Seattle.BloggersPub

I noticed I got a referral from 50 Common Web Design Mistakes today and immediately thought, “this can’t be good.”

Turns out someone named John Rothra wrote the following in the comments:

Another [common web design mistake] is downloading/implementing WordPress themes and calling yourself a website designer (see http://www.bernzilla.com/design.php). All these ‘designed’ sites look like WP themes slapped up for the site.

Guess I better keep my day job

CNN was one of the big sites that hadn’t switched over to Flash video yet. For me, it was the only site that I checked on a regular basis that hadn’t, so whenever I was in Firefox, I couldn’t watch the video. I just noticed thanks to Twitter that they rolled out the new site […]

So we reduced some trucks and smell in smelly truckville.

So we reduced some trucks and smell in smelly truckville.

The University of Washington School of Art holds its Thesis Exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery. Congratulations to the class of 2007: Nola Avienne, Jason Campbell, Celeste Cooning, Benjamin Eckman, Eric Elliott, Andrew Fallat, Julia Freeman, Andrea Gi…

Greetings from the dirty south! My name is JD Roy and from this post on, I will be blogging for Georgetown Stew…

Greetings from the dirty south! My name is JD Roy and from this post on, I will be blogging for Georgetown Stew…

Cascadia’s largest private car insurer—Seattle-based Safeco—has finally announced its first entry into the world of on-board automotive infotech. And it’s not a new insurance plan. It’s a GPS device which, for $15 a month, will notify parents when their teenagers go too fast, too far, or the wrong place. You can now sign up for the service here.

If you’re aghast, well, I’m not surprised. It may make teens feel they’re wearing radio collars. But car crashes cause more than a third of deaths to teens, as the Seattle Times noted in its coverage of Safeco’s new offering. So I’m not against this service, dubbed Teensurance. In fact, I might have considered signing up, if my teenage son hadn’t totaled the family car sixteen months ago, launching us into car-lessness. And, judging only by my own reactions, I’m guessing the commercial market for teen tracking may be robust.

The privacy issues aren’t really what I want to talk about, and I doubt that Teensurance is Safeco’s intended endpoint. The endpoint is pay-as-you-drive insurance, and what impresses me is Safeco’s cleverness.

One barrier to pay-as-you-drive insurance is that, to earn profits and satisfy state regulators, insurers need data on how people drive and how their driving changes in response to different pay-as-you-go pricing plans. Some insurers such as Progressive and Norwich Union have invested millions of their own to gather this data. Unigard has invested from its own pocket and also won federal and state funding for a Washington pilot project (full disclosure: Sightline is part of this pilot).

What impresses me is that Safeco may have identified a way to gather these troves of data at a profit. It’s found a segment of the market that will pay handsomely ($15 a month!) to have Safeco invade its privacy and track its every move.

So, in the grand scheme of things, Teensurance is just the latest Cascadian development in what is now a global race among insurers and technology firms to charge drivers for insurance in more exact proportion to the risks they impose on others: based on how much they drive, how they drive, when and where they drive. (This race is perhaps best chronicled in the charmingly ill-translated writings of the Spaniard Salvador Minguijon, which you can find here.)

(One particularly interesting approach to pay-as-you-drive is described here.) And PAYD is part of the larger  transformation of transportation that information technology may unleash.

As a Cascadian, I’m rooting for our local entries in this race. But in the end, all that really matters is that drivers win an extra chance to save money by driving less—and that all of us win safer streets, less oil addiction, and less climate disruption.

(This post is part of a series.)

When it comes to attitudes about climate change,
seeing really is believing. The death and destruction left in Hurricane
Katrina’s wake prompted public opinion about the reality of global warming to
spike (the percent of Americans who believe it’s happening stands at about 85), not to mention concerns that we might actually see the effects of
climate change in our lifetimes – instead of way off in the far distant future.

Yesterday,
Pew released a new study that shows Americans’ climate concerns are on the rise
again. This is likely due in part to all kinds of crazy weather we’ve been seeing lately. From The
Independent:

There has been a double-digit increase in the proportion of Americans who
say environmental problems are a major global threat - from 23 per cent to 37
per cent [since 2002], according to a comprehensive survey published this week by the Pew
Center in Washington.

The environment is increasingly in the news in the US, thanks to
violent and unusual weather patterns - mainly floods and severe drought -
combined with the rising cost of petrol. The past few days have seen dramatic
rainfall across the southern states. More than a foot of rain fell across
central Texas and Oklahoma yesterday, with more storms
predicted.

Extreme weather is perhaps the most audible among the chorus of alarm bells
sounding on a regular basis. Just as weather gets weirder and weirder, more and more common are reports like the one released this week by The Institute of Social
and Economic Research of the University
of Alaska Anchorage (pdf) that predicts how much damage Alaska — which is currently experiencing
forest fires — would suffer from higher temperatures, melting permafrost,
reduced polar ice and increased flooding. Road
and rail infrastructure costs, in particular, could increase up to 20 percent — that’s
billions of dollars in the next 20 years — due to severe damage in areas where
permafrost is melting.

There are plenty of wake-up calls. But concern about the climate is still
sharply lower in the US than
in any other advanced industrial country, with the exception of the UK. In the rest
of the western world, large majorities view global warming as a far more serious
problem — ranging from 57 per cent in Italy
to 70 per cent in Spain.

Pew found that Chinese citizens are far more likely than their American counterparts to say environmental problems are a major danger (70 percent versus 37
percent) – this gap is likely due to the fact that in today’s China unlike most of the US, many water sources
are tainted with toxins and the air people breath is visibly polluted.

Again, seeing is believing.

Robert Cringely has a post about Adobe and our strategy in which he describes Flash and PDF as “invisible”, the next step after ubiquity. He then goes on to talk about Silverlight, JavaFX, AIR and Adobe’s overall strategy. It was a fun thing to read and I think for the most part Robert captures one […]