Vending Machine for Stories

22

October

2016

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In the generation of eBooks (Kindle, Nook, Play), physical books are becoming old news, and some predict they will soon become antiques. “Well, then i’ll become an antiquarian,” I say. It makes me sad sometimes that so many in the world are alien to the joy of turning a page to read just a little more, they only swipe on glass. Probably that is why the fragrance industry is taking to developing perfumes that smell like old paper and books – in the future, these perfumes might be the only evidence of an era of romance between paper and ink.

Ever so often, the news have headlines like, ‘DC’s libraries have far fewer books and way more e-books’, ‘Aldi gets into ebooks: Will we see local supermarkets do the same?’, ‘This app turns your physical books into free e-books’ (yeah!) What started as a novelty in the 90’s, might soon be the death of physical books.

But wait! Are we judging too quick?
While book stores and libraries are going digital, one publishing house in France is setting up vending machines for stories on paper. In October 2015, Short Edition, a French publishing house startup, installed short story dispensers at the Grenoble train station in the French Alps. It is annoying to wait for trains everyday before commuting to and from work, why not have a short story to read while you’re waiting, they thought. Why paper? Director, Christophe Sibieude said, “Our ambition is to see distributors pop up everywhere to encourage reading – and writing – and to promote our artists. Smartphones have blurred the limits between our professional life and our distractions. The paper medium is a breath of fresh air, it’s more unexpected than a smartphone screen.”

And now, there are short story dispensers setup in public places all across not just Grenoble, but also San Francisco. They have three numbered buttons: one, three, and five, referring to how many minutes a story will take to read. After you make your choice, a light will flicker and a long ticket – something like a supermarket receipt – will slip out with a story on it. “Improbable things have happened since we got these,” an employee working near one of these vending machines said. “Tourists have taken selfies with them. They work incredibly well, and it’s not even peak season.” Ten minutes later, the machine was out of paper.

The founders of Short Edition have requests lined up from around the world, including a high school in Tunisia, a festival on Australia’s Gold Coast, and chain stores in the United States. “Imagine a short story dispenser in every Starbucks,” they say.

And, guess what? The headlines are changing. ‘Kindle sales initially outstripped hardbacks but have slid fast since 2011’, ‘Sony killed off its e-readers’, ‘Amazon has opened its first bookshop’. Waterstones last year stopped selling Kindles and e-books outside the UK, switched shelf space to books and saw a 5% rise in sales.
Now the official Publishers’ Association confirms the trend. Last year (2015), digital content sales fell from £563m to £554m. After years on a plateau, physical book sales turned up, from £2.74bn to £2.76bn. Now that’s news!

So the next time you are visiting France or San Francisco, be sure to try a story!

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Digital Transformation Project with VITAM – Eating Healthy while Saving Time on Campus

14

October

2016

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Here’s a summary of our Digital Transformation Project, done in collaboration with VITAM.

VITAM is the company that operates the two cafeterias (Food Company and De Etude) and three Bean Squares on the Woudestein campus. Though VITAM is a large organization operating in various companies and educational institutions across the Netherlands, in our report we only focus on its business and services on campus.  

One of VITAM’s business focuses include offering daily meals and beverages to everyone on campus. The other is its catering services offered for special events on campus. A discussion with Mr. Feenstra, chief account manager of VITAM’s division at EUR, revealed that the company has a flat organizational structure, and uses IT on a fairly basic level. While IT helps perform basic tasks like sending e-mails to staff or operating the cash register, most of the work is done manually. For instance, co-ordinating between different canteens and Bean Squares is done by Mr. Feenstra himself. The company has been operational at Erasmus University for over two years now, and while it has been doing well so far, it faces tough competition from other restaurants on campus, especially the Erasmus Pavilion.

Hence, to enable VITAM to better cater to its existing customers and gain a greater market share at EUR, we suggest a mobile application that not only shows the company’s daily menu with nutrition information, but also works as a food recommendation engine. It is crucial to constantly adapt to the changing environment, and we believe that this change in business model can become a source of sustainable competitive advantage for VITAM. The proposed application could also serve as a new channel of communication between the company and its customers, increasing the level of consumer engagement. Furthermore, invaluable information could be collected about user behavior on the mobile application.

The application is beneficial for its users for the following reasons:

  • The user has a convenient way of looking up what is available to eat at any given time – reducing search costs.
  • The user can make informed decisions and choose what to eat according to their preferences as well as to how many calories they want to eat – and become a happy customer!
  • The user can have their favourite meals more often, which increases the likelihood that they choose one of the company’s restaurants.

For VITAM, the benefits include:

  • Communicating the brand image of VITAM in a new, more positive light – healthy, nutritious food provider on campus.
  • Increased revenue by attracting that portion of the market that simply did not consider VITAM’s canteens due to high search cost.
  • VITAM can use recommendations gained through the app to improve its menus and fulfill customer needs to a greater extent. If more people like the food being offered, they will also consume more – increasing revenue.
  • It is possible to provide surveys inside the app and incentivize completing them by offering some sort of benefit – such as a discount for your next meal. This would be an inexpensive way to learn about customer preferences and increase the business value of the app for VITAM.

Of course, like all technological products and systems, the application must evolve (say, have additional features), especially in the face of potential substitutes that competitors might launch in the market. One such feature could be pre-ordering meals, but it provides a solution to a different business problem and does not seem feasible currently.

Group 85

Authors:  Zoltán Szilassy, Andrei Letcanu, Balázs Harza, Jahnavi Ghelani

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Why Google decides to leave places off its Map?

