Andreas Wacker

still worth reading
even after a couple of weeks. Thx BlogsNow

That’s an actual quote of a client in an email received a couple of minutes ago. It is his first month with Interdubs, and he is not used to the fact that the bill will only arrive once the month is over. And then he can pay it. Or not. If he should feel like that. Which sounds ‘good hearted’ or ‘weak’. But it makes actually allot of (business) sense: Most of my clients have made more money with the site in their first week of using it, then it will cost them for whole month. A not so significant part of them actually takes just a few hours to make the 285 that the services costs them. Either by direct billing or by improved client relationships. I was aware of this when I designed the system and set the price. The price is solely based on the system working as well as it seems to be. It is arranged around my costs and the future potential of more clients. And maybe on the fact that I like to code fast.

I really hate the business model that tries to leach on to the success of its clients. Network Neutrality is one of those. Phone companies would sure love to charge more for important business conversations than for idle chit chat.

But back to Interdubs: having a super reasonable price that are people actually eager to pay makes everything much easier on everybody. So far people paid their bills. The majority of companies in record time. Thanks again and also from here. If I would try to squeeze more money out of the service, then I might need an accounting department that starts bugging people. I’d rather not.

On the other side with the latest feature additions the price / performance ratio is in danger to tip from “great” to “ridicolously great”. I have feedback from many of my clients saying that the service is too cheap. And I suspect that I could actually sign up more people if the price were higher. Most people think just because the competition is ten times more expensive it also would be better.

Germans don’t like to part from their money. On average each of them has 57.900 Euro (85,000 Dollars right now) in the bank or in stocks. Per person. Not per household. On average people in Germany spend 10% less than they make. That probably explains why S-Class Mercedes or Porsches are a rare sight here. They get made and sold to people that have the money (these days mostly found in countries with oil) or ones that pretend they have (hm, let me guess where that would be). Tragically much of those saved Euro’s were used to finance US mortages.

Right now the Iraq war seems to have cost 482 Billion US$.
So Germany could have paid for 14 of those. From it’s savings.

Annie Leonard talks about stuff Whoever she is.

I am with her. To a point. The breastmilk part is a bit much, and on technology she is just plain wrong. Which discredits the whole piece somewhat. And that is a real shame. Since the whole consumerism / consumption stuff weighted against diminishing returns in respect to happyness is a very important point. And there are others in this presentation that are pretty obvious and get equally ignored. Still worth the link, and maybe even worth watching.

Still can not get a Wii for Christmas? It’s actually Bush fault. Sounds crazy, still true, and just the tip of some horrible iceberg. Nintendo makes those Wii’s as fast as they can. Then they like to make as much money with them as possible. If they sell them in Europe for 250 Euro they get 40,721 Yen. For the ones they ship to the US they get 27,630 Yen. That’s 47% more profit for them. No wonder there is ample supply of Wii’s in Europe.

But that’s currencies, what has Bush to do with it? Well, he makes the fiscal policy. Before he became President you needed to pay 0.9 US dollars for each Euro. Now it 1.47. That’s a sixty three percent decline in value. That’s just great. YellowCake disciples will be quick to point out that this low rate would help the economy since US exports would become cheaper. This is true, but only 16% of the US enconomy is based on exports. Most of the country is depending on the inflow of capital. Or should I say ‘was’? How attractive is it to invest Euros into dollar when you get less and less back out?

So not getting your sweaty little hands on a Wiimote in the foreseeable future might actually not be your biggest problem.

According to this article China holds 1.4336 trln US$.
Big number. Each Chinese seems to make 1500 dollars a year. There are 1,321,851,888 Chinese. Which would mean that all Chinese would not need to work for 8.6 months if they would just spend the Dollars that the chinese reserve holds.

Or they could finance a seven year Iraq war. Out of the cash they have sitting around. And with the kind of spending the US military got used to. Something tells me that the red army has a different pricelist then the military in the US.

So, it seems that having stuff made over there for years somehow gave them allot of money. And therefor power.

I should start writing invoices in &Euro;
Seriously. From 0.90 US cents to 1.448 in five years. Thanks Mr Bush. Asshole!

progress has many faces

Somebody managed to send an email out that the iPhone would be delayed. In the following hours that it took the official Apple PR machine to react and ‘catch the bad meme’ the Aaple did go down by a couple of dollars. Then it rebound. Somebody could have made 3% in a couple of hours.

update 5/17/07:

techcrunch says that the false engadget news wiped of four billion dollars in market cap in six minutes. New travels fast it seems.

Phone companies. Now they call Cingular AT&T. Whatever that means.
I realized that I picked the wrong minutes plan. Too high. Trying to change it.
Of course the web form get’s stuck when you try to submit your information.
The Cingular site is the worst orange thing I ever saw.
It will not help if they make it blue again, and call it at@t.
It should work, and it does not:
The autopay feature somehow stopped working. That’s the only
thing that it has to do: pay my bills. The card is right, still works, is still valid and covered.

Today the 10 was packed. Stalled. All the way. The ‘10′ is a highway in Los Angeles. Luckily I was traveling in the other direction. When I pass these traffic jams I wonder how much the cars are worth that sit there on the other side of the Highway. Since I am waiting on computers right now anyway, I did the math on that. I came up with 153 Million US$ dollars that I passed in ten minutes of driving. Assuming 15,000 US$ average car value. Since we are talking Los Angeles, so that might even be low.

