New Florence. New Renaissance.

Mobile in Job 1 for MLB

“Mobile, in our business, isn’t the second screen,” says Matthew Gould, vice president of communications for MLB Advanced Media. “It’s the first screen”

MLB app At Bat “is open on average 3 million times a day,”

Another app being updated this year is At the Ball Park. This free app lets fans who attend games buy tickets, order food, check-in at the parks for t-shirts and other promotional swag, and see maps of the ballparks to find concession stands and first aid stations.

“The new feature this year is you can use your mobile phone to get a seat upgrade on your way in to most parks,” he said. “Don’t like your seat, upgrade it just like you do on a plane.”

Xconomy

For the 2013 baseball season, Major League Baseball is more than tripling the number of stadiums that will accept mobile tickets via Apple’s Passbook app (as in photo). This year there will be 13 stadiums that will enable paperless ticketing via Passbook, MLB announced at a fan event in New York City Tuesday night. That’s up from four last season.

GigaOm

The changing world of puzzles

You probably haven't heard of the World Puzzle Championship either, but you should have, because it's the most extreme test of pure logical-reasoning power on the planet. It has taken place annually for the past 21 years; in 2012 it drew 145 contestants from 26 countries, many of them people who eat, breathe and, on the rare occasions when they sleep, dream about puzzles full time.

These guys are outliers, honest-to-God geniuses. But they're just the most illustrious representatives--the apex predators--of a vast, worldwide puzzling population that numbers in the hundreds of millions. Puzzles have always been a ubiquitous but unassuming and peripheral presence in our lives, folded meekly into the back pages of magazines and newspapers. But with the rise of the Internet and mobile devices, they've moved closer to center stage and become a not insignificant part of global culture, almost as pervasive, in terms of their reach and the number of person-hours they consume, as television and movies. No one knows exactly how many Americans do puzzles, but everyone agrees that the number of crossword puzzlers runs into the tens of millions. Estimates for the number of sudoku players run up to 80 million worldwide. And that's to say nothing of puzzlish and puzzlesque activities like Scrabble, Words with Friends, bridge, Tetris, Rubik's Cubes (over 300 million sold) and Angry Birds (260 million users at last count). Now that puzzles have escaped from newspapers and migrated onto our phones and tablets, no idle moment is safe from them

Time

Photo Credit

Technological "Solutionism"

I am enjoying Evgeny Morozov’s To Save Everything, Click Here because he points to so many potential candidates for this innovation blog – BinCam, a smart garbage can proposal from Europe which leverages smartphone cameras, Amazon Mechanical Turk, gamification concepts and more.   Santa Monica’s “smart parking”.  Augmented Reality in Japanese kitchens. Actually similar examples have already made their way into my books and blogs.

Morozov’s goal is not to wow, but to force a pause. So, he wonders if the researchers proposing BinCam have thought about its ethics. He would only call the parking meters in Santa Monica “smart” if they allowed a driver to decide what to do with leftover credit not just let it automatically subsidize the city budget. Or if the meter provided citizens stats about who typically parks there – affluent citizens or local students. He says the kitchen AR app leaves the user intellectually diminished.

His basic premise is just because we can use technology to do something, does not mean we should. He quotes Gilles Paquet: “Solutionism (interprets) issues as puzzles to which there is a solution, rather than problems to which there may be a response”

As I go through the book, I have several reactions

a) He misses the theme of  "standing on the shoulders of giants" which has progressed mankind for generations. Reviewing the Zipments site recently, it hit me how dated are Fedex's package tracking, eBay's user ratings, Google Maps, PayPal APIs and other concepts they leverage. Little of what they are doing is technologically innovative at this point. But as a whole, they are crowdsourcing same day and home delivery - a minor trend which could only reshape grocery, logistics and countless other industries.

b) Society and markets have a way of winnowing out frivolous solutions. He points to many solutions which will die a quick and natural death. But I would let the market decide not individuals, even as smart as he is. I am jaded having listened to many enterprise tech execs pooh pooh consumer tech for a while now, when they should be embarassed their data centers are nowhere as efficient as Google's, when their Big Data is puny compared to Facebook's, when their supply chain is simplistic compared to Apple's. 

c) His criticisms of some of the solutions need to be taken in the same spirit as those of consumers who keep clamoring for features in the next camera in their phone – higher resolution, low-light performance, ever faster auto-focus etc. Version 1,2, 3 of anything screams to be improved upon

d) Finally, not sure how he would put the genie back in the bottle. The proliferation of technologies has torn down barriers for anyone to try and solve any problem, small or big. The most powerful example of that comes in the recent Time cover story on cancer. It points to a cocktail of attacks on cancer which have only recently become available “bioengineering, nanotechnology, drug compounds and data gathering, including protein data, splicing data and mutation data, all of which is being hoisted into view by ever cheaper computational muscle.” Even more fascinating, the leadership for this attack on cancer is not coming from the traditional medical elite or from Valley VCs. It is coming from Stand Up 2 Cancer – founded by mostly Hollywood types, impatient with progress in the fight against cancer.

Yes, we are treating many issues as puzzles and applying all kinds of tech to solve them. To me, at least that’s a reason to celebrate “solutionism” even if not all the puzzles are Grand Challenges.

Bequeathing Digital Assets

Consumers are spending an unprecedented amount buying things they will never actually touch. Shoppers shelled out an estimated $4.5 billion last year for e-books and billions more for music, movies and other stuff that exists only on a computer or in the cloud. The benefits of this digital shift are enormous, but so are the unanswered questions. Among the biggest: As more of the things you buy, make and cherish cease to be tangible, what happens to them all when you die?

