IBM Happenings

The month of July was a hot one for much of the country and also at IBM, with technology and solutions annuncements and acquisitions across the board. Here are the announcements made by the company during the month. It was very exciting to be in New York this week for the announcement of IBM’s new Z9 mainframe computing system. As I was looking at it on the stage, I was wondering how many buildings it would have taken in 1967, when I joined IBM, to house an equivalent amount of processing power. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.

Books – 3Q 2005

There are millions of books for sale and thousands of new ones are published every week. The percentage of books that will reach the "Top 10" list rounds to zero. The marketing of books is more art than science — I got quite an education on this with my own book. If I were doing it over again, I would have written the same book but there is much more that I would have done from a marketing point of view. No complaints — Net Attitude continues to attract new readers and I always appreciate hearing from them.

Some people read at least one book every day. Maybe some day I will find time to do that. The purpose of this blog entry is to share what I have read in the past few months. Hopefully, someone will find one of them of interest. (read more)

The PepperBall Log

After so many emails about the PepperBall (see below), I decided to establish The Pepper Ball Log to share some of the inquiries. There is also a new link to enable readers to be able to buy a PepperBall. Chef’n is a leading innovator in the kitchen housewares industry and it seems to be a company moving in fast forward with a passion for innovation. An inventive young man, David Holcomb, had an idea in the early 1980′s to replace plastic container from which you would shake dry flakes of garlic with the Garlic Machine. It also used to be that the only cracked pepper you saw was if someone dropped the shaker on the floor — until Mr. Holcomb invented the PepperBall.

Most people that visit patrickWeb are looking for stories about WiFi, blogging, or Internet technology, motorcycles or music, but the subject that results in the most emails is the PepperBall. I hope you enjoy the log that follows. Fortunately, I have been able to help all those who have written. (read more).

Cash or Plastic

At some point most of the world will be cashless — all transactions will be digital in some form. In addition to debit and credit cards we will soon be able to use our mobile phone to authenticate and authorize payments — even to vending machines. From my perspective, the sooner the better. Cashless transactions enable us to have a digital record of payment and a recourse if there is a problem with the merchandise.

Most trains and many taxis in Europe accept credit cards. On a recent trip to Norway I handed my card to the driver when arriving at the airport, he swiped it through a reader, and the receipt immediately printed out. In Zaragoza,
Spain, however, it was necessary to have euros in your pocket. The inconvenience of carrying both dollars and euros would not be so bad except that you end up with a pocket full of change unless you are lucky enough to have converted the precise number of Euros you would need during your visit. My planning was not very good and last month
I returned home with sixty euros in my wallet. I have been carrying them around for six weeks waiting for the opportune moment to trade them in for "greenbacks".

According to Yahoo! Finance, the conversion factor today is 1 euro = $1.20. Not at Grand Central Station. They were willing to pay only $1.09 for a euro and they charged a $5.25 fee on top of that. I ended up getting roughly one dollar per euro. In other words, to convert my euros to dollars I gave up more than 15% of what I had. The moral of the story is that having cash in your pocket is very expensive. Debit cards and credit cards (assuming you pay your balance due) are much more cost effective in addition to being convenient and providing a digital record.

The cards are going to get more and more sophisticated. McDonald’s has said it will accept payment for its products using radio frequency technology implemented on Mastercards. The cards will actually have more modes: old-fashioned embossing with a paper charge slip, insert them in a special card reader, swipe them through a magnetic stripe reader, or just tap it on the counter and an RFID capability will allow them to be sensed if they are within a couple of inches of the point of sale terminal.

Long Distance — Update No. 10

This is number 10 in a series of updates on "Long Distance". What is long distance? When in Singapore or New Zealand or other parts of Southeastern Asia, you know you are a long way from New York — like 10,000 miles or so. Those places are a "long distance" away. But when it comes to a "telephone" conversation, the words "long distance" don’t really mean anything. Many of us remember the phone ringing at grandma’s house at holiday time and the room immediately being urged to "shhhhhh" because the call was "long distance". Hurry, we would say as we waited our turn for a few seconds to say hello to the caller. Those days are history. (read more)

Train Travel

Thanks to Wayne Jonas Bealer from Reading, Pennsylvania for forwarding a link to a very interesting study by the Christian Science Monitor about Amtrak. If you have any interest in train travel or the economics of train travel, you will find a lot of information on this site. You can click on a train route on a map and see a time and cost comparison of rail, bus, car, and airline travel for that route.

