Innovation & Design

Micropayments & web browsers Tuesday 2/16/2010 12:07:33 PM (CST) - Michael Wells    I've been in the business of developing commercial websites now for a full 15 years, and one of the recurring problems I encounter is the problem of capturing payments. Credit cards are obviously a great step but the level of security required, and the consumer's concerns about mis-use of their card data, make the whole process very inconvenient. I suspect that the web will undergo a radical shift once micropayments become a reality... the ability to safely, securely, make a small payment of cash (as low as a penny or even less!), and manage that payment carefully while you're using your web browser.  This has enormous potential; Individual purchase transations (e.g. buy a book from Amazon) Micro transactions (post an auction on eBay) Metered use... watching TV on the web, movie sites, music sites... What recently hit me though is that this will probably be one of the next major waves of web browser evolution.  The first browser to implement a good micropayments model will be king of the hill very quickly, provided that other browsers are slow to get off the blocks...   [ Comment on this Entry ] [ Email this Entry ]

Revitalizing Old Games Friday 2/8/2008 6:45:01 PM (CST) - Michael Wells    Games are getting good, which brings up an interesting point; what happens to the predecessors which are... also still fun but comparatively obsolete? Perhaps companies should consider giving them away as a promotional tool. Take for example, 3DO's Heroes of Might and Magic.  This is a fun little strategy game where you control a set of Heroes and try to conquer the land while defending your own castles.  It involves a nice mix of resource management, investment, and fighting, which make the game fun. The current version at this writing is HOMM 5, but HOMM 3, even HOMM 2, are also quite fun. The thing about the older HOMM's is that they are missing certain little niceties, like fun and interesting rule tweaks, and convenient keyboard shortcuts.  I could make long lists of these, but let's just hypothesize for a minute, that 3DO took the game, and tweaked it to provide a back-end programming interface.  So that independent developers can more or less rewrite the rules of the game, and to nutty things, like... Make it so that your hero can fly, if 100% of the hero's army can fly (e.g. all black dragons). Make it so that you can hotkey your way through your castle list while building. Add a hotkey to "buy all creatures" from a castle. Allow you to automate creature purchases at certain castles.  A dialog could appear at the beginning of each week; "buy all newly hatched creatures?" Invent new magical artifacts Invent new spells (perhaps only using existing spell effects though, for simplicity)  Write new artifical intelligence scripts for the computer-played Heroes. Make the world maps larger, and larger, and larger.  Perhaps huuuge.  And even maybe wrap around a sphere... Make interesting multiplayer versions of Heroes. Add multi-step quests. Create new monsters, maybe even boss monsters. Create a PDA-compatable version of heroes. So what would the effect of this be?  First, if the game is free, more people will try it.  And once they get addicted to HOMM3, some percentage of them will decide to buy HOMM5 and get the real thing. Remixers will create entirely new ideas (for free), and players will play-test and fine-tune (again, for free) that can be incorporated into future versions of HOMM. I really think that game scripting is an idea whose time has come. Of course, it becomes obvious while writing this that game scripting is a feature that should not be limited to the outdated versions.  HOMM 5 should definately also support scripting.  But it's possible to generate enormous media attention for the HOMM franchise by re-deploying the older versions of HOMM into the wild... armed with some funky new capabilities... [ Comment on this Entry ] [ Email this Entry ]

Future-Proofing Your Data Thursday 6/21/2007 4:36:56 PM (CST) - Michael Wells    About 6 years ago I spent some time working for competitive local exchange carrier or "CLEC" phone company.  The projects my team worked on were enormously fun. We worked long, hard hours to solve large-scale data problems. One of the interesting things I learned in working with a company that has such large customer lists (as a phone company will) is the problems and costs of data entropy. Take for example this innocuous customer record; Chris Smith 123 John St. Anywhere, USA 11111 111-222-3333 Simple and reliable, eh?  Perhaps deceptively, it is not.    [ Comment on this Entry ] [ Email this Entry ]

Physical Security and Rethinking Lock & Key Design Monday 6/5/2006 12:41:28 PM (CST) - Michael Wells    NOTE:  I'm thinking more about this, but I've decided to publish my current thoughts on this topic. Wired ran an article recently on the adoption of RFID and its inherent security risks.  Office key cards are often very dumb and can be duplicated using cheap hardware, price tags can be manipulated, and so on.  This becomes a much bigger concern when you approach topics like implantable biotags, which are supposed to uniquely identify the person they're embedded in, and act as a wallet, passport, etc. The discussion has unfortunately focused on "the importance of security" and "how to make these more secure", but I think that's the wrong approach.  The problem isn't the level of security between the "key" and the "lock"; it's the design of the key and the lock themselves.  And really, the design of all keys and all locks that most of us use everyday. [ Comment on this Entry ] [ Email this Entry ]

Mobile Phones + TV; could Broadcast become big again? Tuesday 7/5/2005 11:50:54 AM (CST) - Michael Wells    An interesting idea; a phone with an integrated TV tuner.  Why not?  Most modern mobiles have a full-color display and decent battery life to boot; add a TV tuner and a PAL/NTSC converter and you've got portable entertainment, and the TV networks get a larger audience with no cable companies in-between. [ Comment on this Entry ] [ Email this Entry ]

J.R.R. Tolkien as an Intersector Monday 1/31/2005 5:42:17 PM (CST) - Michael Wells    Watching the Making of the Lord of the Rings today, one of the interesting comments was that J.R.R. believed his works would be of little interest to the general public. The reason?  He infused the books heavily with his linguistic interests.  Apparently the books were primarily designed to give the background for the elvish language, which he had constructed as a linguist, and which was his real interest. But as we all know, it is precisely this incredible attention to detail, such as the linquism, which makes the mythology so appealing, so believable, so fantastic.  It reads more like history than like a manufactured tale. [ Comment on this Entry ] [ Email this Entry ]

Design v. Innovation v. Creativity Monday 1/31/2005 11:07:04 AM (CST) - Michael Wells    Most popular literature on the nature of creativity do little to distinguish types and methods of creativity.  This of course begs the question, is there a difference? This deserves some serious contemplation, but my initial reaction is that there is a difference, and it is significant. [ Comment on this Entry ] [ Email this Entry ]