A Year On: Did the Panels live up to its Expectations?

It has been a little over a year since we installed our solar panels (also referred interchangeably as PV systems) on our roof with a promise to replace 100% of our electric bill. The offer looked too good to pass and the panels started cranking clean energy starting April of last year (April 13, 2012 to be precise).

A year on, the question is 'has it fulfilled its promise' ? In the spirit of transparency, let me share some real data and you can judge for yourself.

The System

First, a little bit about the system: It's a 5.59 KW DC system leased for 20 years from Solar City for a net upfront cost of $6321. The installer promised no more cost for next 20 years to come as far as maintenance etc for the panels are concerned and guarantees energy generation up-to 90% of its claim on the annual basis with 1% decrements yearly on the guaranteed kwh as the panels age.

Other details of the systems are:

• Panels: 26 Kyocera (#KD215GX-LPU) panels of 215 Watt each
• Inverter: 1 invertor Sunny Boy 5000-US
• mounting system: Solarcity Canopy -C 6"
• 20 years lease upfront cost with no monthly fee: 
• paid upfront: $6321
• Might get county property tax rebate of $3160 (about 5 year wait)

The Expectation

Below are the snapshot of our yearly electric consumption just before the panels were installed:

Bill Date	days	Electric Usage (kWh)	Electric Charges (distribution)	Alternate Supplier Charges	Total Charges	Effective energy rate ($/kwh)
2/23/2012	28	446	$31.29	$39.25	$70.54	$0.16
1/23/2012	35	390	$28.55	$34.32	$62.87	$0.16
12/21/2011	30	294	$24.95	$25.87	$50.82	$0.17
11/21/2011	29	421	$30.43	$37.05	$67.48	$0.16
10/21/2011	32	347	$17.52	$30.88	$48.40	$0.14
9/22/2011	30	560	$24.65	$49.84	$74.49	$0.13
8/19/2011	29	884	$36.16	$78.68	$114.84	$0.13
7/22/2011	32	832	$36.27	$74.05	$110.32	$0.13
6/21/2011	29	547	$26.07	$48.68	$74.75	$0.14
5/23/2011	30	332	-$13.18	$29.55	$16.37	$0.05
4/21/2011	31	413	$29.86	$36.76	$66.62	$0.16
3/23/2011	30	432	$29.19	$38.45	$67.64	$0.16
Total	365	5898	$301.76	$523.38	$825.14	$1.69
Average	30.42	491.5	$25.15	$43.62	$68.76	$0.14

Meaning our monthly bill were averaging $68.46 and we were consuming 491.5 kwh (monthly or 5898 kwh annually. The 5.59 kwh PV system that we signed for were supposed to generate about 9900 kwh/yearly with 4.86 hr sunlight average in our area (Maryland, US) as

5.59 kw * 4.86 hr * 365 days = 9916 kwh.

but since we consume less than 6000 kwh yearly,  we expected our bill to be completely 0 or even negative.

The Reality

So did the system produced what it was designed for ?

Not really. Looking at the solar city customer portal, which by the way, has a good feature rich customer front end to track their energy generation, this is what I see for 2013 and 2013 respectively,

that is it generated about 7027 kwh in its first 365 days cycle, much better than what's solar city guarantees (6212 kwh in year 1 and 6150 kwh on year 2 and so on, i.e. 1% lesser production guarantees in successive year) but less than what it informally promised. Now, to be fair no one has control over how much sunlight you will get and that's why they probably guarantee way lower than what the system is capable of producing..

The Dollars

Now what does this 7027 kwh of electricity generated  translates into, in terms of Dollar ? How much money it actually saved and what's our payback period ?

For this I needed to re-look into my electric bills from Pepco. And that's one piece of the most complicated numbers maze I have ever seen; even more complicated than our phone bills. 

Electric bills in Maryland has several parts and complicated formula; on peak, off peak and intermediate rates. And then for each such slab, you have the distribution, transmission and generation charges. And then tons of small fees or taxes and surcharges. And latly, there is also one big charge called customer service charge of about  $14.56 each months whether you consumed any electricity that month or not . 

