The simple cause of city traffic with a nearly impossile solution

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As an adult on the west coast of the US, I've been driving for many years. On the freeway, in the suburbs, in the city. While I'm lucky to live in a relatively low traffic major city, I've felt the experience of traffic frustration many times over. For the last couple of years though, I've been living in the heart of the city, and walking as my primary form of transportation.

I still own a car, but it sits in the garage nearly all of the time, with use about once per week. So, now I see the world a little differently. With my point of view as a pedestrian and my many years behind the wheel, I have led to a theory of what causes much (most?) of the traffic jams major cities experience.

Pedestrians. Pedestrians like me are why city streets experience traffic problems.

I can't tell you how many times I've sat in traffic where it took two, three, four, even five cycles of a traffic light before I got through an intersection. Only to be stuck at the next one. How many times have you turned a corner, often onto a major street, only to see a line of cars in front of you, barely moving?

Blame pedestrians.

See, nearly every traffic signal includes signals for pedestrians. They tend to indicate: walk, a warning not to walk, and then don't walk. Walk means go ahead and step off the curb and start crossing the street. Its often a green hand, green/white icon of a person, or event he word "walk." The next symbol is a countdown to the changing of the traffic flow. It is often indicated by a flashing red hand, or flashing red icon of a person. It means do not step off the curb, do not enter the intersection. If you are already crossing, you have a limited amount of time to get to the other side of the street. And of course, there is the 'don't walk at all' sign, indicating that you shouldn't be in the intersection at all, typically because of the oncoming traffic.

Unfortunately, pedestrians don't interpret the signs as I've described above, with three stages. My observations show that pedestrians look at those signs in a very binary way. Two stages. Cross, don't cross. The subtle difference between what is intended and how its interpreting is that much of the time, the signal is indicating not to step off the curb, but continue crossing if you already have. Yet, many pedestrians will continue to step off the curb as long as they think they can cross before the countdown is down, or in some cases they'll step off the curb as long as the countdown is still going, even if its down to 1 second before the signal changes.

I'm not trying to be a stick in the mud, or a grumpy old man, but there is a practical implication here. Those signs are set as such in order to allow cars, trucks, buses, and bikes to have an opportunity to turn right or left. As long as pedestrians are in the intersection or stepping off the curb, traffic cannot turn. When they can't turn, they do not move. When they don't move, traffic backs up. On and on and on it goes.

So, to ease traffic we need to clear the way for traffic to turn. To do that, we need pedestrians to follow the signs, and thus following the law. Easy, right?

Nearly impossible.

I think about this problem nearly every day that I walk to and from work, and I haven't landed on a reasonable solution. Hand out traffic tickets to pedestrians? Install physical barriers at crosswalks? Shame pedestrians for stepping off the curb when they shouldn't? Change the symbols on the signals? None of these options seem to have both the intended result while also being practical/realistic.

It appears that the solution employed by some cities, at select major intersections, is to place a traffic officer in the middle of the intersection with white gloves and a whistle. I always thought that they were there to direct vehicle traffic. Now I realize that they are there to direct pedestrian traffic. Stopping them from entering the intersection so that vehicles can make their turns, reducing traffic down behind them. It seems to work, but its not practical at the large scale. Traffic on the streets of downtown Portland is terrible during rush hour. The city would have to deploy dozens of officers, give days a week, to manage these intersections. Not a good use of police officer time, if you ask me.

So, do you agree? Are pedestrians a significant reason city streets experience traffic? Are there ways to solve this problem, which are both effective and practical? Let me know over on Facebook or Twitter, using the links below!

I wonder how a firm like IDEO would approach the solution?

Build better products by vacationing more

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Throughout my life, I've been lucky to do a moderate amount of travel. In the last couple years, my travel has increased significantly, including international destinations for work and play. In fact, over the past 12 months, I've traveled to Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Thailand, Mexico (x2), and even a small town on Canada's Vancouver island (via float plane, of course!).

While traveling, I can't help but notice the differences in the lives of the locals compared with mine back home. I'm talking small things, not the obvious things like income or weather differences. Lately, I can't stop thinking about these differences and how they should change the way I build products. They should change the way you build products. They should change the way everyone builds products.

Below are some of the small observations I've made while traveling this year and thoughts on how they might impact how products are built.

