I am not drinking a lot of coffee, funnily enough - but I’ve happened to go to three Peet’s Coffee’s today. I stopped off at the one in San Mateo (next to Whole Foods), then happened to go to the one on University Ave in Palo Alto to use the wifi (which didn’t work) and now am at the one on Castro Street in Mountain View. The nice thing about the one here is that the wifi- as supplied by Google via Meraki Networks, actually works pretty well. I also saw Josh Elman here (former LinkedIn colleague) randomly.

Oh and I’m a stockholder in Peet’s … fun stuff.

PayTrust.com (now part of Intuit) has been around for quite a number of years with a fairly small user base, but I have always thought there is still room for some innovative models around receiving and scanning mail and turning them into electronic documents. I’d given this type of business some serious thought back in 2004 but had decided it would never really be a big, scaleable mainstream model. It’s an automation/execution play that’s not rocket science but will take a lot of work to make efficient. That being said, although I enjoy shredding things myself I might be interested in the new Remote Control Mail service mentioned here on TechCrunch though they’d reported on it back in September 2005 as well. With low-cost labor having to do a lot of the manual work for this kind of thing (hopefully not penal labor as allegedly utilized by some well-known direct mail companies) there are sure to be some real privacy concerns from people letting people open and shred (or not shred) their mail(!). The human element is almost always the weakest link when it comes to data security…

We mostly shop at Trader Joes and Whole Foods (despite the high prices of the latter). I find visits to the local Albertsons frankly somewhat depressing. And I don’t just mean as someone visiting as a customer struggling to find the things I truly want, but also when I think about how they seem to be running their business. Today’s trip compelled me to scribble down a few thoughts.

I admit that I don’t know very much about the big grocery store business, except that it has very low margins and lots of sameness. Whole Foods has better EBITDA margins than SafeWay (7.8% versus 5.6% for last year for example) but still we’re not talking about them being in a completely different class of company. Whole Foods has grown revenue over $1bb (20%+) in the last year and the year before that though. Given this growth and truly some real momentum behind eating healthier, organic, what I really don’t understand is how the sameness has endured for so long, and continues to endure in these stores. In our local Albertsons there is a (what seems like a token) very small section, 1/10th of an aisle dedicated to organic/healthy products and yet in every other aisle there is choice upon choice upon choice of products but none of the choices that make me go to Trader Joes or Whole Foods.

So if there are 15 different types of laundry detergent, why wouldn’t they get rid of one or stock fewer bottles to make room somewhere else for some of the products that people like me would really like to buy and more to the point, more people everywhere are starting to buy? Obviously a lot of it comes down to the power of the big consumer packaged goods companies who are enormous suppliers to the grocery stores and give them great deals - their model is just not set up to deal with a larger number of smaller vendors who have higher quality, often higher-cost products.

But let’s not kid ourselves about low pricing, it often just isn’t there from the big stores — anyone who has shopped in Trader Joes knows that though it’s hard to find the same products in both venues for a comparison - but in one case a box of Puffins cereal available only in 340g size in Albertsons (in their ‘heathier’ section) costs over $1 over a box more than a 510g box sold in Trader Joe’s. Unreal!

I have to think though, given the comps and the trends that this is a *huge* missed opportunity at this point for a major chain to put some real thought and analysis into going for this market in a big way in their current stores, and that even though there are some interesting initiatives afoot to expand into this through acquiring or starting smaller high-end grocery stores, that a more fundamental shift is needed to get in the face of the mainstream consumer. It’s a great example, I believe, of how difficult it is for a company to turn an incumbent model on its head to go after bigger opportunities that may not even be THAT big of a risk really, with the markets’ short-term quarter-to-quarter focus — the endless cycle of optimizing toward the “local maximum” continues.

I thought this was pretty cool - “SMS Sugar Man“, a film shot entirely on camera phones in Johannesburg (South Africa). I’m always amazed when I go back to see how advanced the mobile phone culture is. Very cool.

I just love this title: Ambient Findability (read about it in BusinessWeek). Now the description may or may not accord with what that title brings to mind, but it is a lovely little morsel, isn’t it?

In the New York Times article from today, Profit, Not Jobs, in Silicon Valley:

Changes in technology and business strategy are raising fundamental questions about the future of the valley, the nation’s high technology heartland. In part, the change is driven by the very automation that Silicon Valley has largely made possible, allowing companies to create more value with fewer workers.

The article is worth reading, somewhat along the lines of Friedman’s The World is Flat which I’ll blog about when I finish the book (soon :-). It brings to mind, however, a good post from Nick Denton I recall reading from March 2002 about how “disappointing” San Francisco had been in its quest to become a great city and why he was moving back to New York. I don’t agree with all of his conclusions and observations about San Francisco and Silicon Valley, but I will say that neither the city nor the Valley are what I’d pictured before moving out here 5 years ago this past week. It does seem to lack a legitimate center, though I’m glad I have occasion to work for LinkedIn in Palo Alto which is as close to a geographic and emotional center (Stanford etc.) as can probably be.

