me in front of the presidential palace in port au prince

I was offered to help the guys deliver supplies via helicopter.  ”sure”, I said, not really knowing what that meant.  Our pilot was a very nice guy named Ryan who had spent 4 years flying helicopters in the middle east for the US military.  He really knew what he was doing.

So we load up into the chopper, per this shot.

See the big box on my lap in the chopper?

The back of the chopper was full and I had the big box on my lap.  That big box was going to be a problem later.  :-)

So then we fly out to a basically empty field which looked like this:

empty field (for right now)

What happens when a helicopter shows up and delivers free stuff out of the sky?  That empty field within 90 seconds looks like this:

chopper dropping supplies

I am not kidding.  The formerly barren field is suddenly filled with people who just show up out of absolutely nowhere.  We still have no idea where they all come from.  Its more than a little scary – these are people in a very desperate situation

Anyways, Ryan told me we have to get to another empty field, put the chopper down, get out and then drop off all the supplies before the haitians can run over to the chopper and try to get in and/or steal from us.  So we find an empty field and start to land.  This is immediately what I saw:

people running towards the helicopter

I got (ahem) a little nervous.  So I frantically tried to get the big box out of the chopper.  Unfortunately the box got wedged on the steering column which controls the entire helicopter.  I was pretty nervous about the guys running towards us, so I did get the box out, but almost rolled the chopper in the process.  Ryan fortunately was able to keep control of it.  He said later on a scale of 1-10 where 10 is extremely dangerous that my little maneuver with the box rated a “9″.

We were able to drop the supplies off, this is people picking them up:

people picking up supplies after we drop them off

and here’s a zoom of one of their faces as they’re looking up at us:

expression on a guys face as we're dropping off supplies

And this photo is of the moment exactly as I almost rolled the helicopter:

the exact moment i almost rolled the chopper

You can see in the above photo how close everyone got to us (and remember, this was a previously empty field).

Apparently we probably would not have been killed, but it should would not have been much fun. So Ryan, thanks for keeping things under control!

I’m not sure there’s anything to be learned here other than be careful if you visit a disaster zone, and have a lot of respect for the people who are out there risking their lives.

UPDATE: One of the pilots (Ty Corbridge) dug up a video as we were doing one of the dropoffs. You can watch it here:

In the end the tsunami warning was cancelled. Apparently we did get a tsunami, 12cm big. We survived.

I’m about a 5 hour drive from Port Au Prince and have visited Haiti twice, so watching the news has been horrifying. To know that so much death and destruction is happening just a short distance away is pretty shocking, and worse that there’s nothing you can do about it. I have one friend living in Port Au Prince, but she and her family are fine I did some relaying of messages between her on facebook and calling people around the DR as emergency supplies were brought across. One girl I met in Santiago a few years ago had her mother killed. Its also been disturbing since I’ve spent a bit of time in Haiti and really like the people.

The DR and Haiti have a tense relationship. We have a lot (1m+) Haitian immigrants living in the DR and they don’t contribute much. But the DR stepped up and got a lot of supplies into Haiti quickly which was impressive. This was a lot of work for a developing country like the DR, but people really came together and worked hard to support our “brother” country.

Also impressive has been the efforts of Jeremy Johnson and Nathan Kinsella from Utah who flew some planes and helicopters in.

Less impressive was the international effort – its unclear to me why professional aid agencies like the Red Cross don’t have thousands of paratrooper style teams like the 82nd airborne who can get quickly into a disaster zone during the initial critical moments and save lives. These are professionals with very large budgets.

WARNING: This is not politically correct, but I need to share this. My views are shaped by living in the Dominican Republic since 2001.

Its about time to question whether Haiti should continue as a going concern. Did you know the Haitians buy american cement, then water it down? You wonder why everything fell down so quickly?

We’ve had NGO’s in Haiti for the past 40+ years and things continue to get worse (I worked for an NGO for 3 years, including at the international level).

Check out the GDP of Haiti vs the rest of the world, so you can see the result of billions of dollars of NGO investment for yourself.

And now with so much money coming in, its like a dotcom boom for NGO’s. Each NGO is saying “wow, now we can get into Haiti and do it RIGHT since now we have lots of money”. Yikes!

Some will say Haiti has been mistreated by various countries or bad luck. I say Haiti has a culture which doesn’t teach people to take risks and become leaders. Unfortunately I’ve been told I’m racist, ethnocentric or that Haiti has no strategic advantages. Yet the DR does fine on the same island. Cuba is embargoed by the USA and does ok, as do the other various islands and cultures in the Caribbean.

Here’s a some quotes from a haitian guy inside Port Au Prince on Twitter in the first days after the earthquake:

Mr President Stop Giving us The Victim Speech! We Need A Leader Right Now!

No Food, No Water, No Medications, Nothing! And Our President says he’a victim as well! How long we have to wait?

Mr Preval, we need 2 hear from u! Take ur responsability. Do ur job like those ppl in the streets helping each other! It’s been 4 days now

Cultures CAN be changed — in the USA people were trained not to litter. Germany has changed its culture multiple times over the past 100 years. China has seen immense changes before, during and after the cultural revolution.

Its not about education – what is needed comes before education. They need the culture instilled into them which truly values progress. Haiti feels like an NGO driven version of socialism, and as someone who has visited North Korea and Cuba, I’ve seen the results of socialism first hand.

Right now Haiti is a tax on the world — billions of dollars are going into a bottomless pit — of just 9 million people! They need capitalism now. The rest of the world needs to have use of their money to support their local communities instead of sending it to Haiti.

So my suggestion for you is:
- support the basics of the Haiti rebuilding effort as I’m sure you have.
- don’t support NGO driven projects in Haiti — even so called sustainable programs. These still start out with handouts and effectively teach generations of Haitians not to lead. The exception would be programs which encourage real true grass roots entrepreneurship like microfinance.
- Look for top down initiatives which force true cultural/motivational change on the country
- if you know people considering cancelling their holiday to the DR, please convince them to come. The DR is 100% fine and could use the economic help especially after supporting Haiti. Your friends will have a great holiday

Further reading:
NYtimes: The Underlying Tragedy
FoxNews: Haiti Should Merge With the Dominican Republic
NYtimes: “To Heal Haiti, Look to History, Not Nature“:

“..the United States and other donors could make a formal undertaking to ensure that the vast amounts that will soon pour into the country for reconstruction go not to foreigners but to Haitians — and not only to Haitian contractors and builders but to Haitian workers, at reasonable wages. This would put real money in the hands of many Haitians, not just a few, and begin to shift power away from both the rapacious government and the well-meaning and too often ineffectual charities that seek to circumvent it.”

