Electric Bicycle Tales

After a lot of careful condsideration, I finally did it.  I broke down and bought a new Trek Valencia+.  That is the middle-of-the-range Trek bicycle.  All three Trek bikes are about the same price, but the Valenica is the most commuter friendly of the three.  The 7200+ is heaviest of the bikes and that's why I didn't get it.

Three weeks into the ownership of the bike, in some ways, I find that I no longer need the battery all that much.  When I first bought the bike, I needed the battery to get more than 15 miles.  Yesterday, I clocked up about 80 miles, of which only 15 were supported by the battery - the last 15.  I didn't intend to go 80 miles, but thanks to a Caltrain breakdown, I found myself biking back from San Francisco as well as to it.

As my level of fitness has increased, I found myself wondering: do I really need the batter at all.  The answer is yes.  I need it for two things:

1. Confidence: With a battery on the bicycle, I can go further without worrying if I will feel like making it back or not.  In the past, just the prospect of being too tired might have deterred me.  Now, I go anyway.  And most of the time, I push through and pedal back without using the battery.

2. Arriving Composed.  Yes, even if you know you can make it, that doesn't make it you will make it without being a sweaty mess.  Now, I can go to meetings and, using the battery, and arrive in pretty good form, having gotten some fresh air along the way.

I'm still finding my way around the better routes, but in Silicon Valley, there aren't many meetings that are more than 15-20 miles from Woodside.

Flickr Image, CC, from G Whalin.

The iPhone on AT&T: Just Terrific

We are so good at complaining about AT&T and the iPhone, but I have to say, after two months using the iPhone 4 on AT&T's network: it's great.  It's not just great: it's better than just about every other combination out there.

I'm a mobile phone whore.  I've had em all.  On every carrier.  In the last five years, I've had Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon.  I've two iPhones and at least five Blackberries not to mention a couple of Nokia phones.  Everything but an Android phone.  And the best of them all: iPhone on AT&T.

There are a few things that make the combination the best of the best.  The iPhone itself is great as a stand-alone device, but the newest iteration excels when you add multi-tasking and a strong network.  I put the iPhone on AT&T to the test and in functions where Blackberries and other networks fail:

• Continuous Music Streaming: On AT&T, Pandora runs smoothly over long trips - not missing a beat.  By contrast, neither Verizon & T-Mobile were able to accomplish the same feat on longer trips.  T-Mobile has the best value of all the networks - but it signal frequently drops down from 3G to edge, making it hard to keep up a music stream.

• Music Streaming & Navigation: The iPhone on AT&T seems to handle multiple processor-intensive applications smoothly.  The combination of CPU-intensive and bandwidth intensive often sent my Blackberry on Verizon into a reboot but the iPhone seems to handle it smoothly.

• GPS Fix: the iPhone latches onto a GPS signal with amazing speed - faster than any Blackberry ever.

I've seen the new Blackberry Torch.  It's a nice looking phone and the best Blackberry ever.  It won't be enough to turn the tide.  RIM's going to have to up their game again.

iPhone Photo from Flickr, CC

When The Punishment No Longer Fits The Crime

As human beings we are deeply flawed.  I don't know anyone who doesn't do bad things.  Some of the bad things we do are illegal.  Some of them are just mean.  And as human beings for all the bad things we do, we are also able to tremendous good. 

One of the greatest things we can do is to forgive ourselves and each other for failures in judgement and move on with life.  The New York Times has written eloquently about how in the online era, since we cannot erase our pasts, we may have to learn how to forgive failures and lapses that might have just disappeared in the haze of time and distance in the past.  Now they live on forever in Facebook or the Google index.

For all the smart thinking about how we need to get better at forgetting and forgiving, as a society it seems like we're getting worse at it.  Zero tolerance policies and three strikes laws are driving schools, businesses, and law enforcement towards pushing punishment out of all proportion with the crime.

And what do we gain?  Arbitrary enforcement and terrible destruction of lives when these policies are applied.  Behind these extreme policies are some very flawed ideas about fairness and justice.  One of the worst is the idea that by applying a zero tolerance policy you are being fair.  Enron did not fail because a middle manager booked used a blank receipt to cash in an extra taxi ride - the company failed because of fundamental fraud at the very highest levels.

Another fallacy behind our trend towards "extreme" justice is the idea that failings in one aspect of a person's life necessarily point to similar behavior in others.  Not so.  People are not uniform or consistent.  There's many a brilliant scientist who can master complex chemical formulas but can't remember what kind of oil to put in the car.  So it goes in life.  Exceeding the speed limit is not "gateway crime" to murder.

In schools, law, and business, it's time to restore a sense of proportion to our approach to justice.  Mark Hurd should get his job back.  Stpehen Slater should be back in the air.  And we should all just learn to go easier on each other.

