January 2005 Archives

The Oregonian reports that when you drive through McDonald's in the Eastern Oregon town of Hermiston, your order is actually taken remotely by operators in Grand Forks, North Dakota. The order is transmitted back to Oregon over the datanets, and a digital picture is taken of your car, and associated with the order. Within a few months, 50 McDonald's restaurants will be connected this way, including five in the Portland area.

Why use such a seemingly needless, over-the-top, solution-seeking-a-problem?
A) Cost. The minimum wage in North Dakota is over two dollars an hour less than in Oregon. Why not go all the way, and send them to our sworn enemy, India?
B) Efficiency. In any given store, you're going to have waves of customers and dry spells where there's no one coming through, but once you aggregate a large number of stores, the demand for burgers should be nearly perfectly predictable.

I'm in favor of this new program, as I am in every instance that automated technology replaces human work, because it means more jobs for computer people, like me.

Google makes me weak in the knees. Today, they launched a beta of their new TV search service. It's actually quite simple -- they tape local broadcasts on eight channels, and index the text from closed-captioning.

Say you search for Michael Jordan. You find out the Michael Jordan Celebrity Invitational Golf Tournament was last weekend, you find out that Michael Jordan liked the voice of Morpheus in the Matrix, so he had Laurence Fishburne narrate his IMAX movie. You find that Jordan is investing in a luxury condominium complex in Las Vegas.

It's that easy!

The service is VERY beta. They're only tracking eight channels, and they're the local San Francisco affiliates, at that. There's no notification feature, like Google News Alerts, yet. You can't pull live video clips down off the site, probably for copyright reasons. But it clearly has huge potential.