There probably are no great solutions for Haiti, but to let it go back to where its been seems like such a waste of humanity. I feel like we have a global responsibility to try something new.

My dream since I was 12 (~1985) was to move to the USA and make a startup. Having grown up in Australia with the Commodore Amiga, I was amazed by the idea of a group of dentists funding an intensely smart group of engineers who ended up building the Amiga. We were blown away by companies like Epyx who made incredible games and utilities. I didn’t know it back then, but many of these companies were based in Silicon Valley.

So I followed my dream, and in 1999 I was working at Oracle in Silicon Valley. But I found the life in a big corporate machine was really not for me. I really, REALLY wanted to be in the startup world, building my own startup.

As an Australian citizen working in the USA with an H1b visa wanting to make a startup, I found 4 options:
1. Join someone’s startup, sponsored under an H1b. The problem with this approach is that if their startup fails, I have to be re-sponsored for a new visa. And, obviously I am not building my own startup this way.

2. Make my own startup. But with an H1b visa, this was going to be difficult to arrange. H1b visas are better for employees with minority ownership, not founders. And again, what happens if the startup fails after 3 months?

3. Leave the USA and move to a country close by which would enable me to use the infrastructure of the US, but avoid the visa issue entirely. (I didn’t want to return to Australia since I didn’t feel the startup culture was very strong there, and the timezone makes online work difficult).

4. Stay working at a big company until my greencard was issued. This would have taken 3-4 years. Maybe I should have followed this approach, but I really, really wanted to be out doing something on my own.

In the end, I chose #3, and now live in the Dominican Republic. I’ve done reasonably well and am quite happy here. But the problem I face locally is the lack of a startup scene and technology talent. I can’t build an ebay or a google from the caribbean. I’ve had to become extremely good at building a network remotely; thus I run http://MeetInnovators.com

I can tell you that if there had been an option of a startup visa, where if I raised $1M in funding I would be granted a visa to live in the USA and build a company, I would have put 100% of my energy in making that happen. And, if a visa category like this is created, I may just go ahead and do it now, even though I’m now considered old by startup standards (37). (Its considered the most successful startups are built by people in their 20s). So this would have been a perfect fit for me 10 years ago.

One last comment: I’m comfortable with risk. So make the visa performance based! Give the entrepreneur 3 shots at making a company work. And if they can’t, send them home. Thats pretty rough, but it would be a much better option than I had back in 1999.

If you want one set of photos to look at, this is it:
http://photos.adrianbye.com/Asia-Pacific/North-Korea/9324440_ufPDF

My writeup of general perceptions:
http://adrianbye.com/2009/08/24/thoughts-from-north-korea/

North Korean People photos:
http://photos.adrianbye.com/Asia-Pacific/North-Korean-People/9367206_FDEQs

Bizarre things from North Korea photos:
http://photos.adrianbye.com/Asia-Pacific/North-Korea-Bizarre-Photos/9373831_Qg5Pv

Videos:
Military type guys training for something:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHtVBcuhN18

A female traffic police directing traffic (they don’t use traffic lights even though they have them):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXe-BI_fjrc

Driving around Pyongyang so you can see how it looks, along with an unusual story from our british guide:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muLz1stvLg4

Performing the Haka (a rugby dance from New Zealand) to our guides:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpcD45Rlrww

A children’s show:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqjAqQTq9X4

How you can influence north korean kids to be more positive towards westerners:
http://adrianbye.com/2009/09/05/connect-with-korean-kids/

And, the 1 hour long video of our entire tour. This cost additional at the end of the tour and came on DVD. Watch this if you’re serious about going to North Korea — it will show you exactly what you will see while you are there. For anyone else, take a look since its quite funny, but it is rather odd.
http://vimeo.com/5851173

How about a way to — in a very small way — diffuse some of the tension between North Korea and the west? A simple way to show them we’re not really as bad as they’ve been taught?

North Korea doesn’t have western style advertising – in its place North Korean kids are fed massive amounts of propaganda about how terrible the West is (and not just the USA). The kids are bombarded with hundreds of thousands of anti-western messages by they time they grow up into adults -this is something which has been going on since 1953. As I found out on my trip to North Korea, by the time they are adults they are taught to literally hate you and wish you were dead.

On my trip I found a simple thing was very interesting. As an obvious westerner in North Korea, I started handing out bags of chocolate to North Korean kids. It wasn’t easy, and about 50% of them were scared of me and wouldn’t accept it, while the others only tentatively did. But the later reaction of the kids who accepted the chocolate made it absolutely clear this was the right thing to do — they had HUGE smiles, and were waving and very friendly. The change only took a few minutes and was dramatic.

I went from being a scary western white guy to a provider of SUGAR!!

No, chocolate isn’t the most healthy thing to be giving out, but the kids love it, and will remember it for a long time. Starvation is a real issue inside North Korea (in the late 90’s about 2,000,000 people starved to death), so some extra calories certainly won’t hurt even though the kids you’ll meet in Pyongyang are the best fed in the country. Luxuries like chocolate aren’t a common treat in a country where people have disposable income US$5 – US$10/month and luxuries like these are not available to the general population.

“Breaking The Ice”

By doing this, something incredibly powerful is happening — you’re showing the kids that westerners aren’t scary people. By having a personal, different experience it may help a little towards undercutting the propaganda messaging of the current regime — while the kids continue getting negative messages from their government, they are receiving chocolate they love from westerners. This will force them to think through the contradiction for themselves. Its a small thing, but small things can lead to big things.

Even if much of the anti-western sentiment in North Korea is towards the USA, and you’re not American – they still think YOU are american, as they consider anyone who is not Korean to be from the USA. Obviously if you are from the US, this will be even more impactful.

