I built TaskBook, an app to help businesses save time by managing employees better

TaskBook_annc_list_for_blog

I’m really excited (ok, and kind of terrified) to announce TaskBook, an app to help businesses manage their employees’ responsibilities. It’s a checklist app that helps automate recurring task assignments so employees know what to do when they come into work.

I’ve probably said, “I’m building an app…” a thousand times this year, and I’m glad I can finally share what I’ve built.

Why a checklist app?

A couple of years ago, I started working on ShareAppeal, which is a social networking app to help us share links and build reading lists for each other and ourselves. That was a really fun project, and I still use it regularly. I worked on ShareAppeal for about a year, and then took a step back to reflect on what I made and consider where to take it next.

I decided to build something new. This time, I would make something small but really useful – something that could be helpful every day.

“What if I made an app to replace the binder?”

Some friends of mine own a bakery, and one day we were talking about the dreaded three-ring binder of checklists. I’ve since learned that this is a universal device that’s used everywhere from hair salons to restaurants to banks. Virtually every time I talk to a brick-and-mortar business owner, they know exactly what I mean when I say “the checklists” or “the binder”. (If you’re not in that world, just picture a pile of laminated paper checklists and a dry-erase marker.)

I could tell the binder was something the bakery used, but that they hated it; it was used, but not useful. It was hard to maintain, didn’t give any kind of history, and employees eventually just stopped using it because they thought they had everything memorized.

I asked my friends, “What if I made an app to replace the binder?”, and they immediately perked up and wanted to know more about what I had in mind. Over the next few months, I worked closely with my friends and their employees at the bakery to build the first prototype of the app.

I was shooting for “small”, but ended up creating something pretty big

TaskBook has come a long way since then, but the basic idea is still exactly the same as that first prototype: managers create checklists and assign them to appropriate days (“Opening tasks” is assigned pretty much every day, but since Monday is a new work week, Monday might have “Monday’s opening tasks” instead). When employees come in for a shift, they sign into TaskBook and the day’s checklists are right there, waiting for them to complete. They find the first incomplete task and start working on it. They tap the task’s checkbox to indicate it’s done, and TaskBook marks the task as complete, stamping it with the time and employee’s name. From the employee’s perspective, that’s all there is to it.

The cool part about replacing the binder with a web application is that apps record data and can be accessed from any device with an internet connection and a web browser. Changing lists becomes trivial – just a few clicks to update the list, and the new version is right there in TaskBook next time an employee signed in. Onboarding and training that used to take weeks now takes hours – at the end of a new hire’s first shift, the manager knows they’ve covered everything.

With my friends’ help, I made something much bigger than “an app to replace the binder”. It’s a simple app, but it’s not small at all – it’s had a big impact the way they run their business.

So that’s what I was talking about when I said, “I’m building an app…”

Ok, now what?

This is where things get a little scary. I’ve spent about nine months building TaskBook, and now it’s out in the wild. Businesses can sign up for a free 30-day trial and try it out to see if it helps their business like it helped my friends at the bakery. The interesting thing is, thanks to all the time I’ve spent at the bakery, I know it will help small businesses. My next challenge is to communicate how useful TaskBook can be for customers.

I spent the past few years learning to build useful apps. Now that I’ve attained my first goal, there’s another challenge right behind it: I have to learn how to sell and market TaskBook while continuing to improve it.

Now, when friends ask me what I’m up to, I’ll have to say something like, “I’m growing TaskBook.”

How you can learn more about TaskBook and follow its progress

Here’s how you can learn more about TaskBook, and keep tabs on its progress:

TaskBook Homepage
More about how TaskBook has changed my friends’ bakery
Sign up for a free TaskBook trial
Like TaskBook on Facebook…
…or follow TaskBook on Twitter

If you have questions about TaskBook, you can leave a comment, or reach out to me on Twitter: @JoshDoody.

Slowing recovery by maintaining the status quo

The monthly jobs report dropped last Friday, and shows a sluggish, but steady recovery. I think this chart is pretty interesting:

EmployRecAlignJune2013

HT @justinwolfers for sharing that pic on Twitter, and obviously Calculated RISK Blog for posting the original.

Note how slow this recovery is, but also note that recoveries have been slowing over time – the U-shaped curves are getting more and more pronounced (less V-like) over time. This is true for the past four slumps (1981, 1990, 2001, 2007). It seems the most unique thing about the current recession isn’t just the time-to-recover, but the depth of the recession. This (admittedly very speculative) post is about the duration (and the trend to lengthening the duration in successive recessions), not the depth.

My purely qualitative theory is this: Government and industry are both mostly interested in maintaining the status quo. So, when something happens (an economic jolt, disruption, globalization) that threatens the status quo, we often must choose between letting the change happen, and trying to protect the status quo. The issue is that we often protect the status quo at the expense of economic efficiency, and this happens aggressively during recessions.

Too Big To Fail (TBTF) was a great example of this. I don’t think anyone thought, “It’s long-run economically efficient to bail these banks and creditors out.” Instead, the rhetoric was, “If we let these banks fail, our economy will crumble and who knows how long it will take to recover.” We knowingly made inefficient decisions to protect the current status quo – we weren’t willing to accept the pain of an economic correction that severe.

