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I was waiting for an Uber and the driver zoomed past me at 35 miles an hour in downtown SF. (Why you wouldn’t drive slower when you’re approaching a passenger is beyond me.) When I flagged him down on the one way street, he backed up in heavy traffic to get to me.

That is the kind of driver that shouldn’t be on Uber’s platform. When I reported what happened, Uber took note and said they were going to reach out to the driver.

But the current process requires active input from passengers. Unless a drive is egregiously bad, most people wouldn’t bother.

Technology provides an easy answer to the problem: passively tracking driver behavior. If someone has a lot of quick stops, swerves a lot, brakes hard or speeds down city streets, that person shouldn’t be on the Uber system.

There’s also another huge advantage: you can track driver behavior when they don’t have a passenger but are logged on the system. The current Uber model provides a strong incentive for drivers to be reckless when they don’t have a passenger. 

For the level of detail that Uber needs to bump bad drivers off the system, the sensors on modern phones are great. 

There are technologies that provide even better data. A start up called Automatic sells a device that consumers can plug into the OBD-II port on 1996 or later cars. The app warns you when you are speeding and braking hard. it also provides logs of your driving and average miles per gallon.

My auto insurance is from Metromile, which uses data from the OBD-II port to charge me by the mile instead of typical pricing models. (I estimate that I’ll save 30% off my former GEICO rates.) Incidentally, Metromile won’t provide coverage while you’re providing taxi services with Uber.

One survey respondent suggested deactivating the Uber app while the vehicle is in motion, much like some embedded navigation systems. Unfortunately, the app is so dependent on people interacting while driving that that won’t happen.

Many taxi drivers are reckless, too. But we can’t do much about that. 

Difficulty: Easy

Provide your answer here.

The key to solving this puzzle was checking the dates and the times.

Airfares, as many people know, have advance purchase requirements. Although these vary based on market, these are generally 21, 14, 7, 3 and 1. The closer you get to the travel date, the higher the fares are. A 21-day advance purchase is usually the cheapest. It gets more expensive at 14 days, more at 7 and so on. (These are general guidelines; airfare pricing is mind-numbingly complicated.)

There are various systems that price tickets. (Known in the industry as GDSs.) These systems are based in different places. Virgin America uses Sabre. Sabre’s systems are in the central time zone. (Even though Virgin America itself is based in San Francisco and the flight was originating in Los Angeles.)

To me, the most logical way to test if you met the advance purchase requirement would be based on airport of departure. But it’s tested based on where the computers processing the ticket are.

My flight date was two weeks from yesterday.

So as soon as the clock struck 12:01 a.m. in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I didn’t meet the 14-day advance purchase requirements and Virgin America upped my fare to $140. But because Expedia’s tickets are processed on the West Coast, I still met the 14-day mark. So I got the 14-day advance purchase fare of $91, instead of the 7-day advance purchase fare of $140.

Whenever I shop, I do market research. Last night I was at the Apple Store in Union Square in San Francisco.

An increasingly common thing for retailers to do is ask for ID on credit card purchases. I’ve had this happen at major retailers like Target, Macy’s, Walgreens and Apple. It’s also really common just about everywhere in Vegas.

But according to card association rules, you can’t require ID to complete a transaction. When retailers ask me for ID, I generally say that they can’t require an ID.

There are some circumstances where they shouldn’t complete the transaction. Last night was one of them. I had accidentally grabbed the card that I had ordered for my assistant. It wasn’t signed on the back and my assistant has a very female name. The Apple store clerk clearly looked at the name and went ahead and sold me an iPad Air anyway.

There were some really good posts on NFC, mobile payments and local that I ran across this week.

These are must-reads for many of the folks who follow me on Twitter:

• The iPhone 5 Doesn’t Have NFC — So What? A PayPal exec takes a look at why NFC isn’t important and the difference between a mobile wallet and a digital wallet.
• Google Redefines Disruption: The “Less Than Free” Business Model A 2009 post from VC Bill Gurley on why Google switched from Navteq and Tele Atlas to generating its own maps. Apple faces a similar bind in relying on archrival Google for maps in iOS. With each search, it provided valuable data to Google. Although iOS maps aren’t great now, I expect that Apple will keep improving them.
• Groupon launches credit card payment business That part isn’t much news (I wrote about it in May), but Reuters’ Alistair Barr provides a solid overview of the overall state of payments business.