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Transportation

Do you have a manual or automatic transmission vehicle? If you are reading from the US or Canada, you likely have an automatic transmission. About 95% of new cars sold in the US have an automatic transmission. An automatic sure makes it easy for us to do other things in the car, like pull up Waze and get directions to our destination, or accept a new passenger in the Uber Partner app for those of you that drive for the transportation company.

However, outside of the US and Canada, I've observed manual transmissions dominating markets. From old, beat up, compact taxis to large, luxury, 10 person vans, manual transmissions are the norm in many countries (Thailand, Mexico, etc).

Now, think about using Waze, Uber's Partner app, Spotify, or any other mobile app you use in the car. Think your usage would be the same if you almost always have 1 hand on the stick shift? I bet not.

Differences in transportation go beyond that. I noticed in Barcelona and Bangkok, scooters and motorcycles are everywhere! Its possible that there are more scooter riders than car drivers in these cities. Knowing that, if your product was used for or during transportation, would you build it the same for scooter riders as car drivers? I wouldn't.

Also in Thailand, Tuk Tuks are the way to get around! Scooters modified to have seating for 2 behind or next to the driver! However, for those that do drive cars in Thailand, they all have these small, sharply curved mirrors at the very front corners of their hoods. What for? Turns out, Thai's drive through some VERY tight spaces, and this mirror helps the driver know how close they are to hitting another car, a wall, or a tree. They drive within centimeters of obstacles on a regular basis. If you are a car designer who's product will be sold into Asia, you probably should think about this before adding that bubbly fender design!

Finally, while Uber has made getting around a breeze in most cases, I experienced a problem recently that doesn't happen to me in the US. While in Mexico City earlier this month, I relied on Uber to get where I needed to go. It was easy, specific, cheap, and crossed the language barrier. There was one problem though: many of the destinations I wanted to go to where not in Uber's mapping database. I've taken for granted that every business or home that I want to go to in the US can be looked up quickly in the Uber app, pinpointing my drop-off location. Not true in Mexico City. Want to go to that great taco stand you read about on TripAdvisor? Don't expect to type the name into Uber and have a pin dropped in the perfect location! This happened to me about 3 times on during my long weekend there and appears to be common. Time to brush up on my Spanish!

Phones & Communication

If you live in a major metropolitan area in the US, especially on the west or east coasts, you are surrounded by iPhones. About 64% of American adults own smartphones, and about 47% of them use an iPhone. Now zoom out and look at the entire world. Less than half of mobile phone users around the world use a smartphone, and of those that do, Android dominates!

In fact, on a trip to Mexico City recently, I don't think I saw a single iPhone in the hands or vehicle of a local. Samsung/Android phones were the norm. In Thailand, outside of Bangkok, it was rare to see a smartphone at all. What the industry calls Feature Phones were the norm (in-between a basic phone with no advanced features, and a full on smart phone with fast web browsing, apps, etc). Building a mobile product for use outside of the US? You better think about these numbers and make sure you are building a product that your intended user can actually use.

Paying for things

Until I began traveling more internationally, I took for granted my reliance on credit/debit cards. At home, I almost NEVER have cash or change on me. This habit had to change when I began traveling internationally more. Go ahead, try to pay for something with a credit card on an island in Thailand. Almost impossible.

Cash is king in many destinations outside of the US, Canada, and Europe. In fact, even in Europe I am required to us cash more often than in the US. Most cabs in Barcelona have credit card machines, but some literally don't! Its nice to know that before you take a ride somewhere :)

In Thailand, I found that many cab and Tuk Tuk drivers didn't have change! Don't try to take a 30 baht ride and try to pay with a 1,000 baht bill. I did this once, and the Tuk Tuk driver had to take me to a 7-11 where I bought a water bottle and got change in smaller bills.

Even when you can pay with a credit/debit card, there are differences. Until recently, none of my debit/credit cards had chips in them. When paying for something in Europe, I found myself having to show the cab driver or restaurant employee how to run a credit card with a stripe instead of a chip. Seriously, it was foreign to them! Think about this if your product accepts physical credit cards and you want to sell your product outside of your home country/region.

This knowledge isn't just valuable when conducting a transaction. If you make wallets, pants and other personal items, remember that in some countries, your user is typically caring around currency. Paper bills, often pockets full of coins. What can you do to make their lives easier? Reinforce pant pockets to handle the change people carry? Provide more room for cash and less room for credit cards in a wallet? These are obvious ideas, I bet one of you out there has a much more brilliant idea!

