Student Driver Flips Car at My Friend’s House

April 16, 2010 · Posted in abundance · Comment

Photos of a student driver who flipped the car are funny. What makes it weird and an example of Abundance is how I heard about it.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1265629/Learner-driver-flips-instructors-car–SECOND-lesson.html

My friend, John, sends me a lot of links to funny or important news and just things he finds that might interest me. John sent me the link to the article about the student driver in England who flipped the car during her lesson.

When I read the article I was surprised to see that it happened in front of the home of one of my friends, Dermot. John does not know Dermot so that makes it more of an interesting coincidence, or is it?

I spend a lot of time online and John sends me over 20 links a day. Each of these are things he and I share a common interest. Dermot and I also share similar interests. A car flipping over is something that Dermot would be very interested to investigate, especially if it happened in front of his home. Further more Dermot and myself are the type who would be good for a reporter to speak with. The shared interest made it more likely he would be on the scene of a random event and more likely that I would read about it. This is part of the Long Tail Effect.

I am able to be friends with John and Dermot because of technology. Without all of us having access to this technology we never would have met or maintained our relationships. Also, this story was shared because of technology. The ease of finding and sharing stories of common interest made it more likely I would run across this story that mentions my friend from another country.

Finally, I sent the link to the email list which Dermot is a member. Dermot may have not known he was quoted in the article but in a matter of minutes the story circled the world back to him. This is all possible because of the innovation and Abundance it creates. Things that would have been impossible even a few years ago are now so easy and inexpensive they are common place.

Tags: <abundance, communication, dermot dobson, funny, long tail, student driver, technology>

Abundance Report: Video Conference from the Jungle

February 15, 2010 · Posted in abundance · Comment

Last weekend I experienced an amazing example of abundance. My friend in Thailand called me. She and her friends took a drive two hours out of Bangkok to a nature preserve. When she was there she used her GSM cell phone to connect her laptop to the Internet and show me live video of the waterfall she was visiting.

The examples and levels of abundance are staggering.

First consider who she is. She is a young missionary from the Philippines teaching English in Bangkok. Her monthly salary is 750 USD. She is the youngest of 6 children of a disabled fisherman. She sends money home to support her parents, helps her other siblings with loans plus tithes 10% to her church. That doesn’t leave a lot of disposable income. So keep that in mind.

This call was not for business, it was just for fun. This is one of the characteristics of Abundance. When things are so cheap you don’t pay attention to the price. Except for the GSM connection to the Internet, the call was free.

She has a laptop with a webcam. So do a billion other people. Just 15 years ago the idea of a laptop was an outrageous luxury item. Now a computer with more processing power than everything that ran WWII is casually taken to a park. And this laptop wasn’t provided by her work. It was a present.

Nearly everyone on the planet has access to the Internet. Most of it high speed and capable of video. Cafes, restaurants, and cheap hotels give access away for free. Some of the poorest people in the world have such cheap and easily available Internet service they can spend hours sending Nigerian SPAM email.

She had a GSM phone to access the Internet in the middle of the countryside. She wasn’t in a big city. She was out in the jungle looking at a waterfall. The GSM phone is three examples of abundance. She could afford to have the equipment. The service was there. It was cheap enough that she didn’t care about the cost. Just 20 years ago making any phone call between Thailand and the USA would require scheduling overseas operators to make connections and it would be so expensive only governments or large corporations would do it. Today a young lady on a day trip calls a friend half way around the world and thinks nothing of doing it.

She used Skype to do the video conference. The software and the service were totally free. Once she was online everything was free.

The fact we even met to become friends is another example of abundance. Global communication is free and easy. Two people out of 6.5 billion on the opposite sides of the world with no people in common were able to meet based on shared interests and values. It wasn’t long ago that was nearly impossible. Now today its common place.

Abundance is the design of the universe and we are seeing the accelerating effects every day.

Tags: <abundance, cell phones, communication, economics, free, gsm, life style, open source, philippines, post scarcity, poverty, skype, technology, thailand>

Why We Don’t Have Flying Cars, Yet

January 23, 2010 · Posted in innovation, prediction · 1 Comment

We won’t have flying cars until we have ground-based cars that drive themselves.

Any particular innovation must achieve all the required Outcomes to satisfy the overall desire. One of the essential outcomes of transportation is arriving safely. Making a small mistake while flying is a lot more dangerous than when driving. Over 37,000 fatal vehicle accidents happen in the USA every year. Almost all of those car accidents are the result of some kind of human error. Until you can prevent the human errors in ground-based cars you can’t do it in air cars.

Innovation follows predictable paths. Trying to jump ahead increases the cost and difficulty by an order of magnitude. In other words, you must walk before you run. Its not entirely true that you can’t skip ahead, but it usually is technologically expensive and the market just isn’t ready.

It might seem like disruptive innovations drastically change things but when you more closely examine the improvements they are just the next logical step. In “Is Automotive Industry Dead or Just Stuck” my associate, Len Kaplan, explains how improving safety will lead to the next generation more efficient, more affordable, and more desirable cars. Len lays out each step for all the technological improvements to arrive at the next paradigm of cars.

A flying car must be lightweight. Except for using extremely expensive exotic materials you can’t make a flying car light and strong enough to survive a crash. The best way to avoid damage is to avoid crashing.

Car companies with a lot of push from government have been focusing on fuel efficiency. Consumers have consistently chosen vehicles they perceived to be safe over fuel-efficient vehicles. The boom of SUV sales was heavily motivated by safety concerns. So consumers are saying safety is the under served desire. If you look at accident statistics for the past 14 years, you see safety has not improved.

Government has been pushing car manufacturers to produce alternative energy cars. But serious technology problems stand in the way of making alternative energy cars viable. There is a technology gap and a consumer demand gap. Alternative energy is a future step but it’s not the next step. The next step in cars is crash avoidance.

Cars today are safer in a crash than ever before. But annual deaths from car accidents in the USA have remained over 37,000 for the past 14 years. Why are cars getting safer in a crash but deaths remain the same? In 2007, 2.5 million people were injured in vehicle accidents. There is only so much you can do to make a car crash safe. As long as the number of car crashes remains high deaths and injuries will remain high.

Prevent the crash, prevent injuries and save lives. Conveniently, the things that prevent crashes also increase fuel efficiency. Plus, the natural progression of crash avoidance also leads to electric cars.

So that leads us back to flying cars. Until the technology is developed to prevent accidents on the ground, flying cars will remain too expensive and too dangerous for average drivers.

When will we have flying cars? We will have flying cars when we have cars that drive themselves.

Tags: <airplane safety, alternative energy, automobile safety, automotive innovation, automotive safety, car innovations, flying car, future cars, predicting innovation, technology, travel safety>