A Different Kind of Camp

[Caution: Possible long Rick Rant, use care]

[Note: I wrote this last week when I was up at 4a for a down and red eye back trip to San Fran before getting on the plane, so it is out of sequence with other, more cheerful posts]

Bar, FOO, Demo, Start-Up, Employment, etc, Camps.  You've heard/seen and maybe attended one or all.  I'm mean, lord, there is even a presentation camp!

I'm here at Toronto's airport getting ready to head out to SFO, do the meeting cha cha, and redeye back home.  So, last night I put some gas in the car so as to get those extra few minutes in bed.  The exact moment I was done and rolling out of the gas station, poof, I get a text alert (AskKinjo) telling me gas is dropping a full 5 cents for Tuesday. Great. Super helpful. Not.

This got me to thinking about technology really still being light years away from actually providing serious day to day help.  This, in turn, got me to thinking about a camp we should have called something like: "Fixing-problems-that-annoy-many-people-with-solutions-they-might-pay-for Camp."

The general parameters would be something like:

We run a contest for the most pain in the butt things we wish technology could do for us. Like track gas prices but link/sync it to my car's gas tank, mileage, usage forecast, whatever, etc, so I time it better. We cull the list down to, say 10, based on reality, doable, etc.

We rent out some big spot like a hotel ball room, unused sports stadium, etc; starting camp Friday and running through 8am the following Monday.  For 48 straight hours, we have hundreds of code teams go at it.  On Monday, at 8am, we judge the results, show demos, and (this is the good part), award prize money, have beta sign ups open.  All the "A" list types can show up, pontificate, judge, whatever, so long as that the end of the session, we have a bunch of solutions out there that should delight a large number of people.

This isn't an incubator, Y (or X) combinator, or Tech Stars, or Demo, or any of that stuff.  The value here is super star programmers solve some problems win some cash, get known, (likely snapped up) and people get some problems solved. This isn't an attempt to create VC investable companies but VCs love super stars so it might be a way to identify them for the next fundable gig.

I'm being only partially funny here.

We live in an age where lots of people are wired up, always on, and always connected.  We have piles of data sitting on hard drives worldwide that contain essentially 'everything'. We have technology that can turn the heat on before you get home, video watch the crock pot to make sure it isn't boiling all over the counter, etc, etc.  Yet the list of really useful services and solutions that fully exploit the technology we already have is, sorry to say, woefully small.  We need to motivate all these super brains and point them to problems to solve which in turn will hopefully lead to even greater things from them and for us.

An interesting scenario:

As I type, the snow is coming down. Hard. Lots. I can't see the Jetway from the gate's window, it is snowing that much.  Chance of this plane leaving on time? Exactly zero.  The 'board' shows an on time departure, of course. The gate agent is pretty much saying there is no update, etc, etc.  So, clearly, there are going to be cascading effects to a late departure.  They might be minor or they might be a seriously big deal but, for sure, this Airbus is not leaving the gate on time.

As I mentioned, I'm heading into San Francisco for meetings.  I have a car picking me up, lunch reservation for 3 at Veggies-R-Us, and blocked off meetings all the way up until the car picks me up and plops me back at the SF Airport for the redeye home.

The data piles:

• Weather history/movements for years on file.
• Flight delay history for years.
• Live flight planning data
• Live Air Traffic Control data
• Live traffic in my home town and destination data
• My schedule
• The other attendees schedules
• Email/Phone contacts of the people I'm meeting with.
• The opentable reservation in my schedule and my guest's schedule via Tungle which is doing an amazing job of helping me let people pick times off my schedule. 
• Addresses of the places I have to be
• My email history (forever in my case)

The connection realities:

• The car service has phone/email
• The meeting attendees have email/phone/SMS
• The restaurant has email/phone/'Internet' (via OpenTable)
• My, glued to my pudgy butt, BlackBerry device is on all the time.

Ok, got all that?  Now, using only what is doable and reasonable, here is technology nirvana:

Somewhere around 4a while I'm still sleeping, HAL has already twigged himself that trouble is brewing. There is a snow storm which, based on live radar, is going to be on top of the airport right about the time I hit the departure area.  Further analysis shows this snow storm is going to cream the drive to the airport which, using history, means I need to adjust my drive in.  HAL adjusts the alarm clock calculating my drive time, shower time, etc, and arriving at the adjustment.  This schedule item is now classified as 'at risk'.  HAL knows to send a "at risk" alert to my meeting attendees giving them a just in case notification.

