Remember a few years back when Bill Gates falsely predicted that email spam would become a thing of the past within two years?
While I’ll admit that email spam has improved a little bit, it is far from gone. In 2004 he also predicted the death of the password. I’m still using passwords, how about you? Then there was Gates prediction that we’d see a $500 Tablet PC for students and speech recognition will be “there” in 2-5 years. Hmm.
For those keeping score, Gates doesn’t have a good batting average making predictions. So what does he do? Make more predictions!
The Seattle PI points to four new predictions by Mr. Gates that will happen within the next five years. His predictions are bolded, my comments are not.
1. All reading will move online as device form factors reach a tipping point in size and simplicity. While I’d agree that this will eventually happen, we’re not going to be there until it’s as easy and friendly as folding a magazine or book. Baking in the sun with some hard to read in direct sun electronic device isn’t going to be welcomed in large numbers — and hasn’t — for longer than five years.
2. Thanks to Internet delivery, TV viewers will see individually targeted advertising. As part of a family that hasn’t had television service for 324 days and have been watching DVDs and games and TV shows through the (legally) available networks online, this one seems possible, however there are way too many television sets out there to become dust magnets in the next five years. There are plenty of people who don’t want to login to watch an episode of American Idol.
There is also a bandwidth quality issue. While I understand we’ll continue to get bandwidth upgrades and the quality of the streaming picture will improve and someday match cable, satellite and over the air networks this isn’t going to cause people to mass exodus for internet TV. I think it might be more like 7-10 years. Sorry Bill you’re close on this one, call it a foul ball. Strike two.
3. Consumers will be the ultimate winners as the old business models for newspapering and print advertising collapse. It’s bad enough that bloggers cover this story ad nauseum, now Gates is filling barf bags. I don’t think we need to wait five years for this to happen, it’s already happening today. Newspapers are going out of business, merging and/or being forced to intensify and improve their web efforts.
But.
The major newspapers like The New York Times will still be here in five years and still printing, still serving happy subscribers. Similar to my response in #1 there are a lot of people who prefer to read news in print, particularly seniors. We’ll call this one a foul popup, Bill.
4. In five years, the number of people consulting the printed Yellow Pages will drop to “near zero.” I laughed out loud when I read this. The Yellow Pages are still very powerful and I don’t see five years breaking that down for people searching for businesses. When the internet is everywhere and everybody carries around devices perhaps then the Yellow Pages usage will drop to “near zero” but Bill is again being too anxious.
There’s a common misbelief that technology adoption moves fast. Sure, technology itself moves fast, but adoption moves slow. Look what’s happening with console video games. The new systems come out but take a couple years to takeover the prior generation systems. Sony is still releasing new PS2 games because much to their chagrin the PS3 isn’t selling as well as the PS2.
Remember how we were all supposed to be using HDTVs? Ha. Do your own self-study and ask your friends how many HDTVs they have and use. We have two HDTVs and four regular TVs. Adoption is slow.
Bill Gates will be stepping down from his post at Microsoft to spend the next phase of his life focused on philanthropy. I hope we don’t keep reading geriatric Gates predictions that never happen. Cannot diminish Gates being a smart man but he can no more tell the future than your nearest 1-800 psychic.
Publishing this 2 hours ahead of schedule today since there was no Hmmcast yesterday (slacker, I know).
Update 3:24pm PST: I decided to add Hmmcast #111 as a video response to the Hoff video mentioned. The YouTube setting is that video responses have to be approved by the person who published the original video so no idea if my parody will be approved or not. We’ll both learn soon.
Electronic Arts (EA), the company with the lock on the popular Madden franchise, is booking half of its revenue for online gaming. I’m surprised they aren’t booking more. Online gaming is the future and if I owned a game company we would put more like 75% of our apples in online gaming. Our company would make sure we were taking advantage of the opportunities on Xbox Live Arcade (how many titles does EA sell there?) as well as the sparsely populated Playstation Store.