On his EconTalk podcast (an excellent, excellent podcast that I highly recommend), Russ Roberts frequently refers to the “Bootleggers and Baptists Theory“. Basically, bad stuff can happen when apparently-opposed interests pursue a common interest that benefits them both at the expense of society. In this case, the bootleggers were the banks, and the baptists were the politicians who (ostensibly) believed America couldn’t handle the economic fallout of allowing the banks to fail. The result was TBTF, and hundreds of billions in bailouts to banks who had already demonstrated that they were not acting in an economically efficient manner. It seems obvious to me that the banks should have failed if we’re interested in economic efficiency. They obviously didn’t operate efficiently, and the market tried to destroy them when the housing bubble popped. But rather than allow them to fail, we propped them up with tax payer dollars.

In general, we see this with rhetoric about how so and so industry is crucial to American interests, and we must protect it. The results are subsidies, favorable regulations, licensing regimes and the like. These are all essentially government and industry working together to maintain economic inefficiency for the benefit of the few, at the expense of the masses. Basically, we allocate capital (human or fiscal) to maintain the status quo rather than allowing the economy to adjust on the fly and reallocate capital efficiently. This is “sustainable” when everything is rosy – there’s all kinds of money available to maintain the inefficiency when the economy is booming. But as soon as we experience a bust, the money dries up and we can’t maintain the inefficiency because there simply isn’t enough capital.

My theory is that the more we support inefficiency is good times, the longer it will take the economy to adjust in bad times because it’s so difficult to unwind the inefficiency. The beneficiaries of the inefficiency are loathe to release the control they gain, and that control must be slowly pried away from them by economic forces over time. The more control they have, the harder it is to pry away from them. TBTF demonstrates this well: It was actually a last-ditch effort to maintain the status quo after the housing bubble burst. The “so and so industry” of the 90s and aughts was the housing industry. We put all our eggs in that basket, promoted it, lobbied for it, subsidized it, did everything we could to bolster it, ultimately misallocating a substantial amount of capital to that particular industry. When the market couldn’t bear the weight of the inefficiency, it collapsed, and the government stepped in with TBTF (a collaboration of government and industry) to try to maintain the status quo. 1 2

This all reminds me of one of my favorite E.A. Poe short stories – The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar. WARNING: SPOILERS LIE AHEAD!

The story is basically about a sick man (M. Valdemar) who is hypnotized and put into a sort of suspended state to prevent him from dying. He’s very ill and would soon die otherwise, but a “specialist” thinks he can prevent M. Valdemar from dying by putting him in a sort of hypnotic state. It works, and M. Valdemar is held there in suspended animation for a long time (like seven months). Eventually, he starts mumbling and moaning, and his caretakers/experimenters are worried something isn’t right. They decide to ask him what’s wrong. That’s where I’m picking up with the story:

“M. Valdemar, can you explain to us what are your feelings or wishes now?”


There was an instant return of the hectic circles on the cheeks; the tongue quivered, or rather rolled violently in the mouth (although the jaws and lips remained rigid as before;) and at length the same hideous voice which I have already described, broke forth:


“For God’s sake! — quick! — quick! — put me to sleep — or, quick! — waken me! — quick! — I say to you that I am dead! “


I was thoroughly unnerved, and for an instant remained undecided what to do. At first I made an endeavor to re-compose the patient; but, failing in this through total abeyance of the will, I retraced my steps and as earnestly struggled to awaken him. In this attempt I soon saw that I should be successful — or at least I soon fancied that my success would be complete — and I am sure that all in the room were prepared to see the patient awaken.


For what really occurred, however, it is quite impossible that any human being could have been prepared.


As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of “dead! dead!” absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his whole frame at once — within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk — crumbled — absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome — of detestable putrescence.


Although they found a way to maintain the status quo, suspending his death – an inefficient decision since they weren’t doing anything to actually address the causes of his illness – his body was primed to deteriorate just as it would’ve without the intervention. They managed to delay the inevitable for seven months, but once they woke him, efficiency was restored and he turned to a “nearly liquid mass of loathsome — of detestable putrescence.” At least M. Valdemar’s body was eventually allowed to correct itself very quickly. This doesn’t quite match my analogy to U.S. industry — we would’ve brought specialists, lobbyist, regulators, politicians bedside to try to slow the decay as much as possible, even after he awoke. We would’ve moved him into a freezer, or given him medicine, or whatever might work to preserve the status quo as long as possible.

So many of our economic interventions – supported by industry and politicians alike – are just like this hypnosis. They postpone the inevitable, but are ultimately bad for the economy as a whole. We hold on to economically inefficient regimes to maintain the status quo, but we’re only postponing the inevitable and misallocating resources in the interim.

FOOTNOTES:

Economics and Politics: Ignorance is bliss

First, a little back story. I began studying Economics during the 2008 election season. I regularly found myself debating some economic idea or another, and wanted to understand the subject better so I could evaluate my intuition and form more-educated opinions. I began reading books and blogs, following economists on Twitter, and studying for my MBA.

Rather than becoming more comfortable with the subject, I’ve become frustrated and regret taking the red pill.

I could probably write thousands of words on this 1, but here’s a quicker way for me to express this frustration:

The surprising part isn’t that the policy ended up being bad, but that President Obama ever believed it could possibly be good. Politicians promote bad policies all the time. But this one is such an obviously-bad policy that it gives me pause – it’s literally an Econ 101 mistake whose awfulness is self-evident. I usually suspect politicians understand that the policies they push aren’t optimal for everyone, but they support those policies anyway because they benefit their constituents; they don’t really think the policy will be good for everyone, but maybe it won’t be bad for everyone, and their constituents will benefit, so it’s ok.