I make it to the airport, beating traffic and the snow rolling into the area, get through customs and security only to see that shiny status board with "on time" on it.  The snow rolls right up onto the airport and <kaboom> we're in the middle of a blizzard. The GPS enabled BlackBerry knows I'm in the gate area but not on the plane. The airline system knows I haven't boarded.  Plus the live weather systems know the airport is getting pounded with snow.  And on top of all of this, it is past departure time.  Using the same systems the flight navigational systems use (winds at altitude, speed, etc, etc) plus all of the aforementioned data, HAL can pretty much predict what's happening. 

You know where this is going, right?  Schedules start talking to each other. The car service starts tracking the flight, HAL is ready to cancel/adjust the Vegfeast.  Why am I sending Eric, Matt, and Adam a note giving them a heads up?  Let the email systems do it. Slide the schedule forward 20 minutes or, if we have a 90 minute delay, bag the restaurant and recommend some delivery to the first meeting place.  And on and on.

While lots of things may not be a VC 100 bagger, I passionately believe that if we attack these 'duh' things, we will simply get smarter, customers will want (and pay for) more as we give them "ah hah" moments of sheer delight.

Then all this technology will start to help all of us with the real world hassles of a cranky ass dragged out of bed only to see his day turn to crap and having to spend tons of thumb time on the BlackBerry sending notes, looking at weather, guessing at traffic, etc, etc.

 

[Afterward: I was 45 minutes late, traffic into San Francisco was a mess, lunch was brutal (Tofu Pizza, are you kidding me??), my meetings were crammed together with me rushing everybody, and the guy FIVE ROWS BACK on the red eye home was snoring that loud for 4 hours straight.]

[Disclosures: We have an investment in Tungle. My partner is on the board, the CEO is a a friend and owes me twenty dollars.]

[Plea: Please don't go to Presentation Camp. Please spend the time just telling me what you do, what problem you solve and how everybody makes money.]

Comments

[Adam Sculthorpe]

This part of your post is where the gold is:

"We need to motivate all these super brains and point them to problems to solve which in turn will hopefully lead to even greater things from them and for us."

More specifically, I'm not talking about the brains and the motivation part, that's easy I mean the "point them to problems" part, please someone create a 'Problem Harvester' and send the output to me, as an entrepreneur I need problems, big ones, small ones, important ones, not so important ones but regardless - I need problems - making money is easy, really it is, the formula isn't rocket science.

I'm really hungry - send ALL you problems to me, I love them. The more you have the better, the more painful and difficult they are to solve the better, no problem is too big or too small - I want them all, I love them, I feed off them and turn them into solutions and gold.

Real alchemists know problems are worth more than lead!

[JDP]

Do you think tackling like this is a potentially ad supported business? Would you pay for this service? More importantly, would thousands of other people? Millions? I've built myself dedicated but private services like this before but haven't seen the traction out there to go further - especially in a venture funded model.

Like you and the previous commenter said, it's not exactly a technology challenge. I wonder if innovation in a startup is the right place to build end-to-end services like this. Not that you're pre-disposed to hear this, given your profession, but perhaps some things would be better to incubate in larger businesses so their indirect value-add could be recognized rather than just their ability to directly make money.

I know from experience that startups move faster and innovate more creatively, but when working with these other giant organizations, are the startups usually the gating factor?

[stewart]

All we need is better search...

[Alex Shore]

Hi Rick-

We are working on many of the problems that you reference in this blog with our TripChill mobile concierge service. We have started by creating a travel assistant. And now that we know people's drive times to the airport/hotel, destination city details, what they want to tell their friends about their travel, what their hotel and car preferences are, etc., we are moving to a full concierge service that is location aware. Our monitoring platform can anticipate problems and proactively help the traveler resolve issues, saving them time and frustration. We are excited about the future of mobile for many of the reasons that you point out in this blog; the information is there, it now needs to be smartly integrated.

[Albert Lai]

Kara Swisher did an interview with Roger/Elevation that dropped some hits about the Palm Pre alluding to some sort of GPS-Calendar-Email Notification intergration for tracking when people are running late and auto-notifying.

Not sure how much of it is real vs. vapor vs. interperation.

But I think that sort of thing would be super cool -- IF (and that's like a 90pt bolded "if") it was done right.

[John MacRitchie]

Set aside the examples that Rick has used.

I get to look at a lot of technologies in my job. Too often, I am being sold on the technologies, which is usually very cool.

However, what it too often missing is any effort to first sell me on the problem - what is it, who has it, do they have money to solve it, what are they doing today instead, what does that cost them, what difference will solving the problem make, what will have to happen for them to buy a solution... I could go on.

Get me excited about the problem first. Then close with your solution.

John

P.S. Read Steven Gary Blank's Four Steps to Epiphany (despite hokey title) if you want more questions to ask.
http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/0976470705