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These are just a few of my observations, and while small, they could make or break the success of your product. So, what differences have you observed while traveling? What have you done to make your product more accessible to users in regions outside of your own? Let me know on Facebook or Twitter using the links at the bottom of this page!

The time I made a better Twitter and foreshadowed Slack

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Most tech entrepreneurs start out with a side-project. A project that scratches their own itch, that they build outside of their normal daily work. Sometimes these side projects are a way for an entrepreneur to cut their teeth, before moving on to the real deal. Other times the side project becomes the startup. Either way, side projects play an important role in the birth of an entrepreneur.

While many of you know about the first and only startup I founded, you may not know that I have a few side projects in my past. I am lucky to have a good friend, who I've known since high-school, that shares the same passions for entrepreneurship and technology. From around 2007 to 2010, Jeremiah and I worked on 3 different web applications, which overlapped each other for some period of time and earned more than 50k combined users in our best month.

One of those projects was called CitySpeek, and it was born out of a frustration that Jeremiah and I both had. In 2007, Twitter was just starting to gain notable usage after being launched in 2006. Jeremiah and I were both early adopters and saw a game-changer. Then, we started experiencing an imbalance of signal to noise. We had to deal with a lot of tweets we didn't care about, to read the ones we did care about. Going the other direction, we wanted to send out tweets to, say Portlanders, and not anyone else, because we knew that the content wouldn't be interesting to anyone outside of the selected region. In other words, we loved the concept of Twitter and wanted to improve it by offering rooms, or channels, where users could opt to view only the tweets about a subject or region they cared about. We also added image/video uploading (at the time, Twitter just linked to an image/video) and message translation (again, something Twitter didn't yet offer).

Now, with the popularity of chat programs for communications both at work and for communities outside of work, I am reminded of how CitySpeek foreshadowed the world we live today. Popular apps like Slack and Hipchat organize communities around channels or rooms. Public but contained spaces where people can discuss specific topics, without adding too much noise to the main stream of information. I'm a member of 4 Slack "teams" (there definition for a group/community/company), 2 of them being groups that represent a community of people that all come together to communicate in a central place. In the case of the PDX Startups Slack, just like we used to do on Twitter. Only now, instead of a single noisy stream of tweets, I can go to a specific channel in Slack, like the #product_management room, to talk only about product management, with people who also only want to talk about product management.

CitySpeek didn't take off. We had a whole bunch of problems, the least of which included being rookies at building, launching, and marketing web apps. That said, the experience building CitySpeek, along with ThePortlander.com (Community curated news aggregator for Portland, OR) and Goboz.com (a better Yelp), is what prepared me to start CPUsage, which while it ultimately failed, was a real company that allowed me to pursue my dreams. Its fun to fondly look back on the past and say "hey, I had a good idea! I may not have executed well on it, but it was a good idea, ahead of its time!"

What fun side-projects have you done? What did you learn? Glad you did it? Let me know over on Twitter or Facebook, using the social media buttons below!

The data behind communication & collaboration apps at work

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Recently, I blogged about some products and services that I wish existed, things I'd pay for if they were available to me. One of those ideas seemed to be rather popular and many of you have the same problem: Too many communication and collaboration tools at work, and its hard to find the information you are looking for.

I was intrigued by all the interest in this idea, so I decided to dig in a bit more. Shortly after publishing the original blog post, I started a survey. I listed nearly 40 business communication, collaboration, and file storage tools. I simply asked for people to check a box next to all of the tools they use at work, and in a second question, tell me the top problem them have with these tools.

The results were fascinating! As of this writing, I've had 58 responses. There is a whole lot of data to sift through and make sense of, which I'll be doing over the next few weeks. That said, I've gotten started and wanted to share what I have learned so far.

Before i jump into it, please note that I am not a professional pollster, nor am I a data scientists. The data I present is likely tainted in a variety of ways, and I am sure that the questions and answer options could have been better presented. One way the survey and data are tainted is that I advertised my survey through my networks on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and an industry Slack channel. Thats a whole lot of built in bias! So, you get what I am saying? Good.

The Apps

There are some clear winners and losers when it comes to the apps you use at work. For starters, 85% of respondents use a chat app, and 75% of those people use Slack. I knew that Slack was hugely popular, but I had no idea it was that pervasive among my network. I also figured that other apps like MS Communicator/Lync and Gtalk were lightly used, but I had no idea that Hipchat would be such a small player at just 8% of chat users.