Big doors swing on small hinges

Suggestions for handing out chocolate:
- Give big bags of individually wrapped chocolate/sweets/candy so one child won’t eat it all by themselves. This way they’ll be more likely to share it with their friends and talk about what happened, this is a form of viral marketing!
- Don’t ask for anything in return (eg photos). Just give them the chocolate, smile, then walk away. It must be an unconditional gift.
- If the child bows after receiving the bag, make a big smile and a friendly wave back without bowing in return. I believe its better to reinforce that we are not Korean and not part of their culture, yet are still their friends and respect them and their ways.
- Approach the child with a smile and look friendly. Remember they are surrounded by almost 60 years of propaganda causing them to be scared of you.
- Chocolate is very cheap, about US$1.50 for a huge bag in most local stores. You can buy lots of big bags everywhere. Hand out an entire bag to each kid.
- Get some shopping bags to carry around with you during the day as you go sightseeing. Try to keep lots with you at all times — sometimes kids will turn up when you least expect it.
- You may want to consider bringing higher quality western chocolate with you, however it may not be so easy to carry in and won’t be brands they are comfortable with. Chocolate is very easy to buy at hard currency stores inside the country.
- Give the chocolate to kids who aren’t somehow connected with the tourism industry as this will make the biggest impact. You’ll have plenty of opportunities as you walk around parks and go to shows.

Keep The North Korean Guides On Your Side

When you’re travelling inside North Korea, you will see things that are absolutely insane by western standards. Don’t criticize them in front of the guides — you need the guides to be on your side and to help you out. If you are unsuccessful in handing the chocolate out yourself, ask the guide to do it. I was successful 50% of the time in handing out the chocolate – the guide was successful 100% of the time. She simply went to the child, asked in Korean for their name and asked them if they liked chocolate. If the guide asks why you’re doing it, tell them you want to help the kids and show them we are their friends.

The North Korean tour guides who will accompany you on your trip will be full of vague, unclear information. When I asked them why the kids often didn’t want to accept the chocolate, they told me kids were taught not to talk to strangers. Having visited Cuba and talking with people there about the socialist system and how people take care of each other, I’m not convinced by this explanation. My general impression in socialist countries is that there is an environment of people trying to take care of each other. Thus handing out chocolate shouldn’t be a scary thing.

I believe its because they are fed lots of negative messages about westerners. Also remember you may be the first westerner they’ve ever met — North Korea is one of the most homgenous countries in the world.

I gave away $30 of chocolate on my trip to 15-20 kids, had I been properly prepared I would have given away at least $150 worth — it would definitely have been possible. Thus I’ve put up this page so future tourists to North Korea can consider the idea.

And by doing this, you’re helping show in a small way that people from the west aren’t all bad. You may even connect with a child who will end up as a future leader of the country and help shape their thinking.

And even if none of that works, at a minimum you’re helping a little with the very real problem of starvation.

My trip to North Korea made me appreciate my previous trips to Cuba. Effectively this was just a propaganda tour – we had little to no contact with local people. We didn’t have real conversations about how people live or how the country works. For example we didn’t learn how much things cost or the truth about how much people earn each month (appears to be around US$5/month, with the government covering all expenses). In Cuba I was free to go wherever I wanted, talk to whoever I wanted, and talk about anything. I engaged very deeply with local people and learned a lot about how things work there. Not in North Korea. Anyways, onwards…

The North Korean style is to be quite reserved and polite, avoiding any kind of conflict. Add on top of that when you have a language barrier and guides that are told by the state to only show the positive side of the country, and you don’t get much real engagement. When I’d ask more probing questions, they would either say they didn’t understand or get distracted with something else. After a few days of this it was quite obvious what they were doing and I was disappointed by it.

Others in our tour got the impression that people liked us in North Korea. But I suspect thats because they didn’t get very close to any North Korean people. At one point I broke through with one of the North Koreans I met on the trip and was told just how much they hate the USA – and are extremely happy that North Korea has the ability to strike back via nuclear weapons and that they will destroy anyone that stands in their way. I won’t say who it was that told me this because it could get them into real trouble. Actually I was very glad this conversation happened because it was a rare moment of clarity and directness on the trip.

Photos were also a real problem, we were not allowed to photograph military who where everywhere, we couldn’t photograph signs of poverty or certain areas relating to the leadership of the country. Please keep this in mind when you see my photos, I’d estimate about 25% of the photos would be different had I been allowed to take more of them.

We were taken on a fairly standard tour of major sites in the country and the two groups who were always present were North Korean military and school children. At one point, in the military museum where we were seeing captured vehicles from the Korean War, there was a scary moment.. I was surrounded by 300 military I was just alone with my guide — in general military have extremely unfriendly expressions on their faces towards us, but this time it was worse. I didn’t understand why, until I realised later that this was the musuem where learning about all the bad things that happened to them during the Korean war!! And there I was, the representative of all the bad stuff!!!

The food was mediocre – it seems that we were given very high level food for within the country, we noticed a few times that the waitresses were extremely happy to be serving us, it seemed like they felt it was an incredibly special occaision for them. For us it was healthy food, but extremely low fat and little meat. As I’m returning to China I am really looking forward to eating some pizza, hamburgers and a nice steak with baked potatoes! Surprisingly the beer was outstanding in the Yanggakdo hotel bar – they have a microbrew which is from a UK brewery that was acquired by the North Koreans and the entire brewery was moved to Pyongyang. It was a world class microbrew which would be well received in any major city around the world.

The level of cultism around the leadership was astonishing. As a long term student of psychology and sales they used every element of psychology I’ve ever seen plus a few more. The result is that the population appears to be strongly aligned with the leadership of the country. We visited the international friendship hall, which is a collection of gifts given by foreign leaders to the North Korean government. The size and scale of it was astonishing, they literally have 100,000+ gifts laid out museum style across several buildings. For information starved North Koreans it clearly gives the impression that the entire world is supporting North Korea and its systems. But the most shocking part was when we went to a special room containing a beeswax statue of the “dear leader” (as he is always referred to by our guides). We were made to smarten up our clothes (zip up coats, etc), be extremely quiet and one guy who was in a wheelchair had to stand up and walk in to the room. We went in, saw the statue in a room with soft background music, perfect lighting, and even a fake breeze fluttering through the leaves on a tree in the background. We lined up in front of the great leader and all made a bow, before then exiting. I’ve never seen anything like it before in my life.

Visiting the DMZ (demilitarized zone) was the highlight of the trip. I’d seen photos before of the shared area between the UN and North Korea, but it was something of a shock to see US military on the other side. I felt a lump in my throat like I was in a place I really didn’t belong.

All in all, the trip to North Korea was a fascinating experience, but I doubt I’ll be back any time soon. I hope they open up more and engage more with the west. Hopefully over time as technology becomes more advanced this will happen.

