Archive for December, 2003

New wi-fi distance record, stretching across 82 miles

by eleanor on 31 Dec 2003 @ 3:59 pm in Datapoints   ++

The new distance record for plain vanilla wifi is now 82 miles, as proven by students at Utah’s Weber State University.

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The Weird Science of Getting A Better Deal on Car-Rentals

by eleanor on 30 Dec 2003 @ 10:09 pm in Toys, Tips, & Tricks   ++

The Wall Street Journal advises how to navigate the complex pricing schemes behind car rentals:

• Book Early and Often - Booking early and often is the key to saving money … Unlike airlines and hotels, rental-car firms don’t charge penalties for cancellations. As a result a good way to lock in the best deal is make a reservation early, whenever you spot a good price. Then, keep shopping around and if you see a better one, book it and cancel the first one.
• Play the Date Game - During most of the year, renting vans, pickup trucks and sport-utility vehicles during the week can save money, since demand for large vehicles is higher during the weekend. Conversely, renting luxury cars such as Lincolns during weekends is cheaper because demand for those cars is higher when road warriors travel on weekdays. And like airline tickets, renting a car with a Saturday night included can save money. ..Sometimes, getting the best deal on a rental can seem counterintuitive. For instance, even if you only need a car for five days, it’s worth seeing if you can end up paying less if you take the weeklong rate.
• Use upgrades - Because many rental locations in business markets don’t have lots of small cars in their fleets, often they run out of smaller vehicles. Savvy travelers can take advantage of that by reserving a subcompact or compact car and then getting a free upgrade at the counter. Warning: This tactic is less likely to work in leisure markets, where smaller cars are more abundant.
• Get Out of the Airport - Whenever possible, try to rent from a shop that’s not on airport grounds. Renting at the airport is convenient for fliers but add-on fees can jack up a bill 12% or more.
• Think Small - Renting from smaller regional and local rental firms such as Advantage Rent-A-Car and Payless Car Rental can be cheaper than even the no-frills major companies such as Enterprise, Dollar and Alamo. The downside: Smaller players often don’t offer the premium services such as express lines and frequent-renter clubs. And local firms often don’t show up on major travel Web sites, except Orbitz.
• Start Online - Start the search online. Travel sites usually offer the broadest sampling of rates, as well as estimates of taxes and fees. With that knowledge in hand, call the rental companies to see if they will sweeten the pot. It’s always worth pushing for a deal if you spot a better price at a rival: Most companies will match it, in keeping with an industrywide push to turn telephone inquiries into sales.
• Grab the Extras - Frequent-renter programs are generally worth the time to sign up. They offer discounts and other incentives, including express lines, free upgrades and airline frequent-flyer miles. Sometimes you can get a membership for nothing: National Car Rental offers complimentary memberships to solve customer-service problems, or to people who simply ask for it. Hertz waives its $50 fee on its Gold Club for anyone renting four times a year.

Source: Edited down from Kortney Stringer’s article “The Weird Science of Getting A Better Deal on Car-Rentals” 12/30/03 The Wall St. Journal
WSJ.com - The Weird Science of Getting A Better Deal on Car-Rentals

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The IT industry shifts away from M$FT

by eleanor on @ 5:20 pm in Open Source   ++

People sometimes fault me for just posting a link to an article, without comment or summary. I’ve made a conscious effort to put down my ’so what’ thoughts within most of these postings.
However, sometimes we see an article that bears no more summary than just ‘read it’. I like this one for that reason: The IT industry is shifting away from Microsoft
A choice tidbit:

The fact is, if you are negotiating with Microsoft, and you pull out a SuSE or Redhat box, prices drop 25 per cent from the best deal you could negotiate. Pull out a detailed ROI (return on investment) study, and another 25 per cent drops off, miraculously. Want more? Tell Microsoft the pilot phase of the trials went exceedingly well, and the Java Desktop from Sun is looking really spectacular on the Gnome desktop custom built for your enterprise, while training costs are almost nil.