Complicating this even further, In Maryland you have a choice of picking your own energy supplier which generally appears very promising since you can buy electricity from them at a predefined lower rates for years to come without any commitment or any penalty for early termination. And sure enough, that's exactly what I had done to complicate my life further :). I had signed up with WGES to buy electricity from them at 8.8 cents/kwh. 

So what does that mean ? Does that mean that by producing 7027 kwh of electricity I saved myself 8.2 * 7027 cents of bill from WGES ? Actually more than that. Since that 8.2 cents/kwh is just the generation part. Producing your own electricity also saves you from transmission and distribution charges.

For this let us look at stack of our last year bill again: $68.76 monthly with $14.56 as connection charges for 491.5 kwh of electricity monthly (all average numbers). Meaning I was paying 53.50/491 = 11.02 cents/kwh

So, what it meant was that last year our panels saved worth 7027 * 11.02 cents = $774 on our bill. So an investment of $6321 should be paid up in next 8.16 years. 

The Dilemma

The dilemma comes from the observation then that our bill still didn't' just go away. After all, the system generated over 7000 kwh of electricity whereas we were consuming less than 6000 kwh  yearly. 

The reasoning for that is 2 folds: 

First, even if you don't' buy no electricity from your supplier, i.e. don't switch on even a light bulb, you still will be slapped with the above mentioned 'consumer service charge' of about $15 a month. 

Second, installing panels, even if designed for 100% of your current capacity, isn't a license to do whatever you want and still expect to live bills free :) The system is just there to generate energy. If you start consuming more than it generated, that excess has to come from somewhere and its' not free. 

And in all fairness that's exactly what happened  to our case. We consumed  a lot more energy this year due to some life events (new local job, new addition to family etc.) and sure enough, there was a bill for that. 

Here are snapshot of our 2 yearly usage and bill summary; one before and one after the PV systems:

The Conclusion

So again, did our bill just vanished ? Not yet. Did it reduce it,  yes, it did by about $45 ($68 vs $23). Did we consume same energy as the year before ? I wish but in fact we consumed about 42% (5898 vs 8403 kwh) more electricity still paying $45/monthly less. 

Driving Nissan Leaf

After closely following the resurgence of (all) Electric Car in last few years, I thought of trying one; no, not buying but renting one.

Yes, there are just 2 companies which rents the electric cars: Hertz and Enterprise. The problem with Hertz is you would never know which make and model you will end up getting & from which location. Enterprise on the other hand shares its locations where you find one and then you can call the rental center to reserve one for you.

Currently Available (All) Electric cars in the market

As you might know in US there are only a few "pure" electric cars available:

Make/Model  (Year: 2013)	EPA Range in miles	mpge(city/highway/ combined) in miles	EPA Size Class	MSRP (US $)	MSRP after $7500 Fed credit
Nissan Leaf	74	129/102/114	midsize	$28,800	$21,300
Ford Focus Electric	76	110/99/104	compact	$39,200	$31,700
Mitshubishi i-Miev	62	126/99/111	subcompact	$29,125	$21,625
Tesla Model S (60-kw)	208	94/97/96	minicompact	$69,900	$62,400
Honda Fit EV	82	132/105/117	Small wagon	$36,625	$29,125
smart fortwo electric drive coupe	67	122/93/106	2 seater	$25,700	$18,200
Toyota RAV4EV	103	78/74/76	small SUV	$49,800	$42,300

Epa data came from epa.gov, price from edmunds.com & Smart car price from here on 5/10/2013

EPA calculates the range as

Range_epa = 0.7 * ( 0.55 * Range_city + 0.45 * Range_highway)

So in reality your range should be about 35-45% higher than the Range shown above.

Rent

I rented the Leaf from Baltimore downtown location. The enterprise.com doesnt' show the electric car  option but when I called them I was told that I should reserve that as 'premier' car which after corporate discount for home use coupon turn out to be $48/day including damage waiver and other basic insurance.

