Wow, I just finished watching the opening ceremony (recorded) which was absolutely spectacular. It was fun to see the Birds Nest having just been there a few months ago, though I just missed getting a tour of the insdie by having to leave a few days before it was open for visits.
China’s presentation went off flawlessly and in super spectacular fashion with a historically unprecedented, stunning and breathtaking blend of technology, humans, and history. Wow.
First I want to say how I really appreciate the fact NBC is going to place all of the Olympic sports content online – a real boon for those of us who follow sports like Table Tennis and Badminton. Those sports don’t make prime time NBC TV – in fact historically they are simply left out of the TV coverage.
But reading in NYT about how they spent much of the past few days keeping the opening ceremony offline makes me wonder how well they thought this out. I really love watching the opening ceremonies – even the boring parts – and for the audience that would have watched this online live I think they could have targeted some great advertising – for example I would have been happy to sign up for “Olympic Specials” and give more demographic info than I normally would do in exchange for the privilege of a real time or short delayed webcast. As an advertisers how would you like it if NBC offered you the ability to slice and dice your audience according to a survey you helped produce?
As it happens my daughter’s play conflicted with the first few hours of the ceremony, so I’ve taped them on media center and will watch them tonight or later. But you can bet your bottom NBC dollar I probably will FF through most if not all of the ads – in fact through the boring parts and ads which I would have *had* to watch if they’d let me see this live on China’s 8/8/8
I can’t help but think NBC’s approach was shortsighted. Why squelch all the videos they could find rather than work to provide us with coverage of one of the the greatest events humanity has to offer at the time we want to watch it? In this case wouldn’t choice have been more profitable?
Olympic Stadium from Pangu Plaza
Originally uploaded by JoeDuck
Wikipedia has a great summary of the Beijing Olympics. I’m a little concerned about the delayed coverages by NBC since I’m a night owl and would enjoy sitting back and watching in real time, but I’m thrilled that NBC will have all the events online so I can watch the Table Tennis, which generally is hardly touched by TV coverage. China is favored to take most if not all of the Table Tennis medals, but the champion has had a bad prior two major tournaments so he may not take the gold.
Here’s a thoughful observations from YieldBuild after attending the the OMMA conference. The issue is whether you can do too much targeting of your advertising and scare folks away by being “creepy”.
Although we’ve only begun to scratch this surface I suspect that it’ll be dependent a lot more on the individual than on the targeting mechanism. For example I don’t really mind Google “reading my titles” and offering relevant ads to me as I read my email, though for some this is clearly a major invasion of privacy. (What? You didn’t realize Google is reading all your titles and possible your content, though I’d guess they dont’t do that for liability reasons alone)
Yahoo BOSS is a promising development tool that allows you to access some very powerful features from the Yahoo toolbox. TechCrunch features some of the best BOSS mashups to date today and also notes that the BOSS “Yuil” application that was quickly pulled together after the notoriously challenged Cuil search launch had to be taken down when Cuil’s legal team jumped on the mashup for copyright infringement.
date: The Medford Mail Tribune is reporting the names of six of the firefighters who died in the Trinity Alps after the worst helicopter crash in firefighting history:
Six of the seven Grayback Forestry Inc. firefighters missing and presumed dead after a helicopter crash Tuesday in the Trinity Alps have been identified. All are from Southern Oregon:
Shawn Blazer, 30, of Medford; imgCounter += 1; aryImgs[imgCounter] = “http://images.mailtribune.com/apps/pbcsi.dll/bilde?Site=MM&Date=20080807&Category=NEWS07&ArtNo=808070341&Ref=V2&MaxW=200&MaxH=180&title=1&border=0”; aryCaps[imgCounter] = “<div class=\”caption\”>Scott%20Charleson%2C%2025%2C%20of%20Phoenix </div>”; aryZooms[imgCounter] = “javascript: NewWindow(870,625,window.document.location+’&Template=photos&img=”+imgCounter+”‘)”;
Scott Charleson, 25, of Phoenix;
Matthew Hammer, 23, of Grants Pass;
Edrik Gomez, 19, of Ashland;
Bryan Rich, 29, of Medford;
David Steele, 19, of Ashland.
Grayback released the firefighters’ names and their photos this afternoon. A spokesperson said the identity of the seventh firefighter aboard the aircraft would be released after the family had been notified.
We are still waiting for news on the names of the firefighters who are missing after a chopper crash near Junction City, CA yesterday evening. Most appear to be from Southern Oregon, based in Merlin.
Local news does not have many details about the crash or those now listed as missing. They are just saying one dead, 8 missing, and four injured. Carson Helicopters was the company running the operation.
