In Free Flight, the seminal book on the forthcoming reinvention of air travel, James Fallows tells a story about Bruce Holmes, who was then the manager of NASA’s general aviation program office. For years Holmes clocked his door-to-door travel times for commercial flights, and he found that for trips shorter than 500 miles, flying was no faster than driving. The hub-and-spoke air travel system is the root of the problem, and there’s no incremental fix. The solution is to augment it with a radically new system that works more like a peer-to-peer network.
Today Bruce Holmes works for DayJet, one of the companies at the forefront of a movement to invent and deliver that radically new system. Ed Iacobucci is DayJet’s co-founder, president, and CEO, and I’m delighted to have him join me for this week’s episode of Interviews with Innovators.
I first met Ed way back in 1991 when he came to BYTE to show us the first version of Citrix, which was the product he left IBM and founded his first company to create. As we discuss in this interview, the trip he made then — from Boca Raton, Florida to Peterborough, New Hampshire — was a typically grueling experience, and it would be no different today. A long car trip to a hub airport, a multi-hop flight, another long car trip from hub airport to destination.
Jolly green heretic
Stewart Brand, a pioneer of both environmentalism and online communities, has not lost his willingness to rock the boat.
IN SOME respects Stewart Brand’s green credentials are impeccable. His mentor was Paul Ehrlich, an environmental thinker at Stanford university and author of “The Population Bomb”, published in 1968. That book, and the related Club of Rome movement of the 1970s, famously predicted that overpopulation would soon result in the world running out of food, oil and other resources. Though it proved spectacularly wrong, its warning served as a clarion call for the modern environmental movement.
Mr Brand made his name with a publication of his own, which also appeared in 1968, called “The Whole Earth Catalogue”. It was a path-breaking manual crammed with examples of small-scale technologies to enable individuals to reduce their environmental impact, and is best known for its cover, which featured a picture of the Earth from space (which Mr Brand helped to persuade America’s space agency, NASA, to release). The book became a bestseller in anti-corporate and environmental circles. In 1985 Mr Brand co-founded the WELL, a pioneering online community that was a precursor of today’s social-networking websites such as MySpace and Facebook.
Mr Brand still has a following among the Birkenstock set, and even lives on a tugboat near San Francisco. But meet him in person and it becomes clear he is not exactly your typical crunchy-granola green. Sitting down to lunch at a posh beach resort on Coronado Island, off San Diego, he does not order a vegan special but a hearty Angus burger with bacon, cheese and French fries, and a side-order of lobster bisque. “I’m genetically a contrarian,” he says with a broad smile.
Midwest Airlines Overture to Northwest – Bad for Flyers?
Northwest Airlines Corp.’s planned investment in the corporate parent of Midwest Airlines came about after Midwest Chairman and CEO Timothy Hoeksema contacted his counterpart at Northwest – about one week after Midwest shareholders elected three board members nominated by rival suitor AirTran Holdings Inc.
Also, Northwest’s planned ownership stake in Oak Creek-based Midwest Air Group Inc. would be around 47%, based on its level of equity investment in the transaction.
Those facts were disclosed today in a preliminary proxy statement Midwest Air filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The document includes previously withheld details on how Midwest Air reached its sale agreement in August with TPG Capital, a Fort Worth, Texas-based private equity firm, and Northwest.
According to the statement, Hoeksema on June 22 called Doug Steenland, Northwest chairman and chief executive officer, and “discussed Northwest’s interest in exploring a possible transaction with us.”
The conversation was “following up on a call (Hoeksema) had placed in early June,” the statement said, without specifying a date.
I’ve noticed that Midwest is no longer competing for the lowest (or lower) fares to many markets from Milwaukee and Madison. Northwest is often lower, largely to compete with AirTran. It will be interesting to see how this plays out…. I assume this was one, perhaps of several reasons why Northwest would like to keep Midwest around – higher fares within their near-monopoly upper Midwest markets. Southwest may well address the upper midwest market – a boon for local flyers.
Oregon’s Burgundy
“It looks like Corton, doesn’t it?” asked one man admiringly as our group gazed up at the tightly spaced rows of Pinot Noir grapevines hugging the hillside at Stoller Vineyards in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.
It did look a bit like France’s famed Corton, a tree-topped hill in Burgundy’s Côte de Beaune region that’s caressed by vines on its lower slopes. Corton is home to some of the world’s finest Pinot Noir wines, and while accepting Stoller as Le Corton takes a bit of imagination, Willamette Valley vintners use the hill as inspiration as they try to produce Pinot Noirs rivaling those of Burgundy. And they’re getting there.
Still, why would a Bay Area Pinot Noir buff travel to Oregon, when fine wines are made much closer to home, in the Russian River Valley, Carneros and Monterey County?
First, the wines are getting better, and fast gaining critical praise. The best Pinots, and those from the small rising stars, are sold in the tasting rooms, with little chance of finding their way to California store shelves.
State of Wisconsin Federal Spending Profile
The following tables show aggregated prime contract dollar totals for the state of Wisconsin. Key data elements (agencies, companies, metropolitan areas) are ranked by their FY2006 – FY2007 YTD Totals. All aggregated data is copyrighted by Eagle Eye Publishers, Inc. Tables may not be reproduced without written permission from Eagle Eye.
Parsing Earmarks with Our Entrenched Political Class: David Obey….
John Solomon & Jeffrey Birnbaum:
Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) confronted David R. Obey (D-Wis.), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, on the House floor in March over this practice, noting that a spending bill then under debate contained $35 million for a risk-mitigation program at a federal space-exploration facility, even though the measure had been certified to contain no earmarks.
“We have passed some good rules with regard to earmark reform and transparency,” Flake said. “But we have found a way around them already.” Obey said that the provision was not an earmark under the rules. “An earmark is something that is requested by an individual member,” Obey said. “This item was not requested by any individual member; it was put in the bill by me.”
Two months later, Obey again rebuffed Flake when Flake pointed out that a supposedly earmark-free bill on the House floor contained an allocation of $8.7 million to ward off floods in New York. The provision was not called an earmark, Flake noted, but Rep. Nita M. Lowey (D-N.Y.) put out a news release applauding the provision and its potential benefit to her district.
Much more on earmarks, here.
First Look at Branson / Rutan’s Space Terminal
Making private space travel possible and accessible to everyone has been a recurring topic at recent TED conferences, discussed by speakers such as Burt Rutan at TED 2006 (watch his speech), Peter Diamandis at TEDGLOBAL 2005, Richard Branson at TED 2007 and others. This week the first images of the central terminal and hangar facility at New Mexico’s future private spaceport have been released.
The Flop Heard Round the World
Fifty years ago today, Don Mazzella skipped out of school to see the hot new car that everybody was talking about, the hot new car that almost nobody had actually seen.
Ford Motor Co. had proclaimed it “E-Day,” and Mazzella and two buddies sneaked out of East Side High School in Newark, N.J., and hiked 13 blocks to Foley Ford so they could cast their gaze upon the much-ballyhooed new car that had been kept secret from the American public until its release that day.
It was called the Edsel.
“The line was around the block,” recalls Mazzella, now 66 and an executive in a New Jersey consulting firm. “People were coming from all over to see this car. You couldn’t see it from the street. The only way you could see it was to walk into the showroom and look behind a curtain.”
Mazzella and his truant friends waited their turn, thrilled to be there. “Back then for teenagers, cars were the be-all and end-all,” he explains. They’d read countless articles about the Edsel and seen countless ads that touted it as the car of the future. But they hadn’t seen the car. Ford kept it secret, building excitement by coyly withholding it from sight, like a strip-tease dancer.
The 7 Wonders of the World in Full Screen VR Panoramas
Your DNA, Please
The Economist:
Rapid advances in genetic testing promise to transform medicine, but they may up-end the insurance business in the process
“IF YOU can make a good soufflé, you can sequence DNA.” That assertion sounds preposterous, but Hugh Rienhoff should know. When his daughter was born about three years ago, she suffered from a mysterious disability that stunted her muscle development. After many frustrated visits to specialists, Dr Rienhoff, a clinical geneticist and former venture capitalist, decided to sequence a specific part of her genome himself. He discovered that her condition, which most resembled a rare genetic disorder known as Beals’s syndrome, was probably due to a new genetic mutation. “Without a lab and for just a few hundred dollars, you can contract or outsource almost all the steps,” he explains.
What a well-connected and highly motivated scientist in California can do today the rest of the world will be able to do tomorrow. Indeed, a number of firms are already offering tests for specific ailments (or predispositions to ailments) directly to the public, cutting out the medical middle-man. Dr Rienhoff, for his part, will soon launch MyDaughtersDNA.org, a not-for-profit venture intended to help others to unravel the mysteries of their family’s genes in the way that he unravelled those of his own.