Monday 19 March 2007

Price check

If petrol stations had wireless data points in their signs that transmitted price data and I had a receiver in my car for this data, I could be alerted when I'm coming up to a petrol station with a good price. Better yet, we can all collaborate and send the live data to the Internet as a city-wide price monitoring project so everyone can quickly and easily see the current petrol prices in their local area. We can also graph the sudden rises in prices over time to see when are the best times to go for a fill-up. The way around that for the petrol companies is to start varying their prices more randomly to avoid people gaming the system. Large hourly changes will prevent the system from being useful but will also drive away casual customers who can never be sure what your price will be.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's a kind of information arms race.
PPS - So far, the companies are ahead.

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