If you’re interested in a simple way to help improve things with North Korea, I’d encourage you to visit this page: ]]> http://adrianbye.com/2009/08/24/thoughts-from-north-korea/feed/ 1 http://adrianbye.com/2009/08/06/the-incredible-cost-of-updates/ http://adrianbye.com/2009/08/06/the-incredible-cost-of-updates/#comments Thu, 06 Aug 2009 12:57:41 +0000 admin http://adrianbye.com/?p=532 I just got back from a 2 month trip of travelling. When I arrived back, my primary computer wouldn’t work anymore. Nor would my network. Even my music setup had problems.

It ended up taking a full day to update most of it and get everything working again — the way it was working before I left for my trip. And today I finished updating the final piece, my music system called Sonos. The network went down as one of the components was updating, and it now looks like that box has been corrupted and will need to be sent back.

If i have to send this box back, it will cost me $50 in outbound postage, and another $70 to receive the replacement. The box itself cost $400.

And what did I get for all these updates?

Nothing!

Absolutely nothing at all! It was just the things required to get my systems functioning.

The worst software I’ve found so far is Jing, a screencapture software for the mac. I use it every 2-3 weeks. Each time I run it, it won’t work because a “critical update” is needed. So I have to stop my workflow and update it so it works again. Every single time!?

I think the software companies are abusing easy updates online. They are concerned about the bad PR they’ll get for security vulnerabilities. So they push us to keep updating everything.

Its time this stopped! We don’t need so many updates. Schedule a date every year to be update day, say June 1. Update all your latest versions then at the same time and we’ll handle it all together. Make the security patches available to those who are compromised meanwhile. The human time cost for managing all these updates is just getting too high.

Tea is pretty awesome – it has no calories, doesn’t contain much caffeine, is cheap, tastes good and when you’re ready for something to perk you up it only takes a few minutes to make. I also love the fact that there’s so many different types of tea out there you can really try a lot of different types.

I barely used to drink tea. Generally I just drank very infrequent packaged teas. Once I switched to loose leaf tea I couldn’t believe the difference. I was making my tea the wrong way (generally putting the teabag in for far too long). With good loose leaf teas you don’t even need sugar or milk. Its all about having the water temperature exactly right and steeping the tea for the right amount of time (steeping = the length of time you leave the tea in the hot water).

How to get started:

1. Get a teastick: http://gamilacompany.com/tea/teastick.html
This is what you use to steep the tea in the hot water

2. Get a package of teas to try. I’ve found I like Rishi teas a lot, and their oolong teas are great. This is a great sampler pack to start with: http://www.rishi-tea.com/store/sample-set-osthmanthus-huang-guan-yin-wuyi-oolong-iron-goddess-of-mercy-bao-zhong.html

Once you’re more serious:

1. You should get a variable tea kettle. This is pretty important. Different teas should be made at different temperatures.

http://www.amazon.com/Breville-BKE820XL-Variable-Temperature-Kettle/dp/B001DYERBK/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden&qid=1241211937&sr=8-4

This kettle is pretty expensive for just a hot water kettle, but it rocks. It lets you set the temperature exactly right for the style of tea you are drinking.

2. Get a timer. Each tea should be steeped for the right amount of time. So you take the hot water from the kettle and put it with the tea for a specific length of time – the timer makes this easy to do. This one should work fine:

http://www.amazon.com/Component-Design-TM15-Extra-Large/dp/B0000W4MYI/ref=sr_1_28?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden&qid=1241212123&sr=8-28

3. Get a bigger infuser. The teastick is ideal for making tea for yourself while you’re working during the day – but if you have a few people to make tea for, you need a way to prepare tea for everyone at once. This prepares tea for 2 people; I often make 3 small cups with it:

http://www.rishi-tea.com/store/Glass-Teapot-with-Infuser-Two-Person.html

This is similar but bigger:

http://www.rishi-tea.com/store/large-glass-teapot-with-infuser.html

The great thing about an infuser is you can watch the colors from the tea swirl through the water while its steeping. Sounds silly perhaps, but its pretty cool!

4. Pick up a bunch more of the rishi sampler packs, so you can find out which teas you like the most. Here’s some good ones to get:
http://www.rishi-tea.com/store/green-tea-sample-set-jasmine-pearl-ancient-emerald-lily-orange-blossom-jade-cloud.html

http://www.rishi-tea.com/store/white-tea-sample-set-silver-needle-premiun-white-peony-peach-blossom-white-tea-rose-m-lange.html

http://www.rishi-tea.com/store/black-tea-sample-set-earl-grey-darjeeling-2nd-flush-keemun-mao-feng-golden-yunnan.html

http://www.rishi-tea.com/store/pu-erh-tea-sample-set-ancient-tea-flower-loose-pu-erh-ginger-pu-erh-classic-ancient-pu-erh-tuo-cha.html

Once you’ve tried a bunch of teas you will find out which ones you like. Many do taste quite similar. But some are very different. These are my favourites, in order of most preferred:

http://www.rishi-tea.com/store/iron-goddess-of-mercy-medium-roasted.html

http://www.rishi-tea.com/store/plum-oolong-organic-oolong-tea.html

http://www.rishi-tea.com/store/citron-oolong.html

I order these in 1 pound bags now, which last forever. You can put those into smaller tea containers like these:
http://www.rishi-tea.com/store/tea-storage-vessels/

I have about 30 different tea varieties and its been a great thing to do.

If you’re interested in other tech guys and how they are into tea, you may want to read this article:

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/04/tech-millionair/

Samovar is a tea house right near Moscone in San Francisco; there’s a lot of conferences in the area such as adtech. Their website is: http://samovarlife.com/ They do charge $8-$10 per cup of tea, but its a pretty awesome place. We saw Tim Ferriss there when we were having tea.

If you get really serious about tea, there’s a tea conference you can go to:

http://www.worldteaexpo.com/

And its worth following Kevin Rose’s tea twitter account:
http://twitter.com/goodtea

This is a pretty concise blog post with a lot of links; it represents 4 months of research (and misteps) about tea and is pretty much everything I know. If you follow these steps you’ll be on the right track. I drink 2-4 cups of tea every day and love it – its even great in hot climates like the Caribbean!

This ad was published in a small local newspaper (Pereira) in Colombia on 25 July 1998. The entire newspaper was in spanish except for this advertisement. I am sure all Canadians are very proud.

