The National Park Service launched their official mobile (iPhone iOS) app in August 2011. It is available free from the Apple iTunes App Store as a 13.9 MB download. I’m reviewing the latest, 1.0.2 version which is compatible with iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices running iOS 3.2 or later. The National Park Service (NPS) has flyers available with QR Codes that make it easy for folks to download the app while on the National Mall. At just under 14 MB the app download does not take too long using a 3G connection.

The app starts quickly and on first use asks your permission to use your current location. Users will want to grant permission as this app is designed to guide you as you travel about the National Mall and Memorial Parks in Washington, DC. The home screen brings up a rotating set of beautiful photographs of monuments with the NPS branding and navigation overlaid. The app has a strong visual appeal, good typography and uses the popular Glyphish Pro iconography.  Rather than using a “More” as the fifth navigational element the designers decided to add four additional nav icon links as shown is the screenshot. This is a bit unconventional but it does work well in this implementation.

The Overview provides a good summary of the National Mall and Memorial Parks (NAMA). A minor quibble I have is they provide links to “our outdoor activities page to learn more” and a link to the NAMA website. Both webpages are displayed in a web viewer and are not sized for mobile devices (mobilized). Why send users of your iPhone app to your website? A better choice would be to offer the content within the NPS app itself.

You only get one chance to make a first impression and the NPS has done an outstanding job with their first app.

The Events and News feature pulls from a NPS feed, which is an intelligent method to keep the contents of a native iOS app up-to-date without requiring a new version in the App Store. The first News item caught my attention as it invites you to a “Public Meeting on Washington Monument Screening Facility.” However, clicking on the item does not reveal the date, time or location. NPS needs to think about adding more useful content to their News feed. The Events feed contains links with more details but I would have preferred to see the events in reverse chronological order. The oldest (October) events were on the top and the current upcoming events were near the bottom of the list.

The Postcard feature is fun and worked well. I was able to take a neat snapshot with the NPS branded boarder around the photograph. You can email the souvenir photo right from the app. I appreciate how the NPS designers were thinking about how and what their audience would want to do with this app, and providing a souvenir photo is brilliant.

The core of the app are the sites and monuments. The NPS provides several ways to discover our national treasures. Map and Sites are two direct methods. The later is an alphabetical listing of each of the locations. Clicking on any of the sites brings you to the details page of that site.  The Map view allows you to explore sites via a Google Maps mash-up. It’s easy to use your fingers to scroll and zoom to see where monuments are located. Using this Map view you can see your own location relative to the monuments that are nearest to you (assuming you are on or near the National Mall).

Each monument has a detailed page that offers an Overview, Info, Album, Events and a button to add the site to your My Tour. This allows you to build your own tour of monuments to visit. The Album button allows you to view photographs of the monuments as well as historical figures and artifacts. I was pleasantly surprised to see that audio and videos of NPS Rangers are also provided in some of the Albums (see Lincoln Memorial). The inclusion of the audio and video was an excellent choice. The Rangers give their own personal statements on why a given monument is important to them. Ranger Elmi Kawther who is from Africa, had a heartfelt message on what the Lincoln Memorial means to her.

It appeared that the photos were loaded over the Internet which may help keep the size of the app small enough for a convenient download.

One feature that I would like to have seen – given the overall high quality of this app – is a way to “check in” to the locations I was visiting. Perhaps an integration with Foursquare would make this a truly killer app. If not Foursquare, then perhaps a checklist of sites that I’ve visited with virtual badges or pins as a reward for visiting a set of monuments.

Location-aware social features could work well with the Tours feature built into the app. The NPS pre-built five self-guided tours that give walking distances between each location. This is another really neat feature and instead of randomly wandering around the Mall, this feature allows you to visit sites based on theme or how much time you have available.

The Park Lens feature uses the built-in iOS compass capability. Holding your phone up to a location lets you augment what you see with additional content. Have no doubt, this is a technically sophisticated feature. It is clear that the iOS developers know what they are doing.

I did experience one app crash after watching a video. This is not uncommon for technically ambitious apps that are only a few months old. I suspect that user submitted crash reports will help to squish any remaining bugs.  While hooking my iPhone 4S up to a MacBook Pro with XCode, the console logs suggested that the app checks to see if I had Twitter available for use, which was surprising as it doesn’t (yet?) integrate with Twitter or any of the other social networking apps such as Foursquare.