Something else interesting, but not surprising, is the popularity of Google. Gmail, Drive, and Hangouts all have better than 50% usage across the survey's respondents. The only Google product that doesn't fair well is Google Talk (Gtalk), with just 17% usage. I suspect that 3-5 years ago, Gtalk would have come in at between 25%-50%, capturing most of Gmails users. However, a few years back, Gogle released Hangouts and began to merge some of their communication tools. A bigger impact on Gtalk was probably the growing popularity of Hipchat and then Slack, which offer much better functionality.

Also popular is video conferencing software, with 83% of you using some sort of tool in the category. Google Hangouts and Skype are the most popular, with every other option a distant 3rd. The least used type of software was in the Customer Service/Sales category (as defined by me), with only 33% of respondents using one of them (Salesforce, Zendesk, etc). Also unpopular is the collaboration category, with tools such as Quip, Jive, and Confluence (again, defined by me). Only 48% of you use a tool like this. A surprise, based on my quick view of the data in the above graphic, was project management tools (Asana, Trello, JIRA...my definition). I expected that nearly no one was using these tools, but it appears that as a group, they are popular, with 60% of you using one or the other. Of course, the category is dominated by JIRA (49% of PM tool users) and Github (54% of PM tool users), which are both more about software development than they are general project management, so my organization of the data and integrity of the survey are likely playing an outsized role here.

Digging into the stats

What I was really excited to learn about was the usage trends and patterns beyond the individual apps. Do people use a lot of different apps? Do they use more than 1 app to accomplish the same thing? I was not disappointed!

For starters, respondents on average use 6.7 different communication and collaboration tools at work. The media is 7, which means half (29) use 7 or more apps! In fact, the respondent with the most apps used in their work was someone with 14 different apps. You use these apps across 4-5 different categories (4.7 mean, 5 media).

With a median of 7 apps across 5 categories, its clear that no only are people using many apps, they are frequently using multiple apps to accomplish the same thing. A vast majority of you are using multiple apps in at least 1 type of communication/collaboration tool category. Just 26% of you are using only 1 app for 1 type of communication/collaboration, across all categories, leaving the other 76% of us double-dipping in at least 1 category.

The most common category where people use multiple apps to accomplish the same thing is in the video conferencing space. The average is 1.7 different apps, with many of you using 3 (17%) and commonly 2 (39%). While that means that the most common was just 1 (44%), this is misleading because the majority of you actually use more than 1 (56%).

Of the 7 different types of apps we looked at, 67% of you use at software from at least 5 categories. Not a huge surprise is the 9% of you that use at least 1 tool across all 7 categories, its just not that common to have to communicate and collaborate in EVERY way possible. After all, certain tools like JIRA and Salesforce are focused at specific functions within an organization (software development and sales, respectively).

What sucks about communication & collaboration software

You'll recall that my second question asked what was wrong with the tools available to you. A whopping 62% of respondents (36) said there was something they didn't like about the tools available to them. Based on the content in those responses, I categorized them into 6 different types of problems: Too many, Distracting/Noisy, Compatibility issues, Usage levels, Finding things, Application quality.

The most common complain? Too many, said 58% of the feedback comments. The second most common problem, which turns out to be very tied to the first, was how hard it is to find things (33%). Many of you, 31%, said that getting usage was a big issue, either on-boarding to these tools or getting the right people, using the right tool for the job. I didn't expect 19% of respondents to have compatibility issues....apps not talking/syncing with each other. That one never occurred to me. Five people said that low quality apps were an issue (14%) and 17% said that noise and distraction were a problem, a number I thought would be much higher.

Since my analysis is part qualitative in addition to quantitative, here are a sampling of a few interesting comments:

“So many choices, what’s the right platform for the message at hand?”
“I have two sets that don’t work well together- Google tools vs. Microsoft. I have a Mac and the MS tools are uniformly terrible. Syncplicity is required, but is one of the worst drive applications I’ve ever seen.”
“Too many of them! Don’t know where to post information. Don’t know where to find information.”
“This information is shared in so many places. There isn’t one place where all the data lives.”

Interesting stuff! I'll continue to dive deeper into the data and report back as I make new discoveries. If you'd like to discuss my findings or get access to the raw data, drop me a note by using the contact form on this site, or mention me on social media!

