DEAR READER
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RMH
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
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@reillybrennan
How to simplify a value proposition in a sentence
How do you fundraise (or hire, or talk about your idea to the press, or...) for your company? If you frame your work with this sentence in mind, I have found it cuts to the oaken core of your value:
"This unusual group of resourceful people is unusually good at something valuable"
Convince your audience of that one sentence.
Machine Earning
We've saddled production vehicles with high-quality sensors in the interest of safety -- or what is currently referred to as ADAS or advanced driver assistance systems. But while most of these sensors are on 100% of the time the vehicle is running, they're primarily doing the job of a quiet watchdog. They're active and sensing, but accidents are infrequent and things like advanced cruise control aren't running but a portion of a duty cycle.
Instead, we need to consider sensors in our vehicles as our subjugates -- that we can control and can use for safety, data collection and profit. During a 30-minute commute, a driver should be able to produce meaningful data from her vehicle's sensor suite such as:
Updating out-of-date road and map data
Lane marking and map matching
Traffic information
Localized weather, road surface and visibility information
Accident reconstruction of nearby vehicle incidents
The modern vehicle is a sensor workhorse, but has a very narrow idea of work. We need to broaden it as a networked sensor workhorse, with the owner / operator benefitting by letting her vehicle's sensors add to a corpus of sensor data. All of the things listed above are services and markets that measure in the billions.
I call this act of selling back vehicle sensor data 'machine earning' and I believe that over the coming decade we will see a number of markets emerge to serve this need, some coming from within the vehicle and some perhaps operating on top. My friend Colin O'Donnell at Intersection calls this 'captcha for cars.'
e.g.
"There is a new roundabout on your route that we haven't mapped yet. If you drive the roundabout three times we will bonus you 1GB of data this month."
"A vehicle near you on your commute was involved in accident. Press OK to provide still images from your rear-view camera that will help reconstruct the accident."
"There is a tricky intersection ahead that requires some human training. Teach the autonomous system how to drive it and we will OTA you a new, faster accelerator upgrade."
As vehicles get more sensors, the driver gets more 'workers.' Now we need to unleash the power of these sensors for a greater, more valuable good. Machine earning will be a new way to 'work' and earn for miles traveled.
Photo by Jon Ottosson for Unsplash.
We're Driving Blind Without More Destination Data
We need more destination information to make transportation more efficient.
People tend to make car trips to the same locations (work, home, market, school, church, etc) -- the number is generally believed to be 6 locations, although I don't know of specific research that supports the claim. Because of our regularity behind the wheel, navigation systems aren't used on most ‘regular’ trips. We just don’t need them -- and that is going to be a limiting factor in opening up the full capability of the transportation market.
But, consider for a moment you know each driver's destination and you can accomplish some powerful things. For example:
Route them efficiently with other drivers going the same direction
Advise them to leave at a time to avoid traffic surges
Cue tasks / to-do items that are en route (aka a 'trip chain')
Offer them money if they pick up carpoolers (think supply side of Uber / Lyft rides)
The last example above is the most impactful and the one most hindered by our lack of navigation data. Those cars 'driving blind' without making their destination data available are throwing away money, or at least the potential of recouping costs. In the US alone, passenger cars travel nearly 3 trillion miles per year. Should those drivers elect to carry a passenger at even a very modest rate of $.25/mile (an equivalent to transit), that represents a $750B market that is largely unrealized due to lack of destination data.
There are a few ways we can get more destination data.
In a real world example, some congested cities have accidentally produced more destination data, even on common trips. Los Angeles has highly variable traffic and multiple routes are possible, so drivers can have vastly different trips if they can choose the route with the least traffic. This has made Waze an almost critical driving application there, and in turn has exposed a lot of destination data.
In another example, we know a lot about a user's destination given their calendar. Integrating the calendar locations gives us a rough proxy for where that person is headed. Its limitation, of course, is that users tend not to calendar regular trips (commuting, going to a favorite restaurant after work).
For a more futuristic example, we can use historical patterns of the user. If I turn out of my driveway and make a right and then a left, I'm probably going to my grocery store. Or if it's 7AM on a Monday and I'm 14% of the route to my office, the vehicle can make an assumption I'm headed there. Ford just published a patent about that very idea. Lyft's desire to expose this market -- via its Driver Destination rollout at the end of last year -- falls directly in line with Ford's line of thinking.