Time (sub required)

Scan of exhibit on varying positions taken by industry players - only available in print edition. Click to enlarge

 

Tesco's Virtual Easter Egg Hunt

Using Google Street View, and with awards like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2s in some of the golden eggs, Tesco has a fun promotion for Easter. Note: awards are only for UK residents but anyone can play as I did around London's Trafalgar Square.

Crowdsourcing Home Deliveries

Frank Scavo shared with me this story that WalMart may be looking at crowdsourced couriers to handle store to home deliveries. That in turn took me to Zipments which has been pioneering such deliveries for a while, and uses plenty of technology to allow for initiating, tracking, paying for and rating such deliveries. From its FAQs:

"Our accessible web application and API allows for seamless integration into any type of business, whether it's a local "mom and pop", a local e-commerce company, or the local franchise of a national chain."

"As soon as a courier is dispatched for your job, you'll receive the assigned courier's Zipments profile which includes a photo, professional background and performance history."

"You can also track deliveries online, and receive real-time notifications showing delivery status each step of the way. And you will know immediately when the delivery is signed for with our digital signatures."

"For more unusual or custom requests, we'll route you to our delivery marketplace where you'll be able to set a target price you'd like to pay. Because Zipments couriers bid on these requests based on their availability and the requirements of each job, this ensures you fair market pricing for your deliveries."

"After each delivery, Zipments lets you rate your courier in three categories: speed, package care, and overall satisfaction."

Photo Credit from their blog of holiday inforgraphic

How Search Works

Really nice infographic from Google – small section in image below

Automating Airport Security Trays

I think the last innovation the trays we use at airport security lines saw was placing ads on them. Staff shuffle them around - they always seem to be away from where the passengers really need them. So, I was pleased to see Holger Mueller describe an innovation he saw in Sweden

"We all know the drill. You have passed the boarding pass and ID check and still have to wait for you and your belongings to be further scrutinized, before you can make it to your plane. It is a classic automation problem, for which airports all over the world have come up with different solutions. The most common answer, however, is to make you put your carry-on belongings on a tray. That helps prevent loss of loose objects, which would delay the entire continuity of the checkpoint.

But the solution to one problem often creates another: How do you get the empty trays back to eagerly awaiting passengers? In the US we've all seen the built-at-home carts that are shoved back to the front of the security line. That's been the solution pretty much everywhere else, too.

Excluding, of course, the efficiency minded Germany and Switzerland. Here the empty trays are placed vertically (more trays, less space) before sliding down an incline to the beginning of the checkpoint. Nice.

However, last weekend I discovered an even more sophisticated solution at Stockholm's Arlanda airport: While waiting in line I was already surprised by how fast it was moving. As I approached I could see that the passengers in front of me, were retrieving trays from a seemingly endless supply beneath the transport belt. No security personnel were involved in pushing tray-loaded carts back. No hiccups or delays, just a seamless flow out of the of the wooden paneled (it's Scandinavia) tray-construction's.

Surely someone was quite busy at the other end of the line, placing trays on the returning conveyor belt. When I reached the end of tray line however, to my surprise, the trays got on their return journey by themselves. When picking up my belongings the mystery was solved: Via light sensor barriers and a camera, the system would wait till a passenger had collected all content from their tray(s). I then also noticed that the blue base of the tray must play a role. Once the tray was empty, it was automatically transported forward to a trap door-like segment of the conveyor belt. It would seesaw, gravity doing its job and setting the tray on its rolling way back to the front of the security line, hidden beneath the forward moving belt with the passenger belongings. 

Credit to Arlanda and the Swedes for the fastest solution to the tray turnaround challenge that all airport security checkpoints see these days. Have you seen other, possibly even better solutions?"

Photo Credit

Tencent – Fueling China’s Web Boom

The story of American instant messaging is one of fragmentation: AOL lost its grip, Gmail and Facebook gained ground, that was that. But in China, IM portal Tencent dominates. It has expanded to games, social networking, apps, and an open platform to encourage a Western-style app ecosystem. (It’s now pushing West, entering Apple’s App Store and buying California-based Riot Games.) It makes $1 billion a quarter, much of it through virtual-goods sales, and is now the world’s third-largest publicly traded Internet company.

FastCompany

The Big Data of Love

Let me start by saying I have never tried a dating site having been happily married for over two decades. But the sheer numbers of people trying them and related personality trait data volumes and matchmaking algorithms are staggering.

NY Times "(eHarmony customers) pay up to $60 per month to be offered matches based on their answers to a long questionnaire, which currently has about 200 items. The company has gathered answers from 44 million people, and says that its matches have led to more than half a million marriages since 2005."

And then there is new book Love in the Time of Algorithms which provides even more color

"It’s the mother of all search problems: how to find a spouse, a mate, a date. The escalating marriage age and declin­ing marriage rate mean we’re spending a greater portion of our lives unattached, searching for love well into our thirties and forties.

It’s no wonder that a third of America’s 90 million singles are turning to dating Web sites. Once considered the realm of the lonely and desperate, sites like eHarmony, Match, OkCupid, and Plenty of Fish have been embraced by pretty much every demographic. Thanks to the increasingly efficient algorithms that power these sites, dating has been transformed from a daunting transaction based on scarcity to one in which the possibilities are almost endless. Now anyone—young, old, straight, gay, and even married—can search for exactly what they want, connect with more people, and get more information about those people than ever before."

Finally, Time columnist Joel Stein talks about a trend where even happily married couples are curious to be benchmarked against these databases:

"The dating site eHarmony designed an algorithm to identify people who would make the happiest 25% of couples based on its research of thousands of marriages"