Less Jail Time, More "Teachable Moments" - Prison (Photo from Flickr, CC)

What Google TV Needs To Do - Integrate Integrate Integrate

The market for online content is coalescing quickly.  The past few days Netflix has announced a stream of big deals designed to bring fresher content to their online offering.  The deals look expensive, given their high customer acquisition cost and churn rate, but they may not have much choice.  Postal costs are rising and users are increasingly looking online for content.

At the same time, Hulu Plus is getting rolled out.  With Hulu Plus, you can watch full seasons and enjoy many programs in high definition and on mobile devices.  Combine that with free over-the-air television for news and major sports, and you have the makings of credible alternative to cable television for lighter TV watchers.

Hulu Plus is $9.99 monthly and Netflix's streaming plan is $9.  That means $18.99 for the two combined - a pretty reasonable price for so much content.  But what's missing is the integration.  One user interface, one program guide, one way to find what you want and then watch it.  Hence the opportunity for Google TV.  Integrated and simplified, it could prove that even on TV, search is the killer app.

Hulu Plus + Netflix: All Your Entertainment Anywhere You Go  (Photo by Daily Life of Mojo)

Financial Industry Still Defying Gravity

The Economist has a great article last week about how fund managers are measured.  It points out that both in private equity and most mutual funds, fund managers often take home millions or billions in pay for performance that is mediocre or nonexistent.  I learned this back in college as an Economics student that stocks are largely a random walk and that index funds are the most efficient way to invest.

So far, nobody has been able to refute that basic idea around investment strategy, but neither does it seem to have gripped most investors. The academic research shows over and over again that investment advisors are a waste of money.  And the press shows over and over again that those same people keep getting paid more and more money.  (Economist)

How long can the whole industry defy gravity?  The more I see things like this, the more I am concerned that Wall Street has gotten too big for America's benefit and that it is no longer functioning as an efficient distributor of capital.  And really, it's a shame I learned all this useless stuff in college.  If I had majored in English and gone to work at Morgan Stanley, I'd be rich by now.

Wall Street - Still Larger Than Life (Picture by HMerinomx)

No Cellular Data, No Problem

Without cellular data, it would seem impossible to get your e-mail on your mobile phone when traveling overseas.  Not so.  I have an unlimited text messaging plan and receiving is free.  So all my e-mails are being forwarded to me by Google as text messages.

Elegant?  No.  The formatting is terrible and the iPhone handles text messages poorly, but it is free and it does work.  Since 90% of the time I am reviewing and reading messages to check content, this is very effective and costs me nothing.

If only I could get a feature in G-mail labs that would strip all unnecessary formatting and send a clean, crisp text to my phone - then it would be almost perfect.  There's no real replying either, but for the moment, this is far cheaper way to get my current notes overseas than actually using AT&T's data roaming.

Text Me.  Image by Erik Schlange

My iPhone 4, Un-Jailbroken

When it comes to technology, I try most things once, sometimes twice just in case I thought it did it wrong.  That's what happened to me with my iPhone 4.  I jailbroke it and unlocked it twice yesterday.  After two tries, I unjailbroke it and restored it to AT&T's total control.

The iPhone 4 is the best mobile phone I've ever owned, but it has two problems:

1. It's carrier locked
2. It's a bandwidth hog with few fine-grained controls

The result is a painful lack of functionality when traveling overseas.  I've checked - looking at data consumption info - and seen that checking e-mail even once can consume as uch as 4 megabytes of data.  That's about $4 if you have a data roaming package and you're retreiving images with your messages.  Far too much money to be sustainable.

The result: the phone becomes a $300 iPod Touch when outside the US.  If you could jailbreak it, then you could put in a local sim card and use your phone like a native, provided you can figure out how local data services are configured (not always easy).

Jailbreaking is ridiculously easy and unlocking is too, using the ultrasn0w system, but unlocked phones appear to suck battery for some reason - 3-5% of battery per hour when unlocked in standby mode.  The user forums are full of notes about this and so until that issue is solved, it's rather infeasible to have the phone unlocked.  Hence my re-locking.

I think this issue will be solved soon, I suspect, and when that happens, I will probably re-unlock my phone whenever I travel overseas.  I'm keeping my contract and services with AT&T, but the cost of global roaming is too much to use the phone outside the US without it being unlocked.

iPhone 4, still locked.  Photo from SuperStriker2

Amazon Should Keep On With The Kindle Hardware

Doing hardware right is difficult.  You need to be cheap and continuously cutting costs, but you also need to be high quality.  And these days, consumer electronics hardware needs to be beautifully integrated with software and services.  Amazon does these things remarkably well.

Indeed, the most powerful feeling I had when opening up and using a Kindle for the first time was what a fantastically Apple-like experience the whole thing was.  High quality. Attention to detail.  Excellent services.  Nice packaging.  Amazon.com does hardware right.

And they should keep doing it.  While Kindle is now more a utility than a piece of hardware (it's everywhere, on your iphone, iPad, Android device), there may long be a market for dedicated eReaders.  They are easier to use than tablets and the eInk screens feature excellent contrast.  As eInk prices keep dropping, it may also be possible to offer eReaders with very very low prices.