This article, for me, reads like Justice Penfold-Jackson’s decision back in 1999 - a scathing, point by point, cause and effect indictment. I’ve been watching M$ as it’s gone through each of these flails - from back when I was at Xerox and got to read Gartner’s defense of licensing 6.0. Altogether this is very satisfying.
Read it and wave your penguin flag.

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VOIP revolution confounds big telecom firms

by eleanor on 29 Dec 2003 @ 1:48 pm in Emergent   ++

Dennis Berman in The Wall Street Journal comments on the increasing hype around VOIP from large telecom players:

These biggies are never shy about wrapping themselves in a capital-P kind of progress, and have lauded VOIP as the most significant advancement in decades, and one that makes “good sense” for consumers and the telecom companies alike.

So what does the telecom industry get for all this good sense? Not much by way of flexibility to use its prime marketing tool: lower prices. VOIP already is typically being sold as an all-you-can-eat package, obliterating the now-meaningless, but highly profitable, distinction between local and long-distance calls.

Some cable companies already sell comprehensive calling plans for just under $50 a month. A few unproven start-ups are taking prices even lower, to $40. The big local phone companies are building or buying cheap Net-calling networks to launch attacks on one another’s turf.

It’s not entirely bad news for the industry: Net-based calling is already lowering traditional phone companies’ capital costs, and will continue to do so. And a rack of VOIP equipment is about the size of a microwave. Just one of those can replace floors’ worth of old-school telecom switches, which are about the size of an industrial refrigerator. It will be decades, however, before the upgrades are complete.

Unfortunately, cable is already in homes first - with coax covering the last mile in most of the country. Phone companies would have to lay fiber to the door to extend their capabilities further, and to begin to match the infrastructure available to their cable rivals.
But the telecoms are at least looking to the future, trying to come up with services that appeal to customers, growing revenue to help fund their capital expansions. But what to offer? Berman points out that innovation in the telecom space is limited by the existence of a very small group of equipment suppliers, that even if telecoms wanted to buy the new, it’s not in the catalogue. Not to mention the face that the telecom apocalypse of the last 4 years has wrung out any heavy-duty R&D and new product work. The companies in this space have just been struggling to survive and have put aside their focus on research in favor of growing profits. Lucent has started coming out of the woods - but it’s questionable if their moves in jettisoning their research staff will support future innovation.
We’ll see, but for now, I pass by the vacant building that once was AT&T Labs on Willow Road, and wonder how much the core identity and purpose of these firms has changed. I wonder whether innovation has shifted decisively to firms that can act on an equity-financed speculative manner, rather than incubated in cash-cow funded research labs.
Telecom’s not alone in this, for sure. One need only go up the hill to the now-independent PARC.

Source: WSJ.com - Portals
12/29/03

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Analyst to watch - China

by eleanor on 26 Dec 2003 @ 8:45 pm in Strategy-Marketing   ++

Joe Zhang, head of China stock research for UBS AG, is an analyst to watch. So far he’s used his insights from growing up in a farming village in central China to unearth fraud and opportunities.
The WSJ says:

Mr. Zhang’s knowledge of the murky world of China’s private sector makes him stand out among analysts covering the world’s most populous country.

“He has a really good sense of where these [companies] are proper businesses, and he has a lot of contacts on the ground in China,” says Ingrid Large, a fund manager with Lloyd George Asset Management and Eaton Vance Corp. in Hong Kong.

He also isn’t afraid to offer advice against the grain. Blowups of one-time highfliers such as Enron Corp. have shown how important that is in the U.S., but investors say it is just as important, if not more so, in China, where there are fewer disclosure requirements and local accounting standards and business practices are unfamiliar to many Westerners.

Most China analysts can talk authoritatively about the country’s two dozen biggest companies, many of which have American depositary receipts that are traded on the New York Stock Exchange or the Nasdaq Stock Market.

But once you move beyond these businesses, Mr. Zhang is in select company, and he covers more of China’s smaller private-sector companies than most other analysts.

Full reference, while it lasts and for subscribers:
WSJ.com - China Analyst Makes Most Of Fieldwork in Private Sector

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Changing face of office space

by eleanor on 24 Dec 2003 @ 9:59 pm in Datapoints   ++

Sheila Muto brings us an update from one of the underpinnings of business growth - the world of leaseholds.   Property developers are doing more to attract new tenants while facing some of the highest vacancy rates in the last decade.   Not only are they thinking differently about what is needed to attract leasors, they’re thinking strategically about managing their businesses.   They’re making the investment, at significant cost savings and to also achieve consistency across their properties.