Range

The car fully charged showed a range of 107 miles (just when I rented) which dropped to 42 after I reached a destination 47.9 miles away loosing 56% of charge. Meaning 56% of charge should have given me 107 * 0.56 = 60 miles of range but it gave me only about 48. But to be fair, it was mostly highway driving.

Next Day I couldnt' charge it very well on my tickle home wall socket. & I mostly drove locally without paying much attention to my charge.
The third day I charged as much I could achieving 86 miles range & then drove to 66.7 (364.7-298.0) miles and the range dropped to 65 miles to 21 miles. This was mostly city driving. So range and actual miles driven were mostly in sync.

So in short, if your city and highway driving is almost half-half mix than you should get within 5-7 miles of the range shown on dashboard i.e/ about 100  miles of driving  per charge (in eco mode).

Charging

Charging on regular 110V household takes for ever; something that Nissan & even other sites very cleverly chose not to express. In my calculation a full 100% charge from an almost depleted level would take around 24 hours.  On a Level 2 charger (fortunately we have plenty of them around the MD/DC area, thanks to semaconnect and blink network mostly free unless the garage charges a parking fee) which gives a 220V and 30A current, this reduces to 5.5-6 hours. DC charger which this particular Leaf was capable of handling thru its quick-charge port, could reduce the charging to about half an hour or less as it pumps 440V DC @50KW, but there are very few ones close-by for me to try and see for myself.

Driving Experience

Car drove nicely with very little to no sound. It has 2 driving mode, regular and eco. In both the modes however you would feel the the scarcity of  power while accelerating. But once I got used to it, it wasn't  something that  bothered me or was a problem overtaking or merging on highways. 

Comfort

The car was comfortable with all the bells and whistles that you expect from a $20-$30K car range including  XM, Navigation, Climate control, cruise control, power everything etc. etc. Its 5 seater is kinda cramped though in the back especially if you are having a child seat. Being a hatchback  design, trunk space was OK too, almost like Toyota Prius.

Economy vs. Savings

The fuel economy data for owing an electric car is well published, nevertheless I wanted to do my own calculation. So here it goes:

This car:
Our electricity rate :  11.79 c/kwh (My Pepco May 2013 bill, generic rate available at  peak rate consisting of distribution, transmission +generation * tax)
Leaf Battery Bank Size: 24 kwh
$ amount to fill Leaf: 24 * 0.1179 = $2.83
useful miles it can drive on full charge : 100
fuel economy: 2.83 cents/mile

Gasoline car:
mpg assumed: 35
Local Best Gas Rate; $3.50 (5/10/2013)

cost to drive a mile: 10 cents/mile

Nissan gives a 100,000 warranty on battery. Assuming that's the life of battery is, 

Savings over lifetime = (10-2.83) * 100,000/100 = $7,170
Not doing the Oil change should bring about $700-$1000 savings as well as any state income tax credit for EV, but I am cancelling that out since level2 charger installation also costs money.

Since after Federal Tax Credit, Leaf price is almost in the price range of any regular gasoline car, the above gas savings (not to mention the maintenance cost) can be treated as pure savings.

Conclusion

In conclusion this is a good daily commuter car if your work is not very far which could save one a solid gas money. Having a 100+ miles range takes away the 'range anxiety' that is generally associated with electric car. After your work, you can still do plenty of running around before heading  home and you will have enough juice left. A level 2 charger is a must though otherwise you wont' be able to drive everyday. For a little DIYer type, creating a Level 2 charger point is not very complicated; just pull a 220V line from your main using a AWG-10/2 copper cable to your garage & a 30W circuit breaker and connect it to a Level 2 Charger kit available for about $1000 at amazon. 

But for my specific case in which I have a daily commute of 90 miles city (or 102 Miles if I take a longer but faster highway route), I can just about it with this Leaf. 

So, guess my search for a good Electric car (or a job little closer to home), is still not over :(

Hotels: Time to get some Facelift

Lodging industry as part of Tourism Industry is one of the top 10 industry in US, with about $127B annual sales revenue and $18B pretax profit from Hotels rooms sales alone.

