Some Location Trackers are best left in the Rubbish Bin
At Knowhere, we’ve always said that location tracking technology can be applied to a wide range of situations to improve our lives.
However, some people seem to think that the best place for location trackers is in your rubbish bin.
So the idea is that by putting location trackers in the rubbish, we can see the ‘removal chain’ for all the crap we throw away. This would allow us to be more aware of the impact of trash and help us to live more sustainably.
Folks at Knowhere are also pretty keen to do our share to improve the environment and be more sustainable. One idea I toyed with is to lower our carbon footprint by keeping a better record of our actual footprint.
Now if you’ve done one of those sustainability surveys, you’d know that there are always a few questions on how far you usually travel on foot/by car/by bus...etc. Honestly, with my very limited short-term memory and my inability to judge distance, you’d get a more accurate answer from psychic hotline. I am sure (well, I hope) I am not the only one with this problem…
To solve this problem, I thought maybe we can add a new feature to our system. I imagine something like a ‘paintbrush’ tool
(different colours represent different modes of transport), which you can use to ‘retrace’ your journey on Knowhere at the end of
each day. Of course, the system would do most of the work for you by checking your speed and guess the mode of transport you used.
So after reading the article on people tracking rubbish, I pitched my idea to our GMP (Grand Master of Programming – yep,
he prefers that over the more traditional title of CTO). Unfortunately for the planet, our GMP is not
convinced that people would use this function. I even tried to appeal to his competitiveness by telling him that maybe he
should talk to some of the ‘better’ developers who have already done something similar on G1. To my surprise, he didn’t take
the bait this time (I think he is starting to catch on...).
Since we have spent most of our market research budget already, I can’t afford to run a concept testing survey just to prove our GMP wrong. So if you want the Knowhere system to develop those new eco-friendly functions I talked about, please drop us a note. Our GMP promised that he would code it if we can get 10,000 people supporting this idea.