Peter’s Blog

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…)

#91 San Francisco « Stuff White People Like

Though they live in a world class city, San Franciscans have a crippling inferiority complex about New York and even hinting at that will make them very sad or very defensive.Fortunately, there is a fool-proof method for quickly returning the conversation to a positive, trust-building tone. No matter how much you have offended someone from San Francisco, you can always make them feel better by asking them how they feel about Southern California.

“Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business”

The most common of the economies built around free is the three-party system. Here a third party pays to participate in a market created by a free exchange between the first two parties. Sound complicated? You’re probably experiencing it right now. It’s the basis of virtually all media.

In the traditional media model, a publisher provides a product free (or nearly free) to consumers, and advertisers pay to ride along. Radio is “free to air,” and so is much of television. Likewise, newspaper and magazine publishers don’t charge readers anything close to the actual cost of creating, printing, and distributing their products. They’re not selling papers and magazines to readers, they’re selling readers to advertisers. It’s a three-way market.

In a sense, what the Web represents is the extension of the media business model to industries of all sorts. This is not simply the notion that advertising will pay for everything. There are dozens of ways that media companies make money around free content, from selling information about consumers to brand licensing, “value-added” subscriptions, and direct ecommerce (see wired.com/extras for a complete list). Now an entire ecosystem of Web companies is growing up around the same set of models.

Great feature piece in Wired’s latest issue by Chris Anderson on why everything is becoming free. What Anderson says here about the media business model being applied to more and more industries ties in a lot with what Tom Foremski has been saying about Silicon Valley becoming Media Valley.

And walking the walk, Wired is giving away the print version of the issue (to the first 10,000). US addresses only, or otherwise I would have signed up. Though I got a year’s subscription to Wired free once with my $20 subscription to Salon, so I’ve already benefited. =)

VC Heidi Roizen has left the VC business and gone into song writing with SkinnySongs. Talk about a change!

There’s a great counterculture map of the world on Strange Maps. The map is good but even better is a quote from a review of it in a 60s Berkeley ‘zine:

Everyone knows that what’s important is people, not distances, and now for the first time we have a map recognizing this.

There aren’t significant differences between northern and southern California, so naturally we fixate on the little things: we hate that they call the freeway “the 101″, while our dedication to the word hella is looked down upon. For those who didn’t know, it means “very” or “a lot”. Well, it’s totally unrelated, but the Dutch word hele/heel (pronounced something like hale-uh/hale) has a similar meaning. So there you go, the Dutch have been influencing Northern California’s English. =)

The Chron has a good piece on the origins of Silicon Valley, and specifically the role of radio.

Former SecDef DonRum has been invited to take a position at the Hoover Institute, everyone’s favorite center of quality Russian research and neocon fantasties. Unsurprisingly, many on the Farm aren’t happy.

Well, a photo of me at BarCampBlock at least. A friend from Chicago found another photo (scroll down a little bit) of me at the event. Now I just need to become an A-lister so people mention me in the photos. =)

Here’s the write-up for the talk I gave yesterday at BarCampBlock on Localization and my Micro Localizations project.