All in all, the National Park Service hit a homerun with their official National Mall and Memorial Parks iOS app. They are to be commended for not rushing and putting out a half-baked, poorly conceived app. You only get one chance to make a first impression and the NPS has done an outstanding job with their first app. I can’t wait to see what they do for an encore. Perhaps versions for other popular sites such as the Grand Canyon? We can only hope!

Smartphones, and their mobile applications are quickly becoming ubiquitous. The technological adoption of the mobile Internet (smartphones) mirrors that of the television during the 1940s and the Internet during the 1990s. Meaning, rapid adoption. The message for the U.S. federal government is clear – make your websites and data mobile accessible.

The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) maintains USA.gov and a listing of mobile applications built by federal agencies. I plan to review a different mobile app each week. For the first review, I’ll start with an app that I know quite well, the Transportation Security Administration’s “My TSA” mobile web and iPhone app.

The MyTSA app was launched in time for the Fourth of July travel rush in 2010. The launch was timed so that it was part of the initial launch of apps.usa.gov – the Mobile Apps site for the USA.gov portal.

There are currently two versions of the app, an iPhone (Apple iOS) version and a “mobile web” version that will work with all devices that have a web browser. TSA currently is working on an Android version but no availability date has been released by the agency. This review is based on the latest (iOS) 1.2.2 version of MyTSA.

TSA realized that many travelers have questions about the airport security process and rules while they are traveling or en route to an airport. So the MyTSA app was conceived to be a “trusted traveler’s companion”.  MyTSA provides real-time operating status for U.S. airports from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA); a tool to find out if an item is allowed in your carry-on or checked baggage; information on ID requirements, liquids rules, and tips for packing and dressing to speed through security.

The home screen of the app contains a wealth of information in an attractively designed layout. A nifty feature of the iPhone version is that it automatically geo-locates the nearest major airport and brings up FAA airport delays, TSA security checkpoint wait times and current weather conditions and temperature. Based on user feedback, TSA added a “Settings” page whereby you can choose to geo-locate to either the closest major airport (default), the closest airport (includes all mid and small airports) or you can set your favorite airport to always appear on the home screen.

The “Status” feature shows airport delays either in a List view or a map view using a Google Maps mash-up. You can pinch-and-zoom to drill down to a specific geographical area. Zooming in on the map view brings up all 450+ airports.

A very popular feature is the “Can I Bring?” which lets you search for any item to see what the security policy is regarding the item. TSA added a type-ahead (predictive searching) feature to help users correctly spell the item. Currently there are over 3,400 items listed in the “Can I Bring?” database (all of which have the correct spelling).  If you search for an item not in the database you have an opportunity to submit the item as a suggestion for TSA to add it to its database. Considering that TSA started with around 800 items during the initial launch, the vast bulk of the items in the database are from passenger suggestions. This has turned out to be a great method to crowd-source a database of searchable items.

Another popular feature is the “Guide” which contains guidance on topics such as acceptable IDs, liquids, special medical needs, helpful tips on packing and what to wear, traveling with food, traveling with children and a section on the new TSA imaging technologies.

Experienced travelers appreciate the “Wait Times” feature that shows recent passenger submitted security checkpoint wait times. As these wait times represent crowd-sourced content, the data tends to be spotty. As the displayed data is limited to the latest 25 times over the past 30 days, some airports only have a few listed times. This feature will grow in usefulness as more people use the app. TSA architected the backend web service in such a way to allow third-party app providers to contribute wait times directly from their own mobile apps.

A recent update from TSA includes a few new features. There are now embedded videos – streamed from YouTube – so you better have a WiFi connection as the video performance over 3G is not that great. Videos include a welcome message from TSA Administrator John Pistole, information about Advanced Imaging Technology and other useful tips to take the stress out of your checkpoint experience.

Current weather conditions and a seven day weather forecast are now part of the application. The weather screens are very attractive and easy to use. TSA uses the iOS “pagers” feature to swipe through the weekly forecast. The weather information is pulled directly from live feeds maintained by NOAA’s National Weather Service. I find myself using the MyTSA app each morning just to get a good local weather forecast. This feature alone makes the app a worthwhile download.

One of the cool elements of this app is how TSA cleanly integrates open government data from the FAA, NOAA and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS). The BTS provides airport on-time performance statistics which TSA uses to show percentages of flight delays for arrivals and departures and the reasons for the delays. Perhaps a motivating factor for this data is that very few of the aircraft delays are because of security. Most of the delays are because of air traffic, carrier or late aircraft.

