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ecoATM: sell your old devices at an ATM-hosted instant auction?

Published December 29, 2012 Technology Closed

Tyler Cowen posted a brief on a new, very innovative venture. I’ll speculate this is a business model that you have not thought of.

…ecoATM, a firm based in San Diego…has devised and deployed in several American cities a series of ATM-like devices that will automatically analyse your mobile phone, MP3 player or phone charger, and then make you an offer for it. These machines will give you cash in hand or, if you prefer, send the money as a donation to the charity of your choice. The hope is that this hassle-free approach will appeal to people who can’t be bothered to recycle their old phone when buying a new one.

After taking fingerprints and driving-licence details (to discourage crooks from using them to fence stolen goods), ecoATM’s kiosks employ a mixture of computer vision and electronic testing (they will automatically present users with the correct cable and connector) to perform a trick that even the most committed gadget fan might struggle with—telling apart each of the thousands of models of mobile phones, chargers and MP3 players that now exist. They can even make a reasonable guess about how well-used (or damaged) a device is, which can affect its resale value. Any mistakes the machine does make are logged and used to improve accuracy in future.

Once the device on offer has been identified, the kiosk then enters it into an electronic auction. Interested parties bid, and a price is struck in seconds. This auction is the key to ecoATM’s business model, because it means the firm is acting as a broker, rather than carrying a stock of second-hand equipment which it then has to sell. If the owner of the equipment accepts the offer, the kiosk swallows the device and spits out the money.

Really.  The article is here.

it looks to me that ecoATM has a multi-layered moat. The physical ATMs and their locations is obvious. But they are also building an ecosystem around their auctions. If they get enough signups it won’t be easy to copy.

Kevin J. Delaney: Look beyond news for mobile innovation

Published December 28, 2012 Media , Technology Closed

Kevin J. Delaney is editor-in-chief of Quartz, the global business news site launched in September by Atlantic Media. He was previously managing editor of The Wall Street Journal Online. This essay is part of Predictions for Journalism 2013: A Nieman Lab Series.

 

(…) Mobile news will start growing up
The list of breakthrough interfaces for reading news on smartphones is a short one. Instapaper is arguably the pioneer in this area, with its focus on a simple reading experience. Vox Media’s SB Nation iPhone app cleverly grouped news updates about the same topic (Vox tweaked that design in its current web app approach.) But many mobile news apps and sites are little more than re-skinned RSS readers, and surprisingly few publishers even bother to format their email newsletters for easy reading on iPhones and BlackBerries. When we were creating Quartz earlier this year, we needed to look for inspiration to non-news applications, such as the Clear to-do list app — it’s hard to find boldness and creativity in the news industry’s smartphone products.

(…) Clearly, more publishers will reconsider their native app focus in 2013 in favor of HTML5.

(…) Gawker Media’s Nick Denton is among those who have made admirable efforts to improve commenting, and Nick has rightly proclaimed that comments on their own can represent as high-quality content as any article. But most of the best discussion takes place off publishers’ sites, on Twitter, Facebook and in private emails. This is a reality that won’t be fully addressed in 2013, if ever.

AC34: Atemis Racing Navigator Kevin Hall

Published December 24, 2012 Technology Closed
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Michelle Slade interviews Kevin Hall – the head of the Artemis performance-instrumentation team. This excerpt illuminates some of the complexities and tradeoffs associated with the ongoing hydrofoil experiments. There is no free lunch.

(…) You guys don’t seem to be putting much emphasis on foiling – what’s your thinking on that?
KH: I remember being in one of the very early design team meetings and one of the assignments for the performance team was to make sure we were on top of all the things we would want to measure, maybe occasionally have some sailor input. Adam (May) and I are both Moth sailors. At that meeting, [designer] Juan [Kuoyoumdjian] and his team came in and announced that it was clear that if you could get a boat foiling and going straight and fast, there was a little bit less drag so it went faster. We had that discussion a long time ago, but it’s correct. We’re not pursuing it to the same extent that the other teams have because there’s always been the question of control. It’s one thing to get something to fly in a model and it’s another to get it to fly in the real world. Hats off to ETNZ for doing that – really!

Then there are trade-offs after that. You pay a price for generating the lift to be able to fly—that price is the drag—then you pay another price for generating that lift in a way that also gives not active control like we have in the Moth but a form like that you can control as the height/lift/leeway changes. They’ve done a good job of making that fairly self-regulating. For us, we’re not sure that all those penalties are worth it. So while you’ll probably sure you’ll see our boat out of the water a bit, I’m not sure how much.

There’s rumor that foils may be abandoned because of the size of the course.
KH: Even on a really good day on a Moth, you do have to bear away and get up on the foils before get going fast. For that brief time you’re slower than a boat that’s designed to sail through the water traditionally. They may already have worked out that all those little times where you have to heat up after a jibe or bear away [after a tack], maybe that’s too costly. We can kind of tell a little bit what they’re doing when they’re going straight but it’s very hard to have a feel for all the dynamic stuff from faraway. Certainly they [ETNZ] know that.

