This is the mobile carrier customer dashboard that I want. The annotations tell the story.

I'm hoping that at least one of Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, or AT&T will eventually realize that transparency is a differentiator (if only because they run out of other ways to stand out). Most of these dashboard elements are possible with existing data that carriers already collect, and in some cases already have in this form for internal use.

This shows two variations on the same dashboard landing page. Click for larger versions to read the annotations.

Same wireframes as a Flickr set.

Zipcar customers must return a car to the same parking spot that it was borrowed from. That means customers must rent (and pay for) one specific car for their entire trip, even when it will be parked in an urban area for many hours during the trip.

In 2009, I emailed Zipcar about cloning The Netflix Prize for a similar purpose: crowd-sourcing (really, expert-sourcing) a set of algorithms, incentives, and restrictions that would let Zipcar offer one-way rentals. Like Netflix, The Zipcar Prize would release an anonymized set of trip data, parking space locations, and an evaluation method (which might emphasize certain aspects, as Netflix did).

This would be a mix of:

• incentives: "We'll discount $2 for returning it a mere 5 blocks away from your preferred location"
• fees: "Returning to this location will cost $4 more"
• enforced policies, like: must reserve 1 day in advance; one-way trip can't leave a lot empty; only offered at certain urban lots (initially)

The email after the jump has lots more details (slightly formatted and edited). As far as I know, no one has tackled this. Zipcar hasn't and I didn't receive a reply.

The first car-sharing service to pull it off will have an amazing competitive advantage: paying for only what you actually need and the ability to get a car to the right place at the right time.

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I uploaded a few concept sketches, a final sketch, a final wireframe, and the end result of Cloudvox's home page redesign. They're in this Cloudvox Flickr set with some annotations.

4 VCs, a moderator, and a roomful of people. Here's the gist.

Now that we've publicly launched Cloudvox, and anyone can use it (and buy it!), I finally get to see the outdoors again. I went to this panel on 10/14/2009 and took as many notes as I could. I missed some things, and tried not to take any comments out of context.

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I went to a Q&A with Mark Anderson of Strategic News Service (SNS) and took down some direct and near-direct quotes Mark is unique for sharing fairly specific opinions; right or wrong, that's rare. Notes are chronological over 90 minutes. I tried not to take any comments out of context.

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Someone, somewhere has the metadata and music chops to deliver BPM-based radio streams. DJs and gym rats will follow. A couple ideas.

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I collected stats from my first sell-side eBay transaction: number of watchers, number of bids, and current item price.  Here's what I found:

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GMail's already-marvelous interface need not deter our constructive "backseat engineering." Here's my wishlist.

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90% of my whois queries are to check whether a domain name is registered, where I don't need any details. Here's a Bash function to check domain availability; type one character, get one character.

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Somewhere it's the Third Rule of Software Product Development: never implement a feature poorly because you expect it to be thrown away. Sure, rewriting is expensive, and seeing a permutation of "spend time with no product gain" is thoroughly demotivating. But there's 3 better reasons:

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