Fuel economy – simple idea to change the world?

I don’t understand why Governments do not appear to be legislating for fuel efficiency displays, alerts and advice systems in cars. These are very cheap measures that would surely make a huge difference to all vehicle drivers, in terms of their fuel costs as well as environmental impact. It could also help combat speeding.

For example, I think all cars should be forced to:

• Show the user current MPG at ALL times, something that cannot be hidden or deactivated. It must also cope with more than 99.99 MPG – an extremely irritating limitation of both the Toyotas I have owned.
• Show the user current average MPG at ALL times.
• Add a red/yellow/green indicator lamp next to the current MPG and average MPG, so the driver is constantly aware of how they are driving. People who don’t study their MPG are often unaware of what is a good or bad figure for their particular vehicle.
• For manual transmissions, add a simple indicator suggesting a more appropriate gear if the efficiency is currently poor – eg “Try changing down to 4th”.

It can be very hard to drive economically even if you watch a standard MPG counter as so much depends on the temperature of the engine and incline of the road. Some reasonably simple logic and sensors could make the car educate people.

Something like this could easily become as ubiquitous as peoples’ reliance on navigation tools like Tom-Tom systems. A retro-fit kit would probably pay for itself within a year in fuel savings alone – so making them mandatory could be a real boon. Of course whether a retrofit is possible on older cars is another matter.

A nice Easter break – reflections

I had a wonderful easter break with my family, mainly consisting of being outside in the generous gardens we are lucky to have – weeding and planting to create a new and interesting garden from the overgrown mess that was left by the previous owners.

I find I can get very passionate about creating a woodland garden. I love woodlands and trying to plant the correct plants to thrive in the deep and partial shade whilst also producing some form of crop or wildlife benefit is really important to me. The book Plants for A Future is invaluable for this – as soon as you start thinking that every space can be filled with a productive plant, you have a completely different view.

I’ve been programming commercially for about 16 years now, and I have to say that if I could make a living being outside and working with nature and plants I’d happily drop it all tomorrow. There are parts of programming/consulting I absolutely love – creating new architectures, UI analysis and design, solving real business problems for clients.

However there is the insidious addictive quality of computers that has kept me in front of a screen for what is probably 5 or so years of that last 16 years since I’ve been programming. That much of my time sitting down typing. Its really ridiculous when you think about it. Think of the self-sufficient permaculture woodland I could have created in that time.

That is surely awful, and I think if I could engage myself in other constructive co-operative activities outside and the mental challenges those can produce, I would not look back to computers for occupation!

I do find it easier and easier to unplug these days, and my happiness has increased tremendously. At weekends I rarely touch my iPhone or laptop any more, and I barely use email now.

We all need to reconnect with the people and land around us.

Google Latitude / musings on behemoths vs small services

I found out today about Google’s new Latitude service. This is basically a “where are my friends” application that uses position information from your phone to update their central servers, and people who you grant access to your location info can see where you were (not are – depends on when you report in!).

Now this is particularly interesting to me as I have a fairly well developed idea for such a service, and had begun implementing this using the iPhone with a custom iPhone application (and of course a Grails application for the back end).

My immediate thought was “phew! Glad I didn’t spend any more time on that. Note to self: check own ideas for ‘behemoth trouncing risk’ in future”. Not to mention some relief that I wouldn’t have to implement the service myself now Google has “done it”.

However, then I started to think a little more and looked at their offering a bit closer – as much as I can with nobody using it and no iPhone support yet.

This made me realise a few things:

1. The behemoth does not always get it right, or rather tends to cater for the very high volume use-case which is not necessarily where the financial gain is to be mad
2. I have not seen their phone app yet, but I am wondering if it will have the right “drop dead simple” UI it requires
3. The behemoth when trying to handle the generic mass-market use cases, can not always create the seamless and simple UI required for users to love (and continue to use) a service
4. Most importantly – this kind of usage is not, in my view, what this technology is best for. I think the money to be made here is on smaller groups of users, and users in specific organisations.

Sure Google will have some plans further down the pipe – I’m sure an API will come (“Show where you are on your blog”, “Get location of friend X” etc). Its also surprising they don’t have an iPhone app (rather than an iphone customized web site) for this already.

However I think there’s a fair bit of money to be made with such a service that focusses on making sure parents know where their kids were when they said they’d check in, and for small-scale logistics for companies. The application UI -has- to be top-notch, and the functions it provides have to relate to the market place. There’s possibly a couple of different client apps that could be made to front the same back end.

So if you’ve got a some spare cash and want to fill what I believe remains a gap in the market, drop me a line and I can flesh out the ideas for you

Another day, another Co-op banking failure

I know, it’s too much to ask. I’d like to view the transactions on my business current account since December 2008 please. Oooops E_MT_ERROR and:

Error: org.omg.CORBA.NO_RESOURCES: vmcid: 0×0 minor code: 0 completed: No (8516)

Again. At best Co-op business banking is painfully slow. Very often it just doesn’t work at all.

Today, I am finally going to see if I can talk to a manager on their internet team and see what plans they have to remedy this.

Thanks to all the Co-op customers who have commented on my various posts about them. Keep the comments coming.