Matt on Marketing mentioned a post of mine & details his reasons for reading magazines. (0)
St. Croix: Watermelon $25, Gallon of milk $9, Avacado $3.69. (0)
Lets say you have a telephone line installed in your house. One day you need to send a fax, so you hook up a fax machine, but it won’t work. A call to your phone company reveals that you aren’t authorized to send a fax over their telephone line. You will have to buy a special phone fax line that is much more expensive. Later on you try to hook up a modem, but it won’t work either. The phone company informs you that to use a modem on the phone line you have to buy a special data phone line that is also more expensive.
In the US we have the concept of common carrier laws. These laws mean that an airline can’t let part of the general public buy transportation while prohibiting another part of the general public. The same thing goes for telephone usage. They can’t sell you a telephone line and then keep you from using it for a fax line so you have to buy a fax line service from them.
This is similar to what is happening with the iPhone. Skype has come out with a program that will let people place phone calls over the data connection from the iPhone. However AT&T (the sole carrier of iPhones in the US) doesn’t want people to use VoIP applications over their data connection. They would rather you use their (much more expensive) voice network. So they make it a breech of your contract to run VoIP over your data connection.
A similar thing is happening with cable modem providers. They are starting to limit the amount you can download. On one hand, this makes sense–people who use more bandwidth cost them more money. On the other hand, many of activities that use lots of bandwidth–particularly video streaming and downloading movies–use a tremendous amount of bandwidth. If the cable companies can prevent users from streaming movies from their Netflix accounts, they may be able to get more of them to sign up for premium services.
It might make sense for cable companies to start charging for usage instead of a flat fee. However, this would probably cut into their very high profit margins on the vast majority of customers who use very little bandwidth per month. If they start making these people focus on how much bandwidth is actually being consumed, they may be less inclined to pay $50 per month for 5GB of data.
There isn’t a whole lot of competition in wireless voice providers and internet providers. Both of these things require a very substantial investment. While it wouldn’t be too expensive to start a small wireless cell phone company, the real benefit of a cell phone is being able to use it everywhere. If you can only use it in one local area, it is much less valuable because people are mobile. (Cricket is a phone company that takes this type of approach.) Cable companies are hard to start because you have to run wires to every house. This is also very expensive.
In the future, a possible solution is going to be wireless internet. With WiMAX, it should be reasonably inexpensive for a company to start up service for a metro area. For service that competes with a cable modem, mobility is less of an issue. The problem is that the speeds provided by WiMAX are much lower than the theoretical limit of cable. It is possible the cable companies may compete simply by offering faster service.
Some municipalities are putting in their own fiber optic networks and treating internet as if it is a city utility. This has its own set of problems–namely that that the cable companies are suing them.
Even if this happens, the competition should be good. If cable companies keep increasing their speed while lowering the bandwidth, people are going to eventually get fed up with a connection that can only be used to its full capacity for 5 hours per month. Given another choice for reasonable service many might make the switch–especially with the plans that can give you internet access at your house as well as your laptop when you are around town.
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Are You a Commodity? - Another article of mine at Freelance Switch. (0)
BlackBerry App World is Blackberry's answer to the Apple iPhone app store. (0)
Tideway has a "Community Edition". Manages up to 30 systems for free. (0)
Quoted in the Examiner: How to Keep Gaps from Forming in your Resume. (0)
I have an article published over at Freelance Switch called 9 Steps Toward Genuine & Effective Networking. Here are some of the things discussed:
- Mailing physical newspaper and magazine articles.
- Befriending the “little” people.
- Meeting in person
- Taking notes.
Be sure to read the full post.
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Some employees work because it pays the bills. They don’t feel that their work is particularly meaningful or important. Others work with a sense of purpose because they feel like what they do matters. If your employees shift to treating their work as a “day job” (something that just pays the bills) you will see much less productivity. This partially depends on the employee, but it is even more dependent on the employer. Here are things to keep this from happening to your employees.
- Meaningful work — It is much easier to be passionate about something that you feel actually matters. Make sure your employees are doing things that matter. Make sure that they understand how their contribution helps the organization function as a whole.
- Pay for performance — If you want you’re employees to be passionate about their jobs then thier performance needs to somehow impact their life. One way to do this is to financially reward people productivity.
- Don’t throw work away — One of the fastest ways to destroy passion in your employees is to ask them to create something and then decide not to use it. Everyone wants their life to count for something, but if the results of their effort just gets thrown away they will just start “putting in their time” with little regard for quality. This isn’t to say that you can never change your plans, but good leaders know how to salvage people’s contribution even if their work is no longer needed for it’s original purpose. I’ve been in situations where I was given a difficult project to complete, but after successfully completing the project, management changed their mind and decided that what they asked for wasn’t what they really wanted anyway. If this happens once, employees will probably just consider it part of organizational change. If it happens several times in a row, most employees will stop putting any real effort into their work, saving their intellectual energy for areas where it might be valued.
- Get to know your employees — You need to know what makes your employees tick. It is much easier for someone to be fully engaged in their job if they feel like their boss understands their life goals.
- Invest in people — This can be done through coaching, sending people to a conference, or even just by buying them a book on some topic you’ve identified is important to them and their career. If your employees feel like they are just a means to a business goal, you aren’t going to get a high level of engagement in their work. Most people want to grow and they will give their loyalty to an organization that helps them to that end.
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After reading a some comments in a blog post about how DMOZ really needs more good editors, I thought I’d give it a try. I noticed that the Personal Organization category didn’t have an editor so I pushed the button to apply to be an editor. I filled out the form carefully and spent a good amount of time trying to find the sample sites that I would add to that category.
After spending a good amount of time filling everything out, I submitted the application. Later on in the day I received this response:
Dear Mark Shead,
Thank you for your interest in becoming an Open Directory Project editor! Although we would like you to join us as a volunteer editor, you have chosen a category that is already well represented, or is broader than we typically assign to a new editor. We would encourage you to re-apply for a category that has fewer editors or is smaller in scope, in order to increase your chances of being accepted.
Feel free to reapply by submitting an application in another area. If you wish to re-apply, you must fill out another application. Please do not reply to this email.
Regards,
The Open Directory ProjectAdditional reviewer comments:
Now I understand if they only want you to be an editor of a small category at first. When I signed up, I tried to use a sub category, but the only subcategory was for consultants, and I wasn’t really interested in doing that.
If they really don’t want people to apply for these categories, they shouldn’t put links to sign up as an editor at the bottom. If they had of had a suggestion of a different category to try that would at least show that there was some level of thought on their side of things. Just saying “keep applying and maybe we’ll eventually let you in” seems like it has a good chance of just wasting my time.
If you want good editors, you need to make sure you aren’t wasting their time. Good editors are more likely to be busy individuals who want to contribute to the community. Bad editors are more likely to be people who will just keep applying over and over again until someone eventually lets them in as an editor.
Maybe I’ll try signing up as an editor again someday if I find a category that I’m interested in, but at this point I think DMOZ may be shooting themselves in the foot by asking for people to sign up as editors for a category and then telling them “no you can’t edit this category”.
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