrip calls for refills, they should be automatically processed in the same way. Neither the doctor, nor I, nor a pharmacist should have to lift a finger.
On Insurance:
As I said previously, employer-provided insurance has GOT to go! Each individual or family should buy their own plan, based on their own preferences, and considering their own unique situation.

Yes, this means the end of the "one size fits all ... at one price" policies that we get from our employers. That's a good thing, because currently, we're spoiled. All the talking heads on TV keep trying to get Obama to say there will be sacrefice. He chickens out, but I won't. When it comes to your health, you should have to do your fair share. Today, we're just passengers getting taken for a ride. Instead:

• We see more and more evidence recently of just how bad people are at making certain types of decisions. Specifically, we suck at assessing extremely unlikely events. Inevitably the "won't happen to me" gene kicks in. When the inconceivable happens, we're caught unprepared and confused. Thus, the vast majority of Americans should have catastrophic insurance. Period. No excuses. It should be cheap, and should only cover the really nasty stuff. No pills for sniffles or aches ... it should only kick in once expenses are above, say $15k. With a nice scotch, a good joke, and a pat on the back, Obama could probably convince me to socialize this piece of healthcare, as long as he doesn't go Robin Hood on me.


• Today, prudent travellers take out trip insurance; prudent SCUBA divers have DAN; hikers (and extreme skiiers) get evacuation insurance. This should be the norm for all health insurance. Smokers should pay more. Skydiving injuries should not be covered unless a risky-activity premium has been paid. Conversely, people who do more than an hour of cardio a week should get a rebate. Triathletes should be damn near free.


• Folks who prefer one treatment to another should be able to negotiate this with their insurance. For example, someone with terminal cancer should be able to trade. "I'll give up chemo, but ya gotta pay for accupuncture, a home nurse, and a pain clinic." Someone with a blown ACL should be able to say "I want extra PT. In exchange, I promise to follow their advice dilligently and keep the knee in good shape so this doesn't happen again." Someone who injures their spinal cord should have the ability to agree "Let me try this experimental treatment, but if it doens't work, I won't sue, or ask you to treat any side-effects." People who are willing should be able to get treatment offshore if the cost differential is significant.
• 

Follow-Up: If we REALLY wanted to fix healthcare, we'd put the patients in charge, not the government!

If you lived in quaint Europe 100 years ago, it would have taken you most of the day to shop and prepare meals. You'd have to make separate stops at the local butcher, baker, grocer, and so on. If the dairyman had no more butter, you'd just have to live without it. If the local miller sold sub-standard, gravelly flour, you'd just have to eat it that way. And since there was no refrigeration, you had to repeat the whole shopping process every day. Fast forward to today, and you can stop at the Super Wal-mart on the way home from work to pick up an incredibly broad diversity of foods at quality incredibly higher. Strangely, healthcare, the Jurassic Park of industries, hasn't had to go through the same evolution. As a result, its tragically inefficient, with quality tragically uneven, at costs tragically high.

Who could disagree with a new healthcare industry that focuses relentlessly on Efficiency, Transparency, Customer (=patient) Satisfaction, and Objective Effectiveness? The devil, of course, is in the dollars ... but not in the way Congress keeps telling you.

All the hype and sob-stories aside, the bottom line problem with US healthcare is that the consumer doesn't get to choose, and doesn't have to pay. The consumer is not empowered.

This can be seen in, for example, the dysfunctional, polygamo-incestuous oligopoly of employer-subsidized insurance. Lose your job and lose your health insurance? Dumb.

The same issue can also be seen within individual insurance plans. Coverage and treatments are black or white, take it or leave it, as opposed to a menu of shades of grey to better fit individuals' situations, expectations, and desires.

Health law and privacy are similarly all-or-nothing. Even when no other treatment works, experimental or alternative approaches are shunned by doctors simply on the basis of legal or bureaucratic grounds. Despite best intent, and even if the patient is warned of heightened risks, one unforeseen turn for the worse is likely to cost even a stellar a doctor or nurse a career. Why risk it? Doctors are afraid to consult anyone else about tough cases. Privacy? We can't even see our own health records, much less share them with others who might help.

Healthcare reform must be addressed on multiple fronts, but if consumer empowerment is a clear path to mitigating a multitude of our issues, why not fix it first? See what issues resolve themselves when people are informed and empowered. THEN size up the residual problems and start making the tough, expensive choices.

Arranging healthcare for the poor and sick is a good goal. Obama's pet "public option" does improve the lot of a certain subset (the poor, the sick, and inevitably the lazy). Sadly, those unfortunate souls may find that they were better off before the plan. Obama demonstrates his demagoguery by placing the lion's share of the financial burden on "the rich." Surcharge expensive health plans; surcharge businesses; surcharge small business owners; surcharge benevolent folks; surcharge those who earn the most; hell, just surcharge Goldman Sachs directly while you're at it. But what happens when costs overrun budgets, as they have in nearly every other public health plan (Hawaii, Massachusetts, Canada, and the UK just to name a few familiar examples)? Does the government begin to ration care, as in Canada? Cancel the plan, as in Hawaii? Or just flat deny coverage, as in Britain?