Products I'd pay for (Or, businesses I'd like to start)

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I'm getting the entrepreneurial itch again, and there are a number of problems I'd love to solve for myself, and then others. Below are some of the ideas I've had recently. I share them here for a few reasons. First, accountability. Now that they are out there, I am accountable to try and do something, right? Next, validation. if you like any of these ideas, please let me know on Facebook (/jmartens) or Twitter (@jmartens). Third, to show that ideas are nearly meaningless, its execution that matters! So without further to do, some products I'd pay for and the businesses opportunities I'm exploring.

Search across cloud services

I have a frustration at work. My employer is a cloud software maker and we practice what we preach. We use dozens of cloud services for communication and file sharing/storage. For example, we use: Confluence, JIRA, Slack, Jive, Google Hangouts, Gmail, Quip, Google Drive, Bluejeans, Go To Meeting, Salesforce Chatter, and more. I also stay in touch with my colleagues on Twitter, via SMS, on LinkedIn, and of course in-person discussion (gasp!).

Do you know how hard it is to find a communication, a file, or any other piece of info? I spend way too much time trying to remember what medium someone used to share information with me and then searching in various places using a brute force, try and try again method, until I find what I need (if I ever do).

I'd pay for a simple app, accessible natively or in the browser on my laptop, that allowed me to search across all of the cloud software services that my employer uses. It doesn't need to be much, just a simple search box and a basic list of results!

I figure my employer spends around $100/month per employee on all the various communication and collaboration platforms that we use. That said, I'd pay $5/month without question and could make a strong argument for as much as $20/month/user.

Dashboard for all my quantified self data

I am an avid user of Fitbit. I've owned a Fitbit fitness tracker for 3 years now (first the Flex, then the Charge HR). I've also owned a Fitbit scale for about 2 years. Thanks to their amazing hardware, I have daily (I'm all or nothing) records of my steps/activity, sleep, heart rate, and weight. Over the last 3 years, I have about 15 months of daily, complete food intake logs on MyFitnessPal (I've been religious about this logging for 2 different periods of the last 3 years, combining for about 15 months of daily records). At times, I've used Endomondo to track intentional exercise like jogging or cycling. I'm also curious about other health & fitness measures, like my blood pressure (Higi) and body temperature (Kinsa).

Isn't that an incredible amount of data? I'd love to graph it together and discover correlations as well as potential cause/effect. Unfortunately, I haven't found any place I can bring all this data together for the purpose of improving my physical health. In fact, Fitbit itself does a shitty job of displaying my data.

Luckily, all of these devices and apps I use have APIs. Most fitness wearables and personal medical devices have APIs. This means that some form of the raw data is available to be pulled out of its source, and used in another application.

I'd pay for a single dashboard that connects to and brings in data from all the health/fitness services I use. I'd like it to graph everything in a timeseries, and make it easy for me to pick a point on the graph of one data source and compare it to the same point in time on another graph from a different data source.

The value to me could be pretty high. I'd happily pay $5/month but it wouldn't be hard for me to justify $100/year. Add in some sort of intelligence on-top of that, where the software spots correlations and potential issues proactively, and I could see spending as much as $20/month ($240/yr).

Unified chat

Above I spoke of all the communication channels I use at work, but really also in my personal life. I have another problem I'd love solved, and its in the instant message (aka chat) space. Remember back in the day when your friends used Aol Instant Messenger but you used Yahoo Messenger? You couldn't talk to each other.

However, email was designed differently. I can use Gmail and you can use Hotmail. We can still talk, it really doesn't matter what software or email address we use.

Why can't we have that for chat? I find myself wanting that again in 2016, long since I used Yahoo or Aol chat. That's because a few years ago, companies started using chat at work. First Microsoft's chat software, then something called Hipchat, and now the technology & startup community is excited about Slack.

In fact, Slack says they are going to kill email! Seriously, thats their goal. I have one problem with that: as long as Slack users can only communicate with other Slack users, thats not going to happen. I'd love to have a chat ID and then be able to use any client I choose (I like Hipchat). I'd also like to have a single ID to use for all the different chat groups I am a part of. Currently, I have to have 4 different accounts, with 4 passwords, for 4 different Slack communities I am part of.

I am not sure if or how I'd pay for this, but like Gmail there are plenty of ways to make money off of giving away a service like this for free.

