Archive for the “transportation” Category

Well, here’s one thing that doesn’t seem to be in evidence in Sicily: a burbling startup scene.  I dropped in at Web Innovators 26 (it seems only yesterday I was at Webinno18) at the Royal Sonesta to check out the demos and pitches.  As usual, there were some “main dishes” that got longer demo spots and some “sides” that got 15 seconds.  All had tables and the big ballroom was packed.

Maybe it’s the recessionary times, but I noted that the companies on offer seemed to cluster around the more basic of human needs.  Not to say they weren’t smart and sophisticated ideas.  Here’s a rundown, and then I’ll get to the strange underwear theme that ran through the evening like an elastic waistband.

Birchbox, a “new concept in beauty retail” that sounds just a little bit like a fancy coffin.

Chargify, a recurring billing service for serial entrepreneurs who have better things to do than worry about dunning and fraud.

DoInk, a community of “artists, animators and doodlers” reusing one another’s artwork to create animations and drawings.  they ran away with the audience choice award by a wide margin, and many tweets reminded people to “show this to the kids.”

JitterJam, some “web-based social marketing software”

manpacks, just what it sounds like, automated underwear delivery for “busy men”

Milabra, a “Visual Intelligence Platform” that serves up ads based on the color and content of a website’s imagery. Smart MIT guys, cool technology, kinda sluggish demo.

RelayRides, like Zipcar but with your car. Or maybe like Circle Lending but with your car. I like the idea that they allow more driving with the existing fleet of cars.

Trustmarker, a provider of “digital trustmark networks” which are, um, those things, you know, like verisign, but your own. I think.

Marketeers have heard endless variants on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the philosophy of selling “medicine, not vitamins”  but I thought this was largely (not entirely!) a refreshingly down to earth bunch of startup ideas.  What’s more basic than entertaining kids, feeling good about how you look, building trust, and getting around town cost-effectively?

But those concepts are as often as not boring or undifferentiated.  And that’s probably why what’s arguably the most absurd of the ideas – manpacks – was the one that everyone, even the other presenters, was taking about.  As the Lorax pointed out, you do not need a thneed, and as I am pointing out, if you’re too busy to pull together some underwear, you need to re-think your business.  But the image of busy (or more likely, lazy) men ordering a tailored internet subscription to their, um, unmentionables, has a strange appeal.

Manpacks is the youngest of the webinno companies – the only one founded in 2010 – and it’s already got a bunch of press.  I have no idea if it has or deserves any customers.  Maybe it’s just a brilliant publicity stunt for some other business, but it helps us ask two good questions…

1. does your business actually solve a real problem?

2. have you built a story around it that would make anybody care?

I noticed an ad for a major airline selling the fact that they don’t charge for (the first couple of pieces of) checked luggage.  And as my premier status on various airlines ebbs, I find myself charged even for the first checked bag more and more often.

Despite persistent rumors that they will soon start, no airline that I know of is charging for carryon baggage.  Here’s why I think they’ve got that backwards: Charging for checked luggage encourages people to carry on more and larger bags.

So what, you say?  It’s their own burden to carry and stow the stuff.  Perhaps so, but it also makes the boarding and deplaning processes much longer for everybody, and according to the Flight Attendants Union it also causes thousands of injuries a year to passengers and airline personnel.  The very people who carry on a larger bag because they want to save time by not waiting for baggage claim are delaying everyone in boarding and everyone aft of them in deplaning.

When overhead storage space is free and unassigned (you have no particular claim to the space above, unlike the space under the seat in front of you which seems to be part of your tiny purchased real estate) you get the classic tragedy of the commons as there’s no disincentive to overusing the resource.

In short, airlines are lax about enforcing size and quantity limits on carryon bags when a simple schedule of fees would take care of the problem for them.  And the best part is, if you’re too cheap to pay the additional carryon bag fee, you still reap the benefit of getting on and off the plane faster!

Not sure of the status of the cars in there, but they’re not letting anybody else in.

I tried to exit North Station this morning and found two of the doors padlocked from the outside.  Not that it would have mattered if they were padlocked from the inside.

Vandalism or overzealous security, it’s hard to say.  7:30 is not exactly the wee hours of the morning for commuting.  In the rare (ok, not so rare on the MBTA sometimes) event of a fire or emergency, reducing the exist capacity by half seems a pretty bad idea. Maybe an alert reader with some clippers can pop over before rush hour hits in earnest.

I set out last week from North Station, taking the commuter rail with legions of downtown office-workers headed home to the suburbs like Don Draper.  But wasn’t headed for scotch and family, I was taking my first car-free trip to the DeCordova museum for the opening of three new shows.

When I arrived at the museum an hour later, I found myself looking at where I started, fifty years ago.

That’s North Station in the ’40s, photographed by Jules Aarons, part of an exhibition at DeCordova called “In the Jewish Neighborhoods” consisting of pictures of Boston’s North and West ends as well as Paris and New York in the 1940s.  The green line trolley is just about the only thing recognizable in this picture now, even though the tracks have been sunk underground and North Station has been subsumed (literally) in the TD BankNorth Garden.