Consider the below figures to understand the dynamics of hotels Industry:
Over 70% rooms has an average rate of $60 or more and over 42% has average rate of $85 or more, the highest room reporting category. Looking at the guests profile, about 40% of guests travel for business reasons with 54% of of them managerial or professional position with an average yearly household income of $116,578.
A typical leisure traveler spends about $105 /night and travel with his/her spouse or family.
Based upon these its safe to assume that a professional business traveler or a leisure family are the two most frequent and most spending guests in upper category hotels.

Yet,  these types of hotels are not keeping up with tremendous technical adaptation going around elsewhere. Not sure if they  are just too complacent in Laissez-faire or the entire management are vacationing at their timeshares at Tahiti but they seems to have missed an entire decade of  technological changes going around everywhere.

If I have to compare my hotels stay from 10 years ago to now, I  will be hard pressed to list even a couple of major significant changes.

Below are some facelifts that the hotels can do at a very low cost to make the stay more  attractive to the new iPad-Facebook generation:

1. Start with Guest Web Page

A good number of guests do create a user's account on hotels site to take advantages of the points system and save their favorite settings like types of rooms, choice of floors, airlines miles etc. These are good settings but it badly needs expansions.

2. Check In Experience

Imagine checking into your hotels, choosing your room and then getting the electronic key on your iPhone while you print your flight boarding card ? How cool is that ?! Not to mention the ease of mind that you will get a room of your choice where you can connect to the internet freely and wouldn't' have to stand up in queue while checking in.

The current check-in system should be revamped to allow a guest to check-in electronically, choose their own room on whatever floor and whatever view or side they prefer in agreement with their purchases. Airlines are doing it since years, no reason hotels couldn't' do it. The hotels can additionally add things like 3D-views, internet and cellphone signals strength etc.  from different floors and alleys  to make the selection more meaningful.

And like an electronic boarding pass, an electronic room key could be sent over to guests smart phone. Some Hilton hotels have an RFID door locks already in place, it just needs to be upgraded to work with iphone key.

And please don't' still add the additional requirement to stop by the lobby. Much more complicated and costly financial transactions happens with faceless electronic verification than a simple hotel check-in Not to mention that the most of the hotels are already equipped surveillance system to cover the additional financial or security risk.

3. Personalize the stay, all the way

The only thing resembling 'personalization'  you can find in hotel stay these days is your choice of pillow, high or low floors or choice between queen or king size beds. These are goods but a lot more can be done to expand the personalization. Few additional areas of personalization are:

TV & Video

Aren't you fed up with turning on the hotel TV, watching the same old access menu which never gives you anything useful to watch. Add to that the excessive costs of movies-on-demand based upon some 20 years old pricing study and the navigational pain with the old IPTV remotes with lacks the basics like programming guides, inline info etc. ?

Things have changed upside down with the advent of iPhone, iPad, the app store and the content delivery network. Its about time the hotel management realizes that and can prioritize these upgrades accordingly. 

By adding a tiny little device like apple TV, or Google TV & integrating its interface with the guest home page, the whole TV and internet world can be personalized, starting from my favorite channels, my favorite apps, last scenes that I watched before I left home, my emails, my Facebook pages, my news sites, my games scores  etc. And as soon as the guest checks out, the customization will revert to default settings waiting for new guests to check in.

For five star and up hotels, adding a Vanity Mirror TV in bathroom, again customized with the above programming and control options will be a nice upgrade. Research shows that the bathrooms are getting more and more used like any other regular room in the house and at least 45% of adult male carry & use smartphone in the bathroom.

 

Internet

Some Chains are already on top of this one. The Data is a premier commodity these days and it costs money. So providing a better speed (or higher data limit) internet and then asking for a surcharge wont' be foreign to the dynamic pricing on internet  going on these days. But please, do provide a higher bandwidth internet with guaranteed speed of 2 mbps or more. Customers wouldn't mind paying for it as they will see the values with other integrated services as suggested here.

