Dot Mac Gallery, and old motorcycle Trip photos

Apple, at the same time as the new iLife launch, launched a very overdue upgrade to the dot mac product.

I sent some photos from the new iPhoto to a new feature – dot Mac Web Gallery. The process is to select your pictures in iPhoto, and, err, push a button (or click a menu item).

The upload process worked pretty well, unlike that of iWeb which was unreliable to the point of uselessness, and the reason one of my previous attempts at blogging died.

I did have problems at the beginning with the sync though – getting duplicates and all sorts of things after I tried to change the order and add additional photos while the sync was underway. Things went more smoothly after I deleted that and started again. I still cannot figure out how to change the order of albums.

So here are a selection of my North and South America motorcycling photos. Check out what happens when you mouse over an album.

I’m impressed with the very simple elegance of the product, both for uploading and viewing.

TDF

Stop banning the internet

A nice column by Deborah hill Cone on ACP’s decision then reversal of the decision to ban Facebook use by staff. It was an uninformed move as Facebook is quite the weapon for journalists.

Deborah also lets slip that NZ Herald also bans Facebook, and no doubt have all sorts of other sites on the banned list.

Here’s a cluestick for all big media companies, heck – for all companies:

Stop banning the internet.

Treat your employees like adults.

No – wait. Treat your employees like children, and educate and expose them to the hazard rather than pretending that the road, river or internet doesn’t exist.

Your employees are not going to turn into MySpace Evercrack Adultfriendfinder Secondlife NZDating addicts downloading pr0n instead of working. OK – maybe one or two will try, but you have the normal tools of management to help them out right? (and when I say help them out, I mean help them focus on work, and give them challenges.)

Meanwhile your provider of banning services, whether internal or external, will often get it downright wrong, and ban sites that should be open to all. The process will also slow things down, and makes your employees feel like they are not trusted, both of which have a detrimental effect on productivity and retention.

Your employees will soon tire of your internet access restrictions, stick their heads back in their shell, and reduce their use of the internet for its truly useful purpose – the world’s research and communication tool.

The answer is simple. Protect your browsers with decent firewalls and the like, stop spyware from coming in by using those firewalls, track IP addresses that people go to (and let them know you do), follow up on anyone that is going to truly nasty sites, but, for goodness sake, do not physically prevent anyone from going anyware.

Free wifi – part of the iPhone success

a telling comment from Rod Drury:

I also noticed that iPhone behavior changes once you move from the carrier network to wifi. Almost everywhere we stopped there was free wifi. As soon as the iPhone user had free wifi then the iPhone was out and being used in conversation.

When I travel in the USA I don’t need a mobile internet solution – just the built in Wifi capability of my mac. Cafes, hotel and similar businesses offer it for free, and in residential areas there are any number of unlocked nodes.

It has been like this for years now.

Back here in NZ and Australia, with our data caps and absurd pricing, we are still years behind. Sure we have high speed mobile data, but at stupid rates, requiring expensive devices, and with crippling international roaming fees.

We need to embrace free wifi, and it starts with our own setup at home.

Air NZ does it with models, Southwest goes prude

Excellent marketing from Air NZ – who once again demonstrate that there are some very smart people that are being unleashed within their domestic team.

Air NZ held a fashion shw in the sky, complete with Rachel Hunter in attendance. Here is one of the eight models strutting one of 30 designer’s ware.

Air NZ fashion show

Meanwhile America’s SouthWest, who have the stock market tricker symbol LUV and a history of scantily clad flight attendants, are getting justly panned for embarrassing a girl with an overly short and tight ensemble. Here she is – what do you think?

SouthWest girl

Who would ever have believed that Air New Zealand would one day be braver than these guys were in 1973 – here is the graduating class of flight attendants. Check out those hats:

jetpsa

Advertising: Have we gone too far?

Via Celsias – a very cool protest about the over indulgence in advertising.

Now I’m not at all for banning advertising a la Sao Paulo, but we all have to remember that public spaces, pages in newspapers and minutes of TV or radio time are public goods.

