Mostafa Nageeb

Since I am trying to learn German, one of the best techniques that work for me is audio courses. I bought a couple from Audible and they are relatively good.

I mostly use Audible to listen to audiobooks. Amazon has whispersync, which syncs where you stopped on the audio book with what you are reading on your Kindle, given you bought both the audio and text versions of the book.

Amazon also has the same book narrated in English, and German. One idea that comes to mind, what if there is a way to use whispersync between the English and the German version, where I can listen to a book sentence by sentence both in English and German, allowing me to learn the language while enjoying the books I am interested in.

It is a language audio course powered by books.

When I was applying at booking.com I read that one of their success factors is price parity. Their contracts with the hotels state that the hotel can’t offer a lower price anywhere else.

This price parity is what makes them able to offer “best price guarantee”, refunding users the difference if they find the same room with the same conditions cheaper anywhere else.

However, this recently became under scrutiny by the European Union. Some countries ruled it is illegal and anti competition, giving hotels the freedom to offer cheaper price on their website.

I am working recently on a side project that I will announce later, this project involves visiting many hotel websites. I noticed the following:

• Parity is dead. Almost all hotels offer a cheaper price if you book directly through them. The ranges are between 5% up to 20%, with 10% being the most number I saw.
• Consolidation is happening across the board. Smaller hotels are being swallowed by bigger chains. Each chain has its different brands for different price segments. One example for this is the Ibis and the NH chains. From budget to 5 stars.
• This one is more of a question than an observation: is there a chance for a no commission, software as a service OTA? The current problem hotels have is that they are not tech savvy, and consumers are lazy to have an account, and put the credit card on every hotel website they book. Maybe there is an opportunity for the Shopify of hotels with single user management system, and no commission model.

Yesterday I read a very exciting piece of news about a group of international scientists being able to edit DNA in a human embryo to fix a disease caused by a defect gene.

This is super exciting news, and could pave the way to treating many diseases like mine. There is a bias in the medical research community to only work on hot topics. Rare, non-deadly diseases like mine go with no attention. There is little incentive to help such a small number of people who are not dying, regardless of suffering from hundreds of fractures in their lifetime and the impact on the life of those around them.

Finding such generic solutions will save many lives, and improve even more. I see some voices against it, out of fear of abusing it to alter humans, but if we can alter genes to get more healthy, smarter, and stronger humans, why not?

Smoking is deadly. I see this on every cigarette pack in Germany, and in every part of the world.

I was with a friend of mine, he is a smoker, he was telling me these photos of sick people they put on the packs have no influence on him. I told him if they didn’t work, they wouldn’t be there. Maybe I am wrong, maybe they are there because a lobbyist convinced governments to put it without real evidence to support that this works.

This reminded me of the identifiable victim effect. People sympathize more with a cause if they see someone hurt, more than if they see an anonymous person, and more than if they just see the number of people hurt.

Saying donate to save “name” led to more donations than saying donate to save people suffering from “cause”.

Maybe the photo on the cigarette pack doesn’t work because it is anonymous. Maybe instead of saying “Smoking leads to xx” they should say “xx suffered from yy because he was a heavy smoker, he died in 20xx”.

One of the common misconceptions people make is confusing rain probability with rain amount.

The higher the chances it is going to rain doesn’t necessarily mean it will rain more water, and vise versa.

I was planning a trip today, and I used the wheelchair accessibility filter on AirBnB, I got this popup.

This text and the call to action “I understand” sounded to me like “we know your anxiety when you book something, but we are not responsible for it”.

Probably a big problem happened with a wheelchair user, or AirBnB customer service reported wheelchair users are making many complaints, which led product to do this.

Finding wheelchair accessible accommodation is a big pain, even with hotels. When I was working for Booking, I worked on a project to define the features of wheelchair accessible accommodations. Unfortunately this project never got to the company priorities because of the very small niche it targets*, and the logistics needed to communicate and serve what’s accessible.

I hope AirBnB dedicate more resources to make hosts clarify their house accessibility options. AirBnB positions itself as an inclusive community, and they can do better.

* 0.40% of Europeans use wheelchairs, out of those how many travel?

Few weeks ago I finished Chaos Monkeys. It is the story of a physicist turned Goldman Sachs analyst, who quit wall street to join a Silicon Valley startup, then went to found his own startup, got into YC, got sued by his previous employer, sold the company to twitter, and landed as one of Facebook’s early Ads product managers, before leaving Facebook and becoming a twitter advisor. As crazy as it sounds, it is a real story with real names and real companies.

As an outsider the valley, and so as most of people, it takes long time to create a mental image of what happens there.

What we see in tech media is full of noise, and it takes time to be able to read between the lines. Personally for me this came through a combination of heavy twitter usage, podcasts, medium, and different media outlets consumption. That’s why when I read this book, I felt like it is a wrap up to everything in a single man’s story.

Here is a quote from the book, about silicon valley rules

Investors are people with more money than time.

Employees are people with more time than money.

Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-betweens.

Startups are business experiments performed with other people’s money.

Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it.

Company culture is what goes without saying.

There are no real rules, only laws.

Success forgives all sins.

People who leak to you, leak about you.

Meritocracy is the propaganda we use to bless the charade.

Greed and vanity are the twin engines of bourgeois society.

Most managers are incompetent and maintain their jobs via inertia and politics.

Lawsuits are merely expensive feints in a well-scripted conflict narrative between corporate entities.

Capitalism is an amoral farce in which every player – investor, employee, entrepreneur, consumer – is complicit.

If you want to understand these lines in detail, read the book.

Since I moved to Berlin, I feel like I am on the most wanted list for Christian evangelists.

Every time they see me, they stop me to give me a brochure. It started to extend further than those in subway stations. Sometimes I get stopped by random people on the street, I think they need help go somewhere to find them giving me one of the brochures. Today a lady stopped me, opened her wallet, and kept searching until she found a brochure to give me.

I am not annoyed by them. They are nice people. It is just an observation.

I was talking to a friend yesterday and telling her why I love Berlin. I found myself spontaneously saying: it is organized so that it is not annoying, and it is chaotic so that it is not boring.

This says it all.

As summer comes, error rates go up, soldouts are more, and provider outages become a norm in a travel company like ours.

I was thinking what would solve the problem of providers being down?

I think the root cause is the centralization of the system. GoEuro, and whomever wants to allow users to search and book tickets have to connect to the rail/bus company’s system. If this system is down, all the partners are also down*.

On the other side, train companies are public companies, their sales is well known – most of the time – and even if the numbers are not public, through the APIs/scraping and if you have the right tracking, you can know when are they going to be soldout, or how many tickets they sell. The worst case you will get a fairly close, yet inaccurate estimation of these numbers.

This makes me think the solution to all of this is a decentralized train availability blockchain. A public ledger of who is on each train, where user identity is anonymous/hashed and can only be unhashed with their private key (for when the conductors are checking them on the train). Miners who verify the transactions are rewarded in ticketcoins, which they can use to hop on trains or sell them to other users.

This same blockchain can have different coin types for different providers, for example a DuetscheBahnCoin for Deutsche Bahn, a FlixBusCoin for FlixBus**.

The beauty of this – although I am not sure about its feasibility – is it is decentralized. You no longer have  provider bottleneck suffocating everyone from booking their tickets, it also offloads big part of the effort from the provider, since the computing, storage, and technical effort is mostly offloaded to the public.

* Companies can still cache and show results, but users would still be unable to book.

** This will be a bigger challenge with private companies since they don’t want to reveal their capacity and sales.