While they might have the NFL license wrapped up, EA shouldn’t be banking too much on Madden. Madden 07 didn’t have significant improvements over prior years, hopefully Madden 2008 due out this August does. One of the most anticipated EA games Spore [see Spore raw video footage in this past post] by the Sims creator Will Wright might not be released until fiscal year 2009, which sent negative energy toward EA stock.
“Spore explains a lot of it,” Pachter said of the company’s fiscal 2008 forecast miss. EA’s investment in online games explains the rest, he added.
I’m not sure if the “investment in online games” part is perceived as bad or good by this article(?) If it’s bad, then I guess if my fictional games company was public, I’d be taking a hit for focusing more resources and energy on online titles. I’m particularly interested in co-op titles because I think it encourages gamers to work together.
When it comes to buying games for the console systems it’s a big plus for those with online gaming options over those that don’t have online play. Even something as small as sharing leaderboard scores is better than nothing.
What games are on EA’s table?
A new Simpsons game to go along with the movie release this summer and a Harry Potter game. The Simpsons games to date have been eithe really bad or ok, there hasn’t been a really good Simpsons game. I haven’t played any Harry Potter games (are there any?), so will leave that to the comment area. As mentioned above, I’m less excited about another yearly Madden title, even though it’s the best football game out there. I suppose there is only so much they can do with football, but, well … it is starting to feel like a yearly money grab title to me. Any other gamers feel the same way?
I continue to look forward to Spore. It seems like a limitless game, but with less tedium than The Sims. I hope EA has thought about making this cross platform and not only a PC game.
Good piece from NPR on the site fark.com and webmaster Drew Curtis who sounds like a regular family working guy running a site and business that does 1.5 million page views a day. His expense ratio is on the high side:
He pays several workers a total of up to $200,000 a year to handle his servers, do Web design and police the site. He says he spends at least another $150,000 on lawyers for advice on contracts and libel.
Curtis also seems abnormally concerned that his site is going to generate a lawsuit, saying:
“I’m just waiting to get sued. It’s just a matter of time before somebody comes after us…”
Haven’t spent very much much time at fark.com but what I have has left me with the impression that it is one of those sites that hovers between adult and mainstream regularly posting links to NSFW (not safe for work) sites. If Fark stopped with the adult (deep) links I wonder what would happen to the traffic? I would imagine a higher percentage of the community is based around the adult links than the mainstream ones, but that’s a guess.
The Total Fark numbers aren’t as good as I’d thought they’d be either. Only 2,000 people paying $5/month? Maybe the subscription model for sites is dead. Hot or not jettisoned the subscription model recently in favor of being completely ad-supported and saw $500,000 a month in revenue disappear.
Fark came under fire for allegedly selling links with preferential treatment without marking them as advertising back in 2004. The advertising there today shown in the picture at the top of this post is clearly identified. I didn’t see any links in the editorial section marked as advertising, so no clue how that all worked out. Comments are below for any Fark regulars to provide an update or ending to that story.
The flash ruined my picture above but the remote control signals the end of being an air conditioning virgin. Sure, we’ve had AC in cars for years and for a short time in high school in blazing hot and frigid cold Wisconsin I lived in a house with my dad and stepmother that had central air cooked in. Never before today — a day where I blew off the Hmmcast and heat — had we gone out and bought an air conditioner.
I took video and pictures and of my sons and I meticulously measuring the window inserts and the room square footage. I learned how many BTUs are required to properly cool a room and followed the basic guidelines in the chart below:
Our oldest son and me did some recon at the Local Home Depot, which had a dozen different models to choose from including a couple of portable units.
I liked the idea of a portable unit because I’m not good with putting things together. Strike that, I suck at putting things together or doing any sort of maintenance man type stuff unless it involves a computer. Home improvement guy I’m not. I like to cook and can mow the lawn and weed eat the yard. I don’t mind doing the dishes. I draw the line somewhere between there and putting stuff together.
