Another Myth

What's the deal with mom and pop sports shops? My experience, over the last couple of years, is that, not only do chains offer a better selection, but they also provide a much better service. I have had bad experiences with a couple of bay area bike boutiques. Not bad enough to mention them here by name, but quite disappointing nevertheless.

On the other hand, whenever I visit Sports Basement in Sunnyvale, or Performance Bike in Mountain View, I am getting an A+ service from passionate, knowledgeable and courteous employees. They provide good advice, they fix my bikes, they fit Emma with the optimal wetsuit, and they treat me well.

Go big business!

It’s a Painting of a Girl in a Shell

After burning through a small stack of physical (i.e. "real") books, I finally got to read on my Kindle 2 a first fun book: the only other item I had purchased for my Kindle is a reference book, which one doesn't read linearly, cover to cover.

The fun book is Passion on the Vine: A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Family in the Heart of Italy, by Sergio Esposito (yes, he of Italian Wine Merchants). It's a lovely, well-written book. I'm almost done reading it, so I'm slowing down to prolong the joy and delay the inevitable.

The only downside with Passion on the Vine is that it makes me hungry and thirsty, constantly craving hearty food and good wine.

Using the Kindle's "clippings" feature, I can share a passage:

And then there is unjustifiable beauty. It’s personal beauty, imperfection, ambiguity. It’s beauty you cannot argue for because you have no material proof, only your own certainty. This was the magnificence of Bartolo’s wine. It was constantly morphing, evolving, impossible to know entirely. You could experience it an infinite number of times and you would never be able to master it. This was the true beauty, the kind of great art that transcends its time and invites its admirer to continue searching within it for the answer to some unknown question. It wasn't a catchy pop song or a girl in a makeup commercial. You couldn't pin it down by saying it smelled like rose petals. That was as reductive and senseless as looking at The Birth of Venus and saying, “It’s a painting of a girl in a shell.”

CertifiedEmail: Now with DKIM

When we designed CertifiedEmail, a few years back, there was no suitable standard for digitally signing an email message. Goodmail thus went and used standard components, e.g. RSA for the digital signature, and SHA-1 for hashing a digest, but we were forced to define our own process for combining these components into an authentication layer.

Over the past few years, an email authentication standard emerged: first in the form of DomainKeys, and later, its successor, DKIM.

It was a relatively simple matter for us to substitute DKIM for our original authentication layer. The authentication layer was, and still is, a rather prosaic component of CertifiedEmail. The other security components, the “secret sauce” that made CertifiedEmail the best and the only secure email certification system, remain in place. DKIM-based CertifiedEmail is as secure as the original specification of CertifiedEmail.

By adopting DKIM, not only do we embrace and help further propagate a worthy standard, we also provide our customers with additional value. Beyond the large number of mailboxes operated by providers who agreed contractually to grant privileges to CertifiedEmail messages, senders of CertifiedEmail will now also enjoy improved deliverability with other receivers who value the fact that CertifiedEmail messages are signed by a trusted third party.

You can read the press release (replete with quotes from luminaries and a car safety metaphor) here.

WSJ - Video Gets Entrée Into Email

Read the whole Wall Street Journal article, but let me cherry pick a few gems (mixed metaphors, I know):

Technology From Goodmail Opens a Long-Sought Horizon for Marketers

Video is coming to email.

Email-security firm Goodmail Systems plans to introduce Thursday a new technology to help marketers and media companies send videos via email. It screens video messages for bugs and viruses and emails them to consumers who have opted to receive them. The Mountain View, Calif., start-up is launching its video email service with Time Warner's AOL unit.

Adding video to email marketing boosts customers' interaction -- such as opening the email or clicking on any of the content -- by as much as 200% to 300%

Live Nation will be among the first marketers to test video emails with Goodmail. The concert promoter relies heavily on email marketing, sending 15,000 promotions last year to customers who subscribed to receive updates about events. Adding video to those messages will give Live Nation the chance to better showcase its artists and give consumers a preview of shows, says Bob Frady, the company's vice president of digital marketing. It tested emails featuring video of Katy Perry as part of its efforts to promote the pop singer.

The email newsletter DailyCandy, which covers fashion and culture for a mostly female audience, plans to start sending videos via Goodmail next week. The newsletter, owned by Comcast, will begin producing videos segments to complement its usual fare like shopping tips and restaurant reviews, says Catherine Levene, chief operating officer. It plans to sell short commercial spots to play before the programming starts.

Thrillist, a newsletter which has 750,000 subscribers aimed at young urban men, plans to send video messages only if they have been paid for by advertisers, says founder Ben Lerer. Thrillist said it has sold its first video campaign to camera maker Canon.

