The Genius of Calatrava

Santiago Calatrava wrote his PhD thesis about folding structures. In his later work, parts of his buildings have featured moving elements, such as the Milwaukee Art Museum's folding wings.

None of these elements have been as useful as the shades at the law library in Zurich.

While Zurich certainly isn't New York, where no work can get done in August, it can get fairly hot and sunny in the summer. If your building does not have air conditioning - new buildings in Zurich have restrictions on the amount of power used for AC per square meter - and has a big glass cupola, things can get uncomfortably hot.



Except if you have shades you can fold out to block the sun, which is exactly what Calatrava installed.

They work pretty well, although I still believe that many students, deep in their hearts, would prefer air conditioning.

$5 Billion for Skype?

There have been rumors about X wanting to buy Skype, where X can be either eBay, Google or Rupert Murdoch. The numbers mentioned were in the range of $2 billion to $5 billion.

But is Skype really worth that much?

A quick look into a business and ecomonics book will yield that there are two ways of judging a company's value: You can look at the substance value or the sum of expected earnings.

The latter is easiest: Skype claims to have 53 million users. They would need to make just about $100 off of each user to yield 5 billions. But let's say that their userbase grows ten-fold: Still, $10 must come from each and every user. Not impossible, but hard to imagine, given that their core product is free.

The other way to look at Skype's value is by calculating how much would need to be spent on re-building it from scratch. If you spent $100 million on development (which seems excessive even for a bunch of very talented CS engineers), and $500 million on marketing (that's how much it costs to establish a new global brand), you end up at around $600 million. A far shot from the $5 billion that eBay is offering.

Dear Niklas and Janus, I think you should accept. It's hard to imagine getting a better deal, especially with competitors quickly catching up. I might add that I haven't seen a significant product improvement lately - animated emoticons don't do it for me.

My Three Rules for Using E-Mail

1. Never, ever, re-reread an e-mail that you sent before the recipient has responded to it. You will only be mad about your typos and grammar mistakes.

2. Turn off the "You've got mail" sound. That will help you focus. After all, human task switches are considered harmful.

3. Train yourself to hit the "Reply" button by default, not "Reply All". This will help you make friends and keep them.

A Small Step for Flights Search

In my quest for the ultimate flight search engine, I came across Yahoo! Farechase, which has implemented some good ideas. Unlike Yahoo Travel flight search, it doesn't rely on one data source, but goes around and searches on other popular travel sites.

There are some things I like a lot.

First of all, it saves your recent searches (and their lowest prices) in a dropdown on the top. Finally, a site that recognizes that you are really researching prices for a trip and that you're not going to enter wildly different destinations or dates each time you return to the site.

Second, I like that their date entry field is free text, not three individual text fields. However, they should accept any entry format: It shouldn't matter if you type "5.5.2005", "5 May 05" or just "5/5".

Also, it searches nearby airports as well to find lower prices. And, while it searches, it also starts displaying results, which is really quite a feat - no more minute-long waiting in front of a screen that says "Expedia is searching. Please stand by".

As always, many possible improvements remain. For example, why doesn't it search days close to your given dates to find even better deals?

But, as far as flight search goes, Farechase is very good. Kudos to the people at the big Y.