Problem of the day.

Packed my bags to the brim for a three-week trip to Sydney, not accounting for my vice for acquiring business books, particularly those that promise clairvoyance, ones with titles like “Seeing What’s Next” (fifth from the top).

Filed under: Uncategorized , business books, clairvoyance, Sydney

The Haves and Have Nots

Greece on the brink of default? Sandra Bullock an Oscar contender? Malaria killed King Tut? Are you kidding??? Gonna need to surprise me with news more shocking ’cause I just made it into the coveted club of Triple Triplers! In a game of FB Lexulous that began with unassuming 3-letter word exchanges, Tracy W. makes the fatal mistake of exposing the right hand side triple word column–with a mere 14 point AVE; mistake!–which I answer with QUOTIENT, Q and the second T both hitting triple word blocks, for a single play total of 226 points, pushing her deficit from 31 points to 257, a comeback impossibility.

Serving pancakes like Prince. Find me on FB if you want some of this wrath.

Filed under: Uncategorized , Facebook, Greece, King Tut, Oscar's, Scrabble, Triple Triple

MWC about big alliances this year

You get the sense that things are a bit different at this year’s Mobile World Congress. More at stake. Acknowledgment of the duopoly of Apple/Android and the futility of incremental. Microsoft reinvents Windows Mobile. Motorola announces (though separate from MWC) the spinoff of handset+set top box. Huge players, whom you might not have expected to getting together, got together. Industry veterans Nokia and Intel, incumbent yet vulnerable, teamed up, Nokia having lost traction with an outdated Symbian and unproven Maemo, Intel having done well with Atom in larger devices but struggling to contend with Snapdragon/OMAP/etc. in smartphones.

But brightest spotlight might be owed to the announcement of Wholesale Applications Community, an agreement between 24 large industry players, consisting mostly of mobile operators but also a handful of handset majors (LG, Samsung, SE) who have neither wholeheartedly committed to Android nor developed a mature alternative, to create a standard for applications that will run on different OSes. Undoubtedly a move to turn the very tides that have turned against operators, control having shifted and continuing to shift toward disruptive handset manufacturers and search/ad networks (i.e. Apple, Google, and the like), and one which reflects how dire the situation is for operators, considering:

1. Data is important as ever as voice revenues continue to decrease and messaging flattens out in US/WEU, making applications and search revenues critical
2. Operators are increasingly pushed to the margins in apps. Fees made on data transfer–an operator sweet spot–while traditionally soaking up 50% to 60% of total app revenue, are expected to drop in share in the next few years, making way for content premiums and advertising revenues. I’ve got some data from Strategy Analytics showing revenues from data transfer falling 10% every 4 to 5 years. It’s precipitous.
3. In search, I doubt the picture is any different. I’d feel comfortable with putting my money on search engines and ad networks as key beneficiaries.

All of this makes WAC big news. A difficult plan to follow through given their unacquaintance with software and the sheer number of founding members and platforms that this new standard needs to meet–we already see some of the difficulties Adobe faces with mobile Flash, even from its dominant base in PC. Things will, of course, get easier once they hook, say, Android as an anchor adopter, not inconceivable considering 10 out of 24 members are also part of the Open Handset Alliance.

Filed under: Uncategorized , Android, Atom, Google, Intel, LG, Maemo, Microsoft, Mobile World Congress, Motorola, Nokia, OMAP, Open Handset Alliance, Samsung, Snapdragon, Sony Ericsson, Symbian, Wholesale Applications Community

TV still got it, never lost it

Difficult to see event programming and other time sensitive content giving up share to the Internet anytime soon.

“Combined with the opening ceremony, NBC averaged 30 million viewers for the first two days of the Vancouver Games, the most for a non-U.S. Winter Olympics since the tabloid-fueled 1994 Lillehammer Games (39.9 million). The 30 million is 33% higher than the two-day average viewership from Torino (22.6 million).” Broadcasting & Cable

Filed under: Uncategorized , Olympics, television, TV

US studios finding ways to make China viable

Learned that Fox financed Hot Summer Days, the just-released Chinese romantic comedy starring Jacky Cheung and FLL high school and occasional present crush Maggie Cheung, marking the studio’s first foray into Chinese film. Not sure which of the majors are doing this already–Warner Brothers set up something in ’04, only to close shop in ’06; don’t think anyone else is really doing it in a big way–but this could end up being a pretty neat channel for foreign studios to capture China growth if arrangements of the kind circumvent the 20 film annual limit imposed upon foreign movies. Does it? Word has it that 3-D films aren’t included under that quota either (200 3-D theaters today). All sorts of interesting implications for outside players in China’s film market, historically uncrackable and soon-to-be global #2.