But in this case – the Chinese-tire tariff – I think it’s obvious that President Obama thought this policy would be great for America. He bragged about it in a recent speech. So the problem doesn’t seem to have been his intentions, but his understanding of very basic economics. The problem wasn’t with his spin of the policy, but that the policy was simply an awful policy with a bad economic outcome for Americans.

If the President’s intuition is this bad on basic economics, how much worse is he at predicting the economic effects of routing federal dollars to specific areas research? Fiscal policy? Labor policy?

Nancy Pelosi, when promoting Obamacare, said overhauling healthcare would provide “lower cost, improved quality” healthcare“, and it might… or it might not. The issue for me is that I don’t believe the President understands basic economics well enough to do a real analysis of the possible effects of such complicated policies. If he couldn’t predict that a tariff on Chinese tires would cause prices to rise for Americans – a prediction most first-year, Econ 101 undergrads would’ve made – then how could he possibly predict the economic impact of capping profit margins for health insurance companies (only a few of the 2,000 pages in the ACA) on healthcare costs?

Footnotes

WWDC 2013: My prediction roundup

WWDC2013Logo

With the WWDC keynote happening later today (instructions to watch it are here), this is as good a time as any to look at my recent Apple predictions. Fortunately, I wised up and started labeling with “Prediction:” on Twitter, and Twitter lets us download our full history, so my predictions are pretty easy to find. Here are my recent predictions that could come true at WWDC 2013.

Summary

  • Prediction: In less than a year, we’ll will forget Apple Maps was mediocre at launch, and wonder why it took them so long to make their own.
  • Prediction: iOS7 will drop August 2013 (ahead of iPhone 5S), will be a drastic improvement, including a possible overhaul of the entire UI.
  • PREDICTION: Third-party apps are coming to Apple TV in 2013. Multi-media, games, new app categories – this will be a game-changer.

Apple Maps

This was from September 2012, so I still have a few months. That said, Apple Maps has improved quite a bit, but is still not stellar. For my original prediction to come true, I really need iOS 7 (which is now all but confirmed) to include a major update to Maps. On one hand, this seems inevitable, but on the other hand it seems like Apple is throwing maximum resources at a UI redesign, so maybe they don’t currently have resources for the under-the-hood improvements needed to bring Apple Maps up to par with Google’s offering.

iOS 7 overhaul

Also from September 2012, this one is more or less a lock and doesn’t seem like much of a prediction at all, but the context is important here: Last September, iOS 6 was still fresh (released on September 19), Scott Forestall was still at the iOS helm, and there was no sign of a major redesign in the offing. iOS had looked the same since its initial release, five years earlier, and the look and feel seemed to be fully entrenched, with Apple adding more skeuomorphic touches over time.

But then Scott Forestall left in late October, and Jony Ive was given oversight of Human Interface design, sending a strong signal that Apple would redesign iOS this year. This is a substantial change: I don’t recall anyone predicting that Forestall would be out, and Ive would take this type of role. But once it happened, a substantially redesigned iOS 7 was virtually inevitable.

Third-party apps for Apple TV

Fast-forward to 2013, and I’m predicting Apple TV will support third-party apps this year. To be fair, I’ve basically made this same prediction every year since 2009 (implicitly in 2009, took 2010 off, 2011, 2012, 2013), so this isn’t an unusual prediction for me to make. But Tim Cook teased “exciting new product categories” on the previous Apple quarterly earnings call, so maybe this is finally happening. Seems like the most likely new categories are TV and wearable tech.

The thing I’m most excited about is the iOS 7 update. I can’t wait to see an iOS 7 demo.

Some stuff I got wrong last year

In the interest of full disclosure, these are two predictions I made that ended up being way off base. Those came and went a while ago, but they signal a pretty big shift in Apple’s release strategy. That change makes it tough for me to feel good about hardware releases, which is why I don’t have any hardware-related predictions for WWDC 2013. I don’t understand what Apple is doing with hardware release cycles, so I don’t feel good about making those predictions right now.

That said, I had a sneaking suspicion that I was going to be super wrong (this is one of several “I could be very wrong” tweets I sent leading up to the iPad mini announcement last fall):

Sometimes you eat the bear…

3D Printing will change everything

The tech world is buzzing about “3D printing” (for some examples, see the links at the bottom of this piece.). I first heard about it a few years ago in the context of printing replacement organs (kidneys, hearts, etc.) for people. More recently, there’s talk about how it could upend the manufacturing world, offer “personal manufacturing”, and shrink the costs associating with prototyping new devices. All these things are true, but the whole way people talk about 3D printing seems short-sighted to me.

The bigger picture is that 3D printing will not only upend manufacturing, but also packaging and distribution. It’ll change how we consume things by drastically increasing the scope of what’s available for consumption 1, and removing almost all of the friction between the creator and the consumer of those things.

Amidst these developments, an interesting domain where the implications of 3D printing are also evident is the realm of anime and game merchandise. Platforms like https://www.geekyinc.com are poised to leverage 3D printing’s potential, allowing enthusiasts to materialize their favorite characters and items with unprecedented ease and customization. Imagine being able to craft your treasured anime figurines or collectibles in the comfort of your home, thanks to this technology. This not only brings fandom closer to the creative process but also aligns perfectly with the democratizing spirit of 3D printing.

In essence, while the discussions surrounding 3D printing often center on its impact on manufacturing and accessibility, its far-reaching influence is reshaping entire landscapes. Whether it’s the way we shop, the goods we consume, or the unique items we hold dear from the worlds of anime and gaming, the undercurrent of change driven by 3D printing is undeniable.