Since I recently moved to Santo Domingo, I don’t know my way around. In addition, people drive like its their last day on the planet, so the traffic can be a challenge and its easy to get lost. I love driving in the US – I just install my GPS and I can find my way anywhere.

For years I’ve wanted GPS maps of the Dominican Republic. But no go. I’ve searched all over the net for commercial maps, I’ve checked out open source community maps, nothing. I was even going to pay someone to make them, but that turned out to be more complicated than we expected.

On the Dominican message boards, DR1, they mentioned the other day that someone had made maps for Santo Domingo, released just a week ago for Santo Domingo! Wow! So I dug out my Garmin GPS I use for trips in the US and went over there (in taxi naturally, since I couldn’t find it on my own!).

I was concerned my US maps wouldn’t fit with my dominican maps, but it turned out that wasn’t an issue. Once I got there, I was sent upstairs and there was a guy installing the GPS units. He was very friendly and just connected my unit via the USB cable and copied over the data. It took about 10 minutes. Then I paid him RD$1400 ($40US) and off I went.

So firstly, they’re not complete maps, its nothing like GPS service in the US. You can’t look up a street address like you can in the USA. All you get are maps of the city, working on your GPS. If you want to go to a specific address, you have to find that location on the GPS map, pinpointmark the position on the GPS and then it will take you there. It has a limited selection of restaurants and locations built in which you can preselect, but its nothing like a mapping unit in the USA which has virtually complete business data for the entire city.

On my first trip it took me about 25 minutes to figure out how to get it to work. But once I’d programmed in the place I was going to (which I had to find on the paper map first ironically), getting there was a breeze. And, once I was there, I marked the position as a favourite in the GPS, so I will be able to find out how to get back there again.

One night when I was coming home late, I got lost for almost 2 hours.. There are often limited sign markings in the DR and late at night there may be nobody around to ask directions.. With my GPS that won’t happen again.

One cool thing was that my GPS is running in english, but giving all the street names in Spanish. So it tells me to turn left in english. For a lazy spanish speaker like myself, I like it.

Without the ability to search for streets and towns, its not perfect, its about 60% of a US GPS map system. But its a great start and hopefully will be improved.

The only issue I found out is that my cigarette lighter electricity had been disconnected, presumably when my ipod system was installed.. So the GPS ran out of power.. Ah, DR mechanics.. but we’ll get that fixed.

Here’s the unit: http://www.ola.com.do/gps.php

Thanks Ola, and good job!

———-

I’ve always moved around a lot. The longest I’ve stayed in one country since 1990 until now has been 3 years. Now I’m moving from a city I’ve lived in for the past 7 years, Santiago, Dominican Republic, to Santo Domingo, the capital (Santiago is the second largest city).

I’m moving for a couple of reasons.. people think i’m crazy but i’ve developed a real phobia about earthquakes. iIf you haven’t lived through a major one you may not understand. We had a big one here in 2003; everyone in the city thought we were done for, and it was only a 6.4.

Santiago is right on a major fault, similar to the san francisco bay area. The difference is that in the Domincian Republic there isn’t earthquake resistant construction. In fact, my current building is designed with a car park UNDER the building, so if a major quake comes, the entire building will collapse on to the car park. (this information comes from some caribbean earthquake geologists from the US). But my earthquake phobia doesn’t come from the initial quake – its the 2 months of aftershocks. As far as I know they’ve not had that recently in the bay area.

In Santiago, the entire city was on edge in 2003 because we never knew when the next quake would come. It was extremely scary – you’d be sitting eating lunch and a 5.5 would just randomly happen.. I’ve read about this kind of trauma on the news in countries like Turkey and China when they’ve had a lot of aftershocks. If you haven’t been through it, its hard to relate to.

Santiago was actually already destroyed in the 1500’s by an earthquake.

A piece of the wall from old Santiago which was destroyed by a massive earthquake in the 1500’s.

The tension has built up dramatically and there is a now major tragedy waiting to happen. I lived in Pereira, Colombia for a while and just after I left, a major quake took out Armenia, a nearby city. It was a real tragedy.

I prefer to be in Santo Domingo which while close to Santiago, is not on a major caribbean fault line. I noticed the earthquake affected almost everyone in the city at the time, we were all tramautized by so many aftershocks and the original quake.

I also just want to live in a bigger city with more services. My next move will likely be back to the US to join or start a startup, probably in 18 months. although I’m game to go anywhere for the right opportunity. I don’t need a job – i want to build a billion dollar company either as a founder or part of a founding team. Meanwhile I will stay in the Dominican Republic, using leverage working with other teams and not working with anyone locally.

As part of this move i have done my biggest ever life cleanup. I’ve gone through every single thing i own and tried to dispose of as much of it as possible, a little “tim ferris” style (although I think I was doing Tim Ferris type stuff before Tim Ferris was!). I’m moving to a furnished apartment so this meant I could really dispose of a lot of stuff. like to delegate as much work as possible, however this was something i couldn’t delegate and had to do myself. I now see why i never did it before .

As I went through my filing cabinet it was shocking to see how many different projects and ideas i’ve worked on over the years. I’ve really tried a LOT of different ideas to try to find what would work. Most things didn’t and failed miserably. But a couple did. Its been a lot of trial and error trying to figure out what works for me and my strengths. Ihave a lot of respect for successful entrepreneurs, they aren’t just overnight successes. there’s a lot of interim steps to get it right.

And, I went through all the wiring i’ve had installed everywhere throughout my apartment. i hadn’t realised just how many different things i’ve attempted to get a good system for playing audio and video. finally i have it here: http://adrianbye.com/2008/11/03/a-breakthrough-my-new-home-audio-system/

As i discarded everything, we put it all in to the living room. then my maid got to work and started selling everything. Keep in mind these were things which have very little value for me; I just want to be rid of as much as possible. Well, i put her on a 20% commission for sales she made. I had no idea that my maid with an 8th grade education would turn into such a dynamo. It turns out that as of Sunday she’s made US$3000 in sales! This from all the stuff in the US that you’d normally just send to Goodwill. Dominicans LOVE buying used stuff. It was funny reading about black friday sales in the US and seeing just the same happening in my living room.

