Dec 19

vehicularThomasCrownePic.jpgWhat I’m proposing here is nothing short of the worldwide Vehicular Thomas Crowne Affair.

I hate photo radar. Hate it. And it’s not because occasionally I drive too fast and get a ticket. It’s because the city prostelitizes it as being a safety measure when in truth they’re using it purely as a revenue-generating tool. Last year in Scottsdale after only six months of installing speed cameras on the 101 highway, the city issued nearly $3MM in tickets… that’s just absurd. It didn’t make anyone drive slower. What it did was cause car accidents because inevitably some of the cars in traffic would hit the brakes as they approached the zones where they knew the cameras were. With a random fraction of the cars sporadically slamming on the breaks without warning, it’s no wonder that stretch of highway became one of the most dangerous in Arizona. Ultimately the City put an end to the experiment and pulled the cameras off the 101. Intersections throughout the Scottsdale still have red light cameras though, and the same problem exists- motorists become more concerned about avoiding a photo radar ticket rather than driving safely.

So if the challenge is how to defeat the photo radar cameras, you have a few options:

  1. You can obfuscate your license plate with a reflective spray or the little plastic shields that affix to your plate and make it difficult to read when the camera flashes. Those are banned in some states because they make it difficult to read the plate at night and worse for you the motorist and having one of will start you off on the wrong foot with an officer in the event you get pulled over.
  2. You can buy a radar and laser jammer to foil the speed-sensing mechanism on the units by disrupting the radio and light waves that bounce back and measure your speed. These devices are also illegal in some municipalities (especially if they employ active jamming techniques). Even if they are legal in your area, they too start you off on the wrong foot with a police officer.
  3. You could always get a paintball gun, be the defiant vigillante and goo up the cameras rendering them inoperable. This was actually happening in Scottsdale for awhile. Defacing city property however is against the law and this will get you fined if not thrown in jail when you’re caught. Plus it’s not a reliable or sustainable way to deal with the problem.
  4. You can accept the fact you’re getting ticketed and employ tactics like overpaying the fee to try and muck up the collection process once it’s issued. Also, because the ticket is not a certified, receipt-requested letter, you can ignore it and claim it never arrived. They will of course try to serve the ticket in person so be prepared to not answer your front door if you’re using this approach.
  5. Assuming that abolishing photo radar via policy is out of the question, you can get creative and think about the series of events through which these tickets get to you and approach the problem differently.

Think: How does the ticket find its way to you? the camera snaps the photo… someone has to look at the pictures and reference that plate number to a plate in the system… then that person mails the ticket to the address on file. Without physically altering your license plate to obscure it, how else could you make it difficult for that person to send the ticket? Simple:

Order a vanity plate with a bunch of characters that are confusingly similar in appearance.

vehicularThomasCrowne.jpgI just got my plate from AZ DMV and happily installed it this morning. It can still be read by the keen eye but from one of those crappy photo radar pictures it will be a non-trivial task to make out the characters. There aren’t many grey Tahoes in AZ that have a plate seemingly with all zero’s so with any amount of research effort the examiner could probably figure it out. But much like The Club causes enough of a nuissance to deter the would-be thief, this technique should cause the would-be photo examiner to pass over your ticket. And the more people that have plates with permutations of 0’s and O’s and D’s, the more difficult their task becomes: a veritable real life Vehicular Thomas Crowne Affair.

Is this civil disobedience? Perhaps. Is it a healthy thing to challenge the system when it sucks? You bet, especially when Scottsdale City Council has proven that all but one member is utterly incapable of performing their job (which should consist of listening to the citizens they supposedly serve and ensuring their concerns are addressed). You can go out and try methods #1-4 or you can abide by the current rule set, use your head and practice passive resistance. I propose the latter and suggest this tactic as a meme in order to send a message to the City of Scottsdale and other municipalities about how f’d up their financial printing press (ummm, I mean photo radar system) is. Research in Europe has already demonstrated that less signage, regulation and distraction makes drivers more aware of their surroundings and, consequently, more safe on the roads. The city needs to either admit that photo radar is a revenue-generating tool or do away with it. Period.

In Arizona getting a vanity plate takes $25 and all of about 5min to order online via this page on ServiceArizona.com. The plate arrives in the mail six weeks later and you swap it out. Done. You do have to specify the reason why you want that particular sequence of characters – I would suggest “Vehicular Thomas Crowne Affair.” Most plates have up to seven alphanumeric chars. Using O’s, 0’s and D’s there are a total of 2187 possible permutations for each state. Get your plate while it’s available! If you dig this technique, then digg this technique.

UPDATE 1/6/07: so this post has generated quite a local media frenzy while I was away on vacation. It made the Reddit homepage then was referenced from a Tribune article, TheNewspaper.com, and then yesterday Channel 3 and ABC Channel 15 interviewed me. I’ll be on KFYI talking about photo radar and the controversy of defeating it via this method and why I think it’s justified. I have not yet read the study on the 101 – if anyone knows where it can be found I would love to see the results and more specifically how it was conducted and how the researchers are interpreting the data. Call in to KFYI tonight at 7pm and chime in with your piece to take part in this discussion- I don’t see the phone # on their site but listen on AZ AM 550 and I’m assuming they’ll announce it. Thanks for everyone below who took the time to voice an opinion. From the comments below it’s clear that people have strong opinions one way or another and it should be a lively discussion.