There's a massive opportunity in knowing Point B information. But until we do, we're blind to the potential (and $750 billion dollars).
(photo by Israel Sundseth)
Alternative Route Optimizing
Consumer navigation systems give us the 'best' route, which is often defined by time: how do I get there fastest? There are some slight modifications (toll/no toll), but time optimization is typical, and rightly so.
But we are starting to see some new things appear that will change our routing options: more available data fields that make possible alternative route optimization (A.R.O.) and more user interest in routing based on something other than a time model.
A few useful (and hypothetical) examples of how you might want to optimize your route:
Safety optimization: I want to commute to work in a flow of traffic with drivers who have the lowest number of points on their license.
Consumer optimization: My coffee-loving cousin is in town and I want to drive a route that exposes us to the highest-rated cafes.
Health optimization: I want a route with the lowest possible carbon exposure.
Visual optimization: Route me along a path with the highest-rated Instagram photos tagged with #landscape.
Bicycle optimization: I want a bicycling route that avoids intersections with a history of high car/bicycle collisions (this example courtesy Eric Nakagawa).
Right now our primary cost model for routing is valued in minutes, but I expect we will see a lot of change in this over the coming years. Some startups working on route optimization are Foxtrot Systems, Routific, Routist (recently bought by Fleetmatics) and I know of a number of teams who are planning on getting into the space.
(photo by Sylwia Bartyzel)
Moving From Idea -> Pant -> Pants
Abe Burmeister is the co-founder of Outlier, a clothing brand that fits somewhere between outdoor gear and fashion. Its origin is like a lot of classical entrepreneurial narratives: to scratch the founder's itch -- bicycling gear was really quite frumpy. He built Outlier from that idea into something much larger.
I like how he moves the concept along here from idea to one pair of pants to multiple pants. Each stage has its own needs and challenges. It's a good story well told. Thanks to frontliner Colin Nagy for pointing me to this.
Your Version of 'Needing to Music Shop Every Week'
In this Resident Advisor interview, my old friend Ryan Elliott talks about how he went from working in finance in Ford Motor Company and not knowing how to DJ to eventually...becoming a resident at what is likely the best techno club in the world, the Berghain in Berlin. Quite a ramp up.
I like what he reiterates in this interview that the basic core unit of being good is something that the outside world often overlooks but you as the creator should never minimize -- in fact it is vital. For him this is expressed (at 34:15) as 'needing to music shop every week.'
'One of the most important things to me is that DJs need to music shop every week. Then you can stay grounded in what new releases are coming out and see the kind of lay of the land. Sometimes I get tired, but it's kind of a good tired, like after a run.'
For an artist it is needing to sketch every week, for basketball players it is free throws in the gym, etc. These are the mostly hidden, mostly unseen and largely uncelebrated aspects of the job. But if you love the job, you love that part too and as Ryan indicates even when he gets tired, he's not really that tired. Over the last few months doing FoT on Sunday evenings is my personal version of this.
Any mention of Ryan Elliott on this site also requires a link to the Baby's on Fire Superpitcher remix.
Launching: Future of Transportation weekly email newsletter
For the past month I've been prototyping something and am ready to push it out there for wider consumption: Future of Transportation weekly.
FoT started accidentally -- as a way for me to compile my weekly notes about things happening in transportation, logistics, automotive startups and the like. After I started sending these to some friends and they responded positively I realized I should just turn it into a distribution list. Like my blog, I use writing of this sort to help me think. So as a subscriber to my list you are probably going to learn something going on in transportation and how I think about it, but I'm definitely going to learn something from writing it.
I send each out on Sunday evening. Sign up here.