Phone

And while at it, integrate the phone system as well. The PBX system can be modified very easily to integrate with the Google or Facebook contacts either directly or using some third party tool. Do folks really still use that $1/min rate to call anyone using the hotel current phone system? Why to have this with no revenue stream but tons of negative appeal.

4. The mini bar and mini freeze

OK, this one is not technical but the recommendations are inspired by tech giants success stories. While Apple and Google have made billions with their 99 cents app store &  highly complex services offering for free, the hotel industry is still trying to nickel and dime customers by selling bags of chips or water bottle or laundry service at 10-20 times their street price. What about treating this line of businesses as complimentary customer service and making it profit neutral ? Believe me, with a happy customer they can make more money than selling a few overpriced bags of chips or bottle of wine.

Bottom line

The bottom line is that the  hotel's bottom line isn't going to get hurt by these seemingly free or at-cost options rather its going to grow. It will save time, add satisfaction and minimize stress to a business traveler and will make a vacationing family's stay smoother whose little ones are getting more & more tech savvier.  

A New Energy Saving Initiative

Everyone these days keeps talking about having a National Level Energy plan; some folks arguing for permitting all offshore drilling and others for exploring all alternate energy sources. What about this simple step to increase the production by 2-3% almost without much effort:

A Solar Panel on Every roof

Yes, it's an ambitious target but assume out of 112M household in US, even if we achieve 25% success rate, that's still 28M new household with solar panels.
A typical family of fours typically consumes about 1 kwh energy per hour which can be met by a 5KW solar panel producing about 25 kwh a day.
A nation wide adaptation of such system would produce 700 Gwh (25 kwh/day * 28M installations)  energy every day, i.e. equivalent to  30GW new power plant of 30 GW capacity (700 per day/24 hours) right there.
In 2010, US total electrical power capacity was 1137 GW.
30 GW or 2.5% of that source will come thru this renewed effort.

 

Lease: 

Purchase and installation of solar panel is still way too expensive in US for an average family and the numbers don't' compete with the grid energy rate.
But a comparatively new price plan, i.e. leasing the panels, is catching up. Combine that with full prepay and you almost get your own system as the lease term is almost as long as the life of the panel itself. Not to mention all the support and warranty being provided by the installer throughout the lease term.

Financing and Low Rate  Loan

A 5KW system leased for 20 years thru a company called Solar city or BGI in Maryland  typically costs about five thousands. Now this is where the federal govt. can chime in and can provide further incentive on top of the 7.5K write off that they provide to the owner (in lease system, it goes to the Leaser). They can provide an affordable (say 0.5% rate for 10 years) loan to the homeowner to meet the upfront cost of prepay lease. This new loan shouldn't need any complicated paperwork and payment plan should also be as straightforward as possible. An example of that would be adding a one page form to the lease document, confirming that the lessee wants to meet the upfront cost thru federal loan. And automatically adjusting the loan premium to the tax return liability without adding that as a tax clause. That is, the homeowner will still file the tax the same way, but as soon as they are done filing, their tax liability will increase increase by say $5250 (yearly payment for a $5k loan for 10 years @0.5%) or their refund reduced by same amount. So, no complicated loan approval process, running to bank or mailing a check etc.


This new initiative will be almost cost neutral to Federal Govt even in the worst case scenario. . They do provide 28M * 5K = 140 B loan though but that's a loan at higher interest rate than currently being extended to bank (0.25%) and its the money directly extended to homeowners and directly working towards stirring the economy and creating jobs.

Personal Railroad Transportation

Thinking in terms of Saving energy, Independence from Gas and Usage of Clean energy, this idea crossed my mind. Will love constructive comments:

Out of the 4 main modes of transportation available today: Automobile, Railroads, Air and Ship (or any water-based transportation) , the last one can be filtered out right away; anything below say 50mph wont' fly here at US. Not to mention their lower fuel economy.