There are obviously many potential applications for 3D printing, but the game changer is how 3D printers will impact regular old consumers. I think the best way to illustrate this is with a simple story:

Little Tommy is getting ready for his first day of second grade. The family just finished dinner, and it’s time to start getting ready for bed. But first, mom and dad let him know they need to get all his things together for his first day of school. He needs his uniform (a polo shirt with his school’s logo on it, a pair of kakis, a brown belt, brown shoes), a ruler, some pencils and pens, paper, a notebook, and a messenger bag to carry all of his gear. So they all head to the living room to use the biggest screen (suitable for family-style shopping). They spend some time picking out the stuff he’ll need on (surprisingly agile and still-profitable) Amazon, choosing the “Buy now with 1-Click” option for everything.

Tommy heads off to brush his teeth while they wait on all his new school equipment to be delivered. Once he finishes brushing his teeth, he heads back to the living room, where all his new gear is sitting next to the family’s 3D printer. He puts the ruler, pencils, pens, paper and notebook in his new messenger bag and leaves it by the front door. He doesn’t need to try on his clothes because they were printed to his current specifications 2, so he takes those in his room and drops them on the floor next to his bed.

The next morning, Tommy wakes up, ready for his big day. But his mom won’t let him leave without a healthy breakfast. She tells the house to make Tommy a couple scrambled eggs with cheddar cheese on them, and a piece of wheat toast with strawberry jelly. A few minutes later, Tommy’s breakfast is ready and waiting under the hood of the family’s food printer. Tommy eats up, and then heads off for his big day at school.

This example raises a lot of questions, so I’ll finish this post off with a sort of self-Q&A.

  • Why is Tommy using paper and pencil at school? Shouldn’t he be using tablets or something? He should definitely be using a tablet, or a “smart desk” or something, but I had to come up with stuff for Tommy to take to school and I didn’t want to spend a lot of time thinking about it.
  • Ah, but where’d the materials used in the printers come from?! Well, at first I think 3D printers will be stocked similarly to 2D printers–we’ll buy buckets of a few basic materials and load them into the printer. Eventually, maybe that stuff will be piped into our homes so we don’t have to go get it. And ultimately, the printers will be materials-free like tele porters in StarTrek. I have no idea how this would work, but it seems like this is an application for a mature understanding of quantum entanglement or home-sized particle accelerators or something.
  • How is the stuff “delivered” from Amazon? Digitally, just like pictures, music and movies are delivered online today. Amazon would just send a digital file (“TommysMessengerBag.3DP”) to the printer, and the printer takes it from there. The product is a one-time-use, DRM-protected digital file, which is created by Amazon or another vendor. This will be true for almost everything – companies (brands) will sell digital downloads of their products. In this story, the pencils Tommy bought would be Paper Mate pencils.
  • Why wouldn’t Tommy just design his own pants and print them off? The same reason I don’t grow my own strawberries. But the bigger reason is that brands and styles will still exist, and Tommy has better things to do than try to ape those brands and styles with his own homemade version. This is sort of like asking why I buy Levi’s 514s when I could just make my own at home. I have better things to do.

I’m curious what other questions people might have about this, and I think it’s fun to think about. This is not sci-fi, it will happen. The question is really how long it will take before the story above is totally plausible. I have no idea, but I’m thinking something like 2030. How fast this happens really depends on how well Moore’s law will apply to 3D printing. My guess is it will apply pretty well, so things should start ramping up here in the next decade.

Links to cool stuff about 3D printing

FOOTNOTES:

Make Better Hashtags With Camel Case

There you are, casually perusing Twitter, when all of a sudden you’re forced to decode a jumble of letters–you’ve run into a garbled hashtag. “I don’t even like word jumbles!”, you shout at your poor, startled roommate, who fell asleep on the couch watching Mythbusters re-runs again.

You didn’t sign up for this, right? You’re only messing around online because you’re procrastinating on a paper that’s due in 12 hours–you’re trying to avoid thinking hard about words and letters and English. No, it’s not fair that the Internet gave you this hashtag to decode, but there’s nothing you can do about it now. You just have to soldier on, decode that sucker, feel that twinge of disappointment when the effort isn’t worth it, and move on to the next Tweet.

But you can do something to help future generations: start using Camel Case for your hashtags, and maybe the change you make in the world will boomerang and make your life better in the future. I took to Twitter on Valentine’s Day to try and get the word out:

Camel Case is a way to write human-readable, multi-word strings sans spaces and special characters. Basically, you capitalize the first letter of each new word in the string, so you can see the individual words at a glance. It’s been around for a long time in computer programming and chemistry, whose taxonomies involve long, continuous strings of words and individual characters. Most user-facing applications and interfaces don’t need Camel Case because they’re usually pretty comfortable with spaces–they’re designed to be human-facing, human-readable interfaces–but you may have seen Camel Case in online usernames (“FrankTheTank”) and a few other places.

Aside from usernames, the most common user-facing, non-spaces, multi-word user interface element is probably the hashtag. But for some reason, people haven’t adopted Camel Case for their hashtags. The result is that hashtags are as much of a nuisance as a tool. But they don’t have to be! Here are some examples of hashtags with and without Camel Case:

nocamelcase

  • #followfriday
  • #justsayin
  • #nofilter
  • #happybirthdayjosh

WithCamelCase 1

  • #FollowFriday
  • #JustSayin
  • #NoFilter
  • #HappyBirthdayJosh

See how much easier it is to read the Camel Case hashtags? The Camel Case hashtags are still clumped up, but at least we immediately know where their words begin and end, making it a lot easier for us to process and decode them.