It may make financial sense to add just one extra minute of ads per hour, or tweak the ratio of advertisments to articles, or add a video billboard above every metro stop, but at some point we the people snap.

For many USA TV crossed the line of acceptability years ago, and as a result TiVo and other time shifting solutions are rendering all ads irrelevant.

Newspapers seem to have rules of thumb about the relationship between content and advertising space, and manage the amount of content around the ads. (no I don’t know what they are, but classified sections do stand alone).

Billboards proliferation is generally constrained by reasonable city council rules, except, it seems, in New York.

But when a movement is started (or at least a cult book) that stands against your industry, it could be time to begin some navel gazing, and to accept that like forestry or farming, sustainability of your core product comes first.

eBay blows cash on TV Ads that are 20 seconds old

eBay UK is placing ads on TV that feature listings with prices that are 20 seconds old. That’s some pretty cute technology, which requires slick systems from end to end.

Now the media companies have a system that can deliver ads that quickly, it’s a short leap to designing, creating  and placing ads that are related to current events.

Of course eBay UK would do a lot better to follow Trade Me’s example, and abandon wasteful spending of money on TV advertising.

As Rowan explains, people that go to a website becasue of word of mouth are far more likely to stick around. Blowing money on ads makes for good member numbers when reporting each financial quarter, but gives lower profits and lower movement from membership to advanced active membership.

While you are watching the eBay ad (it is just a few seconds long), check out the Cadbury Gorilla ad. For me it embodies everything great (the imagery, sound and production are excellent) and terrible (complete lack of reference or relevance to the product) about the advertising industry.

Telecom is a trade barrier

Rather amusingly, the US Foreign Trade Barriers document referred to below also has some tasty things to say about Telecomms in NZ:

 U.S. industry has expressed concern about the fees charged for completing calls using mobile networks in New Zealand, which are among the highest in the world.

That’s a clear statement that Telecom’s under-investment and over-pricing has had a destructive effect on New Zealand’s competitiveness. It doesn’t say much for Vodafone either.

The piece seems to have been written prior to this year, and

The United States will continue to monitor … developments. 

So the US Government is telling us that market forces have failed to provide competitive mobile phone rates, and indeed, their response to the legislation splitting Telecom into three and mandating naked DSL is unequivocal:

The United States commends New Zealand for taking positive actions towards enhancing the competitive environment, which may lead to increased opportunities for U.S. service providers and equipment manufacturers in New Zealand’s market.

So you folk who believe that our “out of control loony left wing government” should have let market forces decide Telecom’s fate cannot even count the conservative led USA among your supporters. Indeed the USA was the original monopoly buster in Telecommunications when it broke up AT&T.*

The situation in NZ was simple – the market failed and the Government had to step in. Telecom could have avoided the ensuing action if they had been more responsible to all of their stakeholders, including customers, society and Government, not just shareholders.

*Of course in recent years AT&T has essentially got back together and is bigger than ever.

The cost of US Free Trade – no iPods

Via No Right Turn, I perused a US document that lists NZ policies thast it consiers are trade barriers. Read the full commentary on this amazing document from Joe Hendren.

It was astonishing to see the US music industry’s thoughts about NZ copyright law & policy in print:

The U.S. music industry opposes a proposed amendment to the New Zealand Copyright Act that would legalize the duplication of sound recordings in other formats for a purchaser’s private use.

So, to get this straight, the US music industry doesn’t want us to be allowed to use iPods.

Think about that.

That means they refuse to believe that iPods will help them increase their sales of music. They clearly want us to use portable discmans and the like, or to buy every song (at $1 US) from an online store.

The New Zealand government says this would enable consumers to employ new digital technologies and would legalize what already is common practice. The New Zealand government also notes the amendment would limit copying to one copy per format, specify that the original sound recording must be legitimate, and exclude making copies from borrowed or rented recordings.

