Of Relevance

So once again I am setting off on the “A blog post a day, for 30 days” challenge. I have attempted this before and have failed miserably, but am hoping that this time better time management will help me succeed.

I am going to see if I can identify a blogging format that works better for me than my past formats. I think I place an onus on blog posts to be lengthy and well argued (whether I achieve this is questionable), and therefore I am put off by the time commitment necessary to write a post.

I am going to try something relatively new for me: rather than post on one topic, I am going to try and post many short paragraphs on various topics. My inspiration will come mostly from my news reader, which is as good a place to start as any. I won’t limit myself to this format, but expect to see it more often here.

“TsFTD” stands for Thoughts of the day, by the way.

Here goes.

In Google’s words, the service…

..is designed to develop mobile applications that serve the needs of poor and other vulnerable individuals and communities, most of whom have limited access to information and communications technology.

The power of the Internet extends beyond cool mapping technology, wikipedia at our fingertips and online shopping. We should not forget that it offers the potential to save lives, improve economic conditions, educate and uplift. It’s heartening to see Google spend efforts to connect the poor, and it is another example of how the Seacom cable is already affecting and improving Africa.

Sticking with the Google (which owns Youtube). From tomorrow you will be able to include a link with any video you post, so that your viewers can click on it and be taken to another website (preferably one that has *something* to do with the video itself. This will drive traffic away from Youtube of course, but since it seems Google has a footprint everywhere, they probably really don’t care. My understanding is that the link will be in the format of the layover ad we are used to seeing already..but you’ll have full control over the text.

Super insightful article from Techrunch exploring the potential of Bitly as a competitor to Digg. Digg gets 20,000 unique URL submissions per day. Bitly gets close to 3 million. Now both services are trying to emulate each other, and I will be watching with interest to see this unfold.

I love bookshops. Even the pathetic excuse-for-ones in Pretoria are my favourite hangouts. So when in New York, I feel as if I am in heaven. Here, the book shops seem to have every title imaginable, spanning multiple storeys of floor to ceiling shelves. I could get lost in one for days.

There is a 3 floor Barnes and Noble a couple of blocks from my hotel. I pass it often, and go in at least twice a day. There is a small Starbucks on the top floor, and I sit and read, while my feet take a well deserved break from all that walking. Mostly, I stumble on the books. (A cover sells the book, at least to me).

But someone tweeted a link to an excerpt of the latest Guy Kawasaki book, and I was intrigued to see it in full glory. Now, the quantity of books in the shop can be a drag when you want to buy something specific, because how do you actually find it? Barnes and Noble have a novel (ha! a pun!) idea: there are computers all over the place, and you search for the book you want much as you would on Amazon. When you find it “online”, you click on “Show me where” and the screen displays a map of the store, with the exact location of the book. You can even print the “map” if you want to.

Stunning. I found the book in no time, and it seemed to live up to all expectations. So you would think that by making the shopping experience as painless as possible, Barnes and Noble are gaining a new client, right?

Wrong.

The 5 books I chose today would have cost me $111.84 at Barnes and Noble. But guess what? At Amazon.com they only cost me $72.10. So with free shipping and next day delivery, I still save $40.

And because Amazon have this built in intelligence where they harness other people’s shopping patterns, they can recommend other titles to me too, and I will probably end up buying some before final checkout. So possibly the total profit for Amazon is still pretty much what it would have been for Barnes and Noble had I stuck with them.

I don’t think this spells the doom of bookshops, of course. But it does not bode well for them either.

(Note: Had I bought the books at Exclusive Books, I would have paid R1,890!!! That means I got them at 30% of the price!!! I’ll save comment on that for another blog post!)

(What have I bought so far? Click on title for Amazon page – no affiliate sales here, lol.

• Stumbling on Happiness
• Nudge
• The Art of the Start
• Reality Check
• How the Mighty Fall

)

So I’m in New York.

I’m no travel noob, but there is something about visiting New York that is different to visiting any other city. It’s almost as if it is “The.City”. And in a way I guess it is.

Last time I was here (eons ago) I was a student in Boston, about 4 hrs north of New York. Even then I remember it took a couple of visits for the City to grow on me. At first I found it too haphazard, too busy, too lonely. But that soon changed. The energy of the City takes over, and there is a definite promise of potential in the air. I would walk past the 5th Avenue shops, knowing that one day they would be mine. My boyfriend’s apartment was slightly bigger than his bed, and that was great too, because I knew that that would all change when we grew up to be responsible adults.

So here I am, the responsible adult. With no apartment on 5th Avenue yet, and with great disdain of the shops that charge $400 for a belt. So at least the responsible adult worked out right ;-). As I walk the streets of New York now, impressed by little that is in the shops but more by the sheer energy and life of the place, I find myself wondering if I could live here permanently. I am still not sure, but I suspect the answer is “No”.

