Smart Trolleys

Nowadays supermarkets have become bigger. This means they sell more products and in high volumes. The result is long queues and overworked cashiers. The reason for long queues especially during peak shopping times is that each product has to be scanned for the price at the counter.

What if the trolleys could be made smarter rather than just be used for ferrying items. For instance instead of using ordinary barcodes to store product and price information, they could use RFID tags that would transmit the same information to a limited distance say a 1 meter radius.

The trolley is then fitted with a receiver that has a small display. Each time an item is added or removed from the trolley the receiver updates the total price of items in the trolley. This would result in customers arriving at the till already knowing how much they are paying.

This eliminates the need to scan all the items as is the current case so that cashiers will now just verify the price indicated on the trolley, receive money and issue a receipt. The overall result is a fast moving queue and satisfied customers.

The downside is that the trolleys have to be monitored and repaired if they break down. They may also introduce the possibility of fraud or loss of revenue if they malfunction. RFID tags also happen to be a little expensive but given the volume of items in any supermarket economies of scale can be applied to mass produce tags that will only be used once. What’s more the technology can be extended to activities such as stock taking etc.

That said we have to evolve don’t we?

Linux On Android

Did you know that you can run Linux on your phone? With a terminal similar to putty maybe now admins can do their daily tasks from the phone/tablet as if they were seated at their computers.

Just go to http://kevinboone.net/kbox.html and download the app: Term-debug.apk because you won’t find it on Google Play Store. Copy it to your phone via Bluetooth or USB and install. Launch and voila! Most of the Linux commands can run..

The next device: smart watch

If there is a device I would like to have next, its the smart watch. Its a very convenient way to interact with the phone in your pocket. I cant imagine how many times my phone vibrates and then after rushing to get it out I find an SMS from AIRTEL telling me that I can now subscribe to SKIZA tunes!

People who have phones with 5"+ size screens can feel me. When you have a phone that big it is always a pain to take it out only to discover a silly notification.

Salient features:

Messaging
Calendar
Social - twitter etc
Music player
Clock
10 meters range
color LED screen

Cons:

You have to charge via USB
Costs $250
Not compatible with all smart phones

Becoming Self-made

The visionary Brian Tracy found that the following concepts and qualities ultimately lead to the person doing them to become a self-made millionaire regardless of who they were.  

Cause and Effect

There is no causeless effect. That everything happens for a reason. If you can think of a desired effect, then you can find someone who started off without that effect, did something and ended up with that result. So you go and do what they did and you end up with the same effect. Success leaves tracks. If you get into those tracks and follow them you will end up where they are.

Nothing works the first time

Most people give up before they try. Once they fail they move to someday. Someday I am going to save money, someday I will do this and that. Whatever it is you are attempting will work after a few attempts that ensure you fully understand what it is that works and what doesn’t.

The person you need to become

The most important thing is not to become a millionaire, it’s to become the person you have to become to become a millionaire. To achieve something you have never achieved before you have to become someone you have never been before.

Qualities

Fact about these qualities is if you have them your success is virtually guaranteed. If you don’t have them they are learnable and lead to you becoming a vastly better person.

 #1 Dream big dreams. 

If your life could be perfect in the next five years what would it be? Dream list is a good way to start. You pick up a piece of paper and let your imagination run. 500 goals might be a reasonable number.  It might just happen that you set off the law of attraction. You attract people, circumstances, resources, ideas etc. that move you towards the goals and move the goals towards you.

#2. Do what you love to do. 

Find out what you like to do and find a way of making a living out of it. Something you love to do gives you energy, motivates you..probably what you meant to do since you were young.

#3. Commit to excellence. 

All people who are successful are into what they do. At the top 10% of your field is where the money is. Everybody who’s doing well didn’t start there. And it takes 5-7 years to get there. What’s worse the 5 years are going to pass anyway.

#4. Develop your unique talents and abilities. 

We are all designed to do something well and derive great satisfaction from it. Look back in your life, what has been responsible for the most success in your life up to now?

#5. See yourself as self-employed. 

You see yourself as in charge of your own life. No one is coming to the rescue and you are entirely responsible. Everybody is self employed. Even if someone signs your pay check everything that happens there affects you and you are responsible.

#6. Develop a clear sense of direction. 

That is you need to become immensely goal oriented because you can’t hit a target that you can’t see. Decide exactly what it is that you want and write down a plan to achieve it. Then determine the price you are going to pay and then resolve to pay that price. The truth is that you have to pay the price in full and you have to pay it in advance.