Moreover does the public option even empower consumers? Does it ensure patients and doctors decide what treatments are best? Or does it give that power to an unaccountable, appointed board of politically-charged "wise men" in DC? Does it increase competition for better ideas, treatments, and service? Or does it simply tilt the playing field toward one plan, one way of doing things, and one group of administrators who get to play by a different set of rules than the rest? Does it "crowd out" other insurance plans because it's better? Or by the fiat of unfairly preferential treatment, enshrined in Federal law? Do we really want a Fannie and Freddie for healthcare? Or Apple and Google?

My take: the public option erodes choice (and thus empowerment) when it should be fostering it.

As I advocated over a year ago in this blog entry, a better plan would decentralize control to those who have the strongest interest in getting it right: the patients. This would naturally put a burden on their primary health providers to ensure patients were informed with the best facts and recommendations, so they could make the best choices. As I put it in my earlier blog:

There is no measure of supply and demand driving the rates of top doctors up or warning me against going to cheap-o ones. Insurance companies (and Medicare) engage in collective bargaining to drive rates down for some, but it's like squeezing a balloon - the air just moves around inside - there's no net savings. Horrifying though it may be for you to think of being sick and having to bid on some Medical eBay for a spot at the best hospital, this would drive overall costs DOWN by rooting out inefficiency, inappropriate risk, statistically unsuccessful procedures, and bad eggs. It would provide a whole new incentive system which would align the interests and thus the efforts of patients, hospitals, insurers, scientists, technologists, businesspeople, investors and doctors alike.

It would also create a bouquet of different kinds of offerings, at different price points. Health care is the only industry I can think of that still follows Henry Ford's original principle: "Any customer can have a car painted any colour he wants so long as it is black." To see hints of what healthcare could be, look no further than the current world of elective/cosmetic treatments. It should be no mystery why medical tourism is referred to as a "nip-n-tuck tour." That whole industry is built on treatments people want which are not covered by insurance (and on wealthy citizens of countries with sub-standard levels of care). Suddenly, incentives are aligned. Choice and price exist ... and, unsurprisingly, so does a diversity of offerings. The differences are shocking.

Empower the patient, and they'll always opt for the Cadillac treatment, many say. You need faceless insurers and that group of wise men in DC to tell people "no." Hopefully by now, my rebuttal of that is predictable.

• First, if the whole industry stepped into the 21st century and was forced to improve on all fronts, the overall average cost-per-level-of-service would come down, just like Wall Street brokerage fees after deregulation broke apart that cartel. To use Dubya's words, it would make the whole pie higher (we knew what he meant).
• Second, if care was properly priced, and if people could choose their level of care (and assoicated price), the whole industry would look a lot different. For proof, look out on the streets today: hundreds of different cars exist with different levels of performance, comfort, and safety, all zipping around together on the freeways.
• Third, again if pricing and choice were introduced, many people would find out that they pay for a Cadillac today, but only get an old Chevy. These folks could pay less, and keep the exact same level of treatment.
• Fourth, yes, people who choose cheap-o policies need to be told "no" when they ask for Cadillac service. Canada or Brittain, for all their warts, at least address this point well. You should be courteously re-routed to the appropriate level of care. You don't use an elephant gun to kill an ant. You don't need an ER full of trauma docs and machines that go bing to fix a rash or when your kid swallows a coin. Wait 'till the morning and go see a nursing clinic.
• And finally, having set aside the impact of those first 4 points, we get down to some residual "tough nuts" to crack. Recently, we've all had our eyes opened to just how bad humanity is at making choices at the margin. We always assume that the unthinkable won't happen to us. Remember, more than half of bankruptcies are triggered by exorbitant, unexpected medical expenses. Avoiding this very difficult, expensive (to the overall economy), and destructive route would give the economy a measurable boost. As a society, it needs to be viewed as foolish and unacceptable to go around without at least a modicum of catastrophic-only insurance. I'd welcome thoughts on how to get there. Like Obama, I'm willing to consider all ideas. I even think we could make it financially viable to socialize this level of care without breaking the system or Uncle Sam's budget. I also think that private solutions could be had.

My blog entry last year highlighted 7 major issues with our healthcare system. To summarize:

1. Risk-aversion: FDA approval is painfully slow and bureaucratic. Healthcare providers choose the safe treatment to avoid being sued.
2. Litigation: lawyers keep us all honest, but ambulance-chasing and malpractice insurance have run amok
3. Stone-age Science: how is it that we STILL have no cure for the common cold, the most frequent killer (heart disease), or the most common ailment (back problems)? Medicine should be a science, not a craft.
4. Stone-age Technology: Hand-written paper files and prescriptions? Seriously? Find me a successful banker, journalist, engineer, marketer, accountant, grocer, soccer mom, or even a McDonalds worker who hasn't deeply integrated the power of computers and the interwebz into their lives.
5. Ambiguous Economics: the economics of choice and price are largely absent ... and predictable, unfortunate consequences have ensued.
6. Reactiveness: As Obama pointed out in this week's press conference, prevention is worth a pound of cure. So pay for it!
7. Mutated Morality: OK, so here goes. The sticky wicket of healthcare. Nobody likes to admit two things: some people are too sick to live ... and the Bible was not meant to be interpreted literally in the realm of healthcare. Get used to it. Death is a part of life. (Allow me to duck now.)

