TechCrunch reports today that Zach Iniguez proposed to his fiancee on an iPad.   He handed her the device and it played back photos of them together, etc.  I’ll withhold judgment.  What do you think?

AOL bought Bebo- the British version off Facebook - about 20 months ago.  The couple that built it got $500M.

Let’s do the math.  That was 20 months ago, which works out to about $43M a month in loss.  That is about $1.4 million a day.

Let me repeat this.  AOL lost $1.4M a day in value on their acquisition of Bebo. That’s some serious hemorrhaging.  Who should we be mad at?  The board?  The CEO?  Dumb luck?

There should be, and I suspect, will be, a shareholder lawsuit over this.  This is a pretty magnificent fumble, if you’re willing to consider it a fumble.  Maybe there’s something fishy going on.  Sooner or later we’ll find out.

Here’s the founders picture, just for fun.  They got $500M out of the acquisition deal:

As the health care reform saga continues, your government has just announced that the current bill will reduce the deficit by $100B.  Some opponents of the bill think it’s not strong enough (a.k.a. a strong public option).  Others think it’s socialist.  Still others just want to oppose everything the president does (we really need to send all of those folks home, regardless of your political affiliation).

The middle group- the “socialism” opposers, have the right idea, in the sense that this is the critical component for everyone to consider.  Health care reform, in it’s current incarnation, is flawed.  But passing it or rejecting will be a major milestone in our history.  It represents a huge question for America- Is the health of our citizenry the dominion of the government?  Or, should it be a private, for-profit venture?  We have to choose. In some sense, we have already- we already acknowledge that for seniors and kids, it most certainly is.  Even Republican opposers are using the threat of reduced Medicare coverage for seniors- an implicit endorsement of the government’s dominion.

We have also acknowledged that health care is the dominion of the government when it comes to the poor and indigent.  Medicaid, a topic you have heard nothing about during the debates, is a huge program that provides coverage to millions of poor Americans.

Health care is also the dominion of the government for veterans.  The VA is a billion dollar agency that serves the health care needs for vets for life.  They do everything- routine screening to advanced surgeries.

So that leaves the rest of us- middle class working Americans.  It’s a pretty sizable chunk. The difference between government influenced health care for our chunk, versus the other chunks is, we pay for our coverage.  The spirit of a public option being that in order to contain unsustainable health care inflation induced by private health insurance companies, we should introduce a price controlled government run alternative, paid into by the citizenry.

Whether or not the final bill contains this (and whether or not President Obama has a trick up his sleeve to introduce it as separate legislation) is not critical.  What is critical is for we Americans, and by proxy, our representatives, to decide, once and for all, if health care is the dominion of the government.  If so, we can always go back and fix what’s not perfect.  If not, we can walk way and move on to the next big challenge.

Has anyone noticed that phone numbers that use letters are unusable by modern cell phones?  How can you call 1-800-GOT-JUNK from your cell phone?  You can’t.

I got a mailer from a wonderful company for a great offer, and I literally could not call them because they failed to translate their fancy letter-number combo to just numbers.

The advent of the modern “smart phone” has killed the letter-number market.  Those numbers simply cannot be dialed from cell phones, unless you can associate the numbers with the letters in your head.  This means that marketers are missing the opportunity to sell their stuff to millions of us.  I literally cannot dial 1-800-GOT-JUNK from my cell phone.

I wonder if companies pay a lot of money for these numbers.  If so, as the world changes, their customer base that can use those numbers is dwindling.  A lot of people have only cell phones now, and many of those are smart phones, and many of those are touch pad phones, with graphical numbers instead of buttons (the iPhone and the Droid, for example).

The back of my American Express card says “1-888-GO-BLUE” or something like that.  I was in Home Depot one day and the clerk took an etching of my credit card (he took my card, and took his copy of the receipt, and rubbed a pencil over my credit card) and when I asked what he was doing, he explained that it was some policy something something.  So, being paranoid, I assumed he was going to take my credit card and buy concert tickets or something.  In the parking lot, I attempted to call American Express from my car, but couldn’t because they didn’t give me a phone number that was usable from my cell.  I sat there for about 15 minutes trying to decipher their damn code.  I even went onto the internet from my phone and did a search.  Guess what came up?  1-800-GO-BLUE.