With the portable air conditioners it seemed they came with all the parts and very little assembly was required. With the ones that go in your window you need to wedge something in the window and/or add insulation of some kind around them. I wasn’t up to that tonight.
The lowest BTU portable unit they had was 8,000 which was good for a room “approximately” 250 square feet according to the manufacturer’s box but 301-350 according to the web knowledge I gleaned before shopping.
Our family room is 250 square feet, but this opens into the kitchen which is 182 square feet which brings the total room size to 425 square feet. That means if we planned to use the portable AC in the family room / kitchen it wouldn’t have enough BTUs.
My office in an extended room off the house — and where I record most of the hmmcasts (and where I’m typing this right now at almost 10pm — is 265 square feet. A nice fit in this room. The bedrooms are all too small for the 8,000 BTU unit.
Home Depot had a 10,000 unit for another $100 and we might go back and buy that one, but we decided to go with the 8,000 portable unit first at $299 USD + tax. It has a built in timer and the remote control you already saw. Setting it up was a snap even for a non-Macguyver.
There are multiple settings on the AC: cool (for hardcore AC action), dehumidifier (get that water out of the air) and fan (with low, medium and high settings). With the fan or dehumidifier modes working, it shows the room temperature and when the cool setting is on the green digital reads the temperature the AC is working toward. It also has a timer function to auto turn on and off based on time. We may have to play with this setting a bit to figure out what’s good.
I’m thinking in the morning when it is cooler it will be easier to keep the temperature down with the AC running and heavy shades on the window.
The AC also came with some sticky insulation tape. Need to buy some more and also some duct tape because I saw numerous nooks and crannies that are definitely leaking degrees. All in all the adventure was well worth playing hookey from today’s Hmmcast to chill out, pun intended.
I’m curious what is your home AC situation like? Do you have central air (I’m jealous, that’s the really good stuff), one or more wall or portable air conditioners? Or have you been sweating it out in the hot spring and summer months like we have for many years? I can proudly say I’m not a 40 year old home AC virgin. You?
The raw footage of this tornado is incredible, but it’s foolish taunting mother nature. These guys are damn lucky the tornado didn’t violently change paths and turn their truck and flesh into swiss cheese.
I remember the tornado warnings when I lived in Wisconsin. It was well understood that when the tornadoes came, you went to the basement. Never actually saw one, other than on TV of course, but there’s no way I’d want to be anywhere near something like this. Tornados have been known to throw wheat through telephone poles, I hope those guys in the video were wearing kevlar (didn’t look that way).
Thanks to USA Today I learned about some sites to shame driving infractions. I chuckled over people describing some of these infractions at platewire.com sporting some 64776 members:
Dude is actually reading the newspaper while driving. At about 7:20 AM, he was heading north on I-355.
What’s a more peaceful solution to road rage? Camera rage. That’s right, just yank out your camera phone and snap a picture of that completely ignorant driver and share at irate-driver.com. Make sure you aren’t creating a hazard yourself in the process.
CrosswalkNegligence.com (site doesn’t exist) would be a site where I’d contribute. My wife’s health hasn’t been the same since being hit in the middle of a crosswalk (November 2003) by a woman who couldn’t bother to take five minutes to defrost all her windows. I could stop at any crosswalk and fill this site up with photos of drivers yapping on cellphones completely unaware that people are waiting to cross the road.
Maybe John Edwards is a better tipper than me, but I don’t understand how any haircut can cost $400. Was it cut by some celebrity hair stylist? If you want to be elected President of the United States go get your haircut where most Americans get theirs cut. And definitely don’t make the “mistake” of charging these $400 haircuts to your campaign.
Edwards haircut math
Let’s assume Edwards gets his haircut every six weeks and calculate the annual cost:
52 weeks / 6 weeks per haircut = 9 times a year (rounded) x $400 per haircut = $3,600 annually
Wow, $300/month for a freaking haircut? That’s mot quite as much as our Saturn Relay car payment, but more than our property taxes for the year. Any karma Edwards might have built-up with hard working geeks by speaking for 45 minutes at Gnomedex last year is likely gone.