Equity Office Properties Trust Inc., the nation’s biggest office owner, began installing suites in its office properties across the U.S. this year. So far, the Chicago-based real-estate investment trust has built out about 200 such suites, ranging in size from 2,500 to 10,000 square feet. Building several at a time costs 10% to 20% less than building out a single suite “because we get the economies of scale,” says Chief Operating Officer Peyton “Chip” Owen.
The upfront investment appears to be paying off for Equity Office. The company completed about 37,000 square feet of suites last month in San Francisco. About half of that space is leased. “We’ve had incredible response,” says Mr. Owen. “Small businesses are leading us out of the recession.”
Not only does the space lease quickly, but “in some situations the space becomes an incubator” because many of these small tenants eventually will need to expand, says Joseph Brancato, a managing principal in New York at Gensler Architecture, Design & Planning Worldwide. The architecture firm has been designing prebuilt space for landlords, such as Boston Properties Inc. and Tishman Speyer Properties Inc., says Mr. Brancato.

from The Wall Street Journal Link to the article while you can.

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SCO-Linux copyright battle not damaging OSS adoption

by eleanor on @ 4:12 pm in Open Source   ++

IT consulting group, Robert Frances Group (http://www.rfgonline.com), reports the results of their survey of 15 companies (ed. note - not a huge sample) on Linux adoption, which indicates that the momentum to move to open source software has not been impacted by the legal fight. The article quotes Evan Bauer, a principal research fellow with Robert Frances Group.

“Many feel they are absolutely protected by the GPL [General Public License],” Bauer said, referring to the open source software license (also called GNU GPL) that details how the open source operating system software and its source code can be freely copied, distributed and modified.
The companies in the survey represented a cross-section of sectors such as manufacturing, retail, financial services, and universities.
Bauer, a former chief technology officer with CSFB who is active in securities industry technology working groups, said the companies were queried about their return on investment regarding Linux, and whether they felt legal issues might slow their deployment of Linux in their IT environments.

Source: Internetnews.com New Survey Finds No Linux ‘Chill’ From SCO Suit.

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SW airlines deals with competitive pressures

by eleanor on 23 Dec 2003 @ 8:06 pm in Geek   ++

WSJ.com - Southwest Air Considers Shift In Its Approach
12/23/03

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Offshoring, view from BusinessWeek

by eleanor on 19 Dec 2003 @ 6:40 pm in Strategy-Marketing   ++

Two articles on outsourcing from BusinessWeek, just further tracking the issue:

The cover story for December 8, 2003, The Rise Of India, about GE’s Technology Research Center in Bangalore.

A commentary piece by Pete Engardio,
Corporate America’s Silent Partner: India from December 15, 2003.

This is starting to feel like the 1980s with Japan……

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Advertising: some on-target, others horribly wrong

by eleanor on @ 9:19 am in Strategy-Marketing   ++

Suzanne Vranica and Brian Steinberg give us a fun look at the best and worst ads from 2003 from The Wall Street Journal .

The Best

• GM’s Hummer Race commercial showing kid building own mini-Hummer for a race, then using the turf-crushing, hill-climbing feature of Hummer-ness, takes an xcountry shortcut win the race.
• McDonald’s Corp.’s “I’m Lovin’ It” - a success with kids. I have never seen these - and have found the use of “I’m lovin’ it” in follow on commercials puzzling without having seen the pilots.
• Adolph Coors Co.’s Coors Light’s “Taking One for the Team” - wingman helping out his friend. Funny, apt, and better reflective of their target market.
• eBay Inc. - “That’s on eBay” - excellent!
• Coca-Cola Co.’s Coke Classic ads with cameos by stars in a real life setting. Nice and understated, especially compared to Brittany et al. over at Pepsi.