And in case you missed the news: I’m getting out of the writing about Groupon business. It’s been more than a year and it’s time to move on to other things. A note to my friends in the media: I’m still happy to help you with your Groupon stories, I just won’t be writing my own. Let me know if you need analysis or introductions to sources.

Earlier tonight I asked about mobile monthly unique users for various products.

Here is a compilation of that data along with some others:

• Facebook – 350 million – publicly announced
• Google Maps – hundreds of millions – estimate
• Angry Birds – 30 million daily uniques – Mashable via Anil Dharni
• Twitter – tens of millions – estimate
• Pandora – 20-30 million – based on 37 million total in SEC filings
• TripAdvisor – 10 million – tweet from TA employee
• Yelp – 5 million – from Yelp PR
• Where – 4 million – announced at time of eBay acquisition
• foursquare – 400,000 – tweet from Rabois

If you have experiences — good or bad — that you’d like to share, email dailydeals@agrawals.org.

Start here

• Why Groupon Is Poised For Collapse

For businesses

• Daily Deal Providers May Be Violating Consumer Protection Laws
• Shop Talk: A conversation with a Groupon merchant
• A look at Groupon’s extremely lopsided merchant agreement
• A sample Groupon merchant agreement
• How daily deal companies could improve the merchant experience — and why they won’t
• Best practices for businesses considering Groupon, LivingSocial or Google Offers
• Shop talk: Square and Groupon
• 6 cases when it makes sense to run a Groupon
• Local restaurant tries do-it-yourself Groupon
• Maximizing the value of deals on Facebook and foursquare

For potential investors

• What are the most notable aspects of the Groupon S-1?

For consumers

• Daily Deal Providers May Be Violating Consumer Protection Laws
• Daily deals and personal social responsibility

My stories on TechCrunch

• Daily Deal Providers May Be Violating Consumer Protection Laws
• Why All The Daily Deal Hate?
• Why Groupon Is Poised For Collapse
• Why I Want Google Offers And The Entire Daily Deals Business To Die
• Google Offers Is A Cheap Knockoff
• Groupon Was “The Single Worst Decision I Have Ever Made As A Business Owner”
• Why Daily Deals Are Becoming A Raw Deal

My series on local search

• Part 1: Local search is starting to get more social
• Part 2: How the battle for local search will be won
• Part 3: Google Hotpot a strong competitor to Yelp
• Part 4: Statistics on business and consumer engagement in local search
• Part 5: Foursquare 3.0 takes mobile ball to a whole new level

I’ve been working in wireless application design for more than 10 years and it’s really exciting to see wireless data take off. Mobile applications and widespread connectivity are bringing oceans of information to our fingertips. In the last year I’ve been more informed, eaten better, taken public transit more and been more adventurous than ever before. I’ve also been less bored and less lost.

The explosion in the availability of data and the creation of data is going to be transformative, perhaps more than the wired Internet. Realtime information from our friends, neighbors and sensors will allow us to be more efficient and avoid a lot of everyday annoyances.

There are challenges:

• Network quality — Wireless networks in the U.S. aren’t nearly as fast or reliable as networks in the rest of the developed world. I’ve got a love/hate relationship with my iPhone. I love it works and hate it when I can’t use it because of network issues.
• Filtering and alerting — With all of the content that is being created through mobile devices (tweets, photos, videos, etc.) sorting through it all to find what’s important is becoming a big problem and the tools that we have today are crude at best.
• Platform overload — There are too many mobile platforms today. Developers have to choose among iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian. And that’s just the smartphones. It’s just not cost effective to develop for everything.

This blog will look at interesting (good and bad) applications of mobile technology and the good and bad of mobile user interfaces. If you have an application you’d like me to take a look at, please drop me a line.

My personal blog will continue to be an eclectic mix of pieces on social networking, search and media.