So, do yourself and everyone else a favor and use Camel Case for your hashtags. Your followers will thank you.

FOOTNOTES:

A Suggestion for Planet Money: Investigate why the healthcare market isn’t competitive

Planet Money podcast: Please consider a second part for “Episode 439: The Mysterious Power Of A Hospital Bill”

I’ve regularly listened to Planet Money for a few years now. I’ve occasionally had qualms with an episode, but it’s a great podcast, and I’ve learned a lot from it. This Tuesday’s episode was about healthcare costs, and it focused on Steven Brill’s ideas (Brill just wrote a whopper of a cover story for Time: “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills are Killing Us“).

You should listen to the podcast to get the full flavor of the conversation. But the gist is that costs are high because insurers lack bargaining power. The silver lining is that Medicare actually pushes costs down because the program has so much bargaining power. Brill suggests we lower the age for Medicare so that costs will come down.

Near the end of the podcast, they acknowledge that there may be an alternate way to push costs down: competitive markets. But they quickly brush this aside after about a minute with, “Obviously we’re not gonna’ settle this debate right here.” Then they close the show. While I understand the time constraints of the podcast, I’m concerned that what they really mean is they aren’t going to try to settle the debate at all. I hope they revisit the idea that competitive markets could help bring costs down, if only healthcare were a competitive market.

“Healthcare is fundamentally different”

Here’s their reasoning for why this just wouldn’t work: Around 16:00 into the 18:00 podcast, they say “…healthcare is fundamentally different. If you have chest pains, you’re not gonna’ like get on the Internet and start Googling ‘what hospital in my neighborhood has the best price for heart attack treatment’, right?. You’re gonna’ call 911, and the ambulance is gonna’ come and get you and it’s going to take you wherever it takes you. So [Steven Brill] argues that the model is not really a sensible model to use for healthcare.”

This just seems like such a weak argument to me. I’m not going to settle the debate either, but I’d like to at least throw out some ideas, and point out how shallow this example is.

How much healthcare spending is on traumatic life-and-death care?

First of all, I’d be curious how much of our healthcare spending goes to this type of suddenly-traumatic and life-threatening situation. My guess is that the vast majority of “healthcare spending” happens in a planned, calculated way. People find out they’re sick, they get a first, second, third opinion. They decide on their course of treatment, and they sign up to receive that treatment at a hospital. There’s a lot of room for regular old competitive markets here. Nobody’s being whisked anywhere in an ambulance. The real question is why healthcare markets aren’t competitive in these planned-care situations.

But let’s look at this heart attack example since it seems to be the most extreme. Someone suddenly finds himself very ill, nearing death, and must seek treatment immediately. He calls an ambulance, and is simply taken to the nearest hospital. Cost is not a factor in any of this because he just doesn’t have time to think about cost. If he stops to negotiate price, he could be dead before he gets the care he needs.

There are just so many things ignored here. I’ll start with an analogy and then circle back to some of the finer points.

What if my car had a heart attack?

About 15 months ago, I took my car to a car wash, left the car with an attendant and waited around front for my car. After they finished washing and drying my car, I got in and could immediately tell something was wrong. The engine was pretty loud, and I noticed the temperature gauge was pointing to “really hot”. I put it in drive, just hoping I could move it to a parking spot or something so I could regroup. It didn’t make it to a parking spot (about 40 feet), so I just let it roll to a stop under a tree, out of the way. My car was dead – it wasn’t drivable and appeared to be in “limp mode”. I had no choice but to have it towed to see what was wrong.

Obviously, I wasn’t in danger of dying, but my car certainly was. What’s more, I was stuck – I couldn’t shop around for a good deal on the repairs because I need my car (I was going home for Thanksgiving in a few days, then off to Atlanta not long after that) and because it’s not drivable. Also, I was pretty sure the car wash wouldn’t be ok with me just leaving my car parked under their tree for very long. If my car were a person having a heart attack in Planet Money’s world, I’d call an ambulance and they’d whisk it away to whichever hospital could save it. I wouldn’t be able to negotiate the cost of repairs, and I’d end up paying a lot of money for some healthcare.

My car is saved, and I get a great price despite a desperate situation

What happened instead is that I called AAA, who sent a tow truck out in about 30 minutes. When the tow truck driver got there, I told him to take my car to Bush Gator Transmission & Auto Repair on Main Street. About 20 minutes later, it was up on the rack and they told me one of my cooling fans had died. I asked what it would cost, they told me, and I had them go ahead and do the repair. A couple hours later I drove home, plopped down on my couch, and finished planning my trip to Jacksonville.

“But you didn’t negotiate price either!”, you might be thinking. And you’re right… and wrong. The reason I didn’t negotiate price is that I knew I was going to get the best price. How? I’d been to Bush Gator many, many times in the previous five years. They’ve been my mechanic since I moved back to Gainesville in 2006. I initially went there because a friend told me about a really great experience he had there, so I decided to check them out. 1 When I first went to them, I did call around to shop prices, but I eventually just stopped doing that because Bush Gator was always far cheaper than anywhere else I called. 2

So, no, I didn’t negotiate the price of this particular repair. But I didn’t need to because I already knew they had the best prices and best service in town. I managed to get my dead-in-the-water car repaired in a pinch and I managed to get a really good price. Why isn’t this possible for healthcare? For heart attack victims, even?

Is healthcare innately different, or do we just treat it differently?

