Vista promo video

Geekzone and Microsoft NZ are runing a competition for Kiwi’s to create a video on “what you like most about using Microsoft Vista”.

Here’s an idea – what about running another competition in parallel – “What you like most about using OSX” and judge responses not just on the quality of the submission, including production quality,  but also on the number of responses…

Or you can just search youtube, and check out the number of positive versus negative Vista videos. It isn’t pretty.

(I’m biased…..)

London vs DC airport transport

London. Tube to Paddington station, up and down one flight of stairs and onto the Heathr0w Express. A walk for about 800m and then the check-in counter. No queue for check-in, no squabbles about bag weight, fast -tracked through security and then a range of excellent shops. A quick pop-in to the Virgin lounge and a “yes Sir we can cut your hair even though your flight is being called in 7 minutes.”, and then onto the plane.

DC. First off the excellent Virgin Atlantic plane, into 0 degree celcius. Walk 100 meters to… a glorified bus (this is Dulles), which once completely and uncomforatbly crowded set off for the main terminal. An unexplained delay in docking and the seething mass of people rushed to customs. Immigration – fingerprinted, questioned (none of which I could answer precisely- “what date did you last leave the USA?”) and otherwise treated like a criminal and without a “welcome to the USA” I was through. My bag was already there (it’s easy when you have to wait so long for INS) and off I went to find a rental car. 10 minutes waiting in the cold and a bus arrived to take me to National Car rentals – they’ve been good before and I like that you can pick your own Unusually Shaped Amercan Car. Two very helpful people served me, but they were confronted with a bafflingly Byzantine computer system. They (and I) kept their humor as we discovered that my car would cost $190 for 2 days rental – that’s about $150 more than normal. It seems that the huge dump of snow this morning in DC meant that cars had been one-way driven away, and there was a HQ-enforced minimum rental cost being enforced. After accepting $50 in vouchers to use next time (sorry HQ MBA’s) I picked an Unusually Shaped American Car (a PT Cruiser), which I later found not only lacked traction control, but also ABS and any sense of road handling whatsoever. Perfect for fun in the snow then. Like all American vehicles pressing the accelerator results in a startling increase in noise but no other discernible effect. But after a brisk drive to DC I was done.

Dulles, by the way, has no train service, a bus/train combination service that takes about 2 hours, and has exclusively licensed Taxi services to one rather average and expensive company – $50-60 gets you to DC…

The Vibe of Vista and Apple…

Interesting wandering around the electronic shops in London today – several had Vista promotions going on, with laptops loaded with a demo. I ran it and while the graphics were slick it was really un-interactive, and had a annoying voice-over. Suffice to say there was not a lot of excitement generated by the Vista launch – the shops in Tottingham Court Road were as busy/quiet as always, while the Dixon’s below had a bit of activity. Note the surly expression – the vibe in the store was lethargy.

Vista launch at dixons

The Apple store on the other hand was packed. Every computer was being used (it helps that they are all connected to the internet), along with most of the iPods, while the genius and other help bars were packed as well. apple store london

apple store london

I had to queue to buy a new laptop battery, but staff bearing mobile devices (apparently some Windows CE thing) started checking customers out remotely – impressive.

apple store london

The Apple store had a buzz about it that was simply missing in front of the Windows PC’s. Of course Apple does a lot right – not only the legendary design of the stores, but also unlocked computers (Apples are much harder to break than PC’s) and internet connectivity.

I found my earlier brief play with the one unlocked Vista computer I did see to be unimpressive. The aero effect was overdone such that I found it difficult to see where the windows stopped and started,  while nothing I saw out-did OSX. But then I’m obviously biased….

But seriously – the vibe for Vista was so poor, and for OSX so strong, that I am seriously considering shorting MSFT and going long on AAPL. This could be another GM & TM deal.

On London

It’s only been a year since I was here last, but several things struck me as I wandered around London today.

Mayor Ken Livingston has been transformational – bike lanes, and traffic congestion charges make for less pollution, while Trafalgar Square is vastly improved. The section of road in front of the national gallery was pedestrianised a few years back, and the Square has been cleaned up – it is actually a pleasant place now.

