Firework in the shape of your face

http://techland.time.com/2012/04/30/fireworks-of-your-own-face-never-has-81-29-gone-to-such-good-use/

Well, apart from the fact that this one is totally out of the weirdo-ballpark, I wonder how they came up with the idea? Did the pyroeffect company hire McKinsey & Company to come up with new ideas? They organised a brainstorm with management and common workers to find monetisation and marketing ideas.
Well, at least it brought them into time magazine.
Where I feel let down by Time Magazine is that they simply print this and publish online without a picture to prove it how it looks like.

Memory lane 1999: could I have become a dot.com millionaire after all?

Recently I cleaned out old brokerage records from the boomtimes of the late 90ies/early 2000. Like probably all of us around that time, I had traded in the in-stocks like Amazon, AOL, Dell, Cisco, Intel and CNET that showed infinite promise and riches (Apple at that time was of course a complete no-go as the most unexciting stock right after Philip Morris).

While I was looking at the sheets of buy and sell, I thought to myself: what if I had not traded but had done a simply invest-and-forget strategy. Could I have been a millionaire by now?

So let's take a look where I would stand today with a typical investment of 10.000 USD in each of those stocks from let's party 'til it's October 5th, 1999 (Stock splits already factored in, all before taxes, amounts rounded for simplification)

What do you think? Gain or Pain after 13 years? The answer after the break.



Amazon: Gain of around 19800 USD - the clear winner, the only solid company after 13 years with good returns.
Dell: Loss of around 6400 USD - well, WTF is Dell after the return of Apple and the resurgence of HP and Lenovo.
Cisco: Loss of around 5000 USD - Interestingly Cisco is still a major player in the Enterprise market, but clearly not from an investors perspective.
Intel: Loss of around 2100 USD - A company as strong as Intel, still around to kick butt, but could never make up the bubble burst.
AOL: Loss of around 7000 USD - Clearly the loser of our little game. The Time Warner debacle and failure to reinvent into whatever brought the medium of the masses into nothingness.
CNET: Loss of around 6500 USD - Close second. CNET had started out in the portal game with interesting subdivisions like Buy.com and Download.com but metamorphed into blogger and consumer advice platform in the first decade of the 2Ks before being snatched by CBS in 2008 (I factored that trade into the calculation). Hadn't CBS brought CNET, they would have come first loser in our little game. Saved by the old media bell!


You do the math. On the good side, I didn't need to have worried about the final outcome. Not a chance to become a millionaire, au contraire.  Bubble remains bubble, even after 13 years and the trench is still deep. Overall from an investment of then 60.000 USD, my today cash value would have been around 53.000 USD. When I factor-in inflation over that period my cash value would be even more meagre: 41.000 USD.

But interesting times, altogether. I remember sitting in a mid-town east Manhattan Steak restaurant for lunch, discusssing the heating of the market in April 1998, watching the ticker on the business channel and Pointcast (anyone remember that?).

Selling my old CDs Pt2 - Economics

Part Two of a multiple blog entry around online CD buyer services - What prices to expect

There are several interesting things around the pricing model of the buyer services. Let's go through them one by one:

Extreme Buyer/Seller Market - When I did my initial research around CD buyer services, I was amazed at how many services there were around. I clicked myself through the first page of Google results just to get a look and feel of the different services, but there were many many more. So many that you cannot keep track. Some seem to be bigger outfits, some seem to be mom&pop trading stores - the web, the great equalizer. But what the real kicker is: the CD titles that are bought by the services differ extremely. I had a mountain of around 100 CDs sorted out. The first service I had selected (Part Three of this series will cover a bit the strategies I applied for evaluation) gave me a green light for about 40 out of 100 CDs. (the services usually outright say: We do not take this CD, or they offer a token price of 1 cent). 

So that left me with 60 CDs. 

Going to the next service, I was amazed to see that it was giving good offers for 25 of the remaining 60 CDs that were previously rejected. You get the drift: every service has a different market and a different need for material. So do not give up, when the first service said no - there are more waiting to take the load off your hand.