How will we be able to match the price of public goods with the costs to society of using those public goods? One of the key areas especially familiar to those of us living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area is that of traffic and congestion. Michael Parekh has a post concerning GPS-based highway tax systems that have been contemplated and are being tested in Oregon. Basic idea - you would get taxed for every mile you drive (partly) instead of getting taxed on every (gallon) liter of petrol (gasoline) you buy. Especially as we have more fuel-efficient vehicles, the problem of congestion won’t necessarily get better even if pollution from less gas being burnt per mile goes down. Problems with this abound of course, especially with privacy where your movements can be tracked and with the Patriot Act (and whatever comes along next) currently being heavily pushed by the government of the US its a potentially very slippery slope. [I blogged about this while at Jupiter Research, concerning the kevlar bags that the operators of the Fastrak toll-taking system gave out to drivers in the Bay Area, so that they could prevent their cars being tracked for the 511 traffic system that now provides real time traffic data to users based on where you and other toll-token holders are driving. Luckily nobody is trying to catch speeders using this system just yet!.]

I just finished reading “Freakonomics” and one of the areas they discuss is comparing the danger to children of parents having a swimming pool vs. owning a gun. Not a complete solution but one that seems less done in the US than in some other countries I’ve seen (from watching, especially, some of these home improvement television programs that Tivo keeps recording) is to have a fence around the pool. It did, however, lead me to think about some other RFID-based solutions or perimeter-based alarms (such as the type that keeps dogs within a certain perimeter, shocking them if they wander too far). I don’t propose a shock of course, but I wonder just to what extent we’re going to see these types of solutions show up in the near future.

Article from a year ago about RFID tracking of kids at Legoland in Denmark — combining WiFi with SMS to parents’ mobile phones to tell them where their stray kid might be in the park. Pretty clever.

I wrote a blog entry about a year ago that mentioned WOZ (Wheels of Zeus), and as expected they are building a location-based service for both consumers and businesses to “Know where your loved ones are, Find them when they aren’t where they should be, [and] Get proactive alerts when they leave or return”. For businesses it promises to track items without costly readers, etc. etc.

They’ve put out a press release with Motorola, but I’m most interested in how they’re going to “map” the world, what their plans are for locating people. It seems it will be a combination of GPS with other technologies, obviously, but still one has to place the coordinates onto some type of map — what would be really cool is if it were not just a topographical map but something like what Urban Data Solutions does (they provide the data that moviemakers use to produce those CG New York cityscapes etc.). I guess it all depends if your homebase is New York City, or the fairly-flat Silicon Valley!

I always loved time-lapse photography; where instead of taking shots at 34 frames per second (or whatever) a camera takes one picture a minute/every few seconds from a static position. Especially of traffic in the city, sunrise etc.

Microsoft Research is testing something called the SenseCam which takes up to 2000 images per day - taking images can be triggered by changes in light, but probably also at periodic intervals, when heart rate changes, etc. etc. We know and expect our future to contain ubiquitous cameras; the most familiar to us are those affixed to a certain spot (e.g. ATM security cameras); and we’re already becoming familiar with the user-initiated personal/portable cameras or camera-phones. Cameras will be embedded in so many other places as costs come down -> the really interesting and potentially chilling issue is whether, how and by whom these persistent, mobile and intermittent images of us could be stitched together. Of course it’s not hard to imaging them being (a) packaged, sold and traded, (b) searchable, available for free online, or (c) both (today: Paris Hilton’s sex tape cottage industry on Google).

I received a mylar bag in the mail last week from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission [SF Bay Area]. Instead of just using your FasTrak RFID toll tag for debiting funds from your toll account, they’ll now be offering a service that tracks traffic patterns in real-time available on their website (511.org) and over the phone by calling 511.

Maybe I missed it, but I haven’t seen anything about this in the local media. The Mylar bag was accompanied by a modified user agreement governing the rules of how they can use the information they collect. The mylar bag is essentially the only way to “opt out” - take the FasTrak off your windshield and put it in the mylar bag to prevent it being read by the frequent readers along the side of the road.

Now, it is said in the agreement that “no information identifying a FasTrak account or a person or vehilce using the transponder will be collected by the Metoropolitan Transportation Commission or ‘511′”, but of course in the case of investigations by law enforcement (even without a court order) this data may be fair game. Who knows when eager state and local governments (especially in CA, unable to raise property taxes) will seize upon automated token speed policing to raise additional funds?

I think the 511 traffic tracking project is overall a positive thing, but I’ll certainly be hanging onto that mylar bag for now.

Location, location, location: the idea is that where you are has value (relative to stores, places of business, public transportation, the beach, etc.) as is encapsulated in real estate prices.

But what about temporary real estate? I already discussed a little bit about trading your place in line, the value of that temporary real estate, but what about services that would seek to be offered for a limited time, to people in a limited area. What are the elements you’d have to look at to come up with a price for that location, the price a consumer would be willing to accept in exchange for some level of specificity about their location?

ie. I’m in Starbucks in Belltown right now as I type this
I’m sitting one table from the back
I’m in Seattle, WA
I’m at my personal laptop
My IP address is x.x.x.x
I’m on a business trip in the Seattle area
I’ll be at SEATAC airport in 3 hours
I’m on Instant Messenger

All of these bits of information are time-sensitive and location-based, how much would you pay to know any of this?