Skype traffic way, way down

"Where have all the minutes gone?", asks James Enck, who reveals some rough stats on Skype voice traffic based on what they publish on their website.

Not only is the traffic down significantly over the past few months, this has happened even as the user base has continued to grow. So the average minutes of use per day per user must really be looking grim compared to six months ago.

Could it be seasonal effects? Summer’s here, students are on holiday, etc…. but is so much of the Skype traffic really just students chatting with each other? Shouldn’t southern hemisphere traffic be at least dampening this effect?

Could it be that voice really does take a back seat to IM text? This has actually been the case for me, where I find myself almost only text chatting to friends/colleagues/family, and escalating to voice only where a lot of content needs to be exchanged.

One way forward for Skype would be to really open up and show the world what it’s users are doing– what are the SkypeIn/Out sub/traffic numbers? What are the chat session numbers?

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Very Old Europe: let’s keep our taxes complicated, shall we?

What's not to like about it?

A flat-tax has been shown to *increase* tax revenues, reduce tax evasion, lower tax collection costs, and make for many happy citizens who don't have to waste days of their lives trying to navigate complex tax rules.

Yet for some reason, it's emerged that a UK treasury study on flat-tax feasibility was heavily censored when released to the public. All the parts that gave positive assessment of a flat-tax were cut out, apparently to make it seem that the idea had been seen as bad.

I like Gordon Brown for his intelligence, idealism, and for setting the example as real hard worker. But it's hard not to think he's been steadily turning the UK tax code into a gigantic mess with too much micromanaging and social engineering. Does he like this complexity? To the point where he'd suppress any hint of the benefits of a flat-tax?

The censorship by the treasury was very old-Europe. Thankfully, the chap who leaked the full report, and exposed the censorship, was being very new-Europe :)

Link: This is Money.

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Nice tool to compare prices between Amazon stores internationally

As someone spending a lot of time in Spain at the moment, whenever I make one of my frequent order to Amazon I must always play what I called “the shipping game”. That is, knowing that I’d order from Amazon, and knowing what I wanted to order, to go back and forth between the US and UK Amazon sites to see where I could get the books cheaper and faster!

Pricenoia takes this pain away by letting you do single searches across all Amazon stores, showing where the product is in stock, estimating the shipping to you wherever you are in the world, and even doing currency conversions to give you a clean comparison of which store is cheapest to order from.

Always great to see some technical innovation in Barcelona.

Some thoughts/feedback about improving the service:

  • Allow me to create a virtual shopping cart of products, to compare shipping when ordering say, 10 books and a DVD. This would fit the more common use-case: whenever I order internationally like that, I always bundle many products together to spread the cost of shipping.
  • When showing products in stock, would be interesting to know more detail– I would rather order from the shop that says, typical shipping in 24 hours than the one that says 1–2 weeks.
  • The price history graph is indeed interesting, but only when there’s enough data stored to make the graph– I would not show this graph if there’s less than like, 10 days data.
  • Would be interesting to tap into someone’s wish list, to find what product(s) they want, then do the Pricenoia search to figure out the best way to ship it to them.

Update: One final thought is that I've seen on many blogs published in countries with no Amazon store, or blogs published for an international audience, people signing up to be Amazon affiliates in all the stores. Whenever they talk about a book, they include links to Amazon US, UK, etc.

It would make sense for Pricenoia to create its own meta-affiliate program that encapsulates the multiple Amazon programs, and transfers commissions to its own affiliates while keeping a commission. The value for a blogger or etailer is only having to maintain a single affiliate login while still being able to earn commissions from all Amazon stores.

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Cheaper to buy a house in Tokyo than Spain

I've finally seen a statistic I've been very curious about for a long time: the average price/m2 of housing in Tokyo and for Japan as a whole.

Well, it was worth the wait, because it's quite shocking!

But first, a couple of points to introduce my interest in the matter. Unless you've been living in a cave, you're very likely aware of the great worldwide boom in property prices, particularly in Europe and the US. Prices have gone up so much in the past 10-15 years, depending on the country, that many are now either worried about a massive bubble "pop" (or "hiss", if you're Paul Krugman).

We know that Japan experienced a crazy property boom in the 80s that peaked in the early 90's. It was in the news that property prices have gone down *every single year* in Japan since 1992! That's a sobering thought- 13 straight years of negative equity for the poor sucker who bought at the top in '92.

Now, I've found it curious that property prices would go down for 13 years in a row, whilst Tokyo still routinely comes out top of the charts as the world's most expensive city. Does this mean that Tokyo is expensive for taxi rides and buying fruit, but in the single most expensive item on a household budget (housing) it's actually relatively cheap?

Last quarter, Tokyo house prices increased 0.4%, a rather modest increase, but still the first one in 13 years. And published figured showed the average price/m2 in Tokyo to be 3,355 Euros. That would make it about 40% cheaper to buy a flat in Tokyo than in Barcelona, Spain! And let's not even start to compare the economic differences between Barcelona and Tokyo- it's too embarrassing for Barcelona.

Even more shocking is the average house price for Japan as a whole is 820 Euros/m2, and continues to decline! This is below the average house price of the poorest of Spain's regions.

I'm only picking on Spain because it's where I'm spending a lot of time at the moment. But the contrast with the Japanese numbers are even greater when comparing with other parts of developed and developing Europe, and even the US.

