The Deutsche Post office across from the train station here offers DVDs, umbrellas, phone cards and toys — with the processing of mail appearing nearly an afterthought. And the facility housing it is not a post office at all. Deutsche Post occupies a corner space in a bank.

What was news to me was how USPS is constrained by law not to evolve or play in limited markets

It’s easy to say that the U.S.P.S. is a bunch of morons, but they live under legislative restrictions on what businesses they can enter and are expressly prevented from entering business unless it’s related to physical mail.

Now thats a bummer. I wonder if these legislative restrictions would be relaxed as things get more digital.

1. Scaling what works best – Ideas that work are scaled rapidly and money flows to them. You would see no-name companies go from small start to national international in matter of years. Venture Capital does wonders over here. Apple, Genentech, Google and Facebook are prime examples. (Sorry for Silicon Valley bias)

2. Law of Land – is enforced and contracts are followed. Enron, Galleon Hedge Fund, Rajat Gupta etc no one is spared. ( Yeah yeah you can say a lot of folks responsible for Financial Crisis didn’t pay for what they let loose but still I think it is net positive than otherwise)

3. University Education – US has most of the world’s best education institutions. This is one advantage that could erode in future as the cost of education is becoming very high plus new models of education would evolve with ubiquitous internet and collaboration tools it enables.

One not so radical idea for USPS is to partner with major grocery chains and be their home delivery agent sort of like webvan. So I order from Safeway, Kroger, Walmart’s website and grocery is delivered next day in neat packages by the friendly USPS guy. This does bring images from my childhood in India where the vegetable vendors would put their wares on a push cart and go thru neighborhoods hawking these vegetables. Do you think this idea of Grocery as a Service would work?

(Flickr Photo under CC by sarelkromer)

Audrey is/was a $500.00 USD “Internet appliance” released by 3Com in 2000 that ran QNX – a popular embedded *nix-like OS. You could surf the web, listen to music and e-mail folks (plus run a few other apps that came with it). It had a touchscreen (tho, you needed a stylus) with a virtual keyboard, but you could also use a wireless keyboard. My setup is a bit worse for the wear, but she still works:

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

The device failed because it was too expensive and just a bit ahead of it’s time (you have to remember, the Internet was a different place back then, with the intended, primary means of connecting the Audrey being dial-up). I believe it also failed because there was no good way to develop for it, thus snubbing early adopters who might have been able to get 3Com over the 1st gen hump and provide it a stream of cool apps to make it worth the money for the general public.

On the internet nothing ever dies. There is still the audreyhacking site live. I might just use audrey for few days for the retro feel.

@jeffnolan sent the above tweet about placing more orders than last year on amazon. This prompted me to look at my order history as I was sure I would be in the same boat. Going through the order history confirmed it. Now two consumers from the same geographic region don’t make a trend. But I suspect that this would be the case for a lot more people who are voracious consumer of information on the web i.e. heavy users of blogs, tweets and online news. Increase in spend in itself is not bad if it has merely shifted spending at brick and mortar to online spending for stuff. It would be bad ( at least for my pocket) if this 24/7 connectivity, 1000s of review sites, ease of online ordering has increased our wants and buying behavior.

While buying clothes and food etc is not practical but buying gadgets, books, music, games and software etc is super easy. There is always a new batch of TVs with more features, digital cameras with HD video recording, AV receiver with newer version of HDMI, new notebooks, routers with wifi-n, ipads and iphones. Then there are techmeme, gizmodo, engadget, amazon etc to review it. For more hardcore guys there is dpreview and avsforum. And all of this in your smart phone, connected TV 24/7 at your service. I think all of this creates a never ending anxiety to upgrade stuff. Which is resulting in ever increasing line items in things-I-bought-last-winter list.

Good or bad depends up the age old question about wants and needs. So far I have started going the route of giving useful age in years to various things electronics e.g. TV, notebook at least 5 years, phone 2 years, computer stuff at least 3 years etc.  Will be watching my behavior

Dilbert – Engineers

While I won’t miss these things about books as physical objects. What I would definitely miss is the impact books have when one is growing up with a lot of books around. Some of the earlier books I read were not recommended to me by any one. I happen to read them as they belonged to my elders and were readily available in the house. As a kid when you have spare time you just pick what is around and read it. With ebook readers it is going to be tough. Another thing that concerns me about ebook readers how it is going to impact libraries. I hope I would still be able to borrow books from library the way I do today. May be even better that I won’t have to go to library physically.

As far as the touting the books you are reading in front of your network – it has already been taken care by the “new media”. See my books section. There are applications like livingsocial, weread on facebook. There is even shelfari.com So nothing to complain over there.

Image Courtesy : Flickr Cheneworth

Over the years my book selection process has become somewhat refined. Before the advent of blogs or even web the way to find good books was word of mouth, newspapers or magazines. There were best seller lists and books of the year but that meant that one would miss good but obscure books. Also the books from past would be missed too. For example there is no way I was going to find about Thomas Schelling’s “Micromotives and Macro behavior” from best sellers list. With blogs this selection process has become really easy and very effective. Since one only subscribe to authors one likes iis quite likely that the books recommended by them on their blogs would be to your taste. And when one is fond of bibliophiles like Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution it is bonus time.

Most of the blog authors when talking about books point to its page on big river aka Amazon. Once at Amazon it is easy to find what other’s are talking about the books in customer reviews. This is all good but what I am really excited about is the ability to check if the book is available at one of the branches of local Santa Clara County libraries (SCCL). This is possible by a little greasemonkey script on firefox that was written for Seattle Public Library which I improvised for SCCL. So now I have a blog filtered stream of books whose reviews I can read on Amazon and check their availability in the local libraries. An optimized solution, just what the good engineer ordered.

Livemint has become quite popular during the last year or two of its existence. But sometimes funny things happen on the first page. Example in case is the screenshot above taken on  Nov 14th about 12:30pm IST. This image shows 4 different values of the BSE sensex index. Which one should I believe? While I can understand why it would happen, but I think it should be embarassing for the site owners.

There has been a visible shift towards design on Beta Thoughts in the past few months. If you are one of the 1.5 readers of this blog you might have noticed it. While I have always been interested in the design of things – but only after the google reader’s recommendation engine recommended “core77′s design blog” that this interest has gone into over drive. Besides my work as a NetWeaver professional revolves around thinking from user’s perspective aka user centric design. So what all of this has to do with the title of this post? Read on…

Core77′s recent post pointed to a lengthy but immensely enjoyable article about the design and development of Wii Fit which might have over taken Grand Theft Auto sales by  now. Don’t miss reading the complete article for some of the craziest places there ideas come from. Over here I would just point out to how important the user centric design is for them

Miyamoto-san banged the table and said, “That’s wrong!” He told this person that from the consumer’s point-of-view, clarity was important. That people don’t say, “You need to lose 2 BMI points to reach your ideal weight”, they say, “You need to lose 3 pounds to reach your ideal weight”. We wanted people from age 5 to 95 to enjoy using Wii and he pointed out that most of those people wouldn’t know what BMI is. He demanded to know how this person could be so backward-looking when so many employees were working so hard to negotiate with official organizations to allow kilograms to be displayed in the game for the benefit of the consumers.

Image Courtesy - Goodrob13′s photostream at flickr