I kept being bumped into. This didn’t happen in Paris at all, but for some reason in London people kept smacking into me, and with seldom a ‘sorry’. It’s a rough place.

The scale of wealth displayed here is daunting, whether shown through the truly insane prices of real estate, the £150,000 shotguns for sale at James Purdey and Sons, or the £4 single ride tube tickets.

The associated ugliness – while London shows it’s wealth, it does not have the style of Paris and other European cities.

So it’s a rough tough dreary place, albeit one where the streets are paved with gold.

bling

Waiting room TV

Great ideas are obvious in retrospect – and this is a doozy. Health TV  will show targeted health programing to people waiting in doctors waiting rooms. With an average wait of 20 minutes that’s an opportunity to hit an audience with some juicy advertisements along with that content.

Sadly for HealthTV’s international prospects this isn’t an original idea – In the USA Accent Health already “reaches 11.3 million health conscious viewers every month, in 10,800 doctors’ waiting rooms nationwide”. Their health-oriented programing is provided by CNN, and runs in a one hour loop.

HTV seems to be pinning a lot on their IPTV delivery mechanism, and see, it seems, the Health TV as just the first venture. However for this venture I wonder whether the IPTV delivery is really needed – or whether a monthly DVD would suffice. The expense and reliability of IPTV, given the appalling infrastructure in NZ, and the use of new technology versus proven older tech means that they may be worrying too much about technology and not enough about content and sales.

Speaking of content – it appears that HTV will be creating (a lot of?) their own content, which is expensive, but nice to have. They have, it seems, already signed up a critical mass of doctors waiting rooms, and so the model should work. HTV also rejects prescription drug ads, which Doctors appreciate but will curtail their income somewhat.

A comment on the reporting – firstly it is great to see htc.co.nz linked to in the NBR article, something which fairfax and APN have yet to figure out. However with 1 second of Googling I was able to find Accent Health – why wasn’t the NBR able to do this?

txtstation signs a great deal

Interesting deal that Kiwi company txtstation has made in the USA. They are working with Fox TV and the NBA on mobile-interactive TV, allowing Americans to answer questions posed on the small screen.

While the USA is well behind in TXTs (and well ahead in mobile email), I wonder whether the success of American Idol, Survivor and the like means that they are now primed for this.

Regardless it is wonderful to see a company from little NZ enter such a giant market so strongly. I hope it goes well.

Game over for Online Real Estate

People in New Zealand looking at real estate sites online spend 73% of that time on Trade Me Property (incl Trade Me Flatmates). That’s a staggeringly high percentage of traffic, and indeed Trade Me Property has been leading the way for some time.

Net Nielsen data
To work this out I took Domestic Unique Browsers x UB Frequency (sessions per month) x Average Session Duration, which gave me very large numbers in seconds. I then converted these numbers into years – so in January 2007 there was 84 years worth of time spent browsing real estate, and 62 of those years were on Trade Me. Next biggest was realestate.co.nz with 10 years, which means that 85% of time was spent on either Trade Me or realestate.co.nz. Harcourts was next with just 2.8 years.

Measuring time spent on sites is a great leveler – attracting visitors is hard, but retaining visitors that actively browse through the site is much more difficult. Trade Me has won the battle for buyers, and it is just a matter of time before the remaining real estate agents follow.

Dragon’s Den VC

So Bob Jones reneged on his Dragon’s Den deals – surprise surprise. The companies hopefully understood that the investment was the least they would gain – the publicity and the possibility of a genuine investor (of which Coleman seems to be one) being attracted via that publicity were the real benefit.

Meanwhile we may now have a number of wannabe entrepreneurs  that believe running the Dragons is a required part of launching a business. It is not.

Living in NZ

So nice to live in a liberal country where a politician marrying his boyfriend (civil union) is essentially non-news….

On the downside, professional incomes are very low – here is a job requiring an MBA that pays just $75,000, or USD$51,000. (It’s nice that Trade Me Jobs shows the salary – it really helps identify the nature of the job.)

In the USA of course, politicians and voters are less tolerant, and MBA salaries are much higher.