The Worst

• Yum Brands Inc.’s KFC flouts health consciousness - “Remember how we talked about eating better?” asks a wife as she plops a bucket of fried chicken down in front of her spouse. “Well, it starts today,” she adds. The ad carried a warning, albeit in fine print: “not a low sodium, low-cholesterol food.” They must have been on crack.
• DaimlerChrysler’s Chrysler ad featuring Celine Dion singing “I Drove All Night” makes this into a pointless music video.
• Victoria’s Secret’s ad featuring models scampering to Dylan’s “Love Sick” - Dylan doesn’t sell.
• Virgin Mobile USA’s “Embryo” commercial - ick.
• Subway’s cross-dressing commercial - bad taste but has supposedly upped sales, Subway likes for it’s “shock value”

WSJ subscribers can hit the page for link to RealPlayer versions of the commercials.

Source: WSJ.com - Can You Hear Me Now?

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Summary of the Year in Ideas, 2003, from The New York Times Magazine

by eleanor on 16 Dec 2003 @ 10:38 am in Datapoints   ++

Extract of the 67 keenest ideas The New York Times Magazine could find for 2o03. It’s interesting to me that I had run across about a third of them during the course of the year.

Here’s how it works:

Each December, The New York Times Magazine looks back at the year through an unusual lens: ideas. We send out a team of researchers and reporters to investigate the latest thinking in every subject imaginable — not just war, medicine and politics but also cosmetics, literary theory and Wiffle-ball technology — and to bring back the most innovative, intriguing, mystifying and promising ideas they can find. Then we boil that vast intellectual stew down to the issue you hold in your hands: an alphabetical encyclopedia of the 67 inventions, breakthroughs and theories (big and small, nice and nasty) that made a difference in 2003.

1) Proving You’re Human
2) The Projection Keyboard
3) The Instantly Passé Trend
4) PowerPoint Makes You Dumb
5) Post-Belief Christianity
6) The Pod Car
7) Offloading Your Memories
8) The Nicotini
9) Iraq, Outsourced
10) News Guarantees
11) The Jules Verne Project
12) Junk Food Is Good for You
13) New Tools for an Occupation
14) Mind Over Matter, for Real
15) Makeup for Men
16) Kid Power
17) Labor Disputes Can Be Deadly for Consumers
18) Tornado in a Can
19) The Real Man’s Wiffle Ball
20) Translucent Leather
21) Tribute Bands in Denial
22) Turning Garbage Into Oil
23) Turnout Wins Elections
24) Ultracams
25) Unjuicing Golf
26) Video-Game Art
27) Young Success Means Early Death
28) The Time Gap
29) The Thunder Run
30) Theory Is Finished
31) Theater for One
32) Text Messager’s Thumb
33) Suspended Nationhood
34) Spray-On Stockings
35) Social Networks
36) The See-Through Coat
37) Sampling Bob Griese
38) Quiet Parties
39) The Homeland-Security Neighborhood Watch
40) The Drought-Proof Lawn
41) Darknets
42) Coincidence Theory
43) Civil Disobedience Against Affirmative Action
44) Body Language Reveals All
45) Bite-Size Nukes
46) Billboards That Know You
47) Biblical Taxation
48) Airborne Humans
49) Cinema Meets Real Life
50) Gratitude Visits
51) The Cancer Vaccine
52) Injectable Beauty
53) Hit Song Science
54) The Hammock Doesn’t Work Anymore
55) G.P.S. Art
56) Give Felons the Vote
57) G.I. Bill for College Athletes
58) Futures Markets in Everything
59) The Gray-Goo Problem
60) Forget the South
61) The Foolproof Umpire
62) The Food Simulator
63) Flop Penance
64) The Fish-Eater’s Cheat Sheet
65) Enough Debating — Let’s Start Hating
66) The Ethical Sneaker
67) Espresso You Can’t Mess Up

Source: The New York Times Magazine, December 14, 2003

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Submit to our presentation

by eleanor on 15 Dec 2003 @ 10:02 am in Datapoints   ++

This guarantees to be joked into oblivion, but it’s a good reminder, and no doubt, I’ll wonder where it came from later.
The New York Times Magazine cites an essay by information theorist and author Edward Tufte which first drew attention to the rather remarkable claim that endless, detailed powerpoint presentations are indeed mind-numbingly boring.