I take issue with that amendment – one copy per song is not acceptable. I have, umm, several iPods loaded with music, and also have copies of that music in my iTunes folder and in backup. I imagine that I have 10 copies of some songs, if not more, what with all the technology detritus I have. It’s about distribution, and not about how I choose to manage my personal music.

The music industry warns that such an exception to copyright protection would make copyright infringement difficult to enforce, send the wrong message to consumers and cost the industry in sales revenue and profits.

Actually it is pretty easy to catch and prosecute the genuine pirates – they are the ones with mounds of CDs in the back room. Meanwhile we certainly don’t want the endless lawsuits that the RIAA is foisting upon its customers in the USA.

The industry adds that the exception would discourage the development of music products that would permit home copying under contractual arrangements between the consumer and the provider.

Not that it would matter, but discouraging DRM products is good – after all even the RIAA is beginning to realise that protected music isn’t really the best way to go.

FastConnect: Phone, electricty, gas and internet connections

Reading through some of the top 50 blogs. I found, on StevePavlina, this little snippet from a review on a book called “Life on Purpose”. The book seems far too religious for my taste, and the review a bit wordy, but I did like the first bullet that Steve quoted:

 1. Become Incredibly Selfish.

This is translated by the book as something like ‘Do what you enjoy doing and are good at, and let others do what they enjoy doing and are good at.’ (wording mine)  It doesn’t mean be a selfish person in the normal sense of the word.

It’s the person to person version of Ricardo’s principle of Comparative Advantage, which states that we all benefit when we do what we are best at.

So I can’t stand dealing with the electricity, gas and other utilities – and they seem to sense this by switching me off and on. I seem to have to spend hours on hold, and then actually talking to a human is often very frustrating for me, as they themselves are confronted with rigid screens and I, well I don’t cope too well with poorly designed systems. I do try to be nice to the telephonists though as they have a tough job.

I’m just getting a short term lease sorted out here in Fremantle, and I discovered that here in Australia is a company that will, after you fax them your details, organise all of that for you. The pain removal factor here is immense.

They are called FastConnect, and the good news is that they are also in New Zealand. The bad news is that they seem to be heavily based on phone operation, which is one of the things that I am trying to avoid by using a company such as this. You fill out a form, it is faxed (yes) to them and they call you back.

Please guys – how about an easy online form and communication entirely by email? And that Australian website complete with ‘Secured by Apache’ and ‘verified by Geotrust’ stickers may have been acceptable in 1996, but these days you look like rubes.

They did call me back after the agent sent a fax, but when I tried to return the call there was, sadly, no answer.

I’d love to see (for me at least) a company with a simple modern website that will let me manage all of my utilities from one location – from set up, to installations, upgrades and changes and billing. Bring it on.

Or maybe, like Rowan, I just need an assistant or an outsourced service for everything. Still I’m not sure I’d trust Sub-Continent based services without much NZ/Australia experience for this sort of thing.

50 most influential bloggers..

No kiwis on the list, but NorthXEast provides an excellent summary of who is who in the blogging world. The interesting thing to me is the number and rank of professional blogging companies and people on the list.

Also news to me – Engadget and Gizmodo were started by the same guy. I guess The Gawker Media Network should have paid him more, much much more, to stay as Gizmodo editor, as new site Engadget is now larger than his first creation.

Read it. And read the bloggers….

Losing Shirts and Shorts

I’m waiting for the tide to turn. My portfolio is growing very nicely this year – at least in USD terms. But I’ve recently got into options…

I still steadily hold a collection of longs (EBAY, AAPL, SNE) and shorts (EQR, MSFT), but I moved to replacing some of those shorts with “just out of the money longer term put options”. It is theoretically doing the same thing as shorting a stock, but it limits the downside risk to the value of the put I purchase. Let me explain…

A put option gives me the right to sell a certain number of shares at a certain value before a certain time.

Right now eBay shares are $36.77 each, and you can buy the right to sell those shares at $30 before Jan 2010 for a mere $3.90 a piece. You buy them in lots of 100, so that’s $390 to short 100 shares. That’s fantastic leverage – 100 shares is worth $3677, but you only have to outlay 1/10th of that.

