I recently needed to book a plane ticket, which is something I hate doing because it seems nearly impossible to know when to buy to get the lowest price. In the past I have used Kayak and Orbitz, which are good at identifying low prices at the times I want, but they are not good at providing future price predictions.
Bing has a great fare predictor feature that suggests whether it is time to buy or if I should wait based on past fare observations. It indicates the likelihood the fare will go up, down or stay the same and the potential price changes as well. There is no guarantee it will be right, but it gives you a good sense about the direction the fare will go and in my case for this flight it was correct and I wound up getting a nice deal. Check it out next time you need to go somewhere.
I dug out the old Nintendo this week and got my fix of Dr. Mario, Duck Hunt and a few other games. Maybe I’m just easily amused, but despite all of today’s fancy game consoles I still like to go back to the oldies. I like the pixelated graphics, 8-bit soundtracks and finicky cartridges.
I mentioned this to some friends this week and one of them pulled out the new Droid phone, where he had some Nintendo games running in an emulator. It’s interesting how yesterday’s games that pushed the limits of technology and cost a premium are now just nostalgic distractions you can carry around in your pocket.
It’s cool that classic games can be played on all kinds of platforms today, but it just doesn’t beat the real thing. There is something special about the clicking sound the gun trigger makes on Duck Hunt, blowing on cartridges and not being able to save your game.
The MIS Research Center (MISRC) at the Carlson School of Management does frequent presentations on all sorts of technology topics. Most recently, Jesse Bockstedt from George Mason University spoke about social media in modern organizations. He gave a great overview of the current social media landscape and even touched on prediction markets, which I was not familiar with. You can view the presentation deck at the MISRC website here.
I recently started following Fred Wilson’s great blog, A VC, where he talks about technology, startups and where it’s all going. Fred is a venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures in NYC, which has investments in companies like Twitter, Etsy, and foursquare to name a few. Check out their portfolio page for a full list.
Came across an older post on a talk he did at Google this past May. He talked about how technology is disrupting entrenched industries like media and how it has great potential to cause massive changes in other industries, specifically highlighting consumer finance, education, energy, health care and government.
I found the talk so interesting I actually started taking notes while I watched it. The video is about an hour long or if you want a quick summary my notes are below.
Lessons From Media
The media industry is being significantly disrupted by the Internet.
Power and control is shifting from institutions to individuals.
This sounds obvious, but when you step back and think about it, I think it’s really significant.
For example, before the Internet, think of how difficult it was for an individual to publish ideas for a large audience. Today with a blog I can make the same ideas available to a global audience essentially instantly all on my own for free.
Startups don’t need as much capital to “take a shot” at large institutions because they can leverage a lot of free and relatively inexpensive technologies to get to market faster.
Conversations on the web are exponential. A blog post or comment can be instantly propagated to a huge audience through various web services.
Internet technologies are disrupting businesses that are not sustainable. Fred frames sustainable business as something that could go on forever.
Key is to start small and solve a tiny piece of the problem first.
What’s next? Industries that are end to end digital.
Consumer Finance
Peer to peer lending
Virtual currency
New banks, built from scratch
Social, collaborative investing services
Education
Open course content, lesson plans, curriculum, etc.
This content will become commoditized.
Aggregating existing content will be important for sourcing the best out there.
Web will become even more important as a digital transcript to tell your story.
Importance of a traditional diploma will decrease.
The increasing cost of higher education vs. the financial gains of having the diploma will hit a tipping point and the system will bust.
The web will be the textbook.
Why pay publishers for books when the same information is online for free?
What can be learned from the home schooling model?
Energy
Smart grids will happen.
Micro grids will allow people to sell surplus energy back into the grid.
As more smart energy management devices are introduced into homes, businesses, etc. there will be a lot of data to analyze.
Health Care
More challenging problems and not completely end to end digital.
Doctor is the middleman.
Digitizing health records and effectively sharing this information across systems and providers.
Need to be able to securely share and collaborate with this data similar to ways emerging in social media.
Someone is going to get this right and the flood gates will open for development.
People are using the web and its resources to find answers to health problems outside of traditional health care systems.
Meetup example about people forming groups around specific health problems.
Government
Communication channels in government need to become more open.
First post. Let’s see where this goes. If you’re viewing this post then you made my poor Frankenstein server that hosts this site groan. It’s cobbled together out of old spare parts, but it gets the job done for now and is proof that there is always some life left in old computer parts.
The point of building the server and this site is twofold. First, I wanted to gain some tangible, hands-on experience with Linux and web hosting/administration by utilizing the LAMP software stack. Secondly, I wanted to start blogging about technology and experimenting with all the great social media services popping up all over the place. This site will serve as the playground for these activities.
On a complete side note, this is a great time of year to check out Young Frankenstein and the entire Mel Brooks catalogue.
joesiewert: @boxee_help Hey, WinXP SP3 and the latest beta, boxee-0.9.20.10711. Similar experiences with the previous beta on a different XP box too. 3 days ago from web
joesiewert: I want to like @boxee but it sucks every time I try it. Choppy video, unresponsive UI and it managed to kill my fresh Windows install today. 4 days ago from web
I like the pixelated graphics, 8-bit soundtracks and finicky cartridges.