LicensePlateOpEdarticle.jpgUPDATE 1/7/07: big thanks to Roberta Gale of KFYI for having me on her radio show last night. And here’s a salty op-ed piece from the Tribune. Betty Conklin clearly needs to switch to decaf and check her facts- a 16yr driving record with one ticket and one accident is hardly reckless.

This concludes the experiment. I registered the JumpBox vanity plate and will retire the OD00D0O plate when the new one arrives. It was never about evading the law or shrugging responsibility. It was about calling attention to photo radar and encouraging people to protest it. I have confirmed my suspicion before ever testing it on the road- the registration they issued me for my truck doesn’t even match the plate. It didn’t take photo examiner error for this technique to be effective- they err’d before the plate left ever the factory… Anyways, thanks for all the comments- I’m glad this experiment helped provoke some thought and stir people to consider some of the flaws with photo radar. It will be interesting to read the details of the independent study on the 101 photo radar safety survey when they finally publish it.

UPDATE 1/30/07- So this is the last update to this post- here is the new plate that arrived yesterday and has been swapped out for the 00DODO0 one – I’m happily sporting this one now but will consider changing to a new plate for all of ’07 for a six-digit sponsorship fee… ;-)

JumpBoxPlate.jpg

Here is the footage from the ABC “Good Evening Arizona” interview:



My favorite hate emails so far have been the ones where people say “what if someone is planning to commit a felony? You’re helping them get away.” Sorry, but which is more likely: that somebody planning to commit a serious crime will order a creative license plate then wait 6wks for it to arrive, or to just put duct tape over their plate and go do it? Oh crap I just told people how to put tape on their plate… c’mon people. I’m glad this experiment caused a stir and provoked some thought on the hypocrisy of photo radar. Aparently it made it all the way to Houston – sweet!

UPDATE 9/24/08: So the company behind the photo radar in Phoenix (Redflex) is more evil than I originally imagined. Apparently now they’re implementing active scanning of license plates of every vehicle that passes through one of their cameras, OCR’ing the plate and comparing it against a police database (cue Minority Report music).

Dec 15

waterdrop_1.jpgWe had the second meeting of the Social Media Club last night in Phoenix, AZ and I believe I can finally summarize the disconnect between old media marketing folk and the new media people who understand the essence of what social media is about. For the sake of this discussion, think of effective marketing as the art of spreading ripples of awareness throughout a glassy pond. If the goal is to cover as much surface area in as little time as possible, this is the critical distinction:

Old media folk are used to a one-shot, one-direction stone toss – you get one chance to lob your rock into the pond and watch the ripples as they emanate out from that. New media people realize that the pond has mud skippers and dragonflies in it, each capable of generating their own ripples and far more important than the waves generated from your toss are the secondary and tertiary ripples coming from the pond’s wildlife.

waterdrop_2.jpgThis rift in philosophies really is that basic. While old media folk will be perpetually looking for a bigger rock to heave into the pond in order to displace more water, how to optimize the trajectory of their throw to get a greater initial splash and how to aim it just right so it lands in the very center of the pond to yield the maximum potential coverage area, new media people will be thinking about ways to reach the wildlife with messages worthy of redistribution. Under the old media paradigm distribution was scarce and channels were controlled by a select few so the well-aimed boulder throw made perfect sense. Today distribution channels are limitless, it’s the attention that’s scarce and the transmissibility of the message is what’s important.

Understanding of the principles proposed in books like Tipping Point is critical. Whether you refer to the pond wildlife as Seth Godin’s sneezers, Guy Kawasaki’s thunderlizards, Malcolm Gladwell’s mavens, or Robert Van Arlen’s igniters – their role is the same: they are the second and third-generation ripplers that filter and relay your message to the rest of the pond (and ripplers talk with other ripplers). The primary determinant of the virility of your message is the value of the message itself. The level of credibility of the ripplers determine it’s tertiary transmission. Yes it’s helpful to connect first with high-ripple-potential wildlife but it does no good if you hit them with a boilerplate press release. Your message must represent clear and present value to that wildlife and the depth of that connection you establish with the rippler is everything. Traffic is of secondary in importance compared to quality of the connection established.

waterdrop_3.jpg As far as the Social Media Club, it’s an energetic group if not a bit overly so. There is an air of irrational exuberance that smells similar to when the dotcom craze struck as people started regurgitating buzzwords. Suddenly people think that blogs and wikis will solve world hunger and that blogging (the verb) is a sacred art form somehow different from writing. It should be no surprise that awareness and attendance of this group has ignited so fast given the nature of the subject matter. Last night had significantly more substance than the first though I’m happy to say. Francine who helped pull folks together as only she can, wrote up her take on the event and was right on with her comments. I’m planning to check out the next one as I am interested in this new press release style they’re talking about. It will be interesting to see how the group evolves.

