|
|
|
“Shop around. If the difference between a $60 book and an $80 book is a nice map, students would rather buy the cheap book and Google a map.”
- Alison Kieler, for the editorial board of the University Daily Kansan, detailing how professors can lessen the cost of college textbooks for students.
It’s students at Springfield High School who are tackling the project in partnership with the Illinois Historical Society.
Under a partnership with the Illinois State Historical Society, SHS students using $1,500 Geographic Information System software are plotting the society’s historical markers and then creating podcast readings of them. Maps marking the location of the markers created by the GIS programs will be put online, linked to the podcasts and automatically updated by RSS feeds ...
I post this so educators can copy it!
MSNBC reports on McDonald’s move to have more of its stores open more hours to increase sales, rather than opening new locations.
For most of its history, growth meant one thing: more locations. And until the late 1990s it worked. Like a juggernaut, McDonald’s rolled over the competition and across the nation, opening hundreds of outlets each year and cranking out a run of hit products. Then the company reached a saturation point. While overall revenue kept climbing, the new sites stole customers from existing locations. Margins and same-store sales slid into 2002, reflecting diminishing returns on the $1.2 billion a year that the company was plowing into new restaurants during this period. By spending so much time on real estate, recalls James Skinner, a 35-year veteran who was promoted to chief executive in late 2004, “we had lost our focus. We had taken our eyes off the fries.”
Now, 40% of US stores are open 24/7 vs. just .5% in 2002. Could you argue that when you run out of, or chose not to play in space, you are forced into playing in time? Is that what Amazon and Netflix do?
The latest entrant into the mobile coupon space is San Francisco startup MoVoxx. In contrast to the mobile download-based CellFire, MoVoxx is SMS-based. This has the clear advantage of a much wider addressable market, without the daunting porting investment. CellFire has recently launched a WAP-based version of it’s service called "CellFire Express", which seems like the right way to address this.
A second important difference in these two service offerings is the way in which they are approaching advertising customers. CellFire is making direct relationships with local Bay Area businesses, and currently has nine customers (these are listed on their web site.) MoVoxx on the other hand is partnering with print media (such as the San Jose Mercury News), and it appears will leverage existing customer relationships held by print media partners.
With these service differentiators, MoVoxx has taken positive steps in proving out the mobile coupon space. The next move will require carrier involvement, taking advantage not only of mobility, but a second characteristic unique to the mobile environment, location. By leveraging LBS, carriers can transform the concept of putting coupons on phones from a paper saving convenience into a unique marketing opportunity.
Usually, we don’t report on hardware advances in the comptuer industry but the announcement this past week, in separate statements, by Intel and IBM has the potential to affect the geospatial industry. According to company statements, new microprocessor chips will be designed with different material designed to stop electrical leakage of the 45 nanometer chip designs. In a statement by Intel, "By using a new material combination of high-k gate dielectrics and metal gates, Intel’s 45nm transistors significantly improve performance to deliver faster multi-core processors that consume less power."
I remember in the late 80’s when the 386 chip was intoduced and I was able to a run speedy version of Autocad. It seemed a real breakthrough for desktop computers and consequently for compute-intensive software like CAD and GIS.
The statement by Intel also suggested that Moore’s Law will "thrive well into the next decade." Even as we move more software to the web, we will still find a need for desktop GIS software. This announcement offers the possibility that as we want more analytical capabilities with even better integration of multiple data types, that computers will support the expectations of users.
