Blog archives for December, 2006

6.25% CDs starting at 3 years

For a fairly liquid high-yield money-parking option check out Pentagon Federal Credit Union, which is currently offering FDIC-insured certificates of deposit at 6.25%. The catch is that their smallest term is 3 years, and breaking the CD opened for a term up to 5 years requires forfeiting 180 days’ worth of interest, but the 180 day interest loss is pretty typical for any of the longer term accounts.

The promotion runs till January 31st, 2007, and the minimum to open a CD is at $1,000, while the maximum is at $10,000. To join Pentagon Federal Credit Union, your or one of your family members (doesn’t matter if it’s grandpa’s uncle’s adopted half-brother) have to be in the US military. Alternatively, you can join NMFA for a quick membership fee of $20. Joining Pentagon Federal Credit Union will offset you another $5, since you need to get a basic savings account with them, and $5 is a minimum balance to keep the account open. You can pay the fee of $25 (if you choose to join NMFA) right on PenFed site, but be careful to pay with your debit card, not credit card, as all credit card transactions are treated as cash advances, and therefore subject to (usually high) fees from your friendly credit card issuer.

The application process is pretty straightforward, and if you have a debit card with $25, you will be a PenFed member in less than half an hour. After that you need to call them up to establish your online PIN as they verify it’s indeed you. The process takes less than 15 minutes. With online PIN you can set up a username+password for penfed.org and apply for a CD as well as immediately fund it from external checking or savings account.

Best cell phones for digital music

The New York Times takes a look at the cell phones for digital music lovers, since carrying both a cell phone and an MP3 player might be too much hassle for some of us. They choose V3iMotorola RAZR V3iMotorola RAZR V3i, which is a modified original RAZR with a button taking you straight to the music collection of 6.9 hours:

The V3i uses the same menu system as the iPod. The phone lacks the iPod click wheel, so an up/down/left/right button substitutes.

Sony EricssonSony Ericsson W810i from Cingular is another one they choose, with the special attention paid to the 3-speaker system and sound quality the phone produces. The phone is also a best seller on Amazon for Cingular plans. Also, it uses a Sony MemoryStick, which works out great, if you listen to the music on both PSP and your phone, but not so great, if you don’t have a MemoryStick.LG VX8500LG VX8500 Chocolate phone offered by Verizon also made the list, but the reviewers weren’t really impressed:

The slider phone has a hot button to take you right to your music, and loading songs, while not flawless, worked with some persistence. Sound quality was a bit thin but acceptable.

YouTube acquisition sets Google as #2 in worldwide unique visits

USA Today points out that by acquiring YouTube with its unique audience Google is bound to cement itself as #2 Web company in the world. The company actually reached that point last month, according to comScore data, but next year both comScore and NetRatings plan to consider both YouTube and Google traffic belonging to the same company. #1 in unique visits is still Microsoft with its variety of microsoft.com, msn.com, live.com and passport.net domains. So is more or less permanent #2 position a big deal for Google?

Google taking the No. 2 spot in worldwide traffic “is a big deal,” Sullivan says. “Google’s critics say the company is a one-trick pony, and is focused too much on just search. This just shows how powerful search is.”

Top Q&A sites reviewed

MIT Technology Review runs a real-world test of top question and answer sites - AnswerBag, Amazon Askville, MSN Live Q&A, Wondir, Yahoo! Answers and Yedda. The sites are rated on the features and originality as well as availability of answers to the journalist’s three questions:

First, I searched each site’s archive for existing answers to the question “Is there any truth to the five-second rule?” (I meant the rule about not eating food after it’s been on the floor for more than five seconds, not the basketball rule about holding.) Second, I posted the same two original questions at each site: “Why did the Mormons settle in Utah?” and “What is the best way to make a grilled cheese sandwich?” The first question called for factual, historical answers, while the second simply invited people to share their favorite sandwich-making methods and recipes.

The results might be surprising to some readers. While it’s generally believed that small startups are better at building efficient solutions, the leaders of the MIT Technology Review are all sites built by Internet giants - Yahoo! Answers, MSN Live Q&A and Amazon Askville all ranked above the competing sites.

Netflix vs. BlockBuster Total Access

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch writes about finally canceling his 5-year-old Netflix subscription and switching to Blockbuster Total Access. His complains mainly involve Inability to get new releases quickly. Netflix deliberately buys a low supply of new releases, since the price points for new DVDs differ at the day of their release and two weeks later. After the initial two weeks passed, the fans of the movie have all bought in, responding to ads and other marketing hype, driving them to “own it today”. The price points change by roughly 25-30% and stay at that level till a 12-month drop, when the movie usually ends up in a bargain bin.

Meanwhile, Blockbuster provides the same plans, with a few twists that position it radically better than current Netflix offering.

  1. You can return movies in store. And therefore have the clerks record the fact in Blockbuster database, meaning that a new movie is on its way the same or next day.
  2. You can exchange movies in store. If you bring in a return from Blockbuster Online, you can also choose to exchange it for an in-store rental. Subject to the same rules as regular in-store rentals, this provides immediate gratification, especially in the case of a new release.
  3. You get a coupon valid for a free in-store rental of a movie or a game. This is not related to the above offering, just a little freebie they provide with subscription to Total Access.