The MyTSA app has been prominently featured and mentioned on the White House webpage for Open Government Initiatives, the Campaign to Cut Waste, and the White House Blog post, “Top 10 Must-Have Government Apps”. In addition to kudo’s from the White House, “My TSA” was named Best Government Mobile App from the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC) at its 9th Annual Excellence.Gov Awards event in Washington, D.C. in March 2011.

InformationWeek recognized TSA as one of the Top 15 Government IT Innovators during the 23^rd annual InformationWeek 500 Conference in September 2011. TSA was recognized for the deployment and enhancement of the My TSA mobile application.

I happened to be on Wikipedia this evening and came across the Runs Created baseball article that I contributed to in the past. In 2008 I had added an alternative Runs Created (RC) metric that I developed in 2003 while I was a contributing writer and researcher for the Baseball HQ website.

Unfortunately the Bill James fanboy (DavidRF) that curates that Wikipedia page deleted my addition of the alternative RC formula. Apparently this genius thinks there is only one Runs Created stat — Bill James’ version, and all others must use a “different name” for the measurement of runs created in a game.

Ron Shandler’s Baseball Forecaster and the Baseball HQ website have been using the version that I developed (Runs created per game2, they call it) since 2005. It does an uncanny job of predicting the productive value of a player or a team based on three fundamental skills: contact rate, walk rate and power (as measured by Swing Speed).   Without further ado, here is/was my contribution to Wikipedia.

The most accurate model for runs created per game

In 2003 Neil Bonner published a series of articles on Ron Shandler’s Baseball HQ website on an alternative method of calculating Runs Created per Game (RC/G). Bonner claimed that his analysis showed there were only three significant elements that could be used to forecast RC/G.

His model is based on the following premise: the rate of runs created is based on a hitter’s power, contact rate and walk rate. From only these three metrics a teams overall runs could be forecasted as well as an individual player. Contact Rate (ct%) and Walk Rate (bb%) are easily understood but he used a new metric to model power which he called, Swing Speed (SS).

SS = ((1B x 0.5) + (2B x 0.8) + (3B x 1.1) + (HR x 1.2)) / (AB – K)

Based on Swing Speed his model of RC/G is:

RC/G = (SS x 37.96) + (ct% x 10.38) + (bb% x 14.81) – 13.04

Using a common formula for games played it is straight forward to calculate overall Runs Created (RC):

Games (G) = (AB – H) / 25.2

In 2005 this method was published in ”Ron Shandler’s Baseball Forecaster” and has been the official method used for RC/G forecasts in both the ”Forecaster” and on the Baseball HQ website.

As Bonner’s method is very different from the Bill James model, Bonner has had his share of detractors. Yet in practice it models the real world very well for both teams and players as this example from 2005 shows:

2005 AL TEAM DATA (Actual v. Forecast)

Tm      R/G     R       RC/G    RC      %off
BOS    5.62     910     5.60    899     1.17%
NYY    5.47     886     5.41    874     1.35%
TEX    5.34     865     5.22    867    -0.25%
CLE    4.88     790     5.16    836    -5.86%
TOR    4.78     775     4.56    741     4.34%
OAK    4.77     772     4.64    764     1.09%
LAA    4.70     761     4.53    738     2.98%
TBD    4.63     750     4.67    748     0.31%
CHW    4.57     741     4.55    736     0.64%
BAL    4.50     729     4.79    772    -5.84%
DET    4.46     723     4.61    746    -3.15%
KCR    4.33     701     4.25    685     2.30%
SEA    4.31     699     4.22    686     1.91%
MIN    4.25     688     4.27    699    -1.64%
TOTAL         10790     4.75  10792    -0.02%

Generally speaking, this method varies by only by one or two percent on a team level. In 2005 the total runs scored in the AL was 10,790 and Bonner’s rate based model predicted 10,792 runs. Examining the prior year data for the 2004 Red Sox:

Pos  Player                 R   RBI     SS   CT%   BB%    RC/G   RC
C    Jason Varitek         67    73  0.269   73%   12%     6.5   84
1B   Kevin Millar          74    74  0.237   82%   10%     6.0   85
2B   Mark Bellhorn         93    82  0.271   66%   14%     6.3   96
3B   Bill Mueller          75    57  0.215   86%   11%     5.7   65
SS   Pokey Reese           32    29  0.176   75%    7%     2.4   18
LF   Manny Ramirez        108   130  0.295   78%   13%     8.1  127
CF   Johnny Damon         123    94  0.223   89%   11%     6.2  107
RF   Gabe Kapler           51    33  0.201   83%    5%     4.0   33
DH   David Ortiz           94   139  0.294   77%   11%     7.8  126
     Orlando Cabrera       33    31  0.215   90%    5%     5.1   33
     Kevin Youkilis        38    35  0.216   78%   14%     5.3   33
     Doug Mirabelli        27    32  0.284   71%   11%     6.7   31
     Nomar Garciaparra     24    21  0.231   90%    5%     5.8   24
     David McCarty         24    17  0.228   74%    8%     4.5   20
     Trot Nixon            24    23  0.248   84%    9%     6.4   26
     Doug Mientkiewicz     13    10  0.164   83%    9%     3.1   10
     Dave Roberts          19    14  0.223   80%   10%     5.3   13
     Cesar Crespo           6     2  0.131   75%    0%    -0.3   -1
     Brian Daubach          9     8  0.228   72%   12%     4.8   11
     Ricky Gutierrez        6     3  0.171   85%    5%     3.0    3
     Ellis Burks            6     1  0.148   76%    8%     1.7    2
     Andy Dominique         0     1  0.125   73%    0%    -0.7    0
     Adam Hyzdu             3     2  0.350   80%    9%     9.9    3
     Sandy Martinez         0     0  0.000   50%    0%    -7.9   -1
     Earl Snyder            0     0  0.167   75%    0%     1.1    0
                          949   911                             947

The 2004 Red Sox scored 949 runs and Bonner’s rate based method predicted 947 runs via totaling the Runs Created (RC) of each of the teams hitters.

I have been mulling about whether or not I should renew my subscription to the Wall Street Journal. Don’t get me wrong, I think the WSJ is the best newspaper produced today. So, my dilemma has nothing to do with the quality of their product, my dilemma has to do with the cost. Get this: for me to renew daily delivery and online access, the cost is $441 per year. Granted the demographic for WSJ subscribers is affluence, but come-on, I’m not an AIG executive.

Information should be priced using open contracts.

This got me thinking about a creative music label that I’ve recently discovered: Magnatune. (Stick with me; I’ll circle back to the WSJ in a moment). Magnatune’s tagline and business philosophy is, “We are not evil”. All of their music catalog can be played in their entirety (no lame 30 second samples) at 128 Kbps, contains no DRM, 50% of the cost of their music goes directly to the artist, and most importantly they use an open contract or variable pricing model for the music. Users are allowed to pay what they feel is a fair price for the album as long as the payment is within a given price range.

The suggested price of each album in the 700 album catalog for Magnatune is $8. Users can choose to pay as little as $5 or as much as $18. Without peeking below, can you guess the average sale price of an album?

Tobias Regner and Javier A. Barria studied 18 months worth of transactions on the Magnatune website and found that the average payment was $8.20 per album, much more than the $5 minimum payment and higher than the $8 suggested payment. Surprised? Regner and Barria explain:

Information goods are experience goods. Consumers do not know what they are worth to them until they experience them (Shapiro and Varian (1999)). Their exact value to the consumer is quite unknown ex ante. The valuation rather develops until the good has been experienced often enough and the true worth has been established.

When customers have full pre-purchase access to songs they are interested in, they can experience the information good long enough to determine how much it is worth to them and decide whether they really want to buy it.

Regner and Barria’s conclusion is that “social preferences are the likely motivation of the customers that make voluntary payments.”

I suspect that they would make far more money than they do with their fixed subscription model.

And that brings us back to the Wall Street Journal specifically and newspapers in general. It seems that many newspapers around the country have severe financial problems. Rather than rely on either a fixed subscription price, ala the WSJ, or an online advertising model, ala the WashingtonPost.com; they should allow their readers to pay via a variable pricing model for subscriptions.

If the Wall Street Journal offered me a range of prices based on my perceived value of their information, they would undoubtedly receive my renewal. In fact, I suspect that they would make far more money than they do with their fixed subscription model.

The world is changing. Information is valued differently by each consumer. If information providers were flexible in their content pricing they would find that social preferences are the motivation of customers that make voluntary payments. Reciprocity is the source of social preferences in the model of information content valuation.