The common answer is some flavor of “healthcare is different” or “but this is life and death” 3, but this is very myopic. It assumes that Yelp! and Consumer Reports can’t exist for healthcare. It assumes that word of mouth isn’t important. It assumes that anyone who ever has a health emergency is totally ignorant of his options for care. It assumes people are incapable of making phone calls to find the lowest price for anything related to health or medicine. 4

But if I’m right, then there’s a big question we need to answer: Why isn’t healthcare a competitive industry? I don’t know, but I think Planet Money has the right resources to find out, and a great platform to tell us.

EDIT: This piece from Uwe E. Reinhardt is a good start: “Shocked, Shocked Over Hospital Bills”

FOOTNOTES:

My weird battlemodo with Gizmodo about sharing ShareAppeal

Gizmodo does a feature called “Chatroom” where they post a question and ask readers to weigh in with their opinions, insight or whatever. I was recently browsing Gizmodo when I saw a Chatroom feature entitled: “How Do You Share Links Between Devices?”

It turns out I spent about a year building a thing called ShareAppeal, which can be described as “a way to share links between devices”. I thought, “Hey! What are the odds that Gizmodo would ask a question, and my answer would be, ‘I actually built a web app specifically to do that thing!’?” Not only that, but it was a Chatroom, so the whole idea was to get people to chime in and tell other readers (and Gizmodo) their solutions to this problem. Serendipity: I had a great answer to Gizmodo’s question and I could tell people about ShareAppeal, and the people I would be telling have to be interested in what ShareAppeal does because they’re reading comments on a post about what ShareAppeal does. Everybody wins!

Not so fast! I hadn’t registered for Gizmodo because I basically don’t comment on posts on any site. I’m more of a grazer and not one to dig in and leave comments. I occasionally comment on something, but it’s really, really rare. So I registered for an account, linked it to my Twitter account, and viola!, I could leave a comment:

I actually created a web app (ShareAppeal.com) specifically to facilitate link sharing. Each user has a reading list. Mutual followers can share links directly to each others’ reading lists, comment on links, save others’ links to their own reading list. It also integrates with Twitter to pull in links from my feed, so they’re easier to find and save for later.

It’s come in handy for me and my friends.

I tried to give a summary of what it does without being too spammy, and avoided any kind of “call to action”. I hit “reply” and let it fly.

Then I waited a while. Since I had just registered for a new account, I figured maybe it took time for the account to get verified or something. After some hours, it still wasn’t showing up as a comment on the Chatroom, so I reached out to Gawker Media Support 1:

I added a comment to this post several hours ago, and it’s not showing up. I can see it when I’m signed in, but not when I’m signed out. Did I do something wrong? Thanks! Joshhttp://gizmodo.com/5961477/how-do-you-share-links-between-devices

My username (Gizmodo) is JoshuaDoody, and I’m authenticated via Twitter.

To be honest, I didn’t really expect much to come of this email. It was a Sunday afternoon and I didn’t know if this was even the type of question that Gawker would answer.

But, I did get an answer, and it was a pretty good one 2:

Josh,

It looks like your comment was probably marked as spam, due to its self-promoting nature (unfortunately, we only allow self-promotion in a limited capacity) Try re-wording your comment ( make it more casual) and try reposting. Let me know if anything else comes up!

–[Support Guy]

Gawker Media Help Desk

I wanted a little more clarification since I wasn’t exactly sure how to address the “self-promoting nature” of my comment since I would have to self-promote to some extent if my reply were to have any substance. I figured I’d try replying to the email to see if I would get another response:

Hi [Support Guy]

I’ll try rewording, but it would help to know if there is something specific I could do to avoid being spam-flagged in the future. Is it ok to have the URL for my web app in my comment? Do I need to reduce the description? It would also be great if there were something to tell me “your comment got canned as spam – try again”. As far as I can tell, I have no way of knowing what happened to my comment after I posted it.

Also, it seems like it might help to have smarter spam filters. Technically, my post is self-promoting, but I’m directly answering the question “How do you do this?” with “I created a web app specifically to do this.” It’s not like I’m spam-bombing random threads with random links.

Anyway, thanks for the reply. I’ll try a more generic comment. It would be really helpful to know if I can include a link to my app, though.

Josh

I wasn’t sure if there was an automated spam filter or if a person was reading and moderating comments. I figured maybe the link to ShareAppeal was being auto-flagged as spam or something.

Support Guy replied as I was writing my new comment:

Josh,

Including the link shouldn’t be a problem, again, just reword it so that it sounds more like a recommendation than self-promoting – regardless, let me know if anything else comes up.

–[Support Guy]

Gawker Media Help Desk

And I went ahead and replied a few minutes later:

[Support Guy]

This is really helpful – thanks for taking the time to respond to me and point me in the right direction.

I’m writing another comment now – hopefully this one gets through.

Thanks!

Josh

PS I’m sensitive to how hard it is to police spam and self-promotion. I just thought it was strange that the point of this particular chatroom was, “How do you do this?” and it seemed like the only acceptable responses were things people already knew about (Evernote, Chrome extensions, iMessage, email, etc.). Seemed to defeat the purpose of the post (finding ways others hadn’t thought of). BUT, I get it now, and I’ll give it another shot. Cheers!

And I posted my revised comment to the Chatroom:

I used to either email links or send them on Facebook or Twitter, but it was tough to keep track of stuff scattered all over the place, and the links themselves would get buried under other stuff or just lost. So I just ended up creating a web app (ShareAppeal.com) specifically to help me save links and share them with my friends.