The "better" plan addresses these things, and more. Through the principle of putting patients in the driver's seat, it:

• Prevents maladies (and thus lowers long-term cost) by focusing on "wellcare"
• Abandons all the hype, BS, bureaucracy, and litigiousness in favor of careful cost management and a focus on customer service a'la the HelloHealth clinic in Brooklyn
• Requires an objectivity about determining what works and and what's most efficient. Then, ensures those things are deployed wide and quick (and that old, inefficient, or ineffective things disappear right quick).
• Frank Lichetenberg's recent study shows us the way. It should be mandatory reading on this topic.
• Encourages the creative destruction of new technologies and procedures. (Again, see Lichtenberg for some interesting figures.)
• Studies the system with the rigor of a physicist, and rebuilds the system with the structure of a systems engineer. (idea courtesy of Dennis Cortese, former Mayo Clinic CEO).
• Ensures that the consumer is fully informed by aggregating all his medical records, test results, history, etc in a single place. Sorry, privacy nuts: this is one area where a trade-off is required to gain improvements in care

Principles are nice, but concrete, actionable ideas are better. Don't worry, I have those too. Too much for one blog, but stay tuned. I'll be back in a few days with some very detailed conversation-starters!

Chalk One Up for Democracy

Has the Paulson Plan finally awakened the sleeping giant again?

Representative democracy seems to be working today, as US citizens have put a (finally) irresistable tidal wave of pressure on their elected officials NOT to sell our childrens' financial futures down the river.

Evidence: the government's internet servers for websites including http://www.house.gov/ have been entirely overloaded all day with citizens logging in to express themselves to their elected officials. Mark my words: they'll report a record number of hits over the last 24 hours.

Follow Up #4: Power

Recently I saw the following chart (left) in the Economist's special report on The Future of Energy. Last year I did some research and drew up these charts in support of my Power blog (right 2 charts). Thanks, Economist for painting this interesting historical picture to queue up my forecasts.

In their chart, what strikes me as most interesting is the speed with which we have been able to switch from one source of energy to another. The shift from wood to coal was halfway complete within 3 decades. We shifted from 3/4 of energy from coal to 1/4 in a single generation (thanks to the increase in oil demand from the exploding popularity of cars).

There's plenty of hard evidence that the rate of technological progress continues to accelerate unabated and with no end in sight. To me, this lends credibility to the argument I've been trying to make of late: the current media hand-wringing is largely misdirected angst. I'm quite confident will be able to shift our energy sources even in the face of unstoppable and dramatic increases in demand ... all before Armageddon is upon us. No, $5 gas is not Armageddon. Jeez.

The Economist seems equally confident that we'll make the necessary changes in the appropriate (yes, "measured and responsible" is an appropriate pace for things) way and time frame. To paraphrase: Don't look now but it's already happening. One of the main sources for their special report, Geoffrey Carr, said it best in a blog at guardian.co.uk: "Alternative energy technologies are proliferating rapidly. And it is big bad business that is making it happen."

Chalk up another one for capitalism to save the day. The Watermelons (aka Green Party) and their type have been thrashing for half a century to absolutely zero effect, save giving environmentalism a bad name.

Source of first chart: BP via Economist.com

Buy! Sell! #1: Prediction Markets Intro

Back in the Nineties while we were still undergrad pimple-poppers, I came to know a coke-laced gambling-addicted, insomniac who traded junk bonds at night while the rest of us studied, drank, and slept. Then there was my roommate who bounced back and forth between joining the Freemen, the FBI, and the Kosovo Jihad.

Who am I kidding ... it was NYU ... everyone was popping pills. But I digress.

The 3 of us could hardly come from more different backgrounds and had our own wacky ideas but had remarkably arrived at the same spot (philosophically, geographically, and temporally) on many levels. I've always appreciated the reassurance of their conviction, even when we were all leaning against a heady wind. Not immaterially, we all shared a deep and long-standing respect for Reagan.

It was the insomniac who first introduced me to prediction markets. What started as a nighttime obsession became a side job became a career, but from day one he never could leave work at the office. Between the office elevator and the subway station he'd be on his cell placing bets on anything and everything that the future might hold. Watching sports with these guys was mentally exhausting. With every point or foul, there was a flurry of cell phones as they all speed-dialled their brokers with a new futures order. Ten thousand at niner and an eighth on Shaq to drink water instead of Gatorade in the fourth! Hedge that with a short on Schumacher to pit before lap 30 at seventy-five spot naught! Rah! Lift that offer you cocksucker! How's the wife? Did she recover from last night yet? Remind me to buy you a drink next time we're in Vegas!

As is the tragedy of evolution, humans hardly even make trading decisions anymore (thanks a mil, modellers!), much less have a broker on speed dial for such interaction. Going going gone the way of the Yellow River dolphin and the open-outcry pits.

