Tech Tourist 2.0

From Vietnam, I get a "page not found" error when I try to go to certain sites. Friends in the US, over Skype, tell me that they can see the same sites. So far the list of blocked sites includes the following:

www.voanews.com  Voice of America News
anonymizer.com  A proxy service

In a poor developing country like Vietnam, where it is 90F every day, opportunities for ice skating do not exist. But I just noticed a way to make it more feasible using artificial ice (Ice Tec 310). This would make it possible to put an "ice" skating rink in central park in Saigon, just like in Manhattan. That would be cool. 

Making an iPhone app is not the path to riches it once was. But innovative new apps still keep getting produced. One of the coolest I've seen recently is the upcoming Cabulous app by John Wolpert's upStart Mobile company. On the one hand, Cabulous sits in the hands of cab (taxi) drivers and on the other hand, anyone looking for a cab opens the app and can see the nearest cabs and hail them. At that point, both sides see where the other is, and can move around without missing each other. It is great if you are looking for a cab in a rather low density or difficult area. The biggest winners are actually the cabbies who lose a lot of potential revenue because they are sitting around idle, or when they do go to someone who has hailed them by phone, they are often not there when they turn up.

Today, I was asked about my thoughts on the new Apple iPhone 3G S.

I'm disappointed to not see an iPod Touch with a camera. Basically, I think the iPod Touch should be an iPhone without the phone option. Obviously this is a deliberate decision. I think a lot of people would decide to keep another phone, and supplement it with an iPod Touch.

Obviously the iPhone 3G S is a must have phone for me. I take pictures with the iPhone all the time, and having a higher resolution camera with auto-focus is a compelling improvement. And video will be great too, especially if I can upload it to flickr, and tweet it, just like I do with pictures using our FlickrTweet service. Video will make the extra memory in the phone important.

Not being able to tether with AT&T remains annoying as hell for the time I'm in the US and very mobile, but with limited Internet connectivity. Without tethering, I am confined to Wifi locations for serious work on my laptop (although thanks to Google, this covers all of Mountain View).

The compass in itself is rather boring (even for me with my navigation compass-using background - I just came back from a week sailing in Thailand, plotting our course all the way), but it will probably add some marginal benefit to navigation accuracy, directions and the intuitive user experience. It, along with voice, is probably designed to help kill the in-car GPS navigation system category.

I'm starting to think I need to have a mobile.me account even though it is priced very unfavourably. The features to find and/or wipe an iPhone seem compelling. Although perhaps not enough in themselves to justify the cost, it does start to tip the balance.

The extra speed should be nice. I find I wait ten or twenty seconds at times for the camera app to open.

Of course, most of this stuff I'll just get to use occasionally when I am in the US. Most of the time I will be confined to an iPhone that I can unlock. I will be most interested in seeing if an unlock for the iPhone 3G S becomes available. As an alternatie, it might even be worth a visit to Hong Kong to get a premium priced unlocked iPhone 3G S when they become available there. 

The Swine Flu has caused a lot of panic. It is now best referred to as H1N1 because panicked and ill-informed people and governments have been avoiding and killing pigs under the false impression that they spread the disease (it is only spread by humans - so it would be more effective to avoid and cull them).

Police, Dec 1918 Influenza Epidemic -- US National Archives

Monday April 20, 2009 -- Oracle has announced plans to by Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion, a 42% premium on last week's closing price.

This has immense implications for the open source database industry because Sun owns MySQL, which dominates the free open source database market. It could be worthwhile to Oracle to simply shut down MySQL or at least subvert its use in favour of Oracle databases. Even though MySQL is open source, and others can use the code to make derivative open source versions (fork the code), Sun and Oracle's ownership of InnoDB could give it effective control over MySQL since this is the database's primary storage engine.

REF: http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13523522&source=features_box_main

Is Joyent down? I can't reach http://joyent.com, http://support.joyent.com, or their emergency phone number, 415-289-0806. Maybe it's just me? I first noticed when our website went down, and it could also affect some of our clients!

It is weird. People in Canada and Silicon Valley could reach our site, http://eastagile.com, hosted on Joyent. But we could not reach any of their infrastructure from Vietnam. Then a friend pointed out that a large number of fiber lines were recently cut in Silicon Valley by vandals, and that traffic was being rerouted in the meantime. It might be that the routes from Vietnam were affected by this.

Ten days ago I reiterated my view that "The dollar will collapse and US interest rates will have strong upward pressure" (see US Economic Prospects: These are the Good Days. March 10, 2009). And this seems to be happening, faster than I expected.

And within a few days ago, the first sign of these movements took place, with the US starting to buy up long term debt, causing the US dollar to decline for the week by more than 5 percent against a basket of currencies. This has been the largest decline since 1985. And according to Reuters, a fall of 5.2 percent at the close later on Friday would [would] make this week's dollar plunge the biggest since 1973 when the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates was finally abandoned.  This decline may also signal an equally significant currency regime change and shift in long run US economic role and fortunes.

From the US government perspective, this is a good move, assuming they also see the same crisis on the horizon. Essentially, they are shifting borrowing that would be short term (e.g. 90 days) to long term debt. This would make a lot of sense if they thought that short term rates would increase substantially during the term of the long term debt, and not have much prospect of falling again. It is an unprecedented opportunity to profit from intertemporal (between time periods) arbitrage -- an opportunity of which few others can take advantage.

By the way, if you haven't read it already, you should see Wired Magazines excellent article about David X. Li's Gaussian Copula Function, and how its misuse to measure risk in Credit Default Swaps (CDS) has been a key factor contributing to the current credit market crisis. 

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant?currentPage=all d

According to the Economist's Economic Intelligence Unit, Vietnam may have 0.3% economic growth this year. That makes a lot of sense given what is going on in the rest of the world. But it is certainly a slap in the face to Standard Chartered's 5% growth estimate, and official Vietnamese government assertions that things would soon get better.

At a conference in Hanoi this week, estimates were all over the map. But all agreed that the government estimates were too high.  A lack of reliable and timely data was one reason reported for a lack of consistency in estimates.

Believe it or not, the United States is in a relatively good economic state right now. When the rest of the global economy improves, that's when things may start to get really bad for America.

It is ironic that while the fundamental and increasingly desperate state of US finances, debt burden, and economic growth prospects would suggest  a collapse in the US dollar, and the US' ability to borrow, quite the opposite has happened. The dollar has remained strong. And the US has had no trouble borrowing unprecedented amounts and at exceptionally low interest rates.  In a panic, everything is relative, and while bad, everyone else seems worse off.  So there is a flight to the safety of the US dollar, and the one last apparent bastion of security, US Treasury Bills (lending to the US government).  But expect another irony: when things start to look better around the world, investors will have less fear and more alternatives. The dollar will collapse and US interest rates will have strong upward pressure.