Its amazing getting rid of everything. I’m switched to mac, so all my PC stuff is now gone. i’ve switched to iphone so all my old cellphones are being sold. I had 5 cellphones and 3 laptops just sitting around which i’d never had time to get rid of. It feels good.

So now starts a major new phase in my life.. new place to live, running on mac, living in santo domingo, completely organized life, ready to work on exciting upcoming projects. i’ve delayed a lot of things to make this move happen and am really looking forward to getting going again.

Imagine if you had your perfect audio management system – one which would let you control it from every room in the house, take music directly from the internet, be wireless, and relatively cheap to roll out. Read on and I’ll tell you how to do it.

When I was about 12 years old I made a special audio system in my bedroom. I connected wires to lots of different speakers I pulled out of old radios and tape recorders. I probably had 7-8 different speakers just in my own bedroom. I had a music system that was REALLY surround sound. Back in 1984 for a 12 year old that was amazing!

I’ve always loved listening to music but have been frustrated in the past few years as to how to implement a good audio system in my house. The changeover from CD to mp3 is obviously happening – but how to implement it? I won’t bore you with the different things I’ve tried, you can just trust me that I’ve wasted thousands of dollars over the years on different things that don’t work very well.

My requirements are:
- 100% of my music should be digital, downloaded from the internet
- I should be able to listen to it in every room of my house
- when a new song is downloaded, it should be accessible from everywhere virtually immediately
- I should have one remote control which easily searches the entire music catalog
- I should be able to take my music collection with me on the road with me, to the gym and traveling or in my car
- It should be reasonably good quality. I’m not an audiophile, but I like good sound.

Finally I have this working! And its turned out to be trivially simple!

The key has been switching from PC to mac. I resisted this for a long time but finally decided to switch both my machines at once. Since switching, I’ve acquired some more apple components to my network such as a wifi network and and iphone. While itunes is ok on the PC, I’ve noticed on the mac that it just works better (I note that while itunes is slow on the PC, Microsoft Office is extremely slow to load on the mac. Coincidence? I don’t think so). Itunes on the PC felt a little like an install of AOL – it takes over your machine. It doesn’t have this impact on the mac, it just nicely fits in with everything else. What has been particularly impressive on the mac is that each new piece of hardware I buy seems to add additional, unexpected value to all the other pieces. I’m not mac fanboi yet, as my switch has been rather painful. But this has been an unexpected benefit with massive payoffs.

Anyways, on with how to set up this audio system which has worked so well for me:
1. Buy an Apple airport extreme for your network. This is apple’s long range wifi network device. Its just a white box which enables a wifi network in your house from your internet connection. ($150)
2. Hook up a couple of Apple’s airport express units to audio players around your house. The airport express is a smaller wifi receiver (relayer) unit. It provides 3.5” line out to audio devices. ($85/each)
3. Install itunes on your computer. It should work on PC and Mac (free)
4. Get an iphone or an ipod touch. This is a critical element – you need this as the remote control. ($200-$400)
5. Get some audio devices. I use the Harman Kardon Go+Play units – they cost around $350/each which isn’t cheap, but the audio quality is amazing. ($350/each or use what you have already)
6. Download apple’s “remote” software from the appstore and install it on your iphone or ipod touch. (free)

Now, you have a wifi lan in your house, which for starters is pretty handy if you don’t already have one. It runs very fast, since its 802.11N, so even if you have a wifi lan this may be faster. The Airport express devices act as repeaters as well as providing audio, so you end up with a very strong network signal through your whole house.. But, you can also stream audio through it using the computer, streaming out to the two airport express units. If you have a really small place or very thin walls you may be able to do it without the airport extreme, but its probably a good idea to get it (I have 2 so I can extend the signal further).

The audio quality is GREAT! I was concerned it would not be good.. but I am very happy with it, and I am quite picky. I have read that the airport express units actually provide digital out signal, which is bit for bit the same as the source audio, so if you have digital receivers you may want to consider this. I am using analog and it sounds great.

I’ve talked with some friends about this and apparently the iphone remote control software was initially not very good. As of now, as an overall setup this is basically perfect. When you have it working you can walk around your house, selecting music in each room, selecting the song and controlling the volume. It does basically everything you’d expect a remote to do – but its your CELLPHONE! And you have no music to move around – as soon as its on your computer its live in your kitchen, bedroom, etc, etc. If you want to take it with you, it syncs with your iphone or ipod touch, and then you plug it into your car using an adapter.

It also controls Apple TV, which I will be testing out next.

The only thing we need is for Itunes to become a service where we rent music per month, rather than needing to rip and/or download our own music collection. I’ll happily pay $20/month to access all the music that is out there. That should also include streaming audio so we can listen to the radio and streaming audio off the net such as Pandora. Sonos offers this today, but has an expensive setup cost ($350+ per room compared to $85 for the apple airport express units).

The great thing is I can add as many rooms as I want, just by buying more audio systems ($350) and airport express units ($85), or around $430 per room. There are also $100 audio systems which would bring your cost per room down significantly. I plan to add another 3 rooms shortly.

Go try it out and let me know how it works for you!

This stuff works – I was the guy who told Rich Schefren about it after I began learning it. He was initially quite skeptical. Then a few months later he began teaching it in his training programs. As of lately it appears that the theory of constraints has become a core part of his business – and theory of constraints is directly from Project Management. Rich – tell me if I’m wrong, but I think this has had a big impact on your business?

The core training for project management is called the PMP, or Project Management Professional. They have a book called the PMBOK, which is updated every year. In actual practice the PMBOK is not very useful; its written like a guide for rocket scientists, not people who want to learn how to manage projects. In addition, IMHO, the PMP goes a litlte further than it needs to as well. But its a great foundation to learn reasonable well.

So my approach was to study for the PMP exam as if I would take it, but not bother to actually do it (I don’t care if anyone thinks I am a PMP certified guy, I just wanted the results!).

Here’s how I would suggest you do it:

1. Get a coach from guru.com. You can find amazing people for $25/hr who want to learn to work online and want some extra income. One guy I had was a PMP certified guy from HP’s printer division. The other I had was finishing his doctorate from GWU and was a full time project manager for a software company. Between the two of them I got differing opinions on how things should be done. Both taught me a huge amount and it was tremendously helpful. And while i didn’t pay a lot of money, the guy from GWU learned from what I was doing and now runs his own internet project managemnt business from Bolivia.

