Ready, Fire, Aim! - Mihail's Public Blog

The new high definition DVD or HD-DVD for your HD-TV is now here (one in ten new TVs sold or a total of 2.5M TVs is one of these) thanks to Sony according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required). A DVD doesn't have enough capacity to hold all the digital data required for a high definition versiono f the typical movie but an HD-DVD can...and is only priced at $3,800, a price that is sure to fall just like the prices for DVD players fell 95% in five years.

For one thing, current DVDs aren't really high definition. The technical details of why that's so involve a blur of numbers. For starters, DVDs have 480 horizontal lines on the screen, while HD-TV systems have as many as 1,080 lines.

Think of it this way. If traditional TV has the general quality of a newspaper picture, then a DVD image is like a color photograph in Time or Newsweek. Real high definition, though, is akin to a well-produced coffee-table book full of rich colors in exquisite detail.

Yikes, that's a lot of new cellphones. If only a small percentage were being donated to nonprofits that refurbish and provide them to battered spouses and others who need them. According to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

Over 423 million mobile phones were sold world-wide in 2002, 6% more than the previous year, according to a study released Monday by Dataquest Inc., a unit of market research firm Gartner Inc. The industry benefited from a strong Christmas season, selling nearly 123 million mobile phones world-wide in the fourth quarter -- a 14% increase from last year.

Microsoft has a new product now in beta testing that has come out of its NetGen product group according to this AP story in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required):

The Redmond, Wash., company is betting its new software, called threedegrees (www.threedegrees.com), will define hipness in greasing teen social connections -- and help it capture a budding generation from competitors led by America Online.

Aimed at the 13-24 age group, the software, now in beta-testing, is like high-octane instant-messaging. People can create groups of as many as 10 people, trade messages, listen to music from each other's collections and share photos. Each group has its own icon and allows users to create new groups that add -- or drop -- others at will.

The last holdout from the online price wars, the cruise business, is finally succumbing with one lucky traveler managing to bid on a 17-day cruise from Fort Lauderdale to Italy for $19 (plus taxes & fees) on skyauction.com. Hmm, shouldn't this site be seaauction.com? I'm assuming the combination of a weak economy and that Norfolk virus epidemic on every second cruise ship (or so it seemed for a while) hasn't been good for business! :)

This Wall Street Journal story (subscription required) confirms what the head of one of the major cruise companies was telling me in LA a couple of months back.

[O]nly 2.7% of cruises will be booked online this year, up from 1.3% two years ago. In contrast, about 25% of airline tickets are now booked online, according to Jupiter Research.

Now, however, Priceline.com (priceline.com¹), Travelocity.com (travelocity.com²) and Icruise.com (icruise.com³) are moving aggressively to challenge the conventional wisdom that people who book cruises can't figure all this out on their own. In addition, the cruise industry, because of the increasing likelihood of war, is looking for ways to fill its berths. The result is a new level of discounting on top of the industry's recent price-cutting.

Earlier this month Google announced a new advertising program that sells and delivers ads on other publishers' Web sites taking advantage of its already growing keyword advertising business according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

The new ad program is content-targeted and automated. So, an Internet user reading a Web page on astronomy might see a related, Google-delivered advertisement for telescopes on that page. The program makes Google, which has focused primarily on providing search technology, look more like an advertising company, similar to DoubleClick Inc., which sells and delivers ads on third-party customers' Web sites.

"They're not laser-focused on search," said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch, a newsletter. "This makes them a media company, an advertising network."

Google, which serves more than 200 million searches each day on its network of Web sites and partner sites, said this is a natural extension of its existing one-year-old advertising program. Google, which boasts more than 100,000 advertisers world-wide, said it already has been serving ads on other sites, such as AOL Time Warner Inc.'s America Online, EarthLink Inc. and Ask Jeeves Inc.

Broadband (which makes your experience up to 10 times as fast as your regular dialup connection at about two to three times the price) is finally beginning to take off as significantly more of the country now has access to it -- via cable for some 80% of all cable users, and DSL for 60% of the country -- according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

Even so, cable is often the better option for consumers. For one thing, the connection speeds tend to be faster than DSL (although cable networks are also more susceptible to slowdowns if all of your neighbors start surfing at the same time). Cable also has a more basic advantage: The service is available in more parts of the country.

...Consumers are responding. Last year, cable and DSL companies added 6.4 million subscribers -- their biggest year ever -- for a total of 17.4 million users according to Leichtman Research Group.

