Tag: mobile apps

• Canada’s COVID Alert app

  

  I installed and setup Health Canada’s COVID Alert app this morning.

  It’s really simple to do that. You don’t enter any personal information. You just select which province you’re in, agree to let it use your Bluetooth, and give it permission to share the random codes that you collect with its servers (more on this below). The app is then active and working. But to be clear, it doesn’t collect your location (it doesn’t use GPS or location services). It doesn’t collect the places or times that you are next to someone who also has the COVID Alert app. And it doesn’t know if you’re with someone who was previously diagnosed with COVID-19.

  Built on top of the private exposure framework that was collectively developed by Apple and Google, the app works by using Bluetooth to exchange “random codes” between nearby phones that have the app. These are anonymous and random codes that are used to track which phones have been next to which phones for any meaningful period of time. The app also uses Bluetooth signal strength to estimate proximity. So it knows how long your phone has been proximate to someone else’s (with the app) and how close they got to each other.

  That’s pretty much all that happens with the app unless you test positive for COVID-19. At that point, you will be given a one-time key along with your diagnosis. The onus is then on you to anonymously self-report on the app. Once you do that, anyone who was exposed — i.e. next to your phone in the last 14 days — will receive an alert on their phone via the app. And since the app doesn’t know any names or who anybody is, it’s of course all completely anonymous.

  It’s great to see all of this coming together. The private sector worked to build the underlying framework and now you have government building on top of it to deliver public health tools. I know that some or many of you will be concerned about privacy, but that appears to have been very well thought out. If you haven’t already downloaded the app, I would encourage you to check it out. It’s available for iOS and Android and can be downloaded over here.

  2020.08.01

• Turning data exhaust into gold

  Last year, social media company Foursquare predicted that Chipotle would see a ~30% drop in its Q1 2016 sales. It knew this because the geo-location data from people using its app (check-ins and passive visits) was also down. They had figured out the relationship between foot traffic and sales. I think I wrote about this in the first half of last of year.

  Not surprisingly, lots of companies – including those on Wall Street – are now starting to pay attention to data sets such as these. Matt Turck wrote a great blog post about it this morning, called: The New Gold Rush? Wall Street Wants your Data. Here’s an excerpt:

  That a social media company could be building a data asset of immense value to Wall Street is part of an accelerating trend known as “alternative data”. As just about everything in our lives is getting sensed and captured by technology, financial services firms have been turning their attention to startups, with the hope of mining their data to extract the type of gold nuggets that will enable them to beat the market.

  The opportunity is open to a wide range of startups.  Many tech companies these days generate an interesting “data exhaust” as a by-product of their core activity.  If your company offers a payment solution, you may have interesting data on what people buy. A mobile app may accumulate geo-location data on where people shop or how often they go to the movies.  A connected health device may know who gets sick when and where.  A commerce company may have data on trends and consumer preferences. A SaaS provider may know what corporations purchase, or how many employees they hire, in which region. And so on and so forth.

  We may be calling this alternative data right now, but it is almost certainly just a matter of time before it simply becomes: the data. 

  I like the term “data exhaust” that Matt uses, because it feels like it accurately captures what is going on right now. The new economy is producing a lot of byproduct. If you clean it up and package it in the right way, then you might be creating additional value. But if you don’t, then it’s probably just exhaust.

  2017.01.17

• So how’s Uber doing?

  A travel expense management company called Certify recently analyzed over 10 million ground transportation receipts across North America for the 3-month period ending last September (2016). 

  And what they found was that, for the first time ever, Uber and Lyft exceeded traditional taxis and rental cars when it came to business expenses. Uber was at 48% and Lyft was at 4%. So together, these two platforms have more than half of this particular market.

  If you compare this to Certify’s data from the same quarter last year, “ride-hailing services” previously accounted for 34% of receipts, whereas taxis and rental cars were at 22% and 44%, respectively. So Uber is up in a big way.

  This may not be surprising for a lot of you, but I thought it would be valuable to check-in on what the numbers say. 

  I’m hit with two thoughts. Firstly, it’s not a question of mobile apps superseding traditional taxis; it’s a question of one company taking over. And secondly, people seem to be favoring Uber over driving themselves around. I know I’ve been heading in that direction.

  Those are two powerful trends.

  2016.12.14

• More thoughts on driverless cars

  

  If you’re a regular reader of Architect This City, you’ll know that I’m a big supporter of public transit. And that’s because, as far as I can tell, it’s the most efficient way of moving lots of people around a big city.

  But more and more I’ve been thinking about how technology might change, or even disrupt, this school of thought. Which is why when I wrote this post a few days ago, I was careful to say that private cars aren’t the mobility answer. Because in reality, cars likely aren’t going to go away. We’re just going to use them differently.

  Here are the two things I’m thinking about most:

  1. Driverless cars

  I’ve written about driverless cars before in terms of how they might be used as a form of public transit. But I think it’s worth revisiting them for a moment. There are lots of driverless car critics out there and they usually fixate on the fact that a car is still a car, whether or not you happen to be driving it. It still takes up the same amount of space in our cities. Or does it?

  The key thing to keep in mind is that when we’re not longer driving the vehicle, it opens up lots of different possibilities in terms of how they might be used and also how they might be designed. I was watching this fireside chat with the founders of Google the other night and, for them, driverless cars offer the possibility of solving two big problems: traffic and parking.

  We know that parking takes up a lot space in our cities. But that’s really symptomatic of the fact that the utilization rate for most people’s cars is incredibly low. Most of the time a car is sitting parked and idle. But with driverless cars, they’ll be able to drop you off at your destination and then continue on to pick up their next ride–thereby minimizing the need for all that parking.

  This would bring the utilization rate way up for each car, which would also minimize the number of absolute cars that we’d need to have in our cities to move everybody around. Of course, this would mean that we’d be sharing cars. People wouldn’t own cars; they would be an on-demand service.

  2. Networked vehicles

  This brings us to my second point: driverless cars will be networked cars. Again, I’ve written about this before, but I specifically wanted to raise it again because of a new service that Lyft just launched in San Francisco called Lyft Line.

  The way it works is simple. You input where you’re going and Lyft will match you up with others who are going to more or less the same destination. The routes get shared and this brings down the costs to everyday use. It runs on the same principles as the on-demand minibuses I wrote about in Helsinki.

  But if you combine this with driverless cars, you’re starting to get at something incredibly interesting. Now all of sudden you’re getting the door-to-door convenience of private cars with many of the efficiencies of public transit.

  So in my mind, it’s very possible that platforms like Uber, Hailo, and Lyft could became major infrastructure backbones in a world of driverless cars. And if you think about it in this context, then I don’t think the valuations for these companies should seem all that surprising. These are potentially huge innovations.

  In the end, I don’t know how this will all shake out. I don’t think anybody does. I believe that strong public infrastructure (such as subways, light rail, and so on) will still be needed in big cities, but I’m starting to think that mobile apps and driverless cars will also form a big part of how we get around. Probably more so than most people think today.

  Image: Flickr

  2014.08.31

• Without trust, you have nothing

  I was reading Fred Wilson’s AVC.com blog this morning (as I do every morning), and I thought his post on trust was a really important one. He was talking about it in the context of building successful web applications, but I don’t think it’s only applicable to internet businesses.

  As marketer Seth Godin wrote on his blog earlier this year, the most important questions are not:

  Is my price low enough?

  Is it reliable enough?

  Do I offer enough features?

  Am I on the right social media channels?

  Is the website cool enough?

  Am I promising enough?

  No, the most important question in marketing something to someone who hasn’t purchased it before is,

  “Do they trust me enough to believe my promises?”

  Without that, you have nothing.

  I thought this was such an awesome, yet simple, post that I actually circulated it to a bunch of people in the office after I read it. Because whether you’re marketing widgets, marketing private cloud storage, marketing to investors, or marketing new condominiums, that question of trust is paramount.

  And it’s for that reason that I think social media and mediums such as blogging have become so important. Customers want to feel like they trust you before they buy your product. The best brands know this and forge “relationships” with their customers. And with the tools at our disposal today, it’s become a lot easier for companies to do that.

  2014.06.27