#7. Refuse to consider the possibility of failure. 

The fear of failure is the biggest obstacle to success. 9/10 things that we try fail. But it makes you smarter. All you need to reckon is that it’s not failure but feedback. After long you make less mistakes. Failure is only an opportunity to begin intelligently again. Always look into failure for something good and you will always find it.

#8. Dedicate yourself to life-long learning. 

Personal professional development is what takes you from rags to riches. Knowledge and skill really are the key (Peter Drucker). (Steven covey) says that your knowledge base has a half life of 2 years. Read in your field 30 to 60 minutes each day. That is books written by the best in your field. Take all the possible courses that you can. The expert talking to you for several hours has been at it for thousands more.

#9. Develop a workaholic mentality. 

In this competition you’ve got to work harder, smarter and better than the rest. The 40 hours a week gets you survival. How many hours over the 40^th really counts. Average for millionaires is 59 hours.

#10. Get around the right people. 

Your reference group is the people you habitually associate with at work, home, social circles etc. You absorb the behaviors, the attitudes, the styles e.t.c of the people you associate with most of the time.

#11. Be prepared to climb from peak to peak.

 All of life is peaks and lows. What is important is the general direction of your trend. 

#12. Develop resilience and bounce back. 

Since most things are not going to work you’ve got to learn to bounce back. So bounce don’t break. It’s better to mentally prepare for the downs before they happen.

#13. Become an unshakable optimist. 

Think and talk about what you want most of the time. Constantly feed your mind about great ideas. Try out more things which dramatically increases the likelihood that you are going to try out more right things at the right time. And always persist.

#14. Develop courage and persistence. 

Two types of courage. First is the courage to begin or launch even if there is no guarantees of success. If all obstacles must be removed nothing will ever get done. If you just leap the net will appear. The other courage is that to endure.

#15. Self-descipline. 

This is the ability to force yourself to do what you know you should. Persistance and discipline are tied together. Full video >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxt4uPFPZP8&feature=youtu.be

One for All

I have always thought that having a tablet, camera and phone is a nice thing though too much at the same time. Whenever you are on the go having these three devices is always a joy. However issues of charging, WIFI and juggling them always gets in the way of enjoyment. That is why you need to lose some of them.

Wouldn’t it be easier to throw away the three devices and get one that does all those functions at once while saving you from the issues. This is a big smartphone, the likes of Galaxy Note II and HTC Butterfly. How? You may want to ask. The typical tablet has a 7” screen and runs “Android”. It can take pictures and allow you to surf.

A camera on the other hand is expressly for pictures and video with some allowing you to share through WIFI. So it’s like a tablet with a different form factor less some functionality. Then you have a phone in your pocket that calls and sends text but also repeats the WIFI, photo and video story. 

So why not eliminate the camera whose functions also appear in the tablet (good camera) and phone (not so good camera). With the camera gone, you are now contending a device with a large screen (tablet) that can’t call unless it’s Skype and Whatsapp or connect to a GSM network (It can’t also fit in your pocket unless you are Goliath) with a device with a small screen but can do all the rest (camera, call, surf). 

So get a phone with the largest screen possible say 5,5”. But now price jumps out to kick you in the stomach. The good thing is that now that you’ve thrown out the tablet (  ̴USD300) and the camera (  ̴USD180) you are left with a tidy sum to get a big smartphone (  ̴USD450). The final nail in this coffin is that you don’t always need a camera or tablet on you but a phone is ubiquitous. Tell me I don’t make sense.

Not Anonymous anymore

Isn’t it annoying when you have a number in your phone that you don’t know who it belongs to? Maybe it’s in a text message or in the call log. You can simply pick up the phone and call to ask who it is..or what if there was a service to do that for you without soliciting from the other end?

Now that all people who have SIM cards are registered with their mobile service providers wouldn’t it make more sense to get value from this titanic database if there was a service to link a number with a name/location?

So how would the service work? Maybe it would be a simple query where you send the number via SMS to a short code and you get a response. Or use a USSD code to interact with a user through a menu to answer a few questions and then get a response through SMS.

However such a service would receive criticism due to the question of how do you maintain customer information confidentiality? This to me is the interesting bit. Either we create a program to read phone logs [missed and received] or messages [received] and we limit searches to only those numbers retrieved from the mentioned sources (logs and messages) as they are unsolicited.

The other would be for the service provider to query a person’s phone records to determine first whether the number in question indeed exists in the received calls/messages, then give an appropriate response. What do you think?