2. Get these two books:
a) PMP: Project Management Professional Exam Study Guide by Kim Heldman
b) PMP Exam Prep, Fifth Edition: Rita’s Course in a Book for Passing the PMP Exam (Paperback) by Rita Mulcahy

You use Rita’s book as the exam text – you need to be able to answer all the questions from her book. And use the study guide to learn how to answer them. It may be useful to have the PMBOK as well to learn from, but its not critical. It may be useful to pick up a couple of other books as well just to round out your knowledge.

One thing I did which turned out not to be useful – I tried learning how to use MS project; my idea was to become an expert at MS Project and then I would be able to manage projects. I didn’t listen to the people who told me that MS project didn’t matter and it was all about the fundamentals. It turns out they were right. Now, several years later, I don’t use MS Project because its too complex. I use programs which are more lightweight.

I spent several months on this fairly intensively and its paid off bigtime. You gain massive leverage over everything you’re doing because you can get your work done faster and more efficiently.

Where incubators do seem to work is when lots of ideas are tested at once, and after a time, the losing ideas/businesses are all dropped. This enables the stars of the team to completely focus on the winning ideas. Tagged, Myspace and Zappos are companies that have roots in this idea.

And generally when a new business is going to work, you can see it pretty quickly.

So why not apply this to testing social business ideas in the 3rd world? From living in the Dominican Republic since 2001, I know that sometimes there isn’t the ability or risk capital to test new ideas. Muhammed Yunus has received a Nobel prize for coming up with the Grameen Bank, which does microlending to poor families, enabling them to get out of poverty. This has been successful as a business and has seen massive social improvements as a result.

But why didn’t someone try microlending before? This could have been done 100 years ago.

So why not set up a 3rd world business incubator? Prototype 10 ideas at once. Document all the results publicly and when scalable, sustainable business models are found, they can be published worldwide for local entrepreneurs to implement across all the countries which can support them. The risk capital for this could be raised from donors in wealthy countries like the US. US$1M would easily fund a lot of idea testing.

But we need to make it more interesting. Having worked in a non profit in the past, I’m less than impressed by the quality of many people working in the non profit world. I think many of them are there because they are not able to be successful in the business world.

So in addition to the $1M in risk capital, we put up a significant prize – say $1M – for the team which comes up with an idea meeting certain criterion (scalability/social value/profitability, etc). This will ensure that true, ambitious entrepreneurs will pay attention and get involved. It means there will be a form of economic payoff just like there can be for starting a business.

If breakthrough ideas like the grameen bank could be prototyped, tested and successfully implemented and then documented for use worldwide, this could be an amazing breakthrough. Local people in third world countries WANT to make money and given working systems (a little like a franchise, except the locals will fully own it) they will certainly do it. We can leverage the capital and business ideas from the 1st world to help implement better systems in the third world.

Here’s an example of an idea which may merit testing:

Here in the Dominican Republic, there is a huge number of single mothers. Abortion is rare here and people don’t use contraception as much as they should. If a girl gets pregnant, the guy usually vanishes.

This is an economic death sentence for the mother. She usually has to stay home to take care of the child, dropping out of school and not advancing further. She may end up with more kids and now she’s a stay at home mom with nobody to support her – she ends up being supported by the extended family. Its a difficult life.

Why not test a system where single mothers can pay a small amount of money, say US$80/month to put their kids in childcare. If a childcare business took 100 kids, and put 4 people to take care of 25 kids each, the salaries for these 4 people would only need to be around US$300/month. If we include a security guard for an additional US$300/month, adding in someone to do cleaning, and rent, we can overestimate costs to be around US$3000/month. 100 kids paying $80/month each for childcare would bring in US$6000/month, leaving a US$3000/month profit.

If this worked, it would enable new single mothers to stay in school, get a real job and become economically independent. And it would allow creation of new businesses, helping grow local economies.

I have no idea if this idea would work or not. I have no kids and know nothing about childcare. I do know the numbers above are quite accurate for the Dominican Republic. There are plenty of reasons why it wouldn’t work. But there is the small possibility it COULD work and for the really good ideas the only way to know if it will work is to try it.

If we took risk capital from the US, and tested ideas directly in the third world, we just might be able to come up with some new breakthrough ideas like the Grameen bank. We’d help solve social problems, create business growth and help lift people out of poverty.

If we ask today – would it be worth $2M to come up with an idea like the Grameen bank, I think the obvious answer is that it would be a bargain. So maybe its time to start testing and prototyping other new ideas as well.

http://photos.adrianbye.com/Americas/Haiti-Cap-Haitian-August-2008/5796339_AaKfS

Before I start, I’d like to note that Haiti is not a safe place to visit right now and if you’re considering this to take real care. From the US Government website:

“This Travel Warning is being issued to advise American citizens to defer non-essential travel to Haiti until further notice… U.S. citizens traveling to and residing in Haiti despite this warning are reminded that there is also a chronic danger of violent crime, especially kidnappings. Most kidnappings are criminal in nature, and the kidnappers make no distinctions of nationality, race, gender or age; all are vulnerable. There were 29 reported kidnappings of Americans in 2007. As of the date of this Travel Warning, fourteen Americans were reported kidnapped in 2008. “

http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/tw/tw_917.html

At the Dominican - Haitian border

The problem is with high gas prices, food prices are being forced up, and the average Haitian is being pushed further down in poverty, which is leading to more rioting and problems. In addition, Haiti currently has no real leader – they are supposed to vote for a new prime minister and for some reason this has been delayed for the past 4 months. In previous times Haiti has been safe and I am sure it will be in future.

With that said, this was by far one of the most fun and interesting trips I’ve ever taken!

A statue near la citadel in Cap Haitian

Why go?

I’ve wanted to visit northern Haiti for a long time – it’s the area where Christopher Columbus landed, in fact his boat “Santa Maria” sank there right near Cap Haitian. I live in the Dominican Republic and have been here since 2001, so I’m pretty familiar with the island of Hispaniola. I also don’t know how much longer I will be in the Dominican Republic, so I wanted to take advantage of still being here – setting up a trip like this remotely would be much more difficult. This part of Haiti is only a few hours away yet is an entirely different culture – they’ve developed completely differently despite having similar resources on the same island. I also have travelled rather a lot and am not interested in boring trips to Europe, etc. Going someplace that is a little more off the beaten path is appealing to me.

How did I do it?

