Eitan Burcat

Tainted Money?

What if we started tracing how money moves around in our economy, in an open and transparent way?

Hypothetically, Practically (see below(!)), I can start voluntarily taint money that goes through me. Publicize how much money I got from who, and to who do I give it. An extreme way of “voting” with every economic transaction I make. What if organizations started to do this in a standardized way?

Could this make some money worth more than other money?

Could this make our economy more “compassionate”, as Daniel Goleman would put it?

Technically, we can very easily start doing some things in this direction. Open a free account, and start logging our transactions over the net.

Decide that the money I got from here, is going in this direction – and see how it goes (or get stuck) from there on…

A proper meta-data would allow us to ask some interesting questions.

Was a shady business involved in the sources I got this money from?

How is my donation being used?

Did the government just “taint” 1 trillion USD last month??

“I only accept money from vegetarians…”

Stuff like that

Sounds easy to implement, and could be tons of fun, don’t you think?

Disclaimer:

<Transaction>

<id>1</id>

<source>http://www.semantinet.com</source>

<target>http://www.eburcat.com</target>

<amount>12</amount>

<date>March 31st, 2009</date>

<unit>USD</unit>

<comment>Salary</comment>

</transaction>

<transaction>

<id>2</id>

<source>http://www.eburcat.com</source>

<target>http://www.istockphoto.com</target>

<amount>1</amount>

<date>April 16th, 2009</date>

<unit>USD</unit>

<comment>That photo you see up there </comment>

</transaction>

Update: a more appropriate representations…

<Transaction>

<id>3</id>

<source>http://www.eburcat.com</source>

<target>http://www.gov.il</target>

<amount>1</amount>

<date>March 31st, 2009</date>

<unit>USD</unit>

<comment>Income tax…</comment>

</transaction>

I wonder if http://www.imterriblysorrybut.com can become viral… If you have any suggestion on how to increase the chances of people sharing this – please let me know at the comments.

On any case, the idea for this site crossed my mind a couple of days ago, so I just HAD to try it out…

If you haven’t already seen Steve Job’s 2005 Stanford commencement speech – this is one of the most inspiring talks I’ve ever seen:

Another inspiring piece I’ve encountered thanks to PodCasts – is this one:

And just today, I’ve come to learn that MIT is using FM Clickers in their classes – as an enabler for active and more powerful learning experience – from this ITConversatinos talk.

YouTube channels are a wonderful way to keep up-to-date.
The White-House, TED, or some nice music players (i.e. Playing for change) – all use YouTube channels to stream some great content.
Watching this content offline – could be a great use of your time in some situations…
The problem is, that YouTube doesn’t offer an easy way to get this channel on your MP4 player.

Lucky for me – iTunes together with RSSHandler – offer a solution just for that.

Simply copy-paste the channel’s URL:
i.e. http://www.youtube.com/user/whitehouse
Into the RSSHandler: http://www.rsshandler.com/converter

And put the resulting url:

http://www.rsshandler.com/flvrss.rss?feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Frss%2Fuser%2Fwhitehouse%2Fvideos.rss&format=18

Into iTunes as a new PodCast.
Start downloading the different videos of the channel (iTunes handle this for you).
And sync your iPhone with these videos (again, iTunes did a wonderful job).

Voila.

Obama video addresses are now offline-copied to my train rides…

Fun

http://hayeruka-meimad.org.il/

Just finished watching a recording of how people surf my blog. I must admit it’s been an amazing eye opener. I can actually see how people interact with my site, what parts they read, where exactly do they try to click and exactly how my message is communicated.

It makes me want to stop that person, and tell him: “Hey, stop using my site like this! Can’t you see that I meant you to click that Red Big Button on the top left, instead of reading that yada yada legal stuff on the bottom right???”.

The future of getting-your-message-through??

I can see (a really close future) when I’ll be able to edit a website (i.e. my Facebook page? My online-product-landing-page?) in real-time (using dream-weaver?) while I see how real people (from google-adwords?)  interact with it (using clicktale?). This can become a transformation of site-building and online-marketing – just like the first terminals transformed the way people started to program. Malcolm Gladwel explained in Outliers: using terminals dramatically shortened the feedback loop of programmers, who before that had to feed their programs into card-reading machines. This transformed programmers from being anal-code-verifiers into the powerful hackers they’ve become today. Using ClickTale can shorten an on-line marketer’s feedback loop – and help him focus his surfer’s attention on the core message. This can transform our online-marketers, design and usability people from being statistics-diggers into real-time-attention-hackers. Wouldn’t that be neat?

ClickTale walk their talk

The usability of the serivce is that of a “Next, Next, Next” wizard. I can feel how minimal is the attention that is required by my side, and how short is the learning curve to get things up and running. I can imagine how the ClickTale team streamlined their own product experience using their own tools, and this must have been very gratifying because I’m sure this have raised their bottom line figures with very short feedback loops.

I highly recommend every site owner to try out this service. Even my very short experience with this service has opened my eyes to some severe usability issues I wasn’t aware of.

Disclaimer: Me and Arik (ClickTale’s cofounder) became friends a coupe of years ago. He’s been urging me for 2 years to try out his service. The first beta versions were a bit shaky, but when I came back to it yesterday – it’s evident they did a terrific job. Way to go!

BTW: Smile, you might be recorded as we speak

Disclaimer 2: Although you are being recorded, I don’t gather any personal information about you – so I don’t have any idea who you are when I watch your recording… Unless you leave a comment on my blog… Hmmm… I wonder if there’s a way to exclude text from ClickTale’s recordings… I’m interested in not to know how anyone I know interacted with my site…

Having your BlueTooth turned on is like walking down the street yelling your Social Security Number

A year and a half ago I was playing around with my (then new) Nokia 6120 Bluetooth, 3G and python capabilities, when I figured out that I could create a pretty nifty spying machine, with some very little effort.

It began with a simple Bluetooth scan. Every 60 seconds my script wrote into a text file a simple line for each Bluetooth device it encountered around it – something along the lines of:

TIMESTAMP, BT-MAC-ADDRESS, PROFILE-NAME, …

It took me about 4 hours to find a proper Bluetooth programming library, and figure out how to python on S60. Then, scripting was simple. Happy about my new creation, I started the program and cheerfuly went home. When I arrived my home-computer and looked at the text file – I was in a bit of a shock. Apparently in a 10 minutes walk down Rothchild street in Tel-Aviv – I harvested more than 30 MAC addresses of people who had their Bluetooth on. Many of them had their full name now in my text file. Not bad. And this was 1.5 years ago.

Then the fun began.

For each line that I wanted, I added Tags.

When my script started, it now read all the lines – and for those with tags – it saved the MAC addresses in a lookup table. Now, whenever a new MAC was found – it was looked up in the lookup tabe, and if tags were there – the phone started to sound a special beep, and wrote on the screen the tags that I added to this MAC address.

So, all the people from the Rothchild strolling were tagged “Rothchild”. All the people from a Pub I went to that day – were tagged “Mish Mish”, and all the MACs from the supermarket were tagged “Suppermarket”.

Whenever I bumped into one of these people again (and the script was on) – I got a nifty alert: “There’s someone around you with the tags “Supermarket” and “Mish Mish”". I could also know when was the last time I tagged them.

But this is not the end of the story.

I later added some 3G capabilities. I tagged people at work with some special tags. Back then, I tried out Grubb.net as an online todo list. So, whenver I encountered one of the people from work that I wanted to do something with – my phone handed me the specific todo items – appropriate for the context I was in. Not bad.

I still don’t have a GPS on my phone, but I figured out that tagging could be really fun with a GPS. I can mark areas on Google Maps, and whenever people were encountered in one of the marked areas – their MAC addresses could be automatically tagged. So the people from the Amado building in my university could automatically get tagged as a high probability of being engineers of some sort. And whenever I encountered that girl from the psychology building, my phone could alert me with a proper pickup line – something like “Didn’t I see you 9 months ago in the such and such” building?

So far – everything is legal. Now, for some illegal ideas that I had in mind. (Not that I would ever implement any of them).

I could store the MAC addresses together with the tags, on a designated website. 3G internet traffic is pretty cheap, so it’s Very much possible to query the DB for each new MAC I encounter. This allows me to share tags with my friends. Now, without ever meeting somebody – I can get the tags that my friends has given to this guy. “This MAC with a profile name “David Nokia6120″ was tagged by Tal at Eran’s school 3 months ago”. I’d never do such a thing, but you have to know that this capability should take me about 8 hours to implement. And I’m not a proficient python programmer.

Next – matching up people’s MAC addresses with their Facebook profiles. Imagine you could browse their Facebook profile just because any of your friends had matched this MAC address with that specific Facebook ID.

Another idea was a service called “Celeb Me”. Imagine that anytime you walked down the counter of any Starbucks – they’d know the type of coffee you always drink and how much sugar you drink in it. Wouldn’t that be neat?

Some drawbacks of this script:

• I don’t know exactly who is it around me who has got that BT MAC address I’m looking at. Using RSSI data is somewhat problematic.
• This script uses the BT, 3G, and could also use a GPS. All of these capabilities drain the battery really fast.

The technicalities:

• The script is run using Python S60 version 1.4
• I used a library called lightblue. The latest release didn’t work back then, I had to use the one before that.
• I connected to the Python using the Bluetooth console and hyperterminal.
• Copying the files in and out of the phone took me quite an effort back then… Nokia decided to make life not easy for people who aren’t paying them for their libraries.
• As you can see, the script is quite short… Could be even more efficient and better written if I wasn’t such a novice in Python
• The link to my crude-but-working script:

And some final thoughts:

1. People who walk around with their BT open – should know that they are actually YELLING a unique ID. This means that they can easily get followed by any Joe Shmoe with very little effort.
2. This thing totally rocks! It is so much fun, especially showing it off in geek parties
3. I have some funny little stories from playing around with this script, but I’ll leave them for another post.

 

 

A disposable napkin*

I wish napkins had this slogan written on them, with the following text on the other side:

“This napkin was once a tree, growing up in Brazil. Then it got cut down, got mixed with some toxic materials, so that it will look shiny and sell better. Then we printed on it (the text that you are reading in this very moment) – using some more toxic materials. Then it got shipped half way around the world, using some fuel. After you’ll use it, this napkin will get shipped to the nearest dumping location (using some more fuel, and polluting the air a bit more). There – it will deteriorate in the course of the next 5 years, putting all that toxic waste back into the ground. And all of this is done so that for 3 seconds you will look a bit more civilized when you eat your fettucini.”

“Please consider putting this napkin back in the stand, so that the next person sitting here will also get educated”.

Now,

I’m sure that producers of disposable dishes think that these napkins would be a bad business idea. Maybe they are right. But, these napkins can benefit us in a couple of ways:

• They educate about “environmental footprint”.
• Less napkins that the restaurant has to buy and manage.
• Less toxic waste that the restaurant will produce.

I call these “guilt napkins”. Maybe another text can be used to create “educational napkins” or “good karma napkins”. Maybe these napkins shouldn’t get produced at all, and an empty “educational napkins-holder” is enough.

Just a thought.

Please consider sending this blog post to someone that needs it

* In the process of writing this post, no napkins were actually disposed. This photo was downloaded from istockphoto…