Note for Edwards damage control: put using the local barber as one of your campaign promises.
Any guesses what’s circled in red in the picture above?
A little over a year ago I wrote a post titled I Sold It on Ebay: cool looking store, subpar internet presence that has since generated 50+ comments ranging from I didn’t know what I was talking about criticizing the business model to confirmation from others that the high lease contracts do hurt the business model to even more bizarre claims like almost none of the franchises are making money. There was even this other guy from a rival service saying how his service wasn’t having the same problems. Clearly this post struck a nerve.
I just reread the original post to see if I wanted to take back anything I wrote today. Sometimes you write things that don’t prove out to be accurate over time or were terribly flawed from the beginning, but I couldn’t see back then how this business could make it having to pay the overpriced strip mall lease rates. And still can’t.
So recently we are up shopping because Best Buy is in the same complex and what do I see?
Yes, that same iSolditonEbay store is moving a little over a year later. They cite having two other locations and I didn’t get a chance to talk to the owner to see if the reason for moving was the high rent prices, so this post shouldn’t be deemed a “look, I told you so neener neener” type post. Rather, it should be further evidence to question how or why people would open one of these beautiful stores in an expensive strip mall if they intend to move location over 15 miles away. Location couldn’t have been that valuable. At least in this case.
An isolated case? I don’t think so.
I can see the model working much better in a less expensive location. Buy a house and renovate it on a budget. Don’t go to a strip mall and think the people will come because hey, look it’s in a strip mall. One of the first rules of managing business expenses is watch overspending. High rent if you don’t have a high traffic business can be a major exposed artery. And it can kill a business in the first five years when cash flow is usually most vulnerable.
Unlike visiting a retail store, shopping in a mall or eating out, people don’t just go out thinking: “You know what, we need to go sell some stuff on eBay!” If they put that much thought into it, then why not get their own account or a friend to do it for them? Or better yet hit the yellow pages or [gasp] search engine, which leads into my other point that if one of these business can’t sell itself in the search engines they might have a hard time selling my stuff on eBay too where the competition is every bit as fierce. It’s not that hard a stretch, but I was challenged on this theory too whether or not a brick and mortar business like this having no search engine presence is important.
That’s ok, I don’t mind being challenged on my opinions. That’s just another way to become more enlightened and learn more about business. The problem I see is a higher proportion of people who take issues in the comments area don’t stick around long enough to see the outcome.
A year later the I Sold It on EBay store and business that was on such strong ground is moving. I’m sticking by my original argument to find a different business opportunity or if you go into something like this then don’t overspend on location.
I don’t know if they moved to another strip mall location or not. Maybe I should keep track of the two other locations and see where they are at in a year or two. And perhaps with that post I can get an interview with the owners to find out what really happens in an I Sold It on Ebay business.
Music lovers might groove on this one. Musicmesh is something you can start playing with right away, exploring new music and YouTube videos. Type in your favorite band and a CD will enter the map. Related artists/CDs will surround the CD. When you click on the CD a list of songs on the CD appears in the right column and you can doubleclick the songs to play YouTube videos for the songs (if they are available).
Revenue? Didn’t see any ads, but you can buy the clicked on CD via Amazon (through an affiliate code likely) through one of the four tabs on the right side. The other tabs are Tracklist, Wikipedia and Reviews. Clean layout of the page, although the tab window screws up the Wikipedia output (not wide enough, maybe consider expanding?). Looks Wii browser friendly too. You can star up to 15 of your favorite videos.
Strike that, I suck at putting things together or doing any sort of maintenance man type stuff unless it involves a computer. Home improvement guy I’m not. I like to cook and can mow the lawn and weed eat the yard. I don’t mind doing the dishes. I draw the line somewhere between there and putting stuff together.
