How will you make your business location stand out as a leading brand? Google has launched yet again a new and interesting proposal: a pilot project allowing the public to look inside shops or offices from Google Map.

The new scheme is on a completely voluntary basis. This new implementation of Street View technology will help businesses to build their online presence. Initially, the roll-out is only for London, Paris and a number of cities in Japan, Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. Google states they have included restaurants, hotels, shops, gyms and vehicle repair workshops in the project.

Google, however, has excluded big-brand chains, hospitals and law firms from the programme. Business owners must warn their customers and employees before taking pictures, and the American firm will blur out or refuse to publish any images that include bystanders.

Many retailers are increasing their online presence, and this application is a development some businesses will no doubt consider with interest, regardless of the privacy concerns.

Boarding time has doubled over the last decades, according to research by Boeing. It now takes 30 to 40 minutes to board approximately 140 passengers on a US domestic flight, up from around 15 minutes in the 1970s.

Spirit Airlines started charging $20 to $40 per carry-on bag. Since it is $2 cheaper to check a bag, more passengers check their bags, and Spirit claims its “stress-free boarding” saves six minutes on average. Another approach is used by Southwest, which says it can board its planes in around 15 minutes. It says the root of the delays is the practice of assigning seat numbers. Southwest’s passengers are instead assigned to one of three boarding groups and then given a number based on the time they checked in.

A few years ago, Jason H. Steffen, an astrophysicist at Fermilab in Chicago tried to solve this problem with a “Markov chain Monte Carlo optimisation algorithm.” In computing, a Monte Carlo algorithm is a randomised algorithm whose running time is deterministic but whose output may be incorrect with a certain (typically small) probability.

Much to Mr Steffen’s surprise, he found that the common back-to-front method of boarding was amongst the slowest methods: passengers must wait for those ahead of them to stow their bags and sit down. It is far better, it turns out, to let passengers board randomly.