The next thought is how much money has gone into expanding and maintaining that strip of road. How many new roads have been built? But the number of cars certainly has gone up.

The problem is, that people don’t make the connection anymore between traffic jam and road/car ratio. They just sit they and endure it. People actually endure allot of things.

“The interface of a cheeseburger” is one of these Blog entries that validate those 30 Million other blogs with random noise in one simple swoop. If you ever contemplated to create anything that get’s used by a human, be it nuclear power plant, condom or breakfirst table for your dearest one, you could find some great insight in this text from Oliver Reichenstein. At least I think it’s by him. While content and form of the text are pretty nice it seems almost a relief that ‘Information Architects Japan’ messed up the branding for themselves. Sticking Lego’s on business cards won’t help either. Die Kinder des Schuhmachers tragen immer kaputte Schuhe.

of course I had to watch another TED video while I was at Google Video. Since it’s such a long way there.

Barry Schwartz talks about choice

I agree with him that the choice is by no means linear to happyness. But I dissagree on his remedy. It’s not a decrease of choice that would be the ideal solution. It’s the management of it. People are not in a situation to make decent and educated descissions. Like mine how to spell certain words for instance. But when people are looking into the options and only choose what makes sense, then all the rubbish will disappear. If you buy crap, or equally worse, let your friends buy crap then you inititate the production of more of it. If you only choose things that are good, then you will steer things in the right direction. The choices will follow.

There are so many junk things around us, since people can survive their wrong choices. So they keep making bad ones.

And finally:
Dan Gilbert about happiness and choice

Autoblog reviews the Bentley Continental Flying Spur

Nice read if you like cars. The 2 door cousin “Continental GT” is kind a ‘dime a dozen’ car in some parts of LA. The Warner Brothers parking lot for instance. The price tag hovering between 1 and 2 hundret thousand US$ scheds a completely new light on situation in some parts of the economy.

Glad I read the review, so that I can hold of the purchase until they get a navigation system that can compete with a Camry.

Arriving at the parking lot of a theme park in Germany in-midst 8,000 sparkling middle class vehicles my daughter asks “Kings drive what kind of cars?”.

Cars are a product of industrial mass society that is incompatible with feudalism that supports Kings. One clearly came after the other.

Looking at the current situation we are somewhat like Kings with cars. Fossil fuels make energy dirt cheap so that we can clutter our material surroundings in the wildest ways. In the same time we already have access to information technology that is clearly evolving the mass culture of the 20th century into something new that has neither name nor definition yet.

It has been a bad year for the US movie box office.

Now everybody jumps to conclusions. Me too. Of course the theatre owners point to everything but themselves. I think they share much of the responsibility for their demise.

People stop going to the movies, and theatre owners blame the bad Hollywood product for it. Maybe they should buy some diversity instead. Maybe -gulp- they should take some risk? Only few theatres have more character than a chain restaurant. Most of them are generic as it comes. And then they show dismal ads.

Cinema also lost the arms race in quality: For the average consumer the picture at home can look as good as it does in the cinema. And this is mostly pre HD DVD we are talking about. The audio at home already is as much 5.1 as it can be in a cinema. Plus that the volume will be always right, and there is no talking person next to you. Or if there should be then that is your own choice, and there is always the pause button.

During the 50s TV took away the cinemas monopoly of showing moving images. Colored movies got a boost from this, but Hollywood and the theatres went one step further: They changed their own format to widescreen. This was costly for production and theatres. But seperated the movi experience from the pale 4 by 3 Black and white TV set. Content adopted to what worked well in cinema. Some Movie genres surrendered to “I Love Lucy” and the likes,
new ones like the Cinemascope Western thrived.

Nothing like this happens right now. The movie theatres have the same whinning tone that we heard from the recording industry for years. They seem equally unable to adopt. Media habbits are changing. Games, DVDs, Internet are booming.

Just like the recording industry the Theatres blame piracy for their demise. Which is the classical looser argument. It’s not going anywhere. It does not help to search your audience for camcorders.

Theatres would have a chance though: They could make movie going an experience. Something that is fun and cool. With bad projection, bad seats and dirty theatres you will loose against any big screen TV. If movie theatres don’t make the show an event again, then they will go away. With the advent of color TVs in the early 70s many cinemas in Europe started showing porn in their struggle. I don’t think that this strategy would help US theatres right now.

If (young) people would start dressing up to go out and to the movies then theatres would have a market that nobody could take away from them. People want to celebrate an evening. Current multiplex generic mall type popcorn outlets are not the right offering for this.

the audio tape

remember what was on the first mix tape you made?
the first one you gave away as a gift?

If you should be that age.

From the above link:


Oddly, Philips did not charge royalties on their cassette patent, allowing numerous other companies to use their design for free. This ensured the quick acceptance of it as a new form of media.


Now isn’t that something that Sony (MiniDisc, MemoryStick etc) should read and read until they do understand it ?

and, of course, this commercial comes to mind

gotta love the onion

and even Alan Greenspan is not so cool with that anymore

When I step out of work I look at the parking lot of a well known director. I am not sure how many cars he does have. They change frequently. His poor dogs however still have to drive that souped up Lincoln Navigator. OK, they don’t drive the car, there is a driver for it. But the cars only purpose to haul those dogs around. They certainly don’t fit in any of the Ferrraris. I am sure the dog’s love those shiny Rim that probably cost as much as the entire education of some kid in Africa.

the big mac index

[as we can See I like the dashboard blogging thing]