My style is not your style - We cannot argue over taste. And this is also true for the different prices offered. My initial theory for used CDs was: well-known artists bring higher prices than obscure artists. This is what reality shows: You cannot predict anything. The prices really seem to be completely random and it would be interesting to know the algorithm behind it. Here is my personal trend barometer from a mostly Pop / Rock / Alternative selling rooster:

- the most know artists and their works fetch the lowest prices; from my stack probably Sherryl Crowe was the most recognized name, her Globe Sessions only fetched only 22 cents. From the alternative artists Beck fared a similar fate with two CDs fetching prices only in the lower 30ies (Mellow Gold and Odelay). 

- Artsy stuff seems to bring the highest prices. Highest grosser with 1,50 EUR was Elvis Costello's Burt Bacharach collaboration "Painted from Memory", closely followed by Prefab Sprout "Jordan the comback". 

- Second tier independent artists are the pricing average ground. Artists like The Verve Pipe, 10000 Maniacs, Blue Aeroplanes came in all around my average grossing of about 80 cents per CD. 

- Solid Jazz / Swing records are the most solid bringers of money. Ella Fitzgerald's Duke Ellington Songbook Double CD brought 6,30 EUR.  

But of course there is a lot of random stuff without reasoning: Michael McDonald fetched 1,30 EUR whereas Joni Mitchell fetched only 0,30 EUR. INXS megaseller "Kicks" came in only at 0,30 EUR but Lisa Loeb's one CD wonder "Tails"high above average 1,20 EUR.

So much for the economics. Part Three will give some tipps and strategies.

Un-unified communication

About 6 years ago I held the position as an IT Strategy Manager for a global Pharma company. The buzz around Unified Communication at that time was a big one. Skype was on the rise to superstardom for private use, Microsofts Office Communicator or Lotus Sametime were rolled-out in the enterprises and Voice-over-IP replaced classic PBX-based telephony at homes and in the office. At the same time the first Macs started rolling out with build in Cameras, as did some Sony laptops. So it seemed just a matter of time until the buzz was daily business and we were able to communicate freely with voice, video, desktop sharing and data exchange between any device and any person at any location. Right?
Wrong!
It seems that we did not get further, the opposite: it seems we are taking constant steps backward! Here are my observations:
Unified: the word alone implies that there is the possibility of a common standard that allows us to connect between devices. This does not happen: every vendor has their own protocols and continues to roll-out  new protocols. Skype - Microsoft company by now - does not talk to anything else but Skype. Apple's Facetime talks only to Facetime and MS Office Communicator only talks to its kind.  And especially in the mobile space there are a million new services that apparently do exactly the same as Skype does. So we are un-unified. Each service basically all does the same, but in a slightly different way to the user and maybe here and there with a small spin (one service allows multiple Video Chats, others only one-on-one, for some this feature is free of charge, for others premium, etc.)
Communication: I observe no trend that really supports communication outside of the model that the original phone invented 120+ years ago. Each channel (voice, video, short messages, chat, sharing) still very much stands on its own, there is no cross-communication. Yes, there are some services that offer one or the other feature to cross boundaries (like Google's Voice to E-Mail translation or Apple's Siri reading a message to me), but it all has the feeling of gimmickery instead of a solution: solving the riddle of communication logistics.

Here are the discrepancies:
There always seems to be one more disconnected party: When we implement one solution that maybe fits the company internal needs, we leave out the rest of the world due to security concerns (leaving out a string of partners and vendors standing in the rain, meaning you need a new different solution to communicate with them).
There always seems to be one more device to consider: On the desktop we run a Microsoft strategy but in the mobile space we run Blackberries, Androids and iOS devices. Pop, there goes the quick chat between me - on the road with my iPad - and the guy in the office. I need to either phone him and send him my documents or need to login to VPN first, start a half baked Office Communicator mobile software and connect then - missing half of the features available to me on the desktop.