I don't think these guys knew that the academics had not fully conceptualized prediction markets yet. I know they didn't give a rat's ass. But intellectualized it was; then automated; then commercialized; then specialized. Corporations (especially HP and GE) started to steal the idea to help them in their sales prediction, as well as new product and marketing campaign creation. Who needs employees at all anymore? But I digress.

Now come vanity markets such as Bet2Give where you put real money in, but any winnings are automatically donated to charity. This conveniently avoids the legality question of betting on the future. As their FAQ says If you bet wrong and lose, your money will still go to worthy causes... but chosen by others. Hmm... I wonder if I can place a bet on how long it'll take the IRS to figure all this out?

Will bets on future events become an asset class in the same way bets on future cash streams or future prices have?

So I'm in. I'll be trading the future and reporting back on my riches ... all of which will be routed to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation for this first round.

There's a twist. Prediction markets are still young, and as such, they're very thin. Not a lot of activity, and not a lot of options available to reflect the nuances or breadth of one's comprehensive view of the future ... aka one's portfolio (of bets on future events) in market lingo. As such, I'll be publishing several "model portfolios" here from time to time under the "Buy!/Sell!" series title.

Follow-Up #2: Power

We live in a disposable society, thanks to American ingenuity and Asian efficiency of production.

Even with nuclear reactors apparently.

Toshiba has recently announced the "4S" micro reactor which you "set and forget" literally. They seal them at the factory. You can put them wherever you want: in a building, underground, in space. Assuming no water gets into their liquid sodium (eek .... ka-BOOOM?), they merrily run for a few decades. When they peter out, you simply throw them away.

Check it out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Toshiba
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/analysis/nucenviss2.html
http://www.atomicinsights.com/AI_03-20-05print.html

Not so fast, right? They'd be full of a thousand years of radioactive waste. My favorite solution to that one has always been to blast the garbage off to the sun. It's an expert at dealing with radioactive waste - it hosts countless nuclear reactions every day.

If we REALLY wanted to fix healthcare, we'd put the patients in charge, not the government!

Healthcare costs continue to outpace inflation as they have for as many decades as I can remember. Pity that the rate of technological progress has not kept up. If I were paying more for commensurately better care, I'd be more apt to shut up and pay. As it is, paying is a foregone in any case, but I do it with a moan. Insurance companies are moaning too, as are doctors and nurses. Drug companies moan, and hospitals threaten to cut back or shut down. Employers moan and cut back on coverage. The media moans via exposes on special case after special case. Politicians ... well, we all know what they do. Nobody works toward even identifying and communicating the problems, much less agreeing on and implementing solutions. We all moan in our special way and continue to pay.

Why?



Issue #1: Risk aversion. Research and technological change are artificially limited by our prevailing attitude that change is risky ... and there's no room for risk in medicine. Other countries take the lead in key areas while we frequently take a decade to approve new treatments. This is government-enforced, but it is not out of sync with popular opinion. The FDA is efficiently converting public opinion into public policy. The other, more powerful mechanism we, the people, use for the same purpose is issue #2...

Issue #2: Litigation. Coulda Woulda Shoulda - Folks on the front line earn their living by making life-or-death decisions in a matter of seconds. We all pretend it's scientific (see Issue #3) but there's plenty of arts and crafts involved. Legal precedent makes it clear that one false move and the professional is sued out of existence, along with his hospital, his staff, his dog, and the guy who fixes his boat. Lawyers may be willing to play dirty to win, but they can't do so without a client. True, they market themselves aggressively ("Have you been INJURED??? Call Now!!!") but if we really didn't want them, they'd have gone the way of the Dodo and the Flowbee. No, we need them to debate the dollar value of unquantifiable notions like mental anguish or pain and suffering. When looked at in the first person, I agree. I want that doctor to think twice and three times about pumping some new drug into me. If he fucks me up permanently, I want compensation. However, the tremendous cost of the suit, the pay-out, and the newly-minted preventative measures must come from somewhere. No doctor or hospital dares operate without mega-million dollar liability insurance policies. No insurer will issue such a policy cheaply. In the end, every penny spent on suits is distributed back to you and me via increased insurance rates to doctors and hospitals, who in turn charge us more. What, then, is the proper balance between justly compensating an innocent person for negligence and collectively degrading the cost/benefit for the entire population? It's the type of choice humans are poor at making. We want to save ourselves and our loved ones at all costs. So the healthcare industry obliges.

Issue #3: Stone age science. In the last 500 years, physics has gone from a philosophy to a science so robust that we can successfully alight a nuclear-powered, computer-controlled satellite into orbit around a distant planet and beam back data. It has matured to a level of self-propagation based on sound underpinnings. Over the same period, medicine has failed to find a cure for the common cold, a way to prevent our most frequent killer (heart disease), or even a way to fix back problems so people can return to productive life. True, via trial-and-error we've stumbled onto some pretty cool stuff such as penicillin and the gamma knife, but a collegiate astrophysicist can tell you EXACTLY where Hale-Bopp will be in 2112. Contrarily, doctors who have a half century of education and experience under their belts are as surprised as you and I when a baby pops out with autism or routine surgery goes horribly wrong. There is a wide tolerance for mis- or no-diagnosis. The effect of treatments is often left to "wait and see." Granted we have made impressive gains in the last 100 years. Granted biology and medicine are bafflingly complicated. Behavior appears to be unpredictable, so we can't draw nice neat cause-and-effect conclusions and thus are robbed of the type of universal laws which underpin the successes of other sciences. I use the term "appears" because I would argue we just haven't yet gotten to the root cause. Current state of the art in medical treatment deals largely reactively, and largely anecdotally. As a consequence, doctors are turned into artists, treatments into crafts, hypotheses into hopes. If we can ever move beyond that, medicine will experience the type of quantum leap that computing saw in the 20th century.