Among the rest, their best passenger mile per gallon numbers are:

• Automobile -car: 200 passenger-miles/US gallon for Toyota Prius
• Automobile -Bus 330 passenger-miles/US gallon (A diesel bus commuter service in Santa Barbara, California, diesel bus with  efficiency of 6.0 mpg_-US assuming all 55 seats full)
• Railroad: 468 passenger-miles/US gallon for Colorado rail
• Air:  78 passenger-miles per US gallon for Airbus 320

So, as expected Railroads has better fuel economy as it doesn't' have to fight gravity like airplanes and has much lower friction than ship or even automobiles.

A railroad based personal transportation can evolve in these 3 stages, co-existing with each other and also with the current modes of transportation:

Stage 1: Bringing masses to Trains

This can  be done by implementing  few major changes. The idea is to overcome the standard problems people face today in train ride :

• Runs only on certain times
• Tickets too expensive
• Takes forever

Below steps should help alleviate these shortfalls:

 

Automate Signalling, Monitoring & Controlling System (read No Driver)

Ever seen the shuttle mono-rails at airports ? Or What about the new driver-less cars traveling in bay areas by Google ? So, why not in trains ? It should not have drivers, train masters, ticket conductor or any supporting staffs, just passengers. After all, they are the only ones paying & they don't' (want to) pay a lot :)

 

No predefined start time times, stoppage etc.

It should all be dynamic, guided by passengers on-board or in-waiting.  We have way too better technologies now and its about time trains should start using them. Passengers run-time requests, tickets purchase, track occupancies etc. would feed into the intelligent train management system to make this happen.

 

Make it smaller

Having done the first two, now its time to reduce the trains length; literally. It doesn't' have to be 10 cars long. Just one car please. Car size can be different, say 10, 20 or even 50 passengers etc. Depending upon the ticket purchased and demand, one of such train cars pulls up at the station and off you go. No need for 10 minutes stoppage at each station to make it economically viable option.

A tiny little engine would be fitting nicely under the car running nicely on electric third rail. reducing the engine size need even further.
A similar rail bus was apparently tried long ago, but this time around, we have the advantage of technologies: ie automatic driving, signalling, smaller engine size etc.

 

And fast please !!

Now that the train is just one car long, there is no need for it to run it at  a slogging 40-45 mph rate. Why not to double the speed ? Current infrastructure should support it just fine without a multi billion dollar new high speed infrastructure change.

 

Stage 2: Making it "Personal" Train

Once the mass starts using the train because they can choose the timing, (almost the same way they set out to drive) and its way too cheaper because of much lower overhead  and its faster because of lesser occupancies and automation, the next step is to bring them even closer to that "personal" transportation experience;

 

Ride with your car:

There is no stone writing that trains should be the way it is. Or even the way it's proposed earlier. The new train car can be just a rack car i.e. four wheels platform with the engine underneath where a car can "ride". Why not to just drive your car instead ? Because car running on train platform will provide :

• Automatic driving 
• Better fuel economy (electric engine, no battery meaning no range restriction) 
• Free time to driver
• Free up from worries of packing your stuff
• Availability of your car at destination ie no more requesting friend & family or hassles of renting
• No Traffic Jam & predictive arrival

So, how this all will look like: You would drive up to the train station, will be redirected to the automatic auto loading yard and with a brief demo, etc. you and your car will be driving on a railroad track without you actually doing anything. Your car will be fed in power (for AC), Internet, Data, TV signals etc. thru from the carrier underneath thru one of the windows.

 

Stage 3: Little More Advance

Once the above 2 ideas are in place, ie once people start choosing trains as a more practical options than roadways and airways, its time to make it even more smart and efficient:

 

Moving Platform

A new train platform where passengers either come to ride a single-car train or drive to be fitted with undercarriage car, doesn't' need to be a regular current station platform. They can be moving platform, cutting down time further on boarding train or waiting to be fitted with undercarriage car.

 

Even faster please !!

Now its time to make the trains running even faster so that they can complete with Air travel in terms of time too. Here some big infrastructure change would be needed for high speed rail. But once the demand is there, driven from the above 2, this infrastructure change should be well perceived & funded. 