Lee Gomes has an amusing Wall Street Journal column on the plethora of what he calls "yuppie papers" that make choosing a simple white 8.5 x 11 letter size paper for your printer a nightmare that seems to require a MPT or Masters in Paper Types, when all it reqruires is good common sense to go with the paper weight and price you can afford. He also had this interesting statistic on paper consumption that I hadn't heard about:

Everyone knows about those goofball predictions from a generation ago about how computers would make for a "paperless office." For a while, of course, the opposite was happening; think of how many trees gave their lives in the service of PowerPoint presentations. For much of the 1990s, U.S. consumption of office paper was growing at nearly double the rate of the gross national product.

Two years ago, though, those trend lines suddenly reversed -- at about the same time as the Nasdaq bubble burst, as a matter of fact. Since then, office paper consumption has been flat, or even down, says Jaakko Poyry, a forestry research company in Finland.

Under pressure from the religious parties that have made recent gains (in the last elections) due to an increasing backlash against the pro-American moderates and made worse by the Iraqi Freedom initiative, Internet censorship has arrived in Pakistan according to this AP story in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required). Right now it appears that only porn sites are being blocked but next it may be any other sites that the religious right or the government disagrees with, maybe sites that talk about safe sex or HIV/AIDS or what have you...which is the whole problem with starting censorship.

Pakistani authorities said Sunday they've blocked 1,800 Web sites in a crackdown on Internet pornography in this deeply conservative Muslim country.

But it's not proving to be easy.

"Curbing porn sites is as difficult as blocking the wind," said Web engineer Farhan Parpia, of the state-owned telecommunications company. "You block one, and dozens more come up like mushrooms."

I've begun to increasingly use SMS text messages as a way to communicate with friends on my cellphone. It is a non-obtrusive way of communicating via cellphones (since I hate the sound of cellphones ringing and people yapping on them incessantly next to me in public places).

According to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required), the government in countries like Hong Kong, where people are especially wired, has begun to communicate with subscribers on important issues like SARS scares. However, SMS text messages are just as reliable as cellphone calls. That is, they're not very reliable:

Recent studies give an idea of the scope of problem. A December test by Keynote Systems found that about 7.5% of sent text messages get never reach their destination. Critics of the study pointed out that many messages considered lost may have been just slow to arrive (Keynote considered anything not received in two minutes to be lost), but in the context of a crisis, this matters.

Due to various misteps on the part of the music industry and ignorance of what consumers are willing to pay for has lead to music piracy continuing unabated in the absence of comprehensive legit alternatives according to this MIT Technology Review story reprinted in the Wall Street Journal (subscrption required):

The humble jukebox has been a mainstay of soda shops, pizza parlors, and pubs since the 1950s. Yet creation of an online equivalent of the jukebox -- one that elicits the same sentimental and lucrative appreciation as its coin-operated predecessor -- has thus far proven a nearly impossible endeavor.

...Various analyses of the half-dozen or so services put the total of their combined subscribers at between 300,000 and 500,000. Emusic, the one legitimate music service that discloses its subscriber numbers, claimed 70,000 subscribers as of year-end 2002. Meanwhile, Kazaa, the leader of the file-trading services not sanctioned by the music industry, has been downloaded more than 200 million times.

A growing number of Arab Americans and people with pro-Arab or Palestinian views are being targeted with impunity according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

Arab-American activist Nawar Shora checked his e-mail one day and found scores of angry messages asking why he hated Americans and Jews. The messages were responding to e-mails marked as coming from him.

Only one big problem: Mr. Shora never sent the hate mail.

Mr. Shora, a legal adviser to the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, was the victim of a form of harassment in which fake e-mail is sent using real addresses.

AOL has filed lawsuits in the US District Court in Alexandria, VA seeking damages of more than $10 million after receiving more than 8 million individual spam complaints from its subscribers according to this AP story in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required):

America Online has filed five federal lawsuits targeting spammers it accuses of sending about one billion junk e-mail messages promoting mortgages, steroids and pornography to its subscribers.

...Individuals named in the lawsuits were Michael Levesque of Issaquah, Wash., and George A. Moore Jr. of Linthicum, Md. Their numbers were unlisted, and registration records for their domain names had false phone numbers. Most of the defendants are "John Doe," meaning AOL couldn't immediately determine their identities. However, filing the lawsuits gives AOL additional authority to subpoena service providers and others to try to track down the spammers.

As the court-appointed date of November 24, 2003 approaches cellular companies are apprehensive (and putting their legal might behind fighting this decision) about what it'll mean for their business to allow customers to take their phone numbers with them according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required). For instance, I have a cellphone that ends in "-1000" and I would never have left Verizon because I love that number and most people I know have that number for me, and it would be difficult at best to get the new number to everyone.