So far Oracle, Emirates Team NZ and Prada have all been testing foiling. ETNZ has been testing for some time on the SL33 surrogate cats (very effective for learning!) The SL33 is another Morrelli & Melvin design: 

Horace Dediu: Apple is approaching Samsung capital expenditures

Published December 17, 2012 Apple , Technology Closed

Horace Dediu has been writing an important series on Apple and Samsung capital structure. In his 12 Dec 2012 post Horace compares 2006 – 2012 capital expenditures. 

In the post reviewing Samsung’s Capital Structure I noted that its component divisions have historically taken 90% of capital investments and that the overall capital intensity for Samsung Electronics has increased in proportion to its component revenues.

In another post regarding the capital structures of other technology companies with different business models I noted that Apple has changed its capital structure to a significant degree over the previous three years.

In the following graph I combined these observations to show how capital expenditure patterns may be used to discern the underlying business model.

That’s just a teaser tidbit. So go straight to the source for the Asymco analysis.  There is a lot going on here that is not obvious.

I consider this extraordinary evidence of an extraordinary shift in strategy.

(…) 

So what tale does this capital tell?

 

Peter Thiel: what if advanced AI is responsible for justice?

Published December 12, 2012 Technology 1 Comment
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Peter Thiel is dependably a source for fresh angles. Check out Peter’s guest lecture for Stanford Law’s Legal Technology course. I would be surprised if any other lectures gave serious thought to a distant future where advanced AI has primary responsibility for justice. I’ll highlight just one favorite quote:

There’s the AI joke that says that cars aren’t really autonomous until you order them to go to work and they go to the beach instead.

Password Security: New 25 GPU Monster Devours Passwords In Seconds

Published December 6, 2012 Technology 2 Comments
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A friend alerted us today to this Security Ledger bulletin on Jeremi Gosney's GPU rig. For those concerned that their online accounts may not be secure there is a series of Seekerblog posts that may be helpful (all have the tag Security).

Regarding the risk posed by these ultra-fast cracking farms, check out Steve Gibson’s “password haystack”. And remember that these fast-crackers are only relevant to physical access cases — where the bad guys either have your computer/device, or they have physical access to a site's password hash files. If you have a 30-character passphrase you are probably safe from even the direct physical attacks. Do make sure your phrase is not in a dictionary, which you can easily ensure by adding say ….. somewhere.

Bandits trying to brute force your Gmail account over the internet are limited to a max attack rate of 100 to around 1000 guesses/second.

But we need to also protect ourselves from social engineering attacks, where even the security-aware could be tricked into revealing information that can be used in a penetration. E.g., How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking

To foil that sort of attack we think it is important to “silo” key accounts with unique email addresses – which do help to create a higher security fence. E.g., we create a unique email address for each high-value account, such as Apple, Google, Gmail, bank, brokerage, etc..

So make sure each such account has a unique email/login and unique/strong passphrase. I expect someday one of our key accounts will be compromised, maybe by an insider. Then we will be really glad that account was in its own silo.

It's not difficult to accomplish this if you use 1Password to manage all of your sensitive data – see my post The only secure password is the one you can’t remember. Now go buy 1Password for each device that will have access to your password “wallet”.

Lastly, here is Steve Gibson's analysis of one of our 26 character passwords. Note that even the 25 GPU Monster will need about 10 trillion centuries to stumble on to this one (at 348 billion guesses / second).

NewImage

 

Dereck Thompson on the App Economy superstars

Published November 20, 2012 Technology Closed

At Atlantic Business, some good stats on the “App Superstars“:

Here's a big (and basically defensible) statement: The App Economy is today's most successful broad-scale innovation revolution. The iPhone, which didn't exist in early 2007, unleashed an international competition to fill our phone screens with square baubles that used the phone's Internet connection, location-based technology, camera, and design intelligence to creates application that far exceeded even Steve Jobs' wildest dreams. As a result, our smart phones today are better little computers than practically any of the computers that existed just five years ago.

The App Economy isn't merely delightful, it's also an economic juggernaut that's created more than 400,000 jobs and a multi-billion-dollar business where there was very recently nothing. That's the good news. The bad news is that in the App Economy, as in every hit-making business, there is the top 1% and there is everybody else. For a taste of the App Economy's inequality: Of the $6.5 billion that Apple has paid to app developers, only 25% made more than $30,000 and 4% made more than $1 million.

It's the Economics of Superstars law, applied to apps: In a crowded international field, small differences in talent can translate to huge differences in outcomes.

(…)

 

Google Throws Open Doors to Its Top-Secret Data Center

Published October 25, 2012 Technology Closed
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Steven Levy, author of In the Plex, my favorite book on Google, has just published a new Wired article on the secret Google data centers.

If you’re looking for the beating heart of the digital age — a physical location where the scope, grandeur, and geekiness of the kingdom of bits become manifest—you could do a lot worse than Lenoir, North Carolina. This rural city of 18,000 was once rife with furniture factories. Now it’s the home of a Google data center.