Time is money after all !!

How to loose an IT Project in 10 days

Sarcastic as it may sound but knowing how you mesh up a project gives you a better understanding on how to run is successfully.
And hence the need for this post. Pretty much the same way, they did that famous movie  :)

The Perception Problem
Don't get surprised if you hear this word again and again 'Perception is everything' or 'first impression is the last one'. specially if you are at the client site whom your company is charging hundreds of dollars/hourly sending you as a can-do-it-all guy.
And you are wondering : how much of that money trickles down to you ?probably none right, because you're a fixed hourly or annual rate. 
But jokes aside, wont' your client preferred that you asked qs and solved them rather than risked your perception, assumed things and kept billing them and billing them & billing them..


Compartmentalize
May sound like same point as above but the difference is you going one step further by compartmentalizing your team again with the fear of so called perception problem.
Whatever happened to that openness and collaboration. 
Not much since you want to loose the  project anyways.


Me The Boss
An organizational chart can do the trick albeit in a slower speed. If you can afford time and enjoy slow and painful killing of your IT organization, use this route. Make sure that your organizational chart (or some form of it)  is visible everywhere; on your site, all floors, break room, in all communiques/emails/memos, and what-the-hell even in your restrooms :) And those little guys who actually do the work, should be as little as possible in a wall size diagram.  

You all have seen a wheel, why not to reinvent 
 Who is not after the raising the bottom line. Since you all have seen a wheel, why not to reinvent it, especially since the client is ready to pay for it, right ?

After all you can always hide behind that 'privacy' curtain for not sharing the design of your earlier wheel and then charge for reinventing that you never need to do. Classic, rt ?

And if you have T&M project, there is the need to look at client's previous work either. Reuse is for fixed price pilot projects, just to gain customer's trust. You already have it now. Enjoy !!

The Apps Bandwagon

Unlike a regular blog post, where you try to impart your newly earned knowledge or share experience, I thought of writing this one with the sole purpose of asking questions.
Not sure if I understand the whole rush towards Mobile Apps & hence this post.

Why Not Apps ?

• After all browsing & searching information with a fewer clicks (sorry taps), it made our lives so easy.
• Apple & Google, ie some of the most successful companies doing it.
• About a million apps already developed, so it must a new hip thing, rt ?
• What better way of constant advertisement & reminder then to put a a nice little company's logo (& the apps) on your screen.
• One can use it offline (well not always but that's what they can probably make u believe)
• Most users usage pattern reveals using a few well known applications again and again. Installing them makes sense.

Why Apps at the first place ?

• Do I really want to search for app store (or marketplace), log in to app store to install, accept licensing agreement etc just for a quick browse. Yes, the businesses would like me to do that , so that i am invested into that apps and keep using that rather than exploring others. But is that the best usage of my time.
• And what about the resource ? App's installed image occupy storage and its in memory for most of the smart-phones, rt ?
• Now an app must be doing some regular book keeping stuff before servicing my "taps" right, like  caching, authorization & authentication, session management , favorites etc. Do I really trust 100 different apps to do these in the most effective and secure way for me ? After-all its my data and my resource. When we pick a browser in laptop/computer world , that browser does these works for me and i am not concerned if Bank of America or CNN is really setting up secure connection for me or not or if they are really cleaning up my temp files once i am done or not, right ? its the browser's responsibility. Don't I  need to do the same diligence before picking up and installing and app or just go by 'Apple and Google

My Dream Browser
I know the current mobile browser lacks a few things that renders it out of competition to the apps' world. But what if it had those features like:

• smart auto completion & favorite features so that
• one can find (or type in) an address in as few steps as possible
• can create and maintain & pick from his favorite list in as few steps as possible
• can choose to view/save pages up-to few level (customizable) deep in offline mode
• has the build in hardware access (camera, gps etc.) the same way an apps has
• And while we at it, what about having a single or reduced sign on feature thru the browser. After-all everything is stored on our smart-phones rt, so why this nagging & repeating re-login messages.