The Case Against Fannie and Freddie, as Made in... 1946

Government-guaranteed home mortgages, especially when a negligible down payment or no down payment whatever is required, inevitably mean more bad loans than otherwise. They force the general taxpayer to subsidize the bad risks and to defray the losses. They encourage people to “buy” houses that they cannot really afford. They tend eventually to bring about an oversupply of houses as compared with other things. They temporarily overstimulate building, raise the cost of building for everybody (including the buyers of the homes with the guaranteed mortgages), and may mislead the building industry into an eventually costly overexpansion. In brief, in they long run they do not increase overall national production but encourage malinvestment.

From Chapter VI "Credit Diverts Production" in Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson," first published in 1946

HT: Prof. Mark Perry

I got "Economics in One Lesson" as a present for the last holiday season. It was slowly percolating to the top of my stack of books to read; it just jumped to the top.

Paradigm Shifts: It's Not How Many Ideas You Have

When I started Goodmail, the Accenture consulting group used to run print ads boasting an insightful slogan:

"It's not how many ideas you have. It's how many you make happen."

And that’s indeed the difficult part, making it happen.

Five years into the venture that uprooted me and my family, from the land of milk and honey to the land of unbounded possibilities, it is time to pause, take a step back, and reflect on the journey so far.

So here are some of the topics I might cover in subsequent blog entries:

• Hiring: surround yourself with a team of losers and nothing will ever get done. Get the kind of people Joel Spolsky hires and there will be no mountain high enough.

• Venture Capitalists: a few geniuses, some talented guys, and so many worthless idiots. Masterminds can be found not only amongst the firms who invested in Goodmail (the best advice I ever got came from a VC who passed on the opportunity), but, taken as a whole, an unimpressive herd.

• Marketing: those standing to benefit the most from your product are not necessarily going to be your first customers. Required reading: Crossing the Chasm.

• Upton’s theorem: it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

OK, But Why the Urge to Share?!

As spotted yesterday in the school's parking lot:

Idiocracy - Help Not Wanted

From The Economist:

Consider the annual April Fool's joke played on applicants for H1B visas, which allow companies to sponsor highly-educated foreigners to work in America for three years or so. The powers-that-be have set the number of visas so low—at 85,000—that the annual allotment is taken up as soon as applications open on April 1st. America then deals with the mismatch between supply and demand in the worst possible way, allocating the visas by lottery. The result is that hundreds of thousands of highly qualified people—entrepreneurs who want to start companies, doctors who want to save lives, scientists who want to explore the frontiers of knowledge—are kept waiting on the spin of a roulette wheel and then, more often than not, denied the chance to work in the United States.

This is a policy of national self-sabotage. America has always thrived by attracting talent from the world. Some 70 or so of the 300 Americans who have won Nobel prizes since 1901 were immigrants. Great American companies such as Sun Microsystems, Intel and Google had immigrants among their founders. Immigrants continue to make an outsized contribution to the American economy. About a quarter of information technology (IT) firms in Silicon Valley were founded by Chinese and Indians. Some 40% of American PhDs in science and engineering go to immigrants. A similar proportion of all the patents filed in America are filed by foreigners.

The United States is already paying a price for its failure to adjust to the new world. Talent-challenged technology companies are already being forced to export jobs abroad. Microsoft opened a software development centre in Canada in part because Canada's more liberal laws make it easier to recruit qualified people from around the world. This problem is only going to get worse if America's immigration restrictions are not lifted. The Labour Department projects that by 2014 there will be more than 2m job openings in science, technology and engineering, while the number of Americans graduating with degrees in those subjects is plummeting.

How do you win the global talent wars when Congress is already in the hands of the idiocracy?

Hurrah, Big Savings!

I love Expedia, but I'm afraid I don't share their excitement here:

Click on the scaled-down picture above and you'll see what I mean...

Stuff White People Like

Stuff White People Like is a funny "anthropological" blog that tells it the way it is:

A few gems:

#60: Toyota Prius
If you see a white person in a Prius you can say “wow, that’s great to see that you’re doing something for the earth.” The white person will feel very good about themselves and offer to drive you home, to Ikea, or drop you off at 80s night.

#62 Knowing what's best for poor people
It is a poorly guarded secret that, deep down, white people believe if given money and education that all poor people would be EXACTLY like them.

#64: Recycling
Recycling is a part of a larger theme of stuff white people like: saving the earth without having to do that much.

Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape it ain't, but Stuff White People Like makes for a really funny read.