Centives

The rise of online shopping means that malls have to change writes Tom Bill. Here’s what they’ll look like:

• People prefer to buy things on the internet. To keep people coming through its doors malls must become more like community centers.
• This means that the malls of the future will have medical and government services as well as art galleries and spa centers.
• There might also be inspiration from other countries: malls in China and Dubai have experimented with having residential spaces or open leisure areas to draw people in.
• The websites of malls will also change. They will include services such as the ability to book a parking space or a restaurant table.

Read more about why logistics is the new retail, the lack of vision by shopping center owners, and the countries where developers are taking a lead to evolve the concept of the mall over here.

Source: Reuters

We’ve previously covered the lengths that people go to, to make it onto best-seller lists. Now Patrick Wensink writes that it’s probably not worth the effort:

• Wensink made just $12,000 after having the book that was number six on the list of best-selling books in America.
• This is despite the book being ahead of the Hunger Games on the list – and not far behind 50 Shades of Grey.
• It made it that far up the list by selling 4,000 copies.
• The disappointing amount is likely why most well-known authors continue to be professors at university.

Read more about the amount that other authors have made, what Wensink did with the money and more over here.

Source: Salon

Carnival Cruise Lines has been in the news for all the wrong reasons recently. Yet it’s stayed in business thanks to the generous help of the US government writes Gwynn Guilford:

• The US Coast Guard has spent millions of dollars on rescue operations for stranded passengers on Carnival Cruise Lines.
• Yet as a company incorporated in Panama (despite having its headquarters in Miami) Carnival doesn’t have to pay any US corporate income tax – meaning it gets the services of the US Coast Guard for free.
• By being incorporated outside the US it’s also able to avoid all the regulation and safety requirements that would probably help prevent such disasters.
• Despite the accidents travelers appear to have a short memory. Bookings recovered three weeks after the most recent incident, likely helped along by generous promotions.

Read more about the Senator trying to take action against Carnival Cruise Lines, a response from a company spokesperson, and a breakdown of what Carnival has cost the US coast guard over here.

Source: Quartz

Marcus Wohlsen writes about a school that doesn’t charge you…until you get paid. Highlights include:

• App Academy offers a 9 week 810 hour course that teaches students how to become expert programmers.
• The classes are free. If graduates of the course get employed then they pay 15% of what they earn in the first year of their job.
• This puts the onus on the instructors to give a high quality learning experience – since they won’t get paid if the students don’t.
• The biggest risk to App Academy is students who join without any real intention of finding a job. To prevent this App Academy requires students to sign a good-faith agreement and pay a $3,000 refundable deposit.
• Admission is competitive. Less than 10% of applicants are accepted.

To read how much money graduates can expect to make, why this is fairly lucrative for the academy, and the types of people who have signed up click here.

Source: Wired

Via: Marginal Revolution

Note: several commentators have pointed out that we’ve failed to make a distinction between a free service and free software. They are correct. We apologize for the confusion.

Google has announced that it’s about to retire Google Reader despite the fact that millions rely on the service. Farhad Manjoo points out that this goes to show why we shouldn’t trust free software:

• The nature of software has changed. Before you would purchase software and you could use it indefinitely. Even now programs decades old can be installed on our computers. Now with software stored on the cloud, if the company decides to shut down the service, there is nothing users can do.
• Free stuff is especially susceptible to this threat. If a company thinks that its software isn’t worth your money then it probably doesn’t think much of the software.
• Similarly, if you do use a free service often, and there’s an option to pay for it, then you should. It might just save the service.
• Google, however, doesn’t really allow you to pay for its service. And that’s likely why a lot of its products will eventually be discontinued. On the chopping block are both Google Voice and Google Scholar among others.

Read more about the future of RSS, some Google products that’ll probably stick around for a bit, and why Orkut will soon die even in Brazil, over here.

Source: Slate

Note: several commentators have pointed out that we’ve failed to make a distinction between a free service and free software. They are correct. We apologize for the confusion.

The Economist took a look at the economics of lifts:

• Four firms make the majority of lifts in the world, and they’ve been doing incredibly well as businesses.
• This is in part due to the rise of China and an increasing demand for high-rise buildings. 70 million people a year – more than the population of Britain – moves to a city every year.
• But this isn’t the whole story. The real reason why lift manufacturers have done so well is because people hate getting stuck in lifts, and the lift firms are able to sell maintenance contracts.
• They can charge up to $5,000 a year to keep the elevators running smoothly. A fat sum for very little effort.
• Maintenance contracts are also lucrative because this demand is much more stable than the demand for lifts – which changes depending on the state of the economy.

Read more about why it’s so difficult for competitors to enter the market, why they might soon anyway, and expanded financials of the industry over here.

Source: The Economist

Komo news writes:

A police survey says panhandlers outside Wal-Mart in Coos Bay can make $300 a day. Inside, it takes a clerk a week to make that much

Source: Komo News

It’s hard to imagine anything more awesome than the TARDIS: it can space travel, time travel, and it’s bigger on the inside. Which may make it quite difficult to estimate the real estate value, but that didn’t stop Nick Johnson from trying:

• The value of the TARDIS real estate is the combination of exterior footprint, plus interior floor area
• The exterior footprint is just the size of a 1960’s London Police Box. Which, multiplied by the price of London property per square foot, gives us an exterior value
• In a 1978 Doctor Who episode, the TARDIS interior is reported to be ‘about the size of the Empire State Building’. So again, Nick multiplied by average London prices per square foot
• Which gives the TARDIS two values: $50,497 for the outside, or $2,580,324,616 for the inside

(Which, incidentally, is around 100 times what Centives thinks the one-year lease on the TARDIS should be.) Read the full article by Movoto Real Estate over here, and we also recommend checking out their price for Bag End

Source: Movoto Real Estate

Few dispute that what Google is trying to create in Google Glass is the future of computing. It’s going to fail writes Andrew Chen:

• Google Glass will be expensive. Yet there are few things that it can do that our smartphones can’t already do.
• Voice is the primary method of input. Yet voice recognition is still weak. Try navigating your phone with voice only and you’ll see how frustrating it quickly becomes.
• Google is giving us a peek into the future…but it’s coming too soon. The technology isn’t ready yet.

Read more about how Google Glass is like Apple Newton, what its supposed capabilities are, and some of its other limitations over here.

Source: Quartz