Peter’s Blog

Had a great time at Picnic today. Met tons of great people, including the head of a top ad agency in Russia, a cinematographer for Survivor and just about the whole Dopplr team. Awesome! Tomorrow I’m part of the Hot100 program.

What awaits the iPhone in Europe? - International Herald Tribune

Wow. What a stupid article. Don’t get it me wrong, it’s well written and I think the central point, that iPhone sales in Europe have disappointed, is correct. However, I think they completely missed the reason why. It’s simple: many Europeans are buying iPhones in the US. Cracked iPhones are much cheaper (would you rather pay €400 or $400?) and they’re really easy to get. I know lots of people that buy several iPhones when visiting the US, and there are even companies that give them away in contests here in the Netherlands. Consider this:

Fueling speculation about an imminent strategic change by Apple are early sales of the device in Europe. Strategy Analytics, a research firm in Milton Keynes, England, estimates that Apple sold 350,000 iPhones in Europe in the fourth quarter of last year, below what it claims is Apple’s internal forecast of 500,000 devices.

The research firm also estimates that iPhone sales slowed to 300,000 in the first three months of this year.

But we’ve also heard that 1 million US iPhones were never registered with AT&T. Assuming that 2/5 of those unlocked phons went to Europe (which seems to be a reasonable guess to me), that’s 100,000 extra phones ‘purchased’ each quarter in Europe, which means Apple is actually close to its targeted sales.

I just got off the phone with Charles Schwab and I’m got some stuff to say.

First, I was shocked when the person helping me didn’t know how to answer my questions immediately. I had gotten so used to solving my problems within a minute of calling Schwab that I was honestly surprised to hear the woman say, “I don’t know. Let me check with someone here.” It didn’t help that she and her colleagues ended up having to wrestle with the system for almost 30 minutes to delete an automatic transfer, disconnecting me twice while I was on hold. That being said, they solved the problem, were very friendly and helpful, and offered me $100 for my ‘troubles’. Now that’s how to ensure customer satisfaction! (more…)

I attended an interesting lecture last night put on by the University of Chicago GSB alumni club. Professor Erik Hurst gave an interesting talk about pensions. He argues that the old saw that people aren’t saving enough for retirement is false for the vast majority of people. A common reason people think retirees are impoverished is because their food spending, of all things, goes down. However, statistics show that the food they eat stays constant and the time they spend shopping and preparing food goes up – they’ve replaced expensive prepared food with raw ingredients that they prepare themselves. So know you know why grandparents everywhere seem to spend their entire days at the supermarket!

So who doesn’t have enough money for retirement? It’s approximately 20% of the population (in most OECD countries), and most of them have ‘involuntarily’ retired. Why retire involuntarily? Normally it is because of a ‘health shock’ (great phrase), in which bad health both costs people a lot of money and prevents them from returning to work. So, these people stop working earlier than they hoped to (or need to) and, at the same time, most countries have good insurance for health expenses but little for lost income.

Pretty interesting, huh? There’s also some interesting research Hurst did on the economics of bling.

Tell me that doesn’t look a burning book. Little did you know that the Dutch police are actually firemen. Speaking of weird things, the Amsterdam police offer a 360 degree tour of a police HQ.

I’m excited I got this working, so I figured to share this. Hopefully at least one person will stumble upon this in a Google search and be helped by it.

I have a phone plan with Rabo Mobiel (an MVNO) and (eventually will) have an unlimited data plan for €10 per month. It’s only GPRS right now but apparently once the network switches from Orange to KPN in mid April I’ll also be getting UMTS. Fair enough.

First, I wanted to get internet browsing working on my Nokia N73. Unfortunately when I used the phone wizard to get the network settings, it grabbed Orange access information. Which didn’t work. Super. However a quick Google search turned up a page on a somewhat shady site (they say they’re located in Amsterdam and China, but random parts of the site are in Russian). This page has what I needed: the names of the Rabo Mobiel access points are ‘Rabo’ and ‘Rabo.extra’. The latter is, according to the site, for unlimited data plans, so I used that. Entering it into my phone gave me mobile internet and now I have the Jaiku and Gmail apps on the phone. Nice.

But, what I really wanted was for my phone to act as a modem for my Macbook Pro. No more wishing for an internet connection at OpenCoffee! It’s kind of tricky but Ross Barkman is the man and has what you need: manufacturer-specific connection scripts. I downloaded the Nokia GPRS scripts and put them into /Library/Modem Scripts/ as instructed. After a fair bit of trial and error I got everything working. What I did was associate my phone with the laptop using Bluetooth and select the option to use the phone as a modem, using Ross’ Nokia GPRS CID1 script (unfortunately the +CGQREQ script, which is supposed to make things faster, doesn’t work for me). I then went to System Preferences > Network > Bluetooth and edited some settings. Under PPP I set the telephone number to be ‘Rabo.extra’ and then I clicked on PPP Options and unchecked Send PPP Echo Packets. From the PPP pane I clicked Dial Now and then Connect in the Internet Connect window that opens. Boom, my laptop’s on the internet using my mobile phone!

Note, while playing around with settings I made several other modem profiles in Internet Connect. While the profile that I use is called Main Number in Internet Connect, when clicking the modem status icon in the menu bar it was called Bluetooth. Weird.

While Ford, GM and Chrysler used to dominate American industry, you can’t really talk about The Big Three anymore. But there’s still one set of big three transportation companies: the main Dutch bicycle companies!

First, because I have one:

Gazelle

Batavus

photo credit: Eerko

Sparta

photo credit: Ibán

I can’t say that there are any sort real difference between the companies, though I do really like Sparta’s logo:

photo credit: Ibán

It’s probably no good for most (all?) of my blog readers (all five of you), but Honderdhandigen, the group that I have office space in the Volkskrantgebow as a part of, is throwing an opening party on February 1:

Very Web 2.0, no?

• Everyone signs their business emails “Met vriendlijke groet”. At least change things up occasionally!
• Supermarkets sell wine, mixers and things like port but they do not sell hard alcohol. Liquor is not super expensive (and beer is really cheap: 24 bottles of Amstel for €6.50 is a steal in my book) and there tends to be liquor stores right next to supermarkets (sometimes even sharing the same building entrance). The liquor stores aren’t state owned, so I don’t know why this rule exists (and there obviously is one).

I’m pleased to announce that Lunch 2.0 is coming to the Netherlands: Lunch 2.0.nl is now online!