It will probably take  a few years before giant companies, like American Express realize that millions of us have abandoned the 10-button telephone for the 30 or 40 key smart phone and that their assumptions that we can translate 1-800-GET-THIS  or 1-800-GO-THERE simply by looking at the letters on our phone is a bad one.  Until then, a lot of us are really going to be annoyed when we need their help, or want to buy their products from our cell phones.

Like many Americans, I spend too much.  I got an offer in the mail from PSECU offering a low interest consolidation Visa.  I took the offer and paid off my American Express card.  My plan was to pay down the loan over 12 months.  The problem is, if you use the credit card, you are charged a much higher interest rate.  If you try to make extra payments, they apply them to your low interest rate.

Effectively, they hold your high interest balance hostage while you pay off your low interest balance.  Needless to say, this is predatory.  It’s a scam with a calculated risk of how many people will notice, etc.  They lure you in with the promise of a sound financially responsible debt reduction plan, but then keep you from selecting which balance you want to apply your payments to.

Fortunately, I caught the scam early and only racked up a small credit card debt, so I won’t be hit too hard.  The PSECU representative assured me that they weren’t trying to swindle me and this policy was disclosed in the fine print.  I told her I wonder if she believes in her heart that this isn’t predatory.

The reason this is so disheartening is, PSECU has a wonderful reputation.  They’ve always been very honest and this is more than just a financial disappointment (I’ll be opening a new consolidation loan and cancelling all of my accounts with PSECU) but it’s a personal disappointment.  I always felt like PSECU was my best kept secret, the one honest bank among scoundrels.  PSECU is now officially a predatory banking institution.  I have  a blog and I wanted to let you know.

We recently bought a fake Wii.  The real one is too expensive.  While playing tennis with my son (I have the sore arms to prove it), I verified something that has been bugging me for about 20 years.  The state of “Deuce” is equivalent to “30/30.”  I don’t claim to be the first to point this out, but I’m sure it’s true.  Turns out there are 20 states in a game of tennis.  For those of you unfamiliar with discrete finite automata (DFAs), consider each arrow a play in a game of tennis, and each box a resting point between plays.  When player A scores, follow the left arrow and vice versa.

Now, consider if we just removed the state of “30/30″ and went right to Deuce.

Suppose you’re winning 30/15 and you opponent scores.  There is no difference in the game if we go to 30/30 or if we just go straight go Deuce.

Just to convince you, let’s combine Deuce and “30/30.”  You can see they’re interchangeable.

I just wanted to get this off my chest.  It’s been stewing a while.

I just bought a Motorola Droid, which features the Android operating system, written by Google.  The phone is good.  I like it, I don’t love it.

Its main shortcoming is that it’s annoyingly branded with Google.  They make it really easy to set up Google Mail, but really hard to set up Yahoo mail, or a 3rd party POP3 mail, for example.

There’s no way to change your search engine.  When you go into settings, you expect to see a setting for “who do you want your search provider to be?” but instead you see “how would you like Google to be your search engine.”

Now, Google just bought MobAd, a mobile advertising partner.  Couple that with them giving away a free OS which locks you into their search engine, and Google is creeping toward evil.  The evil part is their posturing as a benefactor with their free and open source operating system while quietly removing your choices for who you want your search provider to be.

You  may also be reading about how Google is swapping your phone number for it’s Google Voice phone number without your permission.  More on that in another post.

Google is the new RJ Reynolds.

I’ve written here before how I long for the return of the intellectual conservative, lest you think I’m a flaming liberal, anxious to spend other people’s money, but those days are gone for good, I fear.  So I reluctantly side with the Dems, who seem to have a monopoly on well educated policy wonks and intellectuals these days.

But what’s most amusing about the health care debate is the lengths to which white people have flocked to cluster among themselves to protest nothing in particular.  I can’t help but wonder if this has anything to do with a slender black man giving his ideas about how to fix a health problem they might not even agree exists.

Let’s have a look here:

White people protest Obama for nothing in particular

and here:

More Flabby White People Protesting our Slender President

I like this particularly, with the misunderstood meaning of the “Don’t Treat on Me” flag (an image of unity and federalism, or socialism as they surely called it back then with slogans like “Keep Your Hands off My Slaves,” and “Don’t Let Women Have Property,” etc.:

More white people protest the president in general

Conservatism is such an attractive philosophy in theory, but the bloated white people marching in unity against nothing in particular doesn’t really make you want to roll up your sleeves and join them.