(…) But other, less well-known engineering and strategic breakthroughs are arguably just as crucial to Google’s success: its ability to build, organize, and operate a huge network of servers and fiber-optic cables with an efficiency and speed that rocks physics on its heels. Google has spread its infrastructure across a global archipelago of massive buildings—a dozen or so information palaces in locales as diverse as Council Bluffs, Iowa; St. Ghislain, Belgium; and soon Hong Kong and Singapore—where an unspecified but huge number of machines process and deliver the continuing chronicle of human experience. 

This is what makes Google Google: its physical network, its thousands of fiber miles, and those many thousands of servers that, in aggregate, add up to the mother of all clouds. This multibillion-dollar infrastructure allows the company to index 20 billion web pages a day. To handle more than 3 billion daily search queries. To conduct millions of ad auctions in real time. To offer free email storage to 425 million Gmail users. To zip millions of YouTube videos to users every day. To deliver search results before the user has finished typing the query. In the near future, when Google releases the wearable computing platform called Glass, this infrastructure will power its visual search results.

The problem for would-be bards attempting to sing of these data centers has been that, because Google sees its network as the ultimate competitive advantage, only critical employees have been permitted even a peek inside, a prohibition that has most certainly included bards. Until now.

Here I am, in a huge white building in Lenoir, standing near a reinforced door with a party of Googlers, ready to become that rarest of species: an outsider who has been inside one of the company’s data centers and seen the legendary server floor, referred to simply as “the floor.” My visit is the latest evidence that Google is relaxing its black-box policy. My hosts include Joe Kava, who’s in charge of building and maintaining Google’s data centers, and his colleague Vitaly Gudanets, who populates the facilities with computers and makes sure they run smoothly.

A sign outside the floor dictates that no one can enter without hearing protection, either salmon-colored earplugs that dispensers spit out like trail mix or panda-bear earmuffs like the ones worn by airline ground crews. (The noise is a high-pitched thrum from fans that control airflow.) We grab the plugs. Kava holds his hand up to a security scanner and opens the heavy door. Then we slip into a thunderdome of data …

Enjoy!

Google’s data centers: Google has cautiously lifted the curtain

Published October 25, 2012 Technology Closed
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If you have been curious about the massive global computer that Google is building — now is your chance to get some perspective. The Google Blog has cautiously lifted the curtain:

Google’s data centers: an inside look: “Very few people have stepped inside Google’s data centers, and for good reason: our first priority is the privacy and security of your data, and we go to great lengths to protect it, keeping our sites under close guard. While we’ve shared many of our designs and best practices, and we’ve been publishing our efficiency data since 2008, only a small set of employees have access to the server floor itself. 

Today, for the first time, you can see inside our data centers and pay them a virtual visit. On Where the Internet lives, our new site featuring beautiful photographs by Connie Zhou, you’ll get a never-before-seen look at the technology, the people and the places that keep Google running. 

In addition, you can now explore our Lenoir, NC data center at your own pace in Street View. Walk in the front door, head up the stairs, turn right at the ping-pong table and head down the hall to the data center floor. Or take a stroll around the exterior of the facility to see our energy-efficient cooling infrastructure. You can also watch a video tour to learn more about what you’re viewing in Street View and see some of our equipment in action.

For a deeper perspective see Steven Levy’s excellent new article at Wired.

Alex Tabarrok on Truth Bounties

Published October 11, 2012 Technology Closed

Incentives matter. The Truth Bounties venture is a fine example of designing incentives for a badly needed service. Thanks to Alex for this discovery:

The Truth Market is an interesting combination of prediction markets, bounty hunting and crowd funding that aims to separate the wheat from the chaff of truth claims. Here is how it works:

You hear a statement that you think is bogus (or you hear the denial of something that you think is true). You open a challenge in which you offer to pay a truth bounty of $x if someone can prove that the bogus statement is true (or prove false the statement that you think is true). Other people can join your challenge, adding to the bounty. If the total bounty exceed a significant threshold the challenge goes live.

Once a challenge is live, anyone can earn the bounty if their evidence for or against the claim meets the standards of a neutral, professional, scientifically trained group of adjudicators (provided by TruthMarket). If within a given time-frame no one wins the bounty the bounties are returned to the contributors minus 20% which goes to the initial sponsor of the challenge. The initial sponsor can now also trumpet that despite significant cash no one was able to prove the bogus claim (or refute the true claim).

Thus, there are incentives to offer challenges, incentives to answer challenges, and incentives to pay attention to the results. TruthMarket has some serious people on its management team and advisory board. There are already challenges about global warming, cell phones, defensive gun use and other issues.

Will the Truth Market work? In order to work, TruthMarket will need a track record of significant money bounties and adjudicated claims. As of yet, I don’t see many (any? the site is unclear although this is the most important part of the process).

Most important, people have to regard winning a bounty and the failure to win a bounty as informative. My experience, however, is that the people who regard betting as informative are already rational and well-informed about other issues so the bounty isn’t necessary to prosecute the truth claim.

The Amazing Randi’s one million dollar prize for “evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event,” was first offered in 1964 but has never been claimed. In theory, that tells us a lot. In practice, the failure of the prize to be won does not seem to have changed many people’s beliefs.

 

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