Issue #4: Stone age technology. Okay, so we haven't decoded the human genome yet and thus can't nip issues like cancer or multiple sclerosis in the true bud. Does that somehow justify the fact that a doctor still has to write his prescription on a piece of paper which you have to tote to a pharmacy, who must in turn have a human count out pills one-by-one with a butter knife? Usually to get from from feeling cruddy to swallowing a pill takes multiple days. Shit, I can get an exact book sent to an exact address by an exact day at an exact price all by myself. In cities, I can get that book same-day. Where's Amazon for pills?? Why, when I move across the country, do I have to start over with essentially a blank page. Why, when my neighbor passes out in his backyard do the ambulance EMTs show up completely uninformed about his health conditions? Far worse, when he arrives at the hospital 45 minutes later, the doctors and nurses are no more informed. Why does it take hours or days to arrange a test, five minutes to perform it, and then more hours or days to get the results? Why can't I see and quality check my own damn medical records? Every piece of junk email I ever sent or received from my Gmail box and every website I ever visited scoured by artificial intelligence agents for any useful piece of marketing data and likely saved for all eternity somewhere. Would that my doctor could implant a little agent in me to monitor my every bite, beat, and breath so he could really figure out what's wrong with me.

Issue #5: Ambiguous economics. Does the aforementioned genetic puzzle somehow justify the fact that over half of Americans pick a doctor based on convenience (proximity and availability) because they have no way to measure skill or success? I know exactly which camera is better than the others, and which wine tastes a certain way, and even which hairstylist is tops. How? Price. Due to the astounding costs of unlikely events such as cancer, we all have or desperately want to lock in the price of our medical care. Most of us do that via health insurance (which re-distributes the cost of the insured evenly among the insured ... and often their employer). Others by showing up at hospitals sick and broke. Others by not seeking treatment at all. Others (abroad) by socializing medicine so that the aggregate cost of caring for the citizens is distributed to every taxpayer. The consequence of this is that there is no efficient market for the product. There is no measure of supply and demand driving the rates of top doctors up, and warning me against going to cheap-o ones. Insurance companies (and Medicare) engage in collective bargaining to drive rates down for some, but it's like squeezing a balloon - the air just moves around inside - there's no net savings. Horrifying though it may be for you to think of being sick and having to bid on some Medical eBay for a spot at the best hospital, this would drive overall costs DOWN by rooting out inefficiency, inappropriate risk, statistically unsuccessful procedures, and bad eggs. It would provide a whole new incentive system which would align the interests and thus the efforts of patients, hospitals, insurers, scientists, technologists, businesspeople, investors and doctors alike.

Issue #6: Reactiveness. Some studies prove one thing, others prove the opposite, but I'm willing to bet my bottom dollar that the old adage is true: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. This doesn't stop insurers from declining to pay for the vast majority of what marketers have labelled "well care" or preventative medicine. Pregnant mothers get a whole host of pro-active care. I guess that's based on the inevitability of the event. Strange, then, that we don't have the same reaction with something as nearly certain as obesity leading to diabetes and heard disease and joint breakdown. They'll pay for a heart replacement but not a gym membership and a dietitian. They'll let you see your doctor for a cough, but not for a regular (I'm talking weekly) program of health counselling sessions. They'll pay for the Ambulance ride and the ER visit if you have a crashing headache, but won't pay for a nurse to visit your home and hand you a prescription migraine pill. They'll pay for a wheelchair but not rehab.

Issue #7: Mutated Morality. The success of the sci-fi genre of literature probably owes itself to the same basic human tendency as issue #7. The truly original sci-fi novels, comics, and flicks invariably reprised just a couple of themes: scientific discovery gone awry, especially when it comes to changing humans or animals ... always with evil consequences. Think Frankenstein. Think Neuromancer. If it wasn't human mutation, it was the invention of robots who went nasty and tried to take over the human race. This time think Terminator or War Games. The last theme is of science, itself run amok. More precisely, it is of people who are not mature enough for the technology they've developed. Think Star Wars. Think 1984. Those same 3 fears, plus an overly literal interpretation of religious texts causes us to hold ourselves back from some of the most logical and promising developments in medical science such as stem cell research, genetic testing/profiling, and organ harvesting.

