barefoot

Does this actually happen?

I just stayed at a 4 bedroom rental cabin that had this and it was surprisingly useful. All of the audio went back to a receiver in the living room and each room had it's own volume knob. We used it just about every day we were there.

Confusingly similar (cringe) to "namesonic", a company that already exists and has been around since 2001. Interestingly, they claim a trademark on the word but I couldn't locate any filings in the US.

There Was a trademark on "nameonics" in the early 1980's, however:

http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=7...

Nicely done. One problem I've found with optimizing for revenue per visitor is it takes ages to get significant data unless you're right at the end of the conversion process such as in your example. Even then, it's difficult to justify testing on a slice of the users (by campaign, for example) because it may take a month or so before any meaningful answers come in.

Are you planning on integrating additional measurements later on? What if my treatment produces more initial revenue but the lifetime value of those customers is lower by a negating amount through additional support, returns, chargebacks, and reduced rate of future re-orders, etc...

It seems like a very pragmatic solution for now.

I think it could be taken a step further by providing an alternative to going out onto the street to try to get alcohol in various forms (including mouthwash).

While I'm certainly no expert on psychology, my experience has shown me that sometimes the best way to get some tiny bit of purchase on a group of people is to offer a minimally reasonable alternative.

For example, if scrapers are constantly inundating your website one solution is to publically offer an API. Obtaining the data is easier through the API and reduces the automated hits to the human readable part of your website. You can require API users uniquely identify themselves and you are then able to throttle and better track how your data is dispensed.

Following this line of thinking: Why not put in a alcohol vending machine that dispenses variable percentage alcohol based on BAC of the user and frequency of use? It could also adjust the alcohol content up or down based on other factors, like recent civil service or run-ins with the police.

I could think of hundreds of ways this could be improved. Since you are likely getting BAC readings on a regular basis you have a measure of how successful your dispensing profile is. With enough machines you could even split test different percentages, etc... If the machine is not getting any use at first the alcohol level could be stepped up.

I think this touches on an interesting point: A few weekends worth of study can produce a short term "unlicensed" practical grasp on pretty much any subject.

In the startup world this is almost taken for granted. For example, I needed to learn how to collect money from customers and didn't want to use PayPal. One weekend later I had a basic understanding of payment gateways, merchant accounts, PCI compliance, etc... The next, I had working code processing customer transactions that has been running for years now without a single issue.

I've learned a lot about payment processing since then but I _still_ trust that code and by extension my former self that was able to quickly get up to speed on a specialized topic.

I imagine the NCDOT engineers had ascribed a lot of value to the time spent obtaining their degrees and licenses ...instead of the practical benefits obtained. They anchored that pride and sense of accomplishment to the specialized format of the reports they work in.

It's interesting to see these two world views collide and certainly this won't be the last time it happens.

Today I Learned: "unconvinced" is an adjective.