It’s just too busy. I think that that works in ones favour when one is at the beginning of a career, or at the end (with retirement). But in the middle, it must just be exhausting. Life is a battle here, that much is quickly obvious. People are focussed on money. Most conversations I eavesdrop are related to job security, money issues and so on. It’s on the people’s minds all the time.

It doesn’t help that New York is ridiculously expensive. To rent an apartment that could even mildly compare to my living conditions in SAfrica would cost about $5,000 per month. And I must emphasise “mildly compare” … that would get me 2 bedrooms in about 100 square meters, which is about a quarter of what I have now, minus the garden and pool. Kid’s school would be another $3,000 pm and the other costs are equally astronomical. A coke in a restaurant is $4, a movie $12.50 and so on. So the bottom line is…you need to be pretty loaded.

Of course, New York offers you the opportunity to get loaded pretty fast. Be good at what you do, and recession or not, you are going to take home the salary that is needed to pay those bills. My problem is that I have never been the salary kind of girl.

So in some ideal wish-I-wish-I-might world, I guess I could have an apartment here, and visit for short trysts of shopping and theatre, maybe a bit of business but always with the option of going back home. I wouldn’t mind spending a full summer here though, especially with my kid. She would definitely benefit from the very different cultural environment.

And I guess that is new York’s biggest pull: there is just so much to do here. You could never be bored…at worst you could simply be overwhelmed. In that ideal world I mentioned earlier, I would sign up for photography classes, explore museums, take up roller blading again, learn French, take some college classes at NYU…maybe even learn to cook. But I am smart enough to know that the reality would be far harsher, because the pace of life needed to keep head-above-water here would probably not allow me to do many of those things.

One caveat that needs to be mentioned: I purposefully wrote this before I had any business related meetings etc, which start tomorrow. I am fully aware that once I meet people in my industry, or potential future business partners my enthusiasm for the city could increase drastically. And if it does, I will note it duly here.

Photo by Sunsurf, via Flickr

I’ll be flying to New York shortly, and on a whim walked into a travel agent this morning to see what kind of fares an expert could get me. After typing for a good 20 minutes while I twiddled my thumbs (and twittered), this is what she offered:

SAA: R10,252
Delta: R10,432
Air France: R9,652

Not bad, but I’d prefer to fly through London and have three meetings there while in transit. I had already researched this possibility, and knew that Virgin offered a good deal. I asked the travel agent to investigate, and she came back with a fare of R13,855. She said the taxes alone are over R5000, and it just wasn’t worth it.

Now, normally, you’d take her at her work, right? After all, she is a professional, an expert in her field. She must have some connection to a database of flights that you could never hope to have. Right? Wrong.

I got back to my office, logged into Travelstart.co.za, plugged in my dates and within 2 minutes was booked on a Virgin fight, via London to NYC for R8,317, all inclusive!!!

So: without having to drive to a mall, find parking, wait for an available agent, wait for 20 minutes while she types and types, give away my contact details etc etc, I was able to get a fare at about 40% LESS than she could.

Online travel booking – what a pleasure. Travel agents: Bon Voyage.

I have a lot of online accounts to 3rd party services. Some of them are irrelevant to me, and some not. Many of them have content that I have created, and that cannot be found anywhere else (such as this blog). When I die, and especially if my death is going to be unexpected, my family will have a hard time to access these services, should they wish to do so. That’s because I am not in the habit of writing down my passwords etc. They are simply stored in my head.

So I was intrigued to come across Legacy Locker. It’s an ingenious service. For a fee, my family will be given the logins and passwords to services, as stipulated by me. They will also receive a “last email”. There is a strict procedure for determining that I am really dead, so there is little chance of security breach.

The fee is quite hefty though, at $300 (or $30 annually, if you don’t think you have that long :-) )

In theory, I guess if my family had access to my principal email account, they could get access to all my other services, by simply requesting a new password, and receiving it via that email. But we have to remember that not everybody is as online savvy as you and me, and sometimes it is nice to have it delivered in black and white. Of course, I could also just type it all up and attach it to my will, for free. (I do after all, have to inform the Executor of the existence of my info with Legacy Locker). But I still believe that there will be people who are eager to signup for this service, and there will be scores of people who will be grateful for that foresight.

The price point is also interesting. In theory, since the service does not really store any serious files itself, the infrastructure cost is minimal. Yet the price is not. The founder could easily have priced this at $10 or $15 and probably still make a hefty profit. On the other hand, since this goes hand in hand with estate planning, one wants to know that the company is serious, and will stick it out for the long run (or at least longer than you). I wonder if we are slowly going to move away from the “Should it be free?” question to the very opposite side of “Should we charge a premium because it will enhance the perception of value ?”. Or if, in true web 2.0 style, there will be a plethora of copycats who are going to compete on price, and bring the price down to an almost free product?