So what are the issues with Blockbuster? By now seems good to be true, right?

  1. Blockbuster’s selection of foreign or specialty DVDs is occasionally worse. - Might matter a lot or might not matter at all. Mostly it concerns hard-to-find foreign titles, such as Russian The New Adventures of the Elusive Avengers is available on Netflix, but not at Blockbuster.
  2. Majority of Blockbuster DVDs are widescreen, which is great, if you’re an owner of a widescreen HDTV, and which means losing 30% of screen real estate to nice black stripes, if you own a full-screen HDTV.

That’s it. If you’re not too much into foreign or weird movies that are hard to find, and own a widescreen TV, Blockbuster Total Access has exactly 0 disadvantages.

Facebook Share ads

Corporate e-mail vs. Facebook share

Personal e-mail vs. Facebook share

Instant messaging vs. Facebook share

Markets where Google is not a synonym of search

The New York Times this morning runs an article on Google competing in the Russian market. Despite grand entrance, the company failed (yet) to establish itself as the leading search brand, mainly due to (a) complexity of the languages from the Cyrillic family, and (b) not being first to market.

According to comScore Networks, which tracks Internet traffic, 28 percent of Russian Internet users on home or office computers visited Google sites in October, making Google the eighth-biggest Internet brand.

What’s interesting is not as much Google losing to Mail.ru, one of the largest online portals with free e-mail and other services effectively replicating Yahoo!’s horizontal structure in Russia, but Google losing to Yandex.ru, a search brand expanding into related services such as mail, news and maps only after reaching domination in search industry. Yandex has been visited by 64% of Russian Internet users, Google reached 28.5% penetration.

Russia is not the only market where Google has (yet) failed to achieve dominance in the core market - search. Seznam is a heavy player in Czech Republic search market, where Google achieved nominal presence. Seznam has a combination of the language understanding and local features that are either too complicated or too specialized for Google to replicate, as admittedly Czech Republic is not that big of an Internet market to engage a major investment of resources by the Mountain View giant. Seznam also enjoys a decent first-mover advantage.

Naver is the leading search player in South Korea, which just goes to show you how different cultures produce different experiences for Internet searching. Naver is built around question-answer model, and with Korean ultra-high broadband penetration and always-on connection the idea of getting your questions instantly answered by a group of similar-minded individuals seem to work much better than weeding through the search results page. Yahoo! was quick to notice the Korean phenomenon, which led to launch of Yahoo! Answers, which became a pretty successful site as far as traffic numbers (I haven’t seen any data on Y! Answers monetization).

PostgreSQL vs MySQL

Ever find yourself wondering which open source database is the best tool for the job? Well, wonder no more, and let your tax dollars do the work in the form of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory publishing this unbiased review of MySQL vs. PostreSQL. After reading it, however, it seems that MySQL ranks the same or better on most of the accounts, except for locking and concurrency support.

PlayStation 3 and Wii available on Amazon’s Customers Vote

A few days ago TechCrunch reported on the possibility of Amazon selling PlayStation 3 and Wii right before Xmas. They’re available now, although due to supply restrictions Amazon chose to post them as part of Customers Vote promotion. Vote for whether you like PS3 60 GB, PS3 20 GB or Nintendo Wii by Sunday midnight, come back to Amazon on Tuesday morning to find out if you won.

Review of How to Drive Your Competition Crazy by Guy Kawasaki

How to drive your competition crazyHow to Drive Your Competition Crazy: Creating Disruption for Fun and Profit by Guy Kawasaki is a 1996 book that’s nevertheless still inspiring and interesting to read. It tells the stories of Davids fighting Goliaths in all sorts of markets with better and more inventive marketing. Ask an average geek about his marketing plan for any product out there, and most of us could probably come up with a strategy to lower prices below competitor’s. However, even though we’re wallet driven, note how major market leaders out there don’t win by price.

Coke and Pepsi cost more than a store-branded soda, and nevertheless command humongous market shares compared to Safeway Select or Albertson’s brand. Linux is substantially cheaper than Windows, but nevertheless Windows commands quite a market. Most of the time, as marketers find out, people actually feel good about paying extra for the product that delivers extra advantages and differs from the competition. As much as we all like to save money, we all like to feel good spending money in a smart way, i.e. paying more for sophistication and convenience.

Hence Guy Kawasaki tells the store of his career as Apple evangelist, when Mac market share was even below what it is right now. He tells the story of a Mom-and-Pop hardware store that everybody thought would shut down as soon as Home Depot opened next door. A story of Sears making their catalog smaller than Montgomery Ward’s, therefore ensuring it would be placed on top in any household. A story of a pizza chain offering a 2-for-1 special to anybody who brings a Yellow Pages ad of their competitor (and therefore eliminates the opportunity to know the competitor’s phone number next time they need a tasty Italian dish).

The book is good at pointing that competing on price is usually devastating to the business who starts the price war, and that every employee of an organization is in essence a marketer. It provides a fresh (even though it’s a 10-year-old book) view into what effective marketing is, and provides great food for thought regarding good and bad marketing practices we see today. The book is like a buck on Amazon (or if you know me, ping me and I can give you the book), and I read it over a few bus trips to Palo Alto and back.

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