The content is good, the title is unrelated.

Sarah Lacy’s, “Twice You’re Good,” is a shame of sorts.  Let me first cut to the chase, then I’ll expand if you’re interested.  Using on my YouOver scale (i.e., would you go back and read it over if you could get the time back) my answer is no, I would not, but not for the reasons you would expect. I blame this one on the editors.

When you buy the book, you think Lacy is going to try to find the answer to the question we all ask when we read about young Silicon Valley millionaires- are they lucky or are they good?  Or at least, you expect that she’s going to find some lucky and some good and then show you why the good ones are good and the lucky ones are just lucky.  Unfortunately, she doesn’t do this.  The book is a huge disappointment.

Twice You’re Good is a hodgepodge of excellent, intoxicating, intimate narratives, clearly the result of incredible access that Lacy managed to secure.  She interviews all the big names of young Silicon Valley, including Marc Andreesen, Marc Zuckerberg, Kevin Rose, etc.   I confess, I couldn’t get enough, and it’s a confession only because it’s downright indulgent to read.

Lacy fails to make a coherent argument (or any argument at all) about which of the characters are lucky and which are good, and the book leaves you no better informed about whether any of them are lucky or good.  I simply don’t have any new information to ascertain whether Marc Andreesen is good or lucky after having read the book.  She chalks up Netscape, a clear lottery winner of Web 1.0, as the first in Andreesen’s “twice,” (for the uninformed, Netscape peaked on irrational frenzy and then crashed, leaving no real lasting value). And then she goes on to spend a few chapters on Zuckerberg, the Harvard drop out who’s still in his 20’s.  I don’t know if he’s lucky or good, because this is his first (not his “twice) and it’s not over yet.

The editors of the book did a horrible job demarcating the content into a Socratic argument.  The epilogue reads no different from any of the chapters.  It’s just leftover material.  The whole book, for that matter, reads like leftover material.

Another objection I have is that Lacy repeatedly ascribes vision and intention when the men she describes express the opposite in their own words.  Zuckerberg says “I never intended to start a company,” and Andreesen describes how Netscape began, much to his surprise when that guy with all those ex-wives called him (what’s his name again? Jim something?).  Andreesen is genuinely surprised by the phone call, in a narrative where you appreciate his honesty, even if you think he’s lucky.

The one really interesting and to date, unique, account is that of Twitter co-founder Evan Williams.  Lacy narrates the chain of events in fascinating detail (again, Lacy is an excellent writer, with incredible access, but a poor sequential logician).  It’s pretty clear after you finish the book that Jack Dorsey, the geeky genius, made Twitter huge, while Williams watched, then Williams couldn’t contain his jealousy and fired Dorsey, took the helm, then proceeded to retroactively enjoy the glory. I suspect Williams doesn’t sleep well at the helm of Dorsey’s company.  That’s just a guess.

In summary, the book is not drivel, and it’s heavy and complex, but again, there’s just no theme or argument or point.  I enjoyed it, but wouldn’t go back and read it again if I could get my 20 hours back.  It bothers me to say this because there’s so much new and fresh perspective and again, the writing is excellent. The structure and editing is so bad, though, that it reduces all of that hard work to a quilt of non-sequiters and gossip.

For the uninitiated, a “unique” is a unique visitor in a given time period, usually a month.  Companies ensure a visitor is a unique visitor with logins, cookies, and IP addresses, and “unique” counts are generally thought to be pretty accurate.  As far as dollars per unique goes, Google is doing something right and Facebook is doing something wrong.  Google’s Q2 results show $5.5B in revenue, which averages out to $1.83B per month.  Facebook told investors it would reach about $500M in revenue in 2009.  That’s about $41.7M per month.  Now, Google’s traffic last month was 844M, while Facebook’s was 340M (uniques).  Let’s do the math.

Google’s $/visitor = $2.17

Facebook $/visitor = $0.12

That’s about a 17X multiple.  Why is this so?  Both companies have dirty little secrets.  Facebook’s is that people don’t like ads.  The click through rate is really low.  Google’s secret is that they make all their money from paid search results.  I would bet that the click through rate for someone actively searching for “canoes” is about  17x that of someone talking about canoes with their friends.