As a user and as an IT Manager this is a nightmare: for each individual constellation you will need to establish  a new service or support a new technology - a rat race not to be won.  (And I am leaving out here the infrastructure and security concerns all together).
Before I start communicating, I need to find out the most common denominator between the participants, most often ending up with the phone conferencing service and sending out E-Mails with the documents of the meeting. God forbid if I decide to make it an online Office Communicator session or Microsoft Livemeeting, only to find out halfway that it might be a good idea to invite the external project manager spontaneously to the call.

So, where is the Unified Communication in 2012?

Here are the main requirements:
- 1:1 or Conference - no need to define first what type of call you are having
- Dial-in and Over-IP - Voice
- Video for everyone - bandwidth and device independent use of video
- Cross channel abilities - chats become emails become twitters become blogposts become read phone messages become automatic conference transcripts
- Independence - my communication capabilities are the same whatever device I am using
- Follow me - routing capabilities seamlessly have my digital communication stream follow me where ever I go. My deskphone rings, I do not answer, get up and carry my laptop with me to the meeting room. My desktop computer starts ringing instead. I shut it down and walk out into the street and my iPhone starts ringing. Home, my Phone stops ringing and switches to voicemail (and then cross channel abilities kick in and transcribe the voicemails into E-Mails or SMS)
- In-company and out of company and private life
- Time decoupling: If the immediate medium (voice, video or chat) is not available, the next time-level kicks in (e.g. short messages), the next level kicks in (e.g. E-Mail / Voicemail) and so on...

Selling my old CDs Pt 1 - It worked for me.

Part One of a multiple blog entry around online CD buyer services - How it worked for me.

After going all-digital a while ago, my CD collection was settling dust. The upcoming move to Munich made me go through the 400+ strong collection and root out all the digital copy is enough part of the music. Not that I do not fancy it anymore, but the items in question are so rarely heard by me, that even in the case of a digital complete loss (= Media Mac killed plus Apple iTunes Match bancruptcy) I do not shed tears.
So I researched a little bit how I manage to sell off my used CDs and (probably for a lot of people an old hat) found a plethora of used CD/DVD buy-services. Most prominent right now in Germany seems to be "rebuy" but a google on "CD Ankauf Online" brought up an endless list of services. There are similar services for DVDs and Games.

Tried out two services to great success, each taking around 40 CDs off my hands, offering average 0,80 Euro per item, both including free shipping labels.
Both services worked as advertised, no hassles and here is how it goes:
1) Identify the CD by entering the barcode-number (either manually or in case of one of the services by scanning with the iPhone)
2) The service quotes you an instant price and puts the CD into a shopping cart
3) After you have completed the identification bit, you go to check-out (or should this say check-in, as it is  a selling transaction from your end?).
4) You enter your contact information and maybe need to register on the website of the service
5) You provide your banking details or Paypal ID - the service provider in the end wants to give you the money, after all.
6) The provider offers you a reimbursement up to a certain price (usually around 5 EUR) for the shipping or allows an online print out of a prepaid shipping label.
7) You wrap and pack the CDs, slap the label on it and send it off.
8) After a while you get the money.

The service worked for me as advertised, so I cannot comment on exceptional situations whose procedures are described in the selling/buying conditions of the providers (e.g. in case the CDs are scratched and need to be sent back to you)

Stay tuned, in the second part of this series I will write about interesting economics around the CDs and their value judged by the different providers.

First!

Decided to start a new blog. Why that? Don't you have a Facebook page and a Twitter account?
Yes, I do. But FB and @T have a rather short halftime of the things posted there. Found an interesting link or a funny cat video or ate a good ice cream? Post to Facebook = personal life, informal and easygoing. Twitter: not much noise there, it only works if your ecosystem is also twittering - which it is not!
Now the blog: more of strategic thinking, daily observations and a little bit more formal - like keeping the log on more IT and professional life related things.