Non-profit addressing homelessness in radical ways

Now for a departure from tech ideas and to something thats been on my mind lately: homelessness. Its an epidemic in many US cities and things have been getting worse, not better. What I can't understand is *why* things are getting better? Portland, where I live, has hundreds of non-profits focused on the poor and homeless, and has for many decades. Go to any major city in America and you'll find the same thing. Yet, they don't seem to be moving the needle. Its probably because they are fighting an uphill battle that they can't keep up with, but I believe its also in part due to these organizations doing the same thing they always have, and not innovating.

I'd love to be part of an organization that takes a different approach to homelessness. A group of people that love to solve problems and bring radical, new ideas to the table. Like a group of entrepreneurs founding a company. Where the idea is so new, so radical, so different, that people say it won't ever work. Traditional funding sources disappear and risky, alternative finance is required. A solution that has to be 10x better than the alternative, or 1/10th the cost. An organization that is customer centric, willing to go deep to the root of the problem and invent new, unbelievable ways of addressing a problem. People that will iterate, improve, and constantly release new and more value while driving down costs.

If my above description sounds like a startup, thats not an accident. I think this societal issue deserves the best we can give it. New people, thinking in new ways, proposing brand new solutions, and funding those programs differently. Lets not just give a bed to a homeless person for a few nights, lets get the off the street for good, and prevent the next person from facing the same fate of the street.

Mutual funds that index a region's local companies

It is commonly accepted that long-term investing via mutual funds is a low risk way to build wealth. To do so, we can buy all sorts of funds (about 7,000 in the US). Some funds are very cost efficient, like Index funds that follow the broader stock market. Other funds focus on a specific industry and invest exclusively in things like oil, technology, or finance. You can even buy funds that have a socioeconomic slant, like funds that support a 'green' earth or funds that don't invest in conflict regions where industry fuels slavery & abuse.

Those are all great things, and if you are passionate about them, I encourage you to invest! That said, I'm passionate about something else but I don't have any mutual funds available to me.

I'm passionate about where I live. I love the city, I love my community. I am proud of the companies that are headquartered here. The ones that were built by my neighbors, that pay the people who spend money in our local businesses, the organizations that contribute so much to what this city is all about. I want to invest in those companies!

I'd put as much as 20% of my retirement savings into regionally focused mutual funds. Give me a fund that lets me invest in Oregon, or in Portland. A fund that seeks to represent the community I live in by owning stock in the companies that call the region home. Heck, I'd put money into my hometown plus a few other cities I love. Give me something to root for, a reason to check my investment account that goes beyond the balance and extends into my daily life.

Simple picture frame e-commerce

I buy picture or poster frames once a year, at best. Its not a common purchase for me but every single time, its a pain in the ass. In store, or online. The dimensions make things confusing, and the prices can get very high, very fast. You might think I'm pretty stupid for saying that the dimensions of what I want to frame makes things complicated, so let me share a real example. I purchased a 13"x19" poster yesterday. Go ahead, navigate over to Amazon or Michael's and try to find a 13"x19" frame with white matting. I'll wait.

I can't tell if the dimensions being displayed to me are for the cut out that will display my poster, or the total dimensions of the frame? How wide is the frame? Not sure. How thick is the matting? Who knows. I've had the same problem at a West Elm the other week when looking at a frame for a 5"x7" photo, where none of the picture frame boxes said what picture size they held, instead they focused on the overall frame size.

What I want is so simple. A frame, with matting, that can hold a 13"x19" poster. I'd like the matting to be white and about 1/2" thick. The frame black, about 1" wide. I don't care what the resulting dimensions are, as long as my 13"x19" poser is totally visible and the matting/frame sizes are about what I want. I am sure I could go into a custom framing shop, and I'd pay over $100 for what I'm looking for....because its "custom."

There has got to be a better way. In fact, I want to shop for a frame in the same way I described it to you above. Start with the content I want to frame, the work out from there (to matting, then to the frame). Instead, most frame purchasing goes the opposite way. Total dimension of the frame is highlighted, with the area for displaying the visible content being nearly an afterthought.

I'd use a web service that broke picture frame ordering down to the core parts. Size of the content being framed, matte preference, and then frame preference. Simple drop-down menus with dynamic images, allowing me to build my perfect frame. Call it custom framing but really with smart material options and an efficient "built to order" factory, you'll be pushing out custom frames at a fraction of the cost of traditional retail, and offering a much better experience along the way.

Well, what do you think? Any of these sound like products or services you'd pay for? Have you seen any of these before? Want to build one of these with me? Tweet at me or if we are Facebook friends, leave me a comment over there!