If anyone can continue to make this experience worthwhile, it's Amazon.  I'm not sure Amazon could succeed in bringing us an Android tablet focused on eReading, but I am confident that continued offerings in the dedicated eReader space could be a huge success for them.

Still The Best eReader.  Photo by Windell Oskay

Slow Going on GoGo

GoGo inflight internet is invading the US skies.  About 2,000 planes, I'm told, have in-flight internet service in the US.  Yet my experience with GoGo is remarkably mediocre.  Bandwidth feels mostly like dial-up, especially when sending content.

Streaming media is definitely not feasible, but it's just fast enough to do instant messaging and replicate your e-mail.  For most business users, that is enough to make us productive, but not enough to really make the experience enjoyable.

On top of weak bandwidth, the service itself seems to be somewhat random.  The web page for logging in and payments works poorly and just getting online often requires intervention from customer service.  For long flights (transcons) it feels essential, but for shorter ones, I think I will not bother in the future.

Staying Connected On The Road (SFO Photo by Ack Ook)

Federal judge affirms the blindingly obvious. Next up: federal courts to confirm sun still rises every morning.

Are Global Data Roaming Prices An Example of Market Failure?

I passed a sign in the airport at Heathrow yesterday.  Vodafone was advertising global data roaming packages from $1.60 per MB.  Roughly translated, that means my AT&T package in the US of 2.5 GB is about $4.000 when consumed by roaming - this is 160 times the local price.  Voice minutes are, by contrast, about 10 times US prices when roaming - assuming an averge per-minute price of $0.10 and a roaming charge of $1 per minute.  That, by the way, is the "special" package.  If you don't buy a package in advance, you can be looking at even higher rates.

Is this an example of a market failure?  I think so.   While there is competition between mobile operators, it's primarily focused on domestic markets.  Including roaming services in the packages is not a key part of the decision-making process and once you are locked into a contract, just giving up your mobile is not really an option.

There are more and more options for savvy travelers, and increasingly it is less sophisticated users who find themselves gouged when they return home to a $2,000 roaming bill.  In Europe, regulatory intervention in the market for voice roaming has done much to bring down fees and benefit consumers without any evidence that it has hurt companies.

The same may be true in data roaming.  There is no compelling business reason for charges 100 times higher in roaming and it is clearly in the public interest to reduce those charges and make data services more accessible to travelers.

Get Ready To Pay.  Picture from James Cridland

Why The Churn?

Everyone I know loves NetFlix, but as I dig into their financials to understand more, I'm seeing that average churn is about 63% annually.  That means that for every 100 people who subscribe to Netflix, about 63 of them quick annually. 

That's a lot of turn-over.  Yet when you ask people if they like Netflix, the answer is always yes.  The company's standard of service is very high and their investment in online services is leading the industry and bringing along many consumers.

So why the high rate of churn?  Could it be that the content is itself simply not compelling?  Or could it be something else?  HBO's churn is about the same level - and again, while people say they love HBO - the majority of those customers are likely to drop the channel within one year of subscribing.

So what gives?  People don't drop cable. They don't drop satellite, but they do seem to drop premium and movies from their list quite frequently.   The question is why, since the movie business is quite robust and many subscribers seem to return to these services over and over again, only to leave them later on.

Netflix Envelope from Flickr User Rieh

Are You On the TSA Diet?

I am.  I don't consider myself overweight, but I've never been the type of rip off my shirt and flaunt my six pack on the beach. This is probably because I don't have a six pack.  Or big arms.  I've also got some small love handles.  In the past, none of this has really mattered that much.  I live in the bay area where it's cold most of the year and I work in a office that often requires a suit, or at least clothing.  Generally, I look fine in clothes.

The global deployment of body scanners poses changes everything.  Now, twice a week, I will be required to strip naked (electronically) for the viewing pleasure of the TSA staff.  Because I have no trust in my government's promises to do nothing with those pictures, I fear the consequences.  Those love handles will he electronically stored and distributed using the full power of the internet.

And so, I'm now starting the TSA diet.  The TSA diet is for all business travelers who used to think that it was just ok to look good in a suit.  We used to think of a six pack as a convenient way to carry beer, now we must we tune in to episodes of the Jersey Shore to catch up on what's what.

The foundation of the TSA diet is the elimination of airport food.  This is worst kind of food known to humanity.  Every Cinnabon you eat adds measurably to your waist line.  Also banned: those delicious warmed nuts they serve in first class.  Also, I recommend taking all your conference calls while walking up and down the concourse.  This is much healthier than finding a seat near the buffet in the Red Carpet Club. 

The airlines have long feared the security procedures will deter people from traveling.  This may now be true.  We can all handle delays and horrible service, but public humiliation?  Not for me, thank you.

What are you looking at?  (Photo from Flickr user Six Million Dollar Dan)