JFNO’s Blog

A blog about hotel location for travel destination. We’ll try to keep it very focused on destinations and hotel location. We’ll see how it goes.

Once you start with video…

Go see it or press play. It is interesting and an easy introduction material to share.

In the eternal question of age and the entrepreneur here is some data: Paul Kedrosky: Age and the Entrepreneur. This is interesting and surprising for me, but something caught my eye in the report itself. If you read it they also talk about education and there is one place where they give sales figure and number of employee for all the company they studied. They split this in three category all, all with a finished diploma from an ivy league and all with only high school diploma. The numbers are

All : average sales of 5.7 millions USD and an average of 42 workers
All ivy league founder : average sales of 6.6 millions USD and an average of 55 workers
All high school founder : average sales of 2.2 millions USD and an average of 18 workers

I wished they had splitted the data more because the average sales per worker is really bugging me. The ivy league numbers is 121818 per worker, the high school number is 122222 per worker. Maybe I’m the only one focusing on this number, but I like seeing it as the average value produced by workers. Anyway here comes the real story the number for all the company is 135714 per worker. The gap is more than 10%, so there is one category which is performing better than the two the report writer decided to extract. So I guess non ivy league college are good.

Think about it it’s much easier that way. A couple weeks ago I got the customary phone call “we love you and your not locked in with a 21 years contract so would you want to lock in?” But before I said no, I realized they were saying something different. They were saying “You have been a customer (without a contract) with us for many years and we hope you’ll stay for many more years, we want to lower your monthly bill and offer you a phone without any obligation on your part.” I thought “this is too good to be true” so I ask about canceling conditions. They were really clear on the no obligation part, so I ask what the catch is. No catch, I just had to say I “planned” to keep my account with them. So I wrote down the name and the employee number of the person to whom I was talking and said sure.

Two weeks later I got a snail mail saying how they were happy I had renewed my contract with them for a gazillion years and that it would cost me to cancel. I received this snail mail the last day of the 15 days satisfaction guarantee. So I called and cancelled everything. I knew they were dirty, but outright lying.

Anyway Fido has lost a client, this was probably inevitable after Rogers bought them. There was a time when Fido was a different cell company and I was happy to be with the underdog. Now they are still different I guess. They will lie for no good reason.

Harry McCracken at PC World is complaining about Google Gears not being more successful. You can read the piece here: The Frustratingly Unfulfilled Promise of Google Gears (Harry McCracken/Techlog). What I’m wondering is who cares? Offline is a good idea for 5 years ago. Sure it would be nice, but when will it make sense to spend time making it work offline. You are much better spending the time making your application better online. Anyway I’ve not been really excited by it.

Knowledge lock in. I was going to wait and make this post better and better with time. But I realized I have more draft than I can handle. So here is the start of my thought around knowledge lock in.

Now is the Data lock in time. I can’t decide that from now on I’ll manage my emails with Yahoo Mail instead of GMail, unless I move all my stuff. I really believe the data lock in will disappear and people will be able to use 2 or more applications with their data and move their data at will. I have an idea on how this will work, but what was puzzling me until now is what will be next?

After reading some stuff on the virtual teacher:
Daniel Hillis Aristotle and freebase
Bob Cringely column
And Neal Stephenson Diamond Age

I now see the future lock in. The application that will make the most sense of all of our data will be really hard to replace. Each and every one of us will develop a liking for our virtual mentor that will make this relationship really hard to break. This is what I’m calling knowledge lock in for now. As for another lock in after that, I have no idea

You have to check the geekiest comic strip ever. I read it without a fault and most of the time it’s awesome in a geeky way. Today’s one is awesome in a geeky entrepreneur way :

I so often feel like the first guy, trying to solve hard problems by finding new way to solve them. Makes you think about who is really smart. If you start reading xkcd, don’t forget to check the strip title property, often you’ll get a second joke for the price of one.

How many Techmeme’s reader gives a **** about Martha’s blog. I know she talks about an Apple product, but come on. Here is a capture of the joke.

I have nothing against Martha Stewart, but I certainly don’t check Techmeme to find this. This is the mainstream already discovered stuff, I need stuff like Techmeme to help me discover diamond in the rough. Certainly not to help me find more of the mainstream zirconium. This is also true for a lot of the mainstream bloggers. Scoble talks about the freshness he finds in friendfeed, I start to think he is right.

Also maybe you are all very interested by Martha’s MacBook Air.

The folks at Google bring us the possibility to edit pretty much anything in Google Maps. We love them for it, I think it is great. But this is again much more about the data than the software. Lets all crowd source the real world in the virtual one, and give Google the “most” precise database of locations. Surely they will let us play with it if we are nice.