3

October

2016

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We all know about Google – how it started as a search engine and went on to become the tech giant it is today. And while Google Maps have been taking the world by storm with its detailed street views, and showcase of picturesque locations in real-time, only few know that Google Maps do not, in fact, map all of Earth. Fewer yet, know which regions/locations are omitted from view, and even fewer know why. Let’s change that, shall we?

Here are some of the locations that are blurred, blacked/whited out, or completely omitted on the Google Maps – Minami Torishima Airport (Japan), Volkel Airbase (Netherlands), Dugway Proving Ground (Utah), Pacific Northwest (USA), Roswell – New Mexico (USA), Garden of Gethsemane – Jerusalem (Israel), Narssarssuk – Arctic Circle (Greenland), Babylon (Iraq), North Korea, HAARP Site – Alaska (USA), the Poles. The list is long and dynamic.

Dynamic because Google claims some of the images we see on its maps are sourced from “third-party providers (that) are required to follow the law of the countries in which they operate, so some of them may blur images and then supply us with those images.” According to Google spokesperson, Deanna Yick, these images are later updated as and when they become available. Certain sites like the US Capitol Building and the Royal Residence of Netherlands that were previously blurred, are visible now and thus like this, the list of places ‘undercover’ keeps changing.

Though why are the above-mentioned places, instead of being only blurred, sometimes also blacked out or entirely omitted from Google Maps? For some locations, the reasons might be intuitive – like, safeguarding defense plans for the airbases of Japan in Minami and Netherlands in Volkel. After all, they must be doing something other airbases aren’t. Then there are The Poles that are not visible due to Google’s choice of mapping technology (a close variant of the Mercator Projection), though Google Earth (a separate programme) tries to cover for this.
But for other locations, the reasons are less obvious, and undoubtedly conspiracy theories run to fill these gaps in knowledge. For instance, the Michael Aaf Building on Dugway Proving Ground in Utah is rumoured (to have been occupied by the US military to test biological and chemical weapon systems. If that is true, they would definitely not want the world to see that. On the other hand, the Garden of Gethsemane in Jerusalem is simply not visible owing to the religious disputes over its true location.

But how does Google do this? Behind every Google Map is a much more complex map that is the key to search queries but remains hidden from view. This internal, deep map is built by Google in a project called ‘Ground Truth’. Alexis Madrigal, contributing editor to The Atlantic, calls it the secretive program to build the world’s best accurate maps. Until recently, no one was allowed to see how this project actually works. As Manik Gupta, senior project manager of Google, states, “If you look at the offline world – the real world in which we live, that information is not entirely online.” Google Maps, backed by Ground Truth, aim to bridge this gap between what we see in the real world and the virtual world (online).

According to Michael Weiss-Malik, one of the lead engineers behind Ground Truth, “there are a couple of steps. You acquire data through partners. You do a bunch of engineering on that data to get it into the right format and conflate it with other sources of data, and then you do a bunch of operations, which is what (Ground Truth) is about, to hand massage the data. And out the other end pops something that is higher quality than the sum of its parts.” And though Ground Truth might be the key to building better maps for Google and win the operating systems battle against Apple’s own Geo-data services, various locations are left off or simply not detailed on Google Maps.

This is attributed in part to Google’s own partialities. Jerry Brotton, historian of cartography and the author of ‘A History of the World in Twelve Maps’, believes Google Maps is driven by corporate goals of commercial profitability which are fulfilled largely by advertising revenue. It is not unknown that Google’s revenue is largely made up by advertising revenue, which amounted to 67.39 billion US dollars in 2015. As a result of this, Google ranks first among worldwide internet companies, with a market capitalization of 373 billion U.S. dollars, as of May, 2015.

In this light, Google’s business model can be looked at from both sides – the massive advertising revenue allows Google Maps to offer its services for free, and it is this near-monopoly the company achieves by providing free services that gives it the dominance necessary to generate advertising revenue. Google Maps undoubtedly spends a lot of money on developing Ground Truth and allied systems that support Google Maps, but this also affects what is put in and, more importantly, what is left off its maps.

Brotton argues that all maps are “of their time, of their place, and serve certain purposes.” For Google Maps, it is multinational profitability and is fuelled by the fact that the maps are being produced on the west coast of USA. James Wan, senior editor of Think Africa Press, wonders what would happen if Google’s data and programming ability were transferred to a Namibian company – the maps they would conjure up then would be different. They might prioritize Dulce Cafés over Starbucks, Pick ‘N Pays over Wal-Mart, and the panoramic views of African towns that are now only a blur on Google Maps. He says that makers of Google Maps look at the world through a very specific lens, and cyber-cartographers may not be filling in gaps on maps because may be “from 10,000 miles and a universe away, these gaps simply don’t exist.”

The omissions on Google Maps are also attributed to the map projection it is based on – a close variant of the Mercator Projection. Map aficionados and fellow cartographers categorize the Mercator projection as ‘bad’ since it misrepresents relative sizes across the globe and cannot even show the poles. On the other hand, geodesy folks think mapping services get the Mercator projection wrong as they have corrupted it by either using the wrong formulae or the wrong coordinate system for it. There are various map projections, but the wise thing to do is match the projection with the need. According to Daniel Strebe, a celebrity cartographer, in case of Google Maps the need is simple street maps that “do not deform according to the position within the frame or location on the earth’s surface.”

One way or another, Google Maps is the most widely used app after the communication suite (phone, text messages, e-mail, social networks). It is wondrous to think that one company decided to drive cars with custom cameras over every road it could access. Google would be easily over 5 million miles driven by now. And though it might be the first thing we think of when we feel lost on a new or old road, Google Maps does not map all of Earth just yet.

 

 

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