Check out some of the utterly absurd prices being paid for dumps in NYC, and the prices in Japan will really wake you up to reality.

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Google about to make a catastrophic mistake?

I just read via Jeff Jarvis that the $4 billion that Google intends to raise in a secondary share offering was cutely arranged to be exactly 14,159,265 shares. If that number seems vaguely familiar, that's because it's the decimal of Pi, to its first eight places (3.14159265).

Jeff writes:

"Am I the only one who finds that too-cute-by-half? If this bubble ever bursts and little old ladies are left penniless, this is the kind of arrogant business-as-playground that doesn't sound so darling on the other side of the curve."

I agree completely. Along with their recent shameful banning of CNET reporters, hints of Google's high internal arrogance are starting to add up and the blogosphere is duly taking note. This is a shame, because I think everyone really wants to believe in the "happy, innocent Google that can't help but make so much money by not doing evil" myth.

I try to look at all company interaction with the public, whether via PR, marketing, packaging,customer care, and yes, share registration documents, as part of a company's conversation with its public. It's all about the conversation, right? And what exactly is Google telling us with this kind of activity?

There are two fundamental risks with this disturbing hint of evolving company culture. The first is that as examples like the ones cited above leak out into the public, public perception of the brand is severely damaged. People may keep using Google, but they'll slowly and surely stop loving it....bad news long term.

But more near term, and much deadlier, IMHO, is that arrogance can cause companies to make huge, catastrophic strategic mistakes. AOL thought it ruled the world when it did it's horrible merger with Time-Warner.

Which leads me back to this $4 billion share offering Google is contemplating. Om Malik recently speculated that Google might try to offer free broadband via WiFi networks across the US to gain better user data and offer targeted location-based advertising- possibly called "GoogleNet". Reaction in the blogosphere (worldwide!) seems to have been very positive about this idea- check the positive comments: here, here, here, here, and many more here.

I don't really think this is such a great idea necessarily. How much money is being made in location-based mobile advertising today? How would these ads be delivered? To laptops? To mobile phones? How many wi-fi enabled mobile phones are out there? How many people walk around town with their laptops, looking for restaurants or checking directions?

What kind of network would Google offer? 80211.b or a or g? Would it be happy to continually have to reinvest in this network to keep up with ever increasing data speeds?

Weren't there many examples of startups that tried the concept of free network access in the fixed internet world, supported by ads only? Didn't every single one of these startups eventually die out? Why would the same flawed business model suddenly work better in the mobile space?

I think it's an intriguing idea, and maybe one that would eventually work out. Who am I to know? And power to Google for experimenting with these sorts of ideas, if indeed they are. Trialing in a city, with a network partner, for low cost- this is how you try things at very low risk to see where the problems are and how to solve them in a way that makes sense.

But when you see financing being raised for $4 billion, it sort of makes me wonder if Google are not planning a *big bet* move. Something that would be unnecessary, very risky, and based on theoretical market ideas (local ad market is xx billion, wifi is great, lets mash it all together by throwing billions at it!).

Making a big mistake would throw a lot of money away, divert management attention, and slow down momentum enough to allow competitors to catch up.

And to me, arrogance is just the catalyst that pushes companies over the edge into such mistakes...

I think Om, who often is good at pouring cold water on over-hyped ideas, sort of hints at this when he cites VC Paul Kedrosky speculating that so much financing could also pay for 5.4 million Blade servers, *and* the nuclear reactor to power them!

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Mobile barcode scanning hits an interesting new direction

I've just spoken with some former colleagues who are now the European team of Scanbuy, the mobile barcode scanning software company. They demoed for me a new application which looks really great, and should become public in the next week or so.

It's a very creative app that in my mind represents a great solution to problems that people haven't yet realised they have. More on this later...

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NY housing at its most absurd

Via Curbed, a popular NY property blog, reports of a property on the market for almost $5 million, which regulaly lacks electricity and is at times occupied by homeless and prostitutes.

The cliche about NY housing being expensive should give way to what is a more important metric: the price/quality ratio. It's a shame the "quality" part of this equation is so difficult to measure objectively, because if NY is expensive on just price alone, it is by far the worst city I've ever seen in terms of the quality of housing you get for those prices.

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My kind of Crack

I'd love to smoke from this pipe.

Must get my addiction checked before I end up like this poor guy.

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India is the most pro-American country in the world

Via Chrenkoff, the surprising trends in worldwide perception of the US.

I can't think of a better long-term ally for the US than India- multilingual, democratic, pro-education, deeply cultural, the origin of three of the world's great religions.

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Video by the People

Some links to interesting, amateur video:

Brussels Journal has links to some short videos on the theme of terrorism, made by a young Belgian film-maker. They're interesting to watch, and well-made for a 1-man show. Link: Terror on Our Doorstep | The Brussels Journal.

Also, via BoingBoing, I really, really recommend you check out this rock-building video. It's so refreshing to see something new and creative, and wonderfully made on no budget at all. The filmmaker, Danny K. Brown, has done a great job with this.

Finally, as a riff to the meme on war videos coming from Iraq, short film website iFilm has launched a dedicated channel called "Warzone" with short clips taken of real war- sniper fire, helicopter attacks, terrorist bomings. It's fascinating, at times very gruesome; but this is a way to feel what's really going on over there, unfiltered, for better or worse.

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