Other patrickWeb travel related stories

Raising The Bar – Part 2

I don’t mean to pick on the telecommunications companies but they really make things hard to ignore. The day after the incident with Cingular, I received a letter in the mail from SBC saying "Your enrollment in the SBC EasyCharge program has been approved for the telephone number referenced above". Above my name it said "Reference #". There was no number. The letter was signed by "SBC Treasury Operations". Makes me wonder at least two things. First, how can a company send out letters to real customers with a blank reference number? Secondly, knowing that every contact with a customer is a chance to sell the products and services of the company, why would the SBC Marketing department allow letters to be sent to customers from SBC Treasury Operations? Since they don’t know what phone number they are writing about, they probably don’t know which departments are writing letters to customers. As they say, go figure.

Other patrickWeb on demand stories

Raising The Bar

Cingular just sent an email with the bold title of "Raising the Bar". I wish. The email said "Your wireless bill is ready online. Account Number: ***-****7607.
Phone Number: XXX-XXX-0000". The account number was not mine and the phone number obviously belonged to no one. But wait, it gets worse.

My recent email from Vonage (more on that coming up), the Internet telephony service that I use, started out with "Dear John Patrick". The Cingular email started out with "Dear JOHN PATRICK Service". Huh? The all caps look is reminiscent of 1960′s technology. The email went on to say "Your current monthly bill is now available at http://www.cingular.com/ocs. If you have chosen to have your Cingular bills paid automatically through our recurring payment option, your payment will be made for you in approximately 10 days". If I have chosen? They don’t know?

I had started out with AT&T Wireless and had numerous bad customer experiences with them as has been written about here in the blog (See mobile category). The merger with Cingular was said to have great synergy. That may be true long term, but so far I have seen nothing but problems. The "0000" phone number was a result of the merger. It was a carryover from the prior account. When I called the number on the bill I got Cingular and keyed in my 10-digit phone number. Predictably, when a customer service agent came online, their first question was "what is your ten-digit phone number". After giving it to them, they said it was not a valid number. I said I have been using it for years. They said it might be an AT&T number. Yes, but isn’t that now part of Cingular. Well yes, but it is a separate system. "Would you like to be transferred?". Why doesn’t the statement say something like, "if you are a former AT&T Wireless customer call the following number"? The finale was that if I want to have the correct number for future reference, "Get a piece of paper and I’ll give you the number".

Comcast (which has also appeared in this blog) is struggling with the transition to an on demand world also. I enrolled online to have my monthly charges automatically debited to a credit card. No problem. "The enrollment process for recurring credit card payment can take between 30-45 days". Online. Real time.

The telecommunications industry is under huge pressure from every direction — regulatory, customers, competitors — and they are working hard to integrate, improve coverage, move to VoIP and get better at customer service. They are making progress but at this stage I would have to say that consumer expectations are rising faster than what is being delivered.

Other patrickWeb on demand stories

The Long Tail

Chris Anderson from Wired talked passionately at Supernova about how the Internet makes it possible to exploit the "niche" portion of the demand for products, services, and content. His theory is that there is more total demand — revenue — from a large number of little known products that there is from a small number of big "hits". He calls the curve that reflects this phenomenon "the long tail".

In particular, the future of entertainment — books, songs, movies — is at the "shallow end of the bitstream". All of us have unique likes and dislikes. One person’s trash is another person’s treasure. Prior to the Internet bringing us Amazon and Netflix, we had to be content with what was available in the "store" and the store would only carry something that had good odds of selling. The fact is that there is a lot out there that may not mean much to the masses but is exactly what someone somewhere is looking for.

My friend and colleague, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, recently found a personalized recommendation at Netflix for a movie called Blue, by a Polish director, Krzysztof Kieslowski. Irving said he had never heard of the movie or the director but the movie had a very high rating, member comments were positive, and professional reviewers that he trusts all highly recommended the movie. A mouse click later the DVD was on it’s way to Irving and he soon enjoyed it greatly. It turns out the movie was part of a trilogy and he ended up ordering the other two movies also.

A slightly different phenomenon is happening with music. iTunes recommends music on a personalized basis but also provides "iMixes" of various artists and links to music collections that are favorites of music stars themselves. By following the trail from list to list you can get pretty far out on the long tail and find some highly unique music. None of them will sell millions but millions of people will find music that they really like. There will still be "mega-hits" but the world of creating and retailing is being turned upside down. The Long Tail is a really important story and I urge everyone to read it.

See Chris Anderson’s "The Long Tail"

Film category of Irving’s blog

Split Rock Geocache

The Split Rock Mini Cache had some problems as I previously mentioned. However, it was extremely well described on the geocache web page. As with many things, the way you describe it has a big impact on the attraction to it. One thing I have noticed about good caches is that they describe not only the cache but also where to park to begin the hike. This is important because the latitude/longitude and a GPS will get you to the cache but not necessarily in the best way. For the Split Rock Cache, the web site said "Park at the PPL Ledgedale Natural Area on Kuhn Hill Road in Ledgedale, PA.
Trail maps were available at the trailhead. This is another thing I have learned the hard way — always take a trail map if there is one. Even with GPS, it helps to have the overall perspective of the trail system.