It wasn’t easy. I don’t know anybody in this part of the country and there was no way I was going alone. Through a teacher in Santiago I was able to get some contacts. He was the right guy to help, he’s been living in the Dominican Republic for over 40 years. He referred me to a policeman on the border who is half Haitian and wanted to make some extra income, along with a couple of students in Haiti who lived in the town. Given the risk of this travel I decided to take a couple of options, inviting both the policeman and one of the Haitian students. This meant if something went wrong with one of the guys I had another option to fall back on. Both were paid, $50/day per guy each, $300 total for the trip. I was also covering all travel costs, food, etc. My total trip costs came to around $1000. I could do it cheaper in future, but this felt like the safest approach.

The Chilean UN military base

People speak French in Haiti (about 60% of the population) but in practice that didn’t work. My French isn’t strong anymore, but I just found their accent difficult to understand. Creole, the main language of the country was completely incomprehensible. And while my Spanish is good, nobody in Haiti speaks Spanish. So I had to have someone with me all the time.

I’ve travelled to around 50 countries and lived in 7, including Medellin, Colombia just 5 years after Pablo Escobar was killed. I’ve never had a problem anywhere because I *always* follow one simple rule: I always do what the locals tell me to do. And that’s what happened on this trip which made things work a number of times.

Canonballs hidden inside la citadel, ready for use

We also had to watch the timing of hurricanes because there are many passing at the moment. I went right after Hurricane Faye and just before Hurricane Gustav. There was also some military disturbances in Cap Haitian a few weeks before when I originally planned to go so we had to wait for that to cool down. Basically, following the news beforehand was critical, along with checking in regularly with the guys on the ground. I decided to keep the trip short, partly due to work commitments, but also to limit my time on the ground. I was there for just 2 nights.

The last thing I did was to make sure I had a fair amount of cash – using credit cards and ATM cards in a country like this isn’t too good as they can be used for fraud. So I had around $1300 in cash on me – which I was surprised to later read that the average annual income in Haiti is $1300.. I was also startled to read that the Haitian government budget is around $900M/year – my friend Tony Hsieh from Zappos manages a $1B/year budget, and that’s just one company!!

On entering Haiti:

Carlos the policemen and I caught the bus from the Haitian border town after crossing over from the DR. Making the crossing was a real hassle with people constantly surrounding me to sell things. The entire area was waterlogged due the hurricane that had passed through a few days before. I’ve always thought the drainage in the DR was bad but we never have this kind of problem.

Inside the Haitian bus

Once we got on the bus everything was fine.. then about an hour into the trip, I felt something moving around on my feet.. Horrible, it felt like a rat! I couldn’t see anything when I looked down, but then there it was.. A chicken had gotten away from the lady behind me and was sitting on my feet! I jumped up on the seat and asked Carlos what to do – he told me to just push it away. I managed to do that without being pecked. It was rather funny, nobody else in the bus batted an eye.

Chicken wandering around under the seat!

This lead to a rather interesting conclusion about chickens and animals in general in Haiti. They don’t take chicken meat on the bus, it’s always live chickens that are tied up and they’re treated rather poorly. This happens because they don’t view it as a chicken – to them it’s really just a protein food source which is convenient to travel with since it’s alive and won’t go off.

The road to Cap Haitian was in very good condition – when I asked about it later, apparently it’s just been remade.. they’ve been waiting 20 years for it to be done!! It has cut the travel time down to 2 hours from 5 hours. We had police checks every 10-20 minutes, and they stopped the van and got in each time. When I asked about it, I was told it’s because there have been a lot of robberies and carjacking on the road in the past. Naturally I assumed this was 10 years ago in the past, but when I asked for clarification Carlos told me that just 8 months ago it was very bad! Yikes!!

Once we got to Cap Haitian, we were met by hundreds of people running around, offering taxis and all kinds of other stuff.. Fortunately we met up with Demel and his cousin who was to be our Cap Haitian guides. Demel had an SUV and took us straight to a nice hotel. What a relief!

Lots of people you don't know who want to "help" you

We went out later that night. One interesting thing that happened was I met a pretty Haitian girl (no, gossip people, nothing happened!! ). I was joking around with her and asked to see her cellphone photos which she happened to have opened. She showed me, and as I browsed through them I got a lump in my throat. This was just a random cute girl at a bar, which is the same scene anywhere in the world. But her pictures were all of absolute poverty, cinderblock housing, and no furniture. These were the photos of her life.

The money was a problem. In Haiti they refer to “dollars” which can mean either USD or Haitian Dollars, depending on the context (ie value). They also use Haitian Gourdes which are the primary currency. I got rather confused by it all, but was protected from overspending too badly by having the guys with me. The currency was extremely dirty – so dirty that I didn’t want to put it in my wallet.

Haitian money - it gets a lot of use!

The rest of the sightseeing we did was relatively uneventful since I was surrounded by guys and we were in an SUV most of the time. The pictures do a good job of showing what we saw.
When it came time to go home, we managed to get a nice bus which had air conditioning. We had to wait a while before it filled up. At one point a young father (maybe 23) with 2 small daughters wanted to catch the bus. He got in a big fight several times with the driver in front of the small girls over the price – the driver was extremely aggressive and it made me feel really bad, so I just paid for all of them to ride with us (maybe cost $30).

A haitian food - banana with spicy peanut butter!

And as soon as we arrived at the border town, Carlos’s mother showed up, furious with him! It turned out because we were late getting back she was going to notify the Haitian police to come looking for us. It seems she was a little protective of her son – but note that these are the kinds of backups that happen when you have solid local guides.

Exploring inside la citadel

Then the next problem was that the border was closed! But Carlos said “no problem – we’ll go in by the river!”. It seems this is a relatively common occurrence and there was a bunch of Haitians in the dirty waist deep water ready to carry everyone across. Carlos picked out a guy for me and I got on his back with my bag. We almost fell over in the water (which would have cost my camera and cellphone) but a couple of guys came and helped. Could I have walked myself? Yes, but I didn’t want to get all wet, and it was pretty dirty. As from before, I do what the locals tell me to do! Carlos soon followed on the back of another guy, along with his mother and her sister. I would never have considered something like this on my own, but as they say “when in Rome.. “. I’m rather proud to be the likely first Australian ever to get into the Dominican Republic by crossing the river. “Un gringo mojado por cierto!”

My bodyguards parents were also carried across

There were some Dominican military near the border and they checked over all our paperwork. