Monthly Archive for March, 2004
Call a Bike is a (relatively new) service from Deutsche Bahn (the German railway company) that’s available in Berlin, Frankfurt, and Munich. They leave bikes locked up around the city and when you want to rent one you just call the number affixed to the bike with your cellphone, enter your credit card number, and they give you a number that unlocks the bike. You can use the bike for as long as you like, at a cost of 6 cents per minute (euro cents, that is), up to a maximum of 15 euros per day. When you’re done with it you just lock up the bike at the nearest major crossing and get another code that you call in with to confirm that you’ve finished with your rental.Check out the service Call-a-bike.
Roulette, Millions in money and A Cellphone
An alleged high-tech roulette scam that saw three people walk out of a London casino with 1.3 Million Pounds recently sounds too implausible even for a movie plot.
Reports suggest that mobile phones fitted with laser scanners can be used to measure the speed of the roulette ball when it was released, in order to calculate where it was likely to fall. The whole calculation would need to have been completed in just a few seconds, as the dealer cuts off betting after the ball has rolled three times around the wheel.
But the trick could be pulled off a lot more simply if the phones were used as stop watches, says Norman Packard, a physicist at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, US. Just two equations - one for the ball and one for the wheel, which move in opposite directions - predict the likely area where the ball will stop. These equations comprise only a handful of parameters, including the mass and size of the ball, the shape and roughness of the track, and the tilt of the wheel.
Check out this interesting piece of news here.
Startup Secrets Revisited
The Origin of the Entrepreneurial Species is a nice interview from the author of the book “The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses“. Amar Bhide discusses his book here and also pops out some nitty gritties of starting up your own business. An interesting read and a must for any budding entrepreneur.
The introduction to the interview is catchy itself. Check it out:
“I can’t even begin to calculate how often people who are thinking about starting new businesses have asked me to name the one book that illuminates, more than any other, what it’s essential to understand in order to create a successful start-up. For close to 20 years now, I’ve had to answer that there is no such animal. Don’t get me wrong — there are lots of perfectly acceptable books about almost every imaginable aspect of starting and running a new venture, from writing a business plan to raising capital. The limitation of such books is that, important though those tasks may be, you can get them right and still fall flat on your entrepreneurial face.”
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