” In August, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board at NASA released Volume 1 of its report on why the space shuttle crashed. As expected, the ship’s foam insulation was the main cause of the disaster. But the board also fingered another unusual culprit: PowerPoint, Microsoft’s well-known ‘’slideware”

It’s a very good reminder to ensure that the purpose of a presentation is not art, or completed assignment, it is to communicate information, which takes tuning.

Source: NYTimes.com Abstract. Full article is available for purchase from NYTimes.

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Nervous about RFID? EZ-Pass does it already

by eleanor on @ 8:43 am in Emergent   ++

In discussing the emerging applications for RFID (Radio Frequency ID) tags, privacy concerns inevitably come up. Huge value exists in the supply chain for rfid tags, but you can bet that marketers salivate over the sort of Minority Report targeted marketing that could gather customer info via passive scans. The backlash is real, and in some ways, justified. However, retail purchases could easily be run through a machine to deactivate (burn off) their tags, rendering them useless.
The more subtle privacy issues have already moved to places where live tags simultaneously provide both benefit and privacy risk for consumers. One of those applications is already up and running, and has been for years. To help automate toll collection, New York state has the E-ZPass system, and California the FasTrak, for years now. Mobil has their FastPass dongle for automatic gas debit as well. It’d be an interesting survey to track how many people who are worried about RFID in the abstract are cheerful users of it now.
That convenience is not without overhead. The AP reports that this data is already being used for tracking purposes. NY state officials are already mining this data to support criminal investigations.

The New York Thruway System has received 128 subpoenas from investigators since 1998, and has turned over records in response to 61 of them, said Terry O’Brien, a spokesman for the thruway system.

And here’s an example for the libertarians among us:

According to a newspaper report, New York City officials last month transferred 30 detectives out of the narcotics bureau for allegedly claiming false overtime. They were discovered passing through E-ZPass lanes miles from where they were supposed to be working.

I hate mindlessly mouthing quotes, but Scott McNealy’s “get over it” comes unbidden to mind.

Source: originally an AP story, which seems now preserved only on blogs (updated 2/10/2004). See this blog (since their is so basic, you must scroll down or search to the entry for Dec 14, 2003) . The original title of the article was “E-ZPass Card an Investigative Tool” from THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, 12/12/2003. Scott McNealy quote from the 1999 Jini launch is discussed here

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Open Source SW development process

by eleanor on 13 Dec 2003 @ 9:26 pm in Strategy-Marketing   ++

This paper by Tom Adelstein does a good job of explaining what open source means for businesses and how it integrates seamlessly into, and actually promotes, quality, efficient software development practices.

The efficiency of this model lies in the use of standards, the large on-line community from which to draw assistance, team members and help from the public. Instead of having to send an analyst to interview users the team starts with a standards base which has already consulted the user community. Once the project team has generated early code they can accept or reject feature requests.

People refer to Open Source development as a collaborative model. We can also refer to the model as dynamic in that you can characterize it by continuous change, activity, or progress. Projects continue to improve and growth. Projects feed on each other so that the collective knowledge of the group expands exponentially.

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Free Wi-Fi in SF?

by eleanor on @ 1:58 pm in Toys, Tips, & Tricks   ++

TechTV aired a story about free wi-fi in SF.
Bay Area Research Network sounds aptly named. They’ve got a white paper detailing their deployment strategies — an interesting view into ISP-land.

SFLan is another service, one that seems to actually be up and running. Here’s a how to link from their site:

With a laptop: Go in the vicinity of a SFLan node. Associate with it: The SSID is sflanNN, where NN is the number of node, e.g. sflan13. No WEP. You’ll get an IP number assigned via DHCP.

I’ll have to check these out the next time I’m up there with my navi.

