You cannot be Serios!

I've said this before, email is being slowly strangled by the amount of Spam that finds it's way around the network. Ok, I can filter most of it out, so I don't have to look at adverts for V1@gra and various sex sites, but my gmail spam folder has 21,000 emails in it, which equates roughly to the amount of spam I get in a month.

My idea was that we should be paying for email. Hardly revolutionary, and most people would say it'll never work, but the trick is that we're not trying to make money out of email, we're trying to raise the marginal cost above zero. Spam works because the marginal cost is zero (or very close to it). By limiting the amount of emails that can be sent, the value of any email increases. If every verified individual received an allowance of 1000 emails per month, the spammer's job would become a lot harder, but most normal people would not be impacted.



Seriosity have taken this a stage farther and created a currency that can be used for emails sent within an organisation. The sender attaches a 'value' to the email that can be seen by the recipient in order to gauge the importance of the email. Because the sender has only a limited supply of 'Serios' (the currency, not a type of breakfast cereal!), they have to budget what they send. So, only emails that are very important have high Serio value.

Presumably the boss has a lot more Serios than the junior employee, therefore they can spam their employees with worthless tripe on HR issues (aside: HR departments should have a fixed limit on the level of importance they attach to mails - about 2 ought to be enough!)

It's an interesting application, and I think that our work environments will get much more like games in the future. People are able to handle much more information and pressure in the game situation, it makes sense to have reality simulate the game, rather than the other way round.

TechnoGolf

I was just playing down at my local course and there have been a few changes recently. Golf is now embracing technology in a big way.
The whole course is now covered in WiFi hotspots at the tees. Instead of scorecards we were given Nokia N810 tablets running a scorecard application and course information. Clicking on the link for each hole gives the yardages and using the inbuilt GPS marks your current location on the course. Clicking the wings icon takes you into a fly-by video of the hole. The video did take a little time to display, even though things are now improved with Flash 9.
The application syncs with the server back in the clubhouse whenever we are in range of the Wifi (most of the time), giving us the latest scores from all the other competitors on the course. There's even a 'real-time' leaderboard.
Drinks and snacks can be ordered 'online' from the clubhouse, and of course, they know where we are because the GPS location is also synced back!
It is possible (though somewhat tedious) to record every shot using the GPS to plot the lines from start to finish and the application can learn which club to select, based on your past performance with the club. Personally I'll stick with instinct for that.
The only problem was giving back the Nokia N810 at the end of the round...


(n.b. the moral of this story is; never eat any strange looking mushrooms that grow on golf courses! )