Squid on a Stick – Wangfujing Street, China
Originally uploaded by JoeDuck
My China travel pal and I were talking about how we missed all the foods we sampled in China. At the time I was not all that impressed. We ate at many different places of various prices and quality, and although most of the meals were good none really stood out to me as “great”. Charley did like the Beijing King Wah Restaurant, a fairly nice place that specialized in Peking Duck (aka Beijing Duck). Duck is enough of a treat in China that you can expect to pay about $15 per person – an exceptionally high amount when alternative large meals will run $5 – $10 per person for a huge selection of food. Street food – much of which is very good – is practically free. These squids on a stick were 5 yuan= .75 In fact my favorite meal of all was Won Ton Soup in Shanghai. The hand made Won Ton were fresh and spectacularly good, served to the bowl after boiling in a huge pot of delicious broth along with deep fried bready things. 75 cents for a meal sized bowl.
The Knights Templar are suing the Vatican to recover the treasure that was taken from them 700 years ago:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/04/knights_templar_pope/ (thanks Glenn for the tip!)
Just when you thought Facebook employees were making out like bandits and as if the Catholic Church didn’t have enough economic trouble on their hands, let’s assume a very modest initial value of 10 million in Templar treasure.
Now compound that annually at a modest 7% … for SEVEN HUNDRED YEARS!
This would be a doubling every 10 years, so we have 70 doublings of the ten million or
10 x 2 to the 70th power = 1.18 × 10 to the 21st power.
Thus we have about 1.18 x 10 to the 22nd power million dollars owed to the Templars since we started with 10 million dollars.
$11 800 000 000 000 000 000 000.00 = Eleven septillion, 800 pentillion dollars.
Wow – since the annual global economy is only about $150 trillion….. I hope the Templars will take a personal check for the rest.
Although it’s probably a transitional mode of movie distribution until streaming becomes the preferred mode – probably in 3-4 years, Redbox really puts conventional movie stores to shame when you want a popular title.
The friendly big movie boxes are located at heavy traffic stores like Wal Mart, and offer popular titles (as well as a limited selection of older films) at only $1. The combination of a very intuitive and simple touchscreen interface, credit card scan, networking and the “robotics” of the Redbox are impressive to me. The entire system seems well designed to eliminate the challenges that face other touch systems – clunky navigation and printer problems. No printer problems at RedBox because they don’t use one – instead you are emailed both when you rent and when you return.
Another innovative solution is to avoid the frustrating and usurous “late fees” by simply charging a dollar a day – the standard low rental rate – until 25 days after which you own the movie. This is an approach likely to get some revenues from movie sales and avoid pissing off customers who forget or keep the film for a few extra days. I’d guess the optimal “you’ve bought it” number is lower than this – probably about $12 or so – but to know that you’d have to have information such as the cost to replenish titles in the machines, cost of lost revenue before titles are replenished, etc. I’m assuming that RedBox’ largest long term cost is the human interaction needed to maintain and load the machines.
———- Return receipts are emailed immediately ——-
Dear JHUNKINS@GMAIL.COM:
Your copy of “Cloverfield” was successfully returned on 7/11/2008 11:30 AM.
Your return was on time. You will receive a receipt via email when we process your account.
Thanks for using Redbox!
| Return Details | ||
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| Barcode: | 0—-6 | |
| Transaction ID: | 13—1 | |
| Return location: | Wal-Mart (view inventory here) 300 W Valley View Rd Talent, OR 97540-9629 |
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| Rent date/time: | 7/10/2008 1:16 PM | |
| Due date/time: | 7/11/2008 9:00 PM | |
| Return date/time: | 7/11/2008 11:30 AM | |
| Questions? Comments? Contact Redbox Customer Service | ||
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| Phone: | 1-866-REDBOX3 | |
| Email: | questions@redbox.com | |
| FAQ: | http://www.redbox.com/Help/Faq.aspx | |
DVD rentals cost only $1.00 + tax until 9:00 PM the next evening, then $1.00 + tax for each night thereafter. After 25 days, rental charges will cease and the DVD is yours to keep.
Two of very interesting posts about VC fund economics are over at Fred Wilson’s joint:
First “Venture Fund Economics” | Second
A challenge is that my understanding is that Union Square fund has done *much better than average* and therefore you would not want to make generalization about the VC industry from their experiences. I also need to get some feedback from Fred regarding the time frames he is discussing in the specific example he gives of a fund’s projected performance.
As I noted about some of his Venture Capital observations some time ago it’s very important to make sure you are factoring time into these equations, especially when the time frames are in decades or many years.
Fred points this out in the first post as well, noting that doubling your money is not really that impressive if it happens over a ten year time horizon. It is critical to always recognize how the current value of money is greater than the future value – the gist of the notion of how “discounting” affects investment and other economic decisions.
Joe Duck 