Source: Slashdot.org San Francisco’s Got Free Wi-Fi

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An Economic Analysis Model from Brad DeLong

by eleanor on 5 Dec 2003 @ 3:04 pm in Emergent   ++

Economist Brad DeLong posted a blog entry, slide-off-the-tonguily titled, A Framework for the Economic Analysis of Technological Revolutions, with an Application to Nanotechnology.
To get past the daunting title, we’ll break it down. He simply aims 4 questions at nanotech, with an eye to understanding the already-apparent effects of the technology change, as well as to speculate up on its future impact.
His 4 questions are: What becomes cheaper?, What bottlenecks or scarcities (human or material, in my view) emerge?. The last two are related to risk and form two sides of the same coin: “What risks blindside the society as the technology spreads?, What risks do people guard against that turn out not to be risks at all?”
Interesting piece all in all, but I think the greatest value is in this framework.

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Homeland Security and Sensors - Pub Talk at World Internet Center

by eleanor on 4 Dec 2003 @ 4:11 pm in Events & Happenings   ++

Last night I attended a pub talk at the World Internet Center on sensor networks and homeland security.
I’ve been working in the rfid and sensor networks space with a couple of clients, and so have been tracking developments in these two spaces. This session underscores confusion that I’ve experienced with clients in gaining traction around the term sensors. This noun when applied to devices is as generic as you might imagine, covering specialized ’sensors’ that might sniff for poisons or biohazards, to those that would track movement, to those that would take some action, such as unlocking a door.
These sensors can be controlled via different networks, using the rfid transmission framework, or emergent ones, such as Motes from UCB.
The upshot of the presentation was that the industry itself is in confusion. The technology is still coming up, true applications are distant, consumers are nervous, and even the US Government, which has put aside $800 Million for investment in technology under Homeland Security programs, is moving slowly into this space.

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Haas Professors Debate Corporate Governance

by eleanor on 3 Dec 2003 @ 10:32 pm in Events & Happenings   ++

I was just at an event put on by the Haas School of Business’ South Bay Alumni group in Menlo Park. It was a debate between 2 Haas professors, Prof. Ben Hermalin (the Willis H. Booth Professor of Banking and Finance, Haas Economic Analysis and Policy Group) and Prof. David Vogel (the George Quist Professor of Business Ethics Chair, Haas Business and Public Policy Group, and Editor, California Management Review) on the topic of “Has anything changed in Corporate Responsibility?”.
The debate was not, perhaps, as lively as the prior session - the profs did not seem to be too far apart in the substance of their positions. Ostensibly, Prof. Vogel was in favor of greater regulation (such as Sarbanes-Oxley) and believes it will address the problems, while Prof. Hermalin was more cautious and inclined to see the negative impact of regulation upon companies.
My interest in this topic stemmed from the discussion of agency issues, aligning the interests of diverse stakeholders. Prof. Hermalin argued that executive compensation has kept in line with the increasing demands of the job as intermediate layers of management have been stripped away. That the effects of the downsizing process of the last 20 years have been to make management structures much more flat, meaning that top executives now have far more direct reports.
His point connected very well with my recent reading of The Witch Doctors, a book assessing the impact of management gurus upon the corporate landscape. To expand upon Prof. Hermanlin’s point, those diverse direct reports, with all the additional info screening, decisions, day to day management, and simple filtering, make the job much more complicated. Add to that the increased focus on stock performance, which in my book leads to a single-minded concentration on short-term results. Even before the recent scandals, the results of a study by consulting firm Booze Allen Hamilton, published in their journal Strategy+Business found increased exec turnover as senior executives and CEOs have been yanked for poor performance.
The truth is that we’re still stuck in the age of superhero executives - we’re jaded and mad at their failures, but only because we are still expecting the man at the top (deliberate choice of word) to be a miracle worker.
During the debate, Prof. Hermalin also predicted that requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley and some the governance recommendations now pushed (outsider boards et al.) will make the CEO job even harder and riskier. All of which will require a natural increase of compensation to make the risk palatable.
We all know there are market failures around CEO/senior executive compensation, but there are good reasons for the comp being high. Of course, there theoretically exist a pool of female candidates (which I have to assume are “second tier” since they are across the board passed over), who might take the job for less pay, just to be given the chance to perform. Perhaps we will see them step up to the plate and find greater acceptance. Something’s got to change…..

Source: CEO Succession 2002: Deliver or Depart Strategy+Business Summer, 2003.

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