He cites the experience of Hong Kong, where cellular-number portability was implemented in 1999. There, monthly churn rose from 2.5%-3.5% of customers to 9%-10% in the quarter it was put in place, and a massive price war ensued. Churn has settled back into its original range, but rises to 5% or 6% every year on the anniversary of portability when many customer contracts expire. Portability is also the rule in other countries, including Australia and the United Kingdom, though churn hasn't increased as much in the U.K. because it can take weeks for numbers to be transferred.

....Keeping down customer defections is vital: It generally takes nearly a year for a carrier to earn its money back from the cost of acquiring a customer. The average customer stays with a carrier for roughly three years, translating to two years of operating profit. But if monthly churn rises from its current level of 2.8% to, say, 6%, it means a carrier's profitable period could be reduced to as little as four months before the subscriber moves on and the carrier has to start the process all over.

The bad news continues for the large travel industry according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

"We've suffered nine plagues, with SARS being the ninth," says Barry Sternlicht, chief executive of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc., a White Plains, N.Y., company that has the Sheraton and Westin brands. Starwood saw Asia as the strongest piece of its global lodging business -- until SARS. "We were making money in places like Kuala Lumpur for the first time in years," Mr. Sternlicht says. Last week, SARS pushed the occupancy rate at Hong Kong's Sheraton Kowloon...down to just 14% -- "and that was only because people couldn't go home," Mr. Sternlicht says.

...The slowdown is spotlighting just how important tourism has become to the global economy. The World Tourism Organization, a United Nations affiliate based in Madrid, counted 715 million trips to another country last year, up more than 50% from 1990 and up more than 150% from 1980. Foreign visitors spent $470 billion in 2001 on travel, hotels, meals and attractions in other countries. That amounts to about 10% of all international trade and 5% of total global economic output, the World Tourism Organization says.

Esther Dyson devoted her PC Forum (which now stands for Platforms for Communications) conference to "Who? What? Where? Data Comes Alive" according to this Fortune column which covered Intel President Otellini's speech:

Otellini took a moment to brag about PCs, despite the crowd's apparent apathy. He said the global PC industry would return to double-digit growth again this year after a flat year in 2002 and a decline in 2001. But he conceded that, "the industry is still trying to figure out when the corporate refresh will happen." That's the time when companies finally start buying in quantity to replace all those outdated PCs they bought preparing for Y2K. Otellini says there are 500 million PCs out there with processors no faster then 700 Megahertz, which means they can't run the latest operating systems or security software from Microsoft.

The capture of this domain is amusingly reported as the first success of the Iraqi war in this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

So when ex-Marine and Gulf War veteran Darryl Pollock heard the Pentagon had officially launched "Operation Iraqi Freedom," he took it as a call to arms.

No, the 40-year-old night shift employee at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. didn't rush to put on his old uniform. He charged straight online and single-handedly captured the first valuable territory of the war -- the iraqifreedom.com Web site.

Revive, a "purplish, fruit-flavored water laced with vitamin B and potassium" is sold by Energy Brands, a fast-growing company according to this Fortune article:

The product represents a tiny but growing niche in the $7.7-billion-a-year bottled-water industry, which is also expanding. According to Beverage Marketing, in 1991 the average American bought 9.3 gallons of nature's best (not counting tap water). Ten years later that figure had more than doubled, to 19.5 gallons of bottled water per person. So far, enhanced water represents just 1% to 2% of all bottled waters, but between 2000 and 2001 its sales more than quadrupled, from $20 million to $85 million. Analysts say it's still gathering momentum.

From a story in the UK newspaper The Guardian about the renaming of French Fries on Capitol Hill:

Yesterday Republican legislators deemed the nation's favourite side dish unpatriotic, ordering the cafeterias in the US House of Representatives to change French fries to "freedom fries".

"This is a small but symbolic effort to show the strong displeasure of many on Capitol Hill with the actions of our so-called ally, France," said. Bob Ney, chairman of the house administration committee.

The state has started cashing in on the items confiscated by the security folks...by selling them on eBay under the handle, CaliforniaGold2000, according to this San Francisco Chronicle story:

So far, $16,281 has been made selling objects taken from passengers at Oakland and Sacramento airports -- the only ones in Northern California to participate in the state program.

...We're putting items that are reusable back in the hands of people," Deignan said. "On EBay, it's egalitarian. It opens the bidding to the world."

Over 4,000 people have bet about $250,000 at this online gambling site on whether the US will go to war or not according to this San Francisco Chronicle story. There are approximately 1,000 online gambling sites that are taking bets!

Thousands of armchair gamblers are logging onto Internet bookmakers, where they can place bets on the date and hour the United States will attack Iraq. At Costa Rica's www.betonsports.com, winning bets that the war starts next week would pay off 2-to-1; the week after, 1.5-to-1.