That’s a good buy if you believe that between now and then there will be some sort of event that makes the shares drop towards $30. At $30 you could exercise your right to ‘put’ your shares to the market for $30. That doesn’t make sense, at exactly $30, as you’d be selling them for market price. However, if the price dropped to $25, then when you exercise the right to sell those shares to the maket for $30, and buy back the same number at $25, you’ll make a net $5 per share.

But wait – there is more, much more, and that is the time value of the option. The longer the time before the option expires, the larger the value of the option.

Between now and Jan 2010 there are a whole lot of events that could happen – markets and shares will go up and down. If the shares fall to $30, then that option will be much more valuable than just $5, as the probability that the shares will fall even further is higher. Thus the value of the option will be traded up in the market. Indeed there is as simple rule of thumb that traders use – always sell the option, never exercise early.

Right now the value of an option to put an eBay share at $40 is $7.50, which means you pay $4.50 odd over the current price of $37 for the time value of that option. Given eBay’s volatility over the last few years, that seems like a bargain. So is the market underpricing it?
Indeed -how does the market set the price?

The answer is that the price is set by traders, often at the command of hedge funds and the big banks. The trick is that these buyers and sellers are often using variants of a formula called Black Scholes (Nobel prize winning stuff) to value the options, so they come up with similar values. Others may be using Monte Carlo techniques (better) or their own proprietary models – built by ex-theoretical-physicists  using mathematical tools and techniques of such particular complexity that they really don’t deserve to exist.

Black Scholes – the basic PDE wikipedia

However, Black Scholes and many of the other models are fundamentally flawed, as they do not account for massive market events, or even massive events for a single stock. They use historical measures of volatility, and often do not plan for something called Heteroscedacity.

Go on – search for that word.

There are only 873 responses in Google, which indicates just how bad my spelling is how poorly the market understands the risks. Google Fat Tails, the layman’s term, then you’ll get a better response.

Actually, in that linked Wikipedia article is the phrase that pays:

The Black-Scholes model of option pricing is based on a normal distribution and under-prices options that are far out of the money since a 5 or 7 sigma event is more likely than the normal distribution predicts.

And that also means that you can lose your shirt if you think the market is based on a lovely bell-curve like Normal distribution. Events happen, stock prices rise and plummet sharply, and shirts are lost and won.

One of those events was the recent fall in the Kiwi dollar. You can bet that there were more than a few upset Japanese housewives that had failed to exit when the going was good, or worse yet bought leveraged Kiwi dollars near the peak.

Another event that the market isn’t pricing is a possible sharp fall in housing prices. What we saw recently was a ripple from the first USA version of that shock. There could be more to come. Much more.
So -here’s my non-diversified self managed portfolio – 43.8% up YTD. How long will it last I wonder?

my us portfolio return this year

Google video ads

Forget preroll, and postroll – the new new thing is Google’s idea of semi transparent ads over the top of the  bottom fifth of video. It may even have legs on TV – as we all move to control our own TV watching through time shifting.

Frankly this may be the only hope for TV, as consumers are increasingly driven to timeshifting to get past the great mass of advertisements on free TV.

It is to the point where I simply cannot watch a program of Free to air TV now, be it sport, movie or even news.

Scrolling or semi transparent ads may help me want to come back. The only other thing that could work is a dramatic reduction in the minutes of advertisments per hour – down to say one or two minutes of very expensive ads. Think of say four 30 second ads per hour – it would mean that you could actually watch a movie, and I’d even consider (briefly) not getting pay TV. On the other hand right now the choice for me is clear – between pay TV or no TV. No TV loses only because of rugby. The World cup rugby coverage on Channel Ten is so poor that I would simply not bother following things until the final. Thankfully all of the games are on Foxtel (Japan Fiji was excellent), and I am able to record them on my mac. Thank goodness for eyeTV, SkyTV/FoxTel and the 250 GB HDD on my MacBook Pro.