And I sent off another email to let Support guy know that I’d tried again, hoping maybe he could help shepherd my new comment through the moderation/approval process:

[Support Guy]

I created a new comment, but can’t find a way to do anything with the old one (delete it). Two questions:

1. Is there some way to delete the old one (if it even matters).
2. Here’s my comment – if there’s anything you can do to help it through the spam filters, that would be great: “I used to either email links or send them on Facebook or Twitter, but it was tough to keep track of stuff scattered all over the place, and the links themselves would get buried under other stuff or just lost. So I just ended up creating a web app (ShareAppeal.com) specifically to help me save links and share them with my friends.

Thanks again for your time and help

Josh

This is where things start to get a little weird, and I realized I probably wasn’t going to be able to post any meaningful comment to the Chatroom. Support Guy replied and even suggested a rewording of my comment:

Josh,

Unfortunately, due to our terms and conditions, we are not allowed to delete any comments ourselves, however, it shouldn’t matter anyway.

As for the comment: Again, it sounds a bit too ad-like (keep this in mind: not only do you have to go through the spam-filter, but you also have to go through the mods who read this stuff- if it sounds too much like an ad/too much like self promotion, they’ll dismiss it too)

Try something like this: “I hated the fact that there wasn’t a way to keep track of all the links I wanted to share/send. so I said, screw it, I’ll build my own app. So far, it seems to be doing the trick (try it here: <link> ) – let me know what you guys think!” [Emphasis mine]

Keep it casual (again, don’t make it sound like an ad /too much like self promotion) and keep it to the one comment (if you continue to promote in general, the system will probably mark you as a spam account). [Emphasis mine] Again, we don’t allow too much self promotion, but if you’re proud of your app, then make it more about you than the app itself. (tell us what led you to make this app in the first place, rather than why people should use it- see the difference?)

Any who, let me know if anything else comes up!

–[Support Guy]

 

Gawker Media Help Desk

Well, that’s a little odd. The content of his suggested comment is more or less the same as mine, except he’s using exclamation points and actually asks people to visit the site. He also switches to a sort of college student dialect. He recommends keeping the link, though.

The stakes have also been raised: I’ve now submitted two comments that are apparently being flagged as spam, and there’s a risk I could get marked “as a spam account” if I keep trying and failing. So this is a nice little Catch-22: I can water down my reply so it’s non-specific or mentions other services that people already know about, and that’ll probably get posted; or I can try to answer the question specifically (which seems to be the purpose of the entire Chatroom) and risk getting marked as a spam account. What to do? I decided to just hope my latest comment made it through the filters, but not to try posting again lest I be banned.

I also found this a little confusing since it really wasn’t any different than mine except it seemed to have been run through a “regular guy-to-college guy” translator or something. I sent off one last email to Support Guy (never got a response on this one):

[Support Guy]

Thanks again for your input. Honestly, I think my second comment is much less self-promoting than your example. For instance, I don’t ask anyone to give me feedback (that seems spammy to me).

Is there any way a mod could see my post and manually evaluate it? Or maybe the author of the post/chat room on Gizmodo (Eric Limer) could see it and approve it?

It seems like the system is sort of breaking down here. I think my answer to the chat room’s question is about as direct AND unique as possible. I’m not asking for clicks, spamming, etc. your example and mine are only  SLIGHTLY different and almost all the difference is in style, not content. The main difference is you ask for feedback and I don’t.

(I’m not trying to pick a fight here. I’m genuinely unsure how I could contribute to that thread and answer the author’s question any better or more directly.)Thanks again for the dialogue – I hope you’re having a good weekend!

Josh

And so, neither of my comments was ever posted to the Chatroom. I didn’t try again because I was concerned about being flagged as a spam account. But what’s crazy is mine might have been the most unique possible answer to the Chatroom. The whole reason this particular Chatroom was useful is that the ways people already share links are pretty hacky: Open a new tab in Chrome so it syncs through the cloud – that works for one person, but what about sharing with someone else? Evernote – same thing. I actually had a unique take on the question, but I wasn’t allowed to post because I was sharing info on a tool that wasn’t already mainstream. Round and round we go.

It would’ve been great to share ShareAppeal with people who could really use it, not only because I think it’s a great little app, but because they may have given me new feedback that I haven’t gotten from the current beta testers. That seems like a win-win to me. But my comment was no match for Gawker’s convoluted comment approval system. C’iest la vie.

What would make an iPad Mini compelling? (HINT: Color e-Ink.)

iPad Mini rumors have been flying for a while now, and Apple is allegedly sending out invites today (October 10) for an announcement on October 17. 1 This is different than my normal predictions and prognostications because, frankly, all of this is very murky to me. I’m really just thinking aloud, and writing what I think.

I should also emphasize that I think I’m very wrong here. The most logical iPad Mini would just be a smaller iPad with an almost-Retina display, amazing battery life, Lighting connector, and full-fledged iOS 6. But that’s boring, and I don’t see what it really adds to Apple’s product line. This post is really about how I think Apple could design an iPad Mini so that it adds something new and game-changing to the market place, but my predictions probably aren’t realistic.

Summary (in case you don’t feel like reading the whole thing)

  • I don’t really understand the niche that the iPad Mini would fill
  • If Apple does release an iPad Mini, they should’ t call it “iPad” anything – they should call it iPage
  • iPage should have a color e-Ink screen
  • To keep costs down, iPage would have to be a feature-poor iPad
  • iPage should run a lightweight version of iOS
  • iPage should start at $199 for a 16GB version (maybe the only one)
  • iPage should offer a $100 option for cellular connectivity

I don’t really understand the niche that the iPad Mini would fill

Will there be an iPad Mini announcement? It seems dubious to me, but the rumors are pretty loud and strong, so I have to give them a lot of weight. I don’t quite understand why Apple’s iPad needs a small cousin to compete with Kindle et al. The biggest problem with releasing an iPad Mini is the price point.