Driving Experiences Defined By The Future
It's likely that some will remember this era of automotive innovation for user experiences gone wrong. Some manufacturers are tightly coupling their HMI (human-machine interaction) to that of a mobile phone OS, some not enough, others committing new sins that the devil himself never imagined. What is clear within any 2015 model year product is that there is a lot of experimentation going on. And since many vehicles look the same on the exterior (based on a combination of aerodynamics, global design studios and a market that rewards similarity), I'm often finding the interior is the best place to actually get a feeling for a company's point of view. This point of view is actually much more difficult to ascertain than the old manner of testing and judging products. The 'classic' manner of vehicle testing did in many ways focus on HMI, but often only in a mechanical context (how the driver interacted with the weight balance of the vehicle, its engine, braking, steering, suspension, etc). But this new era of vehicle experience as defined by HMI relates more to interior software and hardware as it does what's under the hood. Getting a handle on this requires an incredibly longer time on task, with all manner of use cases and third party devices and services (phones, apps, networks) to be brought under consideration. Unfortunately the publications that I used to love for car reviews haven't considered this evolving driver experience to be important and don't cover it nearly enough (sometimes calling this entire field, somewhat derisively, 'tech' and giving it short shrift). The downside of that means it's quite difficult to understand if a car is good for you without actually owning it; user reviews are thus proving to be more important than traditional media until this gap is closed. Nobody has cracked the code on testing in this manner yet, but I know someone will at some point. I like the work from car writers like Damon Lavrinc at Jalopnik and Wayne Cunningham at CNET. Outside of vehicle-specific media, the teams at design firms UsTwo and Teehan Lax are worth following. In fact Jeff Teehan's rant about depressing car interfaces last year still brings a smile to my face because it is so on target. Last week in Detroit I had the opportunity to drive the new 2015 Cadillac Escalade and it was positively brimming with new types of user experiences that I've never seen or felt before. The car is a rolling example of the expressionistic tools available to a designer today that go well beyond form. In the Escalade, the driver's seat is actually mapped to vehicle alerts such that edging closer to the right lane on a highway will vibrate the right side of your rear end, the left side the opposite; backing up out of a driveway into an obstacle vibrates the entire rumpus. Seat vibrations aren't new to vehicles but mapping them to specific alerts and warnings is quite revolutionary. It is another way in which designers are putting their point of view on the vehicle in ways unseen to the exterior. Unfortunately the new Escalade is also saddled with a number of user experience ills -- including the hard-to-use and slow-to-react Cue touch display system -- but as I said we are in an era of great experimentation. At least Cadillac is committing sins of commission and not omission.
This new era of experimental HMI will be so exciting and so frustrating. We ought to care more about how to translate that work to consumers to make smarter decisions.
(Photo: Dome Zero prototype from the 1970s)
From Unloved to Adequate: New Transportation Uses Will Redefine Product Quality
I wonder how new uses for vehicles in the collaborative economy will shape how we judge them. Most of the current analysis of a vehicle's worth is through the lens of ownership and I believe that be too narrow. For example, today Consumer Reports and the major car magazines put a heavy value on 12-month tests which are often indicators of durability, reliability and what I would describe as 'livability,' pointing out the little ways that the vehicle fits or doesn't fit into our average, daily lives over a long time phase.
But new systems are available today that are shifting the unit of time we need to interact with a vehicle and of course the ownership and usage model at large. This means our view of a vehicle's worth is likely to change.
Take, for example, the Daimler-owned Car2Go car sharing network that is available in 11 U.S. cities (esp popular in the Northwest). When it was announced that the service would only use the Smart Fortwo, I was among many who doubted it because I viewed that to be a grossly underwhelming car to buy. But then a funny thing happened: the Fortwo has proven to be perfectly adequate for this particular type of car sharing network. It's small (easy to park), easy on fuel (cheaper for Car2Go and its users) and easy to spot in a parking lot (a problem when you're using something for a short trip and find yourself in a crowded parking lot).
The architecture of the network plays into the Smart's strengths, too. The Car2Go Smart cars can't be booked far in advance (such as with Zipcar), which means people tend to use these for spontaneous trips for commute rerouting or quick errands. Contrast this with pre-planned big cargo trips (to Costco for example) which would expose the Smart's tiny cargo capacity. Since you can't do that with Car2Go, it somewhat brilliantly hides the car's flaws and highlights its benefits.
As more types of car sharing are brought to market, we will see more currently unloved vehicles exposed as, actually, good cars. I know of one manufacturer that is actively studying car sharing usage as a product development tool -- in time imagine a vehicle that is designed to target a specific part of the sharing stack. This might be a completely new form factor or one that is highly modified in the service of its end use.
Thanks to author Edward Niedermeyer who visited us car people at Stanford some weeks back and helped me germinate on this idea a bit.
On the Evolution of Driving and Mobility
People ask me what driving will look like in 10 years and I always tell them I have no idea. What interests me more than what driving looks like is our framework for thinking about driving. What does that feel like in 10 years? Right now we take a lot of the driving experience for granted in the U.S., including the following assumptions:
Most people move about in a car they own, which they bought at a franchised dealer in an auto mall
Cars have engines and run on gasoline
Cars depreciate the moment they leave the dealership
It's difficult to know what's wrong with your car and working on it or customizing it is difficult and/or voids the warranty
The most desirable cars have big loud engines, heavy curb weights and a lot of stuff on them
All of the above will remain true in 10 years, but each and every one will start to evolve dramatically during that time period. All of the things I've listed are currently in the sights of entrepreneurs who are chasing down a radical future where our assumptions are upended.
Truthfully, many of them will fail.
But our entire way of thinking about these things will change, not in a solitary event but gradually like a tide. The reason for this has as much to do with the mobility entrepreneurs and their startups as it does the surge of technology literacy in the U.S: We will continue to expect technology to provide drastic improvements to all areas of life.
Recently Damon Lavrinc wrote a manifesto about this change, which I think will likely be one of the landmark turning points for this discussion. It has an eye toward the literal 'experience' for those who care deeply about driving being a personal (and highly manual) exercise of tires and engines and speed and things like they always were.
Putting it on Jalopnik was an act of civil disobedience itself, but the comments indicate it's a conversation even the most ardent enthusiasts are comfortable having at this moment -- mostly because we have suddenly arrived at a time where these futuristic-looking concept vehicles are both on sale and fantastic (see also BMW i8, Tesla Model S).
A few weeks back at Stanford we hosted the biennial conference for the Society for Automotive Historians and they capped their two-day session with a keynote by our friend and recently retired Nissan designer Masato Inoue. Masato-san started designing traditional things like the original Maxima but later in his career he spent a lot of time and effort thinking about mobility systems, EVs and a new way forward. His last big project before retirement was as chief designer of the Leaf EV.
In talking about EVs and systems, he said something quite beautiful: new systems bring new challenges, but they also bring new joys. One specific example he pointed out that hit home with me was the inherent stillness of an EV -- with no vibration and very little sound, it can act as a rather effective tool to experience things near the vehicle. His cottage in Japan has a very quiet forest road nearby and he can drive his Leaf under 5mph, turn the windows down and hear everything around him. Thinking about EVs as a replacement for today's vehicle is therefore permanently flawed; it's just something else entirely and there will likely be things about it we don't like but many new things we do.
Our idea of driving is evolving. It's just happening a lot faster now than it ever has.
Why is it so difficult to find automaker contact info?
A few nights ago I was up at 3AM and wanted to dig in a bit deeper to some elements of the recent GM recall involving their ignition switch problem. I found information on the recall very hard to parse on GM's site (they're even advertising a link on Google which doesn't actually work; sadly even after I told them about this they still haven't fixed it and are still advertising it). What I found most frustrating was the lack of contact information. How should an end user contact the company?
Now it was 3:30AM and I clearly wasn't getting back to bed, so I made an attempt to see if I could find recall and contact information at all the other OEMs. It proved to be a clump of spaghetti just like the GM experience. With that bit in my teeth, I built a spreadsheet over a few hours and published it as a table with some help from R Christie's table guide. The goal of this page is to make two things easier:
Find a way to see if your car is under recall; submit a complaint directly
Contact the automaker directly via all available formats
I hope you find it useful.
Link: reillybrennan.com/recalls
Herbert Matter's 'Works of Calder,' with music by John Cage (1950).
This is an opportunity to remind you to visit the Calder.org website, a wonderful experience and resource. The full 20-minute version of the Matter film can be found on the site in the films section.
The Nass CPM Model for Dynamic Advertising Pricing
Months back we lost Cliff Nass, the brilliant and friendly professor who made life wonderful for people at Stanford, myself included. I dearly miss him. In addition to his role as director of the Revs automotive research program, Cliff was of course one of the leading experts in human-computer interaction. The night of his memorial service, Revs advisor David Kelley summed up our grief quite succinctly: "When most people die we are sad for the loss of not having them in our lives; with Cliff gone we can be sad about that and for the future losses of all those wonderful things he would have figured out."
While Cliff's multitasking research hit on various parts of life, our time typically focused on things like media and transportation. During these moments, Cliff waved his hands and raised his voice to a yelp and smiled and made the entire discussion a high wire act of ideas. This was play for Cliff; idea generation was a team sport.
While he was interested in how end users were impacted by things like media displacement (the idea that new media tends to take away time from existing media; e.g. internet takes time from television, which took time from radio and so forth), I was always keen on thinking about the upstream systems that allowed for multitasking in the first place. We theorized that multitasking would not only continue to impact human life, but also further impact the devices themselves. As a matter of fact, it's almost absurd that in 2014 your devices aren't working together -- and it makes for the entire value chain around those devices inefficient and wasteful. Where Cliff found the negative effects of chronic multitasking in humans, we found that the opposite was true for devices.
Today, when you're sitting on your couch with your tablet open and your television on and iTunes playing in the background and your phone buzzing on your lap, it's as if each device is operating on an island. Advertisers who pay for your attention on those devices are paying the same rate whether you are looking at only your iPad or four devices concurrently. That waste? Ultimately you are paying for it.
In the future when these devices communicate to take advantage of multitasking, these advertising rates will change dynamically. A new system for adtech will be required that sympathizes with this interplay. Cliff and I were fascinated by how this might work and how things like rank order and eye tracking (even ear tracking) would play into account. This idea of changing advertising was a logical next step, a rightful 'win' for multitasking.
One thing stumped us, though. What would we call it?
Now with Cliff gone I submit that we just call this the Nass CPM (in advertising lingo, ads are bought by 'CPM' or cost per thousand). A Nass CPM would dynamically change as devices in the room were opened and used by the couch potato.
The coda to the Nass CPM is a fascinating takeaway for the automobile business: when these rates are studied across all environments of life (living room, bedroom, workplace, gym, etc), we posited that the automobile would be able to achieve the highest 'Nass CPM' because in the pre-autonomous car you simply can't consume a lot of media at once. A quaint old format like in-car radio (or podcasts) will look to achieve comparatively high advertising rates as a result.
Cliff is gone but his work will live on. I hope his crazy ideas live on in name, too, and ask you all to carry the Nass CPM forward as it develops.
(Desk photo from Vadim Sherbakov via Unsplash/Ooomf)
Mike Mills: Kids' Wisdom
Mike Mills: Kids' Wisdom on Nowness.com
"I just really love interviewing people. When I’m done, I feel invigorated and refreshed and full. Sometimes when you direct filmmaking, you feel way to full of yourself by the end. With these things, I feel like I’m a listener. That’s all I really am."
Nick Parish on Mastery
In a conversation on slow things and learning, Nick Parish dropped this one on me which hit home, particularly because I am not a fast learner or a fast anythinger:
This is one of the most subtle parts about growing up that I like: shooting for mastery not immediately, but imminently. I might be OK at fishing in my '60s. Same with writing. No need to hurry to 'get good.'
To be a Student in the Classroom of Willis Simms
I only learned about Willis Simms a few years ago, after he had died and I read a small piece about him and his career as an artist, educator and environmentalist. He worked to give the gift of animation to his students in high schools around the Los Angeles area and after reading that piece I wondered if any of his films would see the light of day.
Last week I had the good fortune of finding one of these films -- a production by his students done in the 1970s called Classroom Safari. You can tell from the wonderful fabric of this film that the Simms classroom was likely a fun place to learn. Classroom Safari has a simple premise, really about daydreaming your way into something more invigorating than a classroom.
Other films by Simms's students have been retained on Archive.org and you'll find an equal amount of happy animals and two-dimensional walking scenes in lovely little vignettes. All of the films were collaborations between Simms and his students, with the class dreaming up the ideas and painting all of the characters and backdrops, with Simms making the edits and often the school's music teacher helping to assist on sound roll. Remarkably, three of the films Simms made with his students were distributed nationally.
Some of my favorite moments of Classroom Safari are capped below, with the full video at the bottom. To read more about Simms, view this page or click here for some of his illustrations.
Patti Smith: "Keep doing your work" from KFF.