Filed under: Uncategorized , 3-D, China, Fox, movie, theater

Super Bowl XLIV most watched program ever in US TV history

From B&C today:

“CBS’ coverage of Super Bowl XLIV was watched by an estimated 106.5 million viewers, making it the most-watched program in [US] television history.”

TV, unlike the papers, still got it. Never lost it.

Filed under: Uncategorized , Super Bowl, TV

Pre-Oscar piracy on the decline

Andy Baio, entrepreneur and blogger behind Waxy.org, puts out an annual data set reflecting the state of piracy of Oscar nominated films. This year’s shows that it takes roughly 21 days–the highest since at least 2003–for films to leak onto the Internet from date of theatrical release. While only 3 weeks, still huge if you consider (1) back in 2003/04/05 it only took one or two days; and (2) opening weekend typically captures 1/4 or more of box office revenues.

Filed under: Uncategorized , Oscar, piracy

Weinstein to Morris

Harvey Weinstein berating Errol Morris on his lackluster promotion of The Thin Blue Line. Hilarious. “If you continue to be boring, I will hire an actor in New York and pretend that he is Errol Morris.”

Filed under: Uncategorized , Errol Morris, Harvey Weinstein, The Thin Blue Line

Chicken feet arbitrage

Globalization will occasionally yield the darnedest of exchanges; this from the WSJ on Friday:

“Indeed, the U.S. sells almost all the chicken feet it produces to China, where they can fetch around 65 cents-70 cents per pound, compared to the 2 cents a pound they would sell for domestically, where they are rendered into such products as animal feed. In the first seven months of 2009, the U.S. exported 436,544 tons of chicken worth $376 million to China, about half of which was chicken feet.”

Which, of course, upsets Chinese farmers, prompting MOFCOM to levy taxes on US poultry producers proportional to business and benefit they bring to China, taxes ranging from 40 to 80%.

Filed under: Uncategorized , chicken feet, China

McSweeney’s Wholphin

Love my Wholphin, savior of the slow office afternoon.

Filed under: Uncategorized , Dave Eggers, McSweeney's, Wholphin

Timothy McSweeney passes away

Dave Eggers reveals the full story behind Timothy McSweeney, the man whom the line of McSweeney’s journals and mags was named after, befitting of not just the personality behind the man but the strange manner in which the two came to form a connection.

Filed under: Uncategorized , Dave Eggers, Timothy McSweeney

Dallas Open, 2009, Round 6, Joel Sherman vs. Joey Mallick

Play-by-play analysis of Scrabble playoff between Sherman and Mallick by three-time NSC champion Joe Edley. Game play beyond my grasp.

Filed under: Uncategorized , Scrabble

The lost era of US book prices

Stumbled upon some data from The Library and Book Trade Almanac tracking historical book prices in the US. Best I could go out to was 2005. Still, makes you appreciate the lost era of book publishing where hardback fiction averaged over $25 in the ’90s/early 2000s; the decades of setback that digital brought on (with Kindle’s $9/$10 bestseller pricing); and respite that iPad’s $13/$14 brings, however incremental.

Filed under: Uncategorized , Apple, books, digital, iPad, Kindle, pricing, Walmart

As with Tupac Shakur . . .

. . . consuming the work of posthumous Salinger enjoys additional pleasure brought forth by scarcity.

Filed under: Uncategorized , J.D. Salinger, Tupac Shakur

Things will be good again.

My life’s been a bit drab since The Wire ended a few years ago. Tried to find solace in substitutes. Generation Kill turned out a bit weary. Eastbound & Down never made it to China. Nor did Bored To Death. Even tried BSG, for godsake. But things have been looking up for me–David Simon’s new HBO series Treme, set to land in April, seems to have the seeds of a cure. New Orleans, post-Katrina. Kermit Ruffins. Bunk. Playing the trombone. (Yes.) Life is good again.

Filed under: Uncategorized , David Simon, HBO, The Wire, Treme