Dec 14

We had Pat Sullivan over for an interview recently. Pat was the founder of the popular contact management and CRM systems ACT! and Saleslogix. Pat shared his experience with us in building both multi-million-dollar companies from scratch. Check out the audio for that conversation with Pat here. We’ve  had a string of solid guests on Venturecast recently- Fred Mapp, ex-CIO for AMD, American Express and Honeywell shared his story with us. And before him was the original founder of Scottsdale-based startup iTOOL, a company that ultimately sold to Onvia for $24MM in stock.  Jason’s audio interview is here.  If you have iTunes you can subscribe to Venturecast directly via iTunes by going here.

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Dec 14

9r_rounded_trans1.gifSo I was checking the server logs at 5am (because that’s what you do at 5am when you can’t sleep) and I noticed a spike in traffic from the 9rules.com domain. Digging further I came across this page on their site which lists the latest round of acceptances to their network. Wow. I’m peeing myself right now. This is the third time I have applied and I’ve been waiting to add their little 9rules flower to my sidebar for nearly two years now. Thank you Scrivs and Tyme for the add. Being the guy who was religiously picked dead-last in kickball and turned down by the fraternity the I rushed in college, it feels pretty freakin’ amazing to finally get accepted to a club ;-)

Dec 13

If you’re a developer or designer and haven’t checked out Cambrian House yet, you are missing out. This is a project eerily similar to the virtual co-op we were attempting with Grid7 Labs last year only they did a stellar job of telling the story, getting some VC money behind it and building up inertia with a solid community of contributors. I was interviewed recently for their “Movers & Shakers” section and they just posted our conversation as a podcast. There’s over 3500 ideas currently in their idea bin. I submitted a handful and two have been lucky enough to float into the top eight in the past two tournaments.

The one that’s in the running now in the Purple Cow Tournament is called “Disruptive Virtual Renderfarm” and you can read more about it on their site. The essence is the idea that the advent of utility computing for the public as afforded by Amazon’s EC2 service makes it possible for somebody to create a virtual render farm that could compete against existing outsourced render services like RenderNow.com that have heavy investments in physical infrastructure. Aside from having no fixed costs, the differentiators would be simplifying the render job submission process by creating hooks for each major animation packages and having a payment system that lets people pre-load their account and draw down as they order jobs. There’s good dialogue with people picking it apart but (fingers crossed) it will advance today to Round #3 of the tournament.

The incentive here is that the winning idea gets built and the original contributor and the people that submit code and designs earn ownership rather than contract rates. This is precisely what we hoped to create with Grid7 Labs – an environment for fostering innovation where the contributors would get not a paycheck but a stake in what they helped build. Where we diverged from CH in the model was in the decision to couple the roles of idea contributor with project manager and as we learned that was a critical error.

CH is not without its flaws – I’ve written a little about what I think they’re still missing, namely 3 of the 4 preconditions for the Wisdom of Crowds magic to work. In their defense though, we know first-hand what it is to try and run a virtual co-op; project managing these experimental developments and encouraging people who aren’t getting paid immediately to give up their Saturdays and evenings in order to contribute. All things considered, they’ve executed and actually shipped products. Guy Kawasaki says “Sales fix everything.” The equivalent statement in the world of virtual co-ops is that “Enthusiasm and community fixes everything,” and so far CH has built a phenomenal community. They continue to make all the right moves and their decision to form a “tribal council” of community members to help resolve the inevitable disputes that arise when people are submitting similar ideas is genius. It’s an honor to be listed as their latest “Mover and Shaker.”

Take a minute to setup an account if you don’t have one already, peruse the eight ideas competing in the tournament and cast your vote for the one you think should be built.

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Dec 13

We held the first ever Barcamp Phoenix event on Saturday at the UAT and drew a crowd of about 40 at it’s highest peak of attendance. It was an unstructured, participatory event in which we collected a bunch of potential tech topics, triaged them and then assigned a moderator. We chunked them into 15min quick sessions and flashed through them- any people wishing to delve deeper after the time limit were free to wander off and form a break-away session. All in all, a very positive event and proof that useful conferences don’t require massive preparation and strict schedules and agendas to be useful. Here’s the whiteboard of topics we came up with – the checked ones are the ones that we covered:

BarcampPhxWhiteboard.jpg

Chris Tingom posted a rundown on his blog, a couple others have posted flickr photos. and Erica Lucci posted extensive notes on the day. You can bet there will be another one of these events again. As far as what we learned about logistics in running things- it’s decentralized so there’s no set tracks or authoritative figure but at the same time, somebody needs to take charge and move things forward when a topic is exhausted. Doing 15min fly over sessions and allowing people to break off and dive deeper is a good approach- our group whittled down to about 25 so we all stayed in the big auditorium as one unit but factioning into smaller breakouts would be sensible at the next one when there’s a larger crowd.

Keep your name on the wiki page if you intend to come to the next one. There was a company there that was capturing the video and projector demos by intercepting the VGA feed. They promise to post the sessions they captured once they’re produced and make them available via the Barcamp wiki. Thanks for everyone that attended. See you at the next one.

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