Choices Pay: The $144,146,165 Button
The average New York City taxi cab driver makes $90,747 in revenue per year. There are roughly 13,267 cabs in the city. In 2007, NYC forced cab drivers to begin taking credit cards, which involved installing a touch screen system for payment.
During payment, the user is presented with three default buttons for tipping: 20%, 25%, and 30%. When cabs were cash only, the average tip was roughly 10%. After the introduction of this system, the tip percentage jumped to 22%.
Those three buttons resulted in $144,146,165 of additional tips. Per year. Those are some very valuable buttons.
Source: unwieldy
Somebody is Watching You
A recent NYTimes article titled, How to Muddy Your Tracks, speaks to the challenges we face in protecting our metadata in an increasingly digital world. In a piece we posted last year, Your digitalDNA™: Be Forewarned and be Forearmed, we coined the phrase, digitalDNA™ which refers to the mountains of metadata that we create as we continue to log on to facebook and twitter, do google searches and move “freely” around the internet.
People are becoming more aware that moving around “freely” doesn’t insulate them from sophisticated computer programs gathering information on their internet habits. The data culled from this traffic analysis can create a virtual encyclopedia of all of your steps which can be logged and later used for various reasons some of which may prove to be nefarious.
Some take the attitude that their is not much they can do, at this point, but their are adjustments one can make to their patterns in order to inject, what is often referred to in the tech world as anomalies, into ones digitalDNA™
We all adjust our habits, in the real world, so to not create a pattern that can leave us susceptible to a predator or make us the victim of a crime. We should also take steps to to protect our digitalDNA™ in the virtual world.
Their are many ways to “muddy your tracks” or poison your digitalDNA™ . Not all of the solutions are perfect but if you analyze your digital security needs you’ll be able to come up with the right combination of tools to better protect you from unwanted traffic analysis. We recommend taking a look at the Tor Project , as a good starting point and a way to begin confusing unwanted prying eyes.
How We Watch From Screen to Screen
The average American watches nearly five hours of video each day, 98 percent of which they watch on a traditional TV set, according to the Nielsen Cross-Platform Report, released today. Although this ratio is less than it was just a few years ago, and continues to change, the fact remains that Americans are not turning off. They are shifting to new technologies and devices that make it easier for them to watch the video they want, whenever and wherever they want.
TV is Still the Center of Viewing
In the past year, the number of homes with an HDTV grew by more than 8 million to 80.2 million, leaving little doubt that the TV screen remains the dominant platform on which to consume video content. But the means by which the content is delivered appear to be shifting.
Traditional—live and timeshifted—TV viewing remains the primary role of the TV, accounting for more than 33 hours per week despite a decline one half of one percent in time spent compared to Q4 2010. To fill the gap, consumers are finding new ways to use their TVs.
Game Consoles Now in Nearly Half of TV Homes
Consoles have become strategically positioned as a secondary gateway to TV content, and can now be found in 45 percent of TV homes, an increase of three percent over last year. With Netflix and other streaming apps, Blu-ray players, social gaming and point of purchase seamlessly integrated into game consoles, it is no surprise that consumers are relying on their consoles to perform double (and triple) duty. These new activities are adding up and contributing to the growth of content consumption. Interestingly, households without children are leading the way in new game console adoption, demonstrating that game consoles are appealing to a range of audiences for a variety of purposes.
Mobile Viewership Small but Growing
With improving screens, Internet connectivity and the advantage of being “the best screen available” while on the go, smartphones are increasingly becoming portable TVs. In fact, 33.5 million mobile phone owners now watch video on their phones—an increase of 35.7 percent since last year. While mobile phones won’t replace other screens anytime soon, they are part of the ever-increasing number of ways in which consumers consume content.
Apps Used to Report Community Issues in Arizona
More Valley cities are using mobile technology to enable residents to report neighborhood issues like overgrown weeds or barking dogs, but critics say the smartphone applications could foster distrust and suspicion as ordinary citizens become the eyes and ears of local government.
The increasingly popular “citizen reporter” apps make it easier for officials to resolve public-property issues, such as graffiti and potholes, but many communities have expanded the technology to include more personal violations, including unsanctioned yard sales or even expired vehicle tags.
Nick Dranias, constitutional policy director for the Goldwater Institute, a Phoenix-based conservative watchdog group, said the apps encourage people to “surreptitiously report on their neighbors.”
Microsoft Contemplates A Web Based Skype
It looks like Microsoft is ready to let people use Skype through Web apps, not just native apps.
Microsoft is hiring staff “to help us bring Skype experience on to the Web,” a move that could help people use the Internet-based video and audio chat service more broadly.
Skype’s VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) service today requires a native app to run on various operating systems. A browser-based version, though, could bring the service to OSes that aren’t supported, such as Google’s Chrome OS; make it easier for people to use Skype on a machine for which they don’t have installation privileges; and potentially integrate with other Web-based services.
Microsoft revealed the project through recent job ads.
Read more at CNET
Smartphones Vs. Tablets
The rise of e-reading
21% of Americans have read an e-book. The increasing availability of e-content is prompting some to read more than in the past and to prefer buying books to borrowing them.
One-fifth of American adults (21%) report that they have read an e-book in the past year, and this number increased following a gift-giving season that saw a spike in the ownership of both tablet computers and e-book reading devices such as the original Kindles and Nooks.1 In mid-December 2011, 17% of American adults had reported they read an e-book in the previous year; by February, 2012, the share increased to 21%.
The rise of e-books in American culture is part of a larger story about a shift from printed to digital material. Using a broader definition of e-content in a survey ending in December 2011, some 43% of Americans age 16 and older say they have either read an e-book in the past year or have read other long-form content such as magazines, journals, and news articles in digital format on an e-book reader, tablet computer, regular computer, or cell phone.
Download the full Pew Internet Research report here
Gartner predicts top 10 mobile technologies
The top 10 mobile technologies that will change business, as described by Gartner research VP, Leif-Olof Wallin
HTML5
By 2015, Gartner predicts HTML 5 will deliver 50% of allapplications that would have been native in 2011. Wallin notes, however, that while HTML5 is often presented as the solution to all problems, it will not be the only solution for some applications, since it is not yet fully standardised. Wallin warns developers and business to expect fragmentation and to adapt applications accordingly.
Near-field communication
“This is really great technology that has unfortunately just taken forever to mature,” says Wallin, adding that it will undoubtedly become the leading ‘touch to act’ tech. According to Gartner, near-field communication (NFC) will enable numerous capabilities such as payments, ticketing, vouchers and coupons, check-in services, access control and information sharing. “There is already support from key platforms and vendors such as Android, Nokia and RIM,” notes Wallin.
Wallin, however, warns that m-payment solutions won’t happen readily and commercial and technical battles are expected to emerge between banks, network operators and Internet mega-vendors.
Platform independent AD tools
Gartner says no single mobile platform will dominate, and HTML5 alone will not satisfy all cross-platform development needs. As a result, there is opportunity in recognising that operating systems are not the only platforms one should be independent of.
According to a February report from Nielsen and NM Incite, social networking applications accounted for 5.5% of time spent on mobile phones in October 2011, compared to 13.3% for text messaging.
It takes 90 minutes for the average person to respond to an email. It takes 90 seconds for the average person to respond to a text message.