Price point – There’s been a lot written about this. The best piece I’ve seen is from Gizmodo: “The Single Biggest Question about the iPad Mini“. Basically, it’s tough to figure out where iPad Mini would fit into Apple’s pricing scheme. It would have to be cheaper than a “full-size” iPad (right?), which means it would land smack on top of the iPod Touch in Apple’s pricing structure. So, consumers could buy an iPod Touch or iPad Mini for the same price. That seems odd to me. I don’t think it’s a showstopper, but it would be strange to see an iPad Mini competing with iPod Touch.

I think the iPad Mini will have to start at $199 to compete with the “eReader” market that it belongs in. Presumably, the reason Apple would create this device is to compete with the Amazon and Barnes & Noble. To really compete in that world, $199 is almost mandatory. What’s odd is that Amazon and Apple have entirely different (opposite, really) business models. The Kindle is a loss-leader designed to give Amazon customers an easier way to buy stuff from Amazon 2. So, there’s the stuff people buy (songs, movies, etc) from Amazon, then there’s the way for them to buy it (Kindle Fire, e.g.). Apple does the opposite: their stuff exists to make the Apple ecosystem a richer place so that customers will buy their hardware, which is where they make all their money. So, in order for Apple to enter this space, they’d be creating profit-making hardware to compete with loss-leading hardware.

To be clear, I think Apple can do this 3, I just don’t understand why they would. Apple could probably create a great sub-$200 competitor for the eReaders out there, but I don’t see what they would gain from that device. Apple doesn’t want to sell music or eBooks just to sell them – they only sell those things to make iOS devices more useful. Trying to figure out the utility of a $200 Apple eReader keeps landing me in logic whirlpool.

I’ve been pretty good about iPad predictions in the past 4, and I’ve followed the iPad very closely, but I don’t quite understand why an iPad Mini makes sense. All that said, why not get into a hypothetical “iPad Mini is happening!” mindset and make some predictions?

If Apple does release an iPad Mini, they shouldn’t call it “iPad” anything – they should call it iPage

I’d expect Apple to differentiate the iPad Mini from the iPad itself. The iPad isn’t an eReader, it’s a tablet PC. But the “iPad Mini” wouldn’t really be a tablet PC so much as a super fancy eReader. My guess is they would differentiate it from the iPad by calling it something completely different. iPage seems logical, except it conflicts with their Pages word processor.

iPage should have a color e-Ink screen

I think the next big display breakthrough will be color e-Ink with refresh rates that make it possible to browse the web and flip through color e-magazines. There has been a lot of ambiguity about the resolution of the “iPad Mini” display (mostly that it won’t be Retina, but will still have pretty good resolution). This could be because the new display isn’t the same technology used for current backlit displays.

One thing Apple really focuses on is making it easy and pleasurable for its users to consume content on its devices. They’re in the midst of a full-on Retina update to everything they sell. It’s time for the next big thing, and that thing could very well be color e-Ink. Other firms have tried this 5, but the bottom line is that current technology just can’t refresh fast enough to be useful. It takes too long to draw the screen, so flipping pages or looking at anything that moves just doesn’t work very well. If Apple solves this problem and makes a 7″ color e-Ink screen technology (I would call it “Perfect Print” or “Print Perfect” or something like that) that allows for page flipping and animation, that would be a game changer.

iPage with Perfect Print would introduce some technical challenges for the user experience. Swiping and scrolling would probably have to be rethought so that they’re more efficient and economical. Unless they’ve made huge strides with refresh rates, we won’t be able to just swipe down and watch our Twitter feed inertially scroll by – e-Ink just couldn’t keep up with that.

To keep costs down, iPage would have to be a feature-poor iPad

My guess is that these Perfect Print displays would be expensive, which means Apple would have to cut some functionality elsewhere to compete at the $199 price point. What they would cut, I don’t know, but I have a few suggestions.

iPage should run a lightweight version of iOS

I don’t think this device would run a full version of iOS, but a slimmed-down version (think Apple TV). Mobile Safari might look more like the “Reader” functionality available now – no video, but a clean way to read and maybe see embedded (static) images. Email should be ok. Newsstand would obviously be a big part of the device.

iPage should start at $199 for a 16GB version (maybe the only one)

The baseline iPage would start at $199. Storage would start at 16GB, and that may be the only option. I think on-device storage would be a great place to cut costs since most of the stuff consumed on the iPage would be eBooks and that sort of thing–all stuff that could just be “streamed” from the cloud. It probably won’t have a camera, and LTE would be extra.

iPage should offer a $100 option for cellular connectivity

Getting all that stuff from the cloud is obviously easiest using WiFi, but Apple likes to give customers full mobility, so I expect a cellular option for $100. The pricing for this option is tricky, as the iPad cellular option is $130, but I just don’t see how they could offer a $130 add-on for a $199 device.

Final thoughts

I don’t understand the need for an iPad Mini, but if they do it, they should call it iPage, start innovating color e-Ink technology, and make it $200 or less.

If Apple could revolutionize e-Ink and make it really sharp, with great color saturation and faster refresh rates, I might just buy one. Otherwise, I’ll probably just stick to my iPad.