In closing, before I get accused of trying to sell everyone's health and well-being to "the man" on the cheap, let me be clear: I'm talking about implementing some basic economics (and common sense) here. I'm talking about re-using strategies that have succeeded in other industries. I am NOT talking about putting a corporation in charge of deciding which treatments are most cost-effective or profitable. Rather, I'm refraining one of my favorite topics: individuals need to be responsible for their own lives and choices. My gripe with the healthcare industry is that it's structure doesn't allow us the information or flexibility to do that.

A blog only a software shop could love

Here's perhaps the most basic goal in designing software: nailing down ALL the requirements. If this is done right the first time, writing the SW is cake. In fact, it could probably be automated. That's the concept behind, for example UML.

Here's the rub: no person or organization ever thinks of (or has time to document) ALL the requirements. We're just not prescient and omniscient enough.

Here's one stab at a solution: creating long lists of "Use Cases" and then break these down into individual business requirements, then translate these into functional specifications, which are re-translated into technical specs, which are then coded.

Problem is, use cases are the business equivalent of a Roomba, wandering randomly around the room with no aim or accountability.

What Will Tomorrow Bring: Car In-dash Computers

I almost feel foolish making this prediction, since it seems so obvious. It has even been "prototyped" (read: proto-hyped) for years. Hell, they even put an iMac into a VeeDub on Pimp My Ride 2 years ago.

Nevertheless... by the time you sell your current car, you might find a REAL, fully-functioning PC instead of a CD player just above your A/C controls. There will be growing pains; mark my words some hapless car company will try to build something proprietary and locked-down. They will fail, and the industry will learn how it's gotta be. OR they can just read on .... It's gotta:

• Be Open
• Be price-competitive. They charge $1500 for a nav system; there's no reason they can't install a whole laptop for that price.
• Be Powerful. Well, as powerful as your average laptop today. 1.xxGhz and 50GB should do.
• Have a proven and extensible OS: either Linux, Windows, MacOS, or Symbian.
• Be able to use multiple interface modalities, available transparently to all applications in all contexts. Users should be able to switch at will among the modalities:
  • Voice enabled
  • Voice-to-text interpreter
  • Text-to-voice reader
  • Touch screen
  • Joystick slash trackball slash navigation nob
  • Hide-away wireless keyboard
  • PC remote control (think firefly)
• Have webcams built in (interior-facing for communications apps, exterior facing to record the driver's-eye-view, rear-facing for backing up)
• Have (or connect to the vehicle's) front and rear bumper proximity sensors
• Have GPS built-in
• Have multiple connection modalities built-in. It should be able to switch among them automatically and transparently to the user:
  • Wi-Fi
  • Bluetooth
  • GRPS and EDGE, capable of using any of the major US providers
• Also have the ability to act as a wireless access point for those in the car with their own laptops
• Have USB connection points (used to connect iPods, cameras, etc ... and also to charge cellphones, etc)
• Have a solid-state hard drive
• Be aware of who is driving the car. Specifically. Some manufacturers do this via weight on the seat, others via a chip in the key (where everyone has their own key). An RF chip-embedded card in everyone's wallet would fit the bill, as would voice or fingerprint recognition. Alternatively, it could ID your cell phone using Bluetooth.
• Be able to support multiple applications simultaneously on multiple screens, networked throughout the vehicle. If this causes difficulty, the alternative can be to run multiple, low-spec computers in the back seat, networked to a more powerful "server" up front.

Users would be able to install any of the standard applications available for the chosen OS. Minimally, they'd want:

• Web Browser
• Email (web mail, Notes, Outlook, etc)
• Music Player (iTunes, internet radio, podcasts, satellite radio, etc)
• Games
• Video Player (DVD, mpeg, streaming internet video, Sirius satellite TV)

Above and beyond that, based on this platform, there will be a new market for apps. The obvious killers would be:

• Google Navigation: [[ See earlier blog post ]]
• CarLog: Accessing the vehicle's internal computer to present:
  • Stats (hours and miles driven, average mpg, average mph, location history, etc). These stats would be available for each driver as well as the car, the trip, past trips, etc. To allay Big Brother fears, each user should be able to reset, erase or disable the collection of his own data.
  • Performance mode: 0-60 timer, current hp output (all with history)
  • Maintenance Management: Alerting the user when scheduled maintenance is due. To the extent possible, this should be adjusted based on self-awareness sensors which would look at the current condition of the oil (using specific weight measurements or translucency), tires (using tread-depth sensors), air conditioning (using chemical composition measurement), battery (using resiliency and peak charge measurement), range (using gas levels), etc.
  • As an option, users could volunteer to put this data in a "black box" which would disable their ability to clear data and would regularly upload it (securely) to an independent, trusted site. They could then selectively choose to release the data (as people do with medical records). For example, an insurance company might offer lower rates based on your good driving record as recorded by the app (miles driven, frequency of tailgating (speed-calibrated), % of time speeding, % of time parking in a high risk area, % of time driving below 32 deg, % of time driving at night). One might even use this in a court case. Naturally, protection would have to be placed on the data to prevent hacking ... and also subpoena-ing. An arguement could be made that the 5th Ammendment might apply to disclosure of this info.
• GreaseMonkey CarDoc: This would access the car's internal computer to read in any error codes and offer a "help" function which presents:
  • A full description of the error as well as common causes
  • A step-by-step diagnosis and resolution path. There should be pictures and animations.
  • Phone numbers presented for the manufacturer's care line (OnStar, etc) and the closest dealer (using the GPS, a specific POI db, as well as Bluetooth capabilities). Additionally, it could upload exact location and relevant error info to the dealer to expedite the call.
• Interact!: A communication tool which gives a single user interface for the user's existing e-Mail, Fax, SMS, IM, and Voicemail. Based on the current context (user in car or away, car moving or not, interaction is urgent or low-pri, etc), the application would manage these "interactions" differently. For example, when an email comes in, the app would follow a decision tree to determine what to do:
• • Is the car moving?
  • What is the communication modality? Phone? Email? SMS?
  • Is it for the driver or someone else? If it's the driver, the notification needs to be audible ... and/or delayed
  • Is someone on the phone currently? If so, the notification might be a chime or just delayed
  • Is the email urgent or from a high-priority sender? If yes, perhaps the system asks if it should read the message aloud immediately rather than just playing a tone
  • etc.
• This, of course, requires:
  • User-awareness (can select from a list of people in the car based on above-mentioned ID strategy)
  • DEEP Bluetooth integration
  • Blackberry integration
  • Corporate and POP3/IMAP email integration
  • Its own address book and calendar, but also integration with major existing applications (Outlook, etc)
• The ability to access all functions and user data via the car's computer as well as any internet browser ... and perhaps even any Symbian or Blackberry device
• Interaction Tracker: tracking and displaying statistics on interactions with each contact (date and time of each call, email, etc)
• The ability for users to indicate how frequently they'd like to interact with any given contact. The system would have a countdown timer which would alert the user if they've neglected the person for too long. Every time an interaction takes place, the timer is reset.
• TopicTagger: automatic tagging of each interaction with topical keywords. These would be derived, for example, from the subject line of emails, or from the most commonly used word in emails/text messages/phone calls (yes, it would be able to recognize spoken words). the user could, of course, add their own tags via any of the input modalities.
• Calendar-based alerts. The lead time (time between alert and appointment/event) would be automatically determined based on the user's physical distance from the stated meeting site.
• Public Safety Emergency Alerts (specific either to the current location or current people in the vehicle)
• CrazyDriver: using the forward- and rearward-facing cams, would give the driver the ability to hit a button which saves the last minute of video in a package for either later viewing or transmission to law enforcement.. Ideally, it would have the ability to recognize license plate numbers automatically and tag videos
• NewsReader: Either as a component of the media player, or separately, a tool which downloads news feeds (RSS, etc) and auto-selects those most likely to interest the driver and passengers. Then reads the article aloud, giving the driver the ability to vocally skip, tag for later revew, and rate the article
• InstaFeedback: This app would use GPS to realize when users park the car near a store/restaurant/hotel/etc. When they return to the car (computer is turned back on), they are prompted with a short-list of nearby locations to rate. In as little as 2 "clicks", they pick the place, and enter a rating (0-5 stars). If the want, they can enter comments (voice or text) as well.
• RadarNet: Controversial, but inevitable ... the ability to link to the car's radar/laser detector to identify speed traps. Then, the ability to network with other cars ahead and behind to propigate the news about where smokeys are.
• Blog-on-the-go: Ability to post voice/text blogs. Ability to combine with the vehicle's cams and saved pix. Text, of course, should be create-able via keyboard or voice recognition.
• Doberman: Uses cams to take a snapshot of whoever starts the car. These snapshots are stored for a few weeks and regularly uploaded to a web site. On one hand, this could be used to watch one's kids. On the other, it could be used to positively ID a thief or carjacker. Using the outward-pointed cams and a proximity or contact detector, vandals might also be spotted.

In terms of marketing, it seems natural that there are two initial adopters: high-end luxury sedan segment (think Maybach and 7-series) and technophile twentysomething dorky trendy segment (V-dub, Prius, Scion, etc). From there, it should quickly propigate down the price point spectrum to fam-wagons (Suburbans, minivans). From there, market permeation can flow based on demand, freeing the developers create enhanced software (backed up by enhanced HW) for several niche markets, such as:

• Long-Haul Trucking / Commercial Vehicles
• Fleet Manager giving home office info about the fleet (location, rig stats, drive time, etc)
• Enhacements to navigation looking for truck stops and also determining the best route based on tolls, road grade (to minimize fuel consumption), weather, and a list of pickups/drop offs
• Clearinghouse of possible jobs
• Enhancements to GreaseMonkey for big rigs
• Bus/Van/Shuttle ... perhaps even Airlines
• Fleet Manager
• Bluetooth auto-pay functionality. Each passenger's fare would be computed once they exit the vehicle based on their wait (compared to average), the distance travelled, the popularity of their route (if they pick their suburban house as the drop-off, this would be more expensive than a local park-n-ride even if the distances were similar). This could be adjusted based on the number of passengers in the current vehicle who pick the same drop-off, encouraging people to group themselves prior to boarding based on destination area.
• Interactive real-time info on waiting passengers' locations
• Ability for passengers to input their desitnation once onboard via preset preferences, terminals, voice, or SMS. Based on this, and the locations of waiting passengers, traffic, etc, the correct route would be contstantly re-calculated and each person's wait time could be indicated. An enhancement to this would be to track each passenger's wait time (both before pickup and en-route) and constantly recompute route to minimize the average wait time for all passengers. The current (or recent average) wait times could be indicated online and at the bus stops so people could decide which mode of transport will be most efficient for them. They could choose to wait for the bus, pick a different bus company, take a taxi, walk to the subway, etc.
• Feedback to dispatch, who would have heatmaps, stats, etc available. Possibility of automating dispatch entirely
• Enhancements to entertainment systems to provide each passenger with the ability to access the internet, games, and entertainment. An enhancement would be to have automatica Bluetooth links between each passenger's cell phone and their computer terminal so they could access a public-transport-specific version of Interact!
• Military
• Much lower-cost Aegis connection (and higher functionality, with more feedback to central)
• Real-time battle info
• Contact lists / chain-of-command charts
• Live translation
• Car rental
• Fleet Manager adjusted specifically for rental car needs
• Sightseeing manager enhancements
• Ability to create and publish vacation logs (voice, typing, video, pictures) on the go
• Ability to adjust rental contract online (change dropoff, extend contract, change insurance, etc) without having to spend interminable minutes on the phone waiting for a customer service rep. If a small thermal printer were added to the car, it could actually produce its own receipts, saving rental companies from the need to have an employee check-in each car upon return.
• Emergency Servies / Law Enforcement
• Enhanced Emergency dispatch
• Online medical info including individuals' medical records
• Online criminal info for police
• Online building plans for fire dept

C'mon Google - Navigate!

I'm desperately hoping for Google to either come out with their own car navigation device or to simply supply the software for an existing gizmo.

The GoogleNavigation I dream of would look like this:

• Google Earth, integrated of course with GPS. Their existing real-time traffic, directions, satellite view, POI layering would be in full force.
• The full system should be acessible via the contraption or a web browser, including all my routes, favorites, and user data
• Traffic would be enhanced to be predictive (based, of course on a time-weighted historical profile)
• Users would be able to access (via built-in broadband connection or Bluetooth link) additional POI databases from third-parties. Hopefully, the likes of Magellan would step up to leverage their existing data assets. I'd also want to see something from Menupages, Yelp, Michelin, and Fodors, presenting not just names and numbers, but pictures, menus, and rating/reviews.
• The interface would have to be simplified and adapted to touch/voice/text input. Users should be able to toggle between them at will.
• Also, the system would collect my feedback and use this in subsequent routes. For example, if there's a road I hate, I should be able, with two or three steps max, to tell the system to avoid it in the future.
• Taking the feedback app further - if I search for Korean restaurants and eventually choose one for it to navigate me to, when I get back in the car, the screen should be preset with a feedback option. With one touch, I should be able to give the place a rating (1-10). With a second touch, I should be able to input verbal or text comments. Similarly, if I simply park near a store/restaurant/etc and then return to the car, the system should prompt me with a short-list of nearby places I might have visited. With one touch I should be able to select where I went. With a second touch, I would enter a rating ... If this data could be uploaded back to said third-party POI databases, think of the follow-on possibilities in terms of a new levels of accuracy in feedback and advertizing.
• The system would have a Pricefinder function. I would indicate a specific good (gas, t-bone steak, North Face backpack, etc). It would find the lowest price for a the good within X
  miles of my current position. This might be weighted by availability and breadth of selection. Perhaps store rating as well. A variation on this would be a constantly-recomputing gas price calculator, which would always determine the best option for filling up after considering prices in the area, as well as gas consumption to get to each station. Sometimes it would make sense to stop at a nearby cheapie place, even if I still have half a tank.
• The POI search function would be enhanced to include an "along my current route" option. The idea is that, if I'm headed from Manhattan to Boston and want a burger, I'd rather drive 15 miles down the road to a Drive-Thru just off the highway than drive 5 miles perpendicular to my main route on local roads to a small village's Main Street cafe. Ditto gas.
• The routing option would be expanded to include "use scenic/historic routes"
• The routing component would enable users to VERY quickly create multiple-waypoint trips. In fact, it would facilitate the planning of trips by considering routing, waypoints, traffic, etc to suggest the best route, as well as "must see" waypoints nearby.
  • Scenario: I'm at home in, say, Berkley, CA. I have a 10:00 meeting in the financial district of SF, a customer to see in Burlingame, a store to visit in Nob Hill, a friend to hang with in Santa Cruz, a fiance to pick up in Oakland, and then a golf weekend in Carmel.
  • Behavior: I input these waypoints and constraints. The system analyzes various routing options for timing and efficiency. It considers wait time as well as traffic levels. It also looks at miles travelled, comparing with existing gas, to determine where I'll be when I need gas (and automatically building those stops into the route). It further looks at restaurants along the route (my favorites first, then the highly rated ones). If it finds that I'll be passing by one around mealtime, it would suggest a stop and recompute the route. It might even suggest a re-organization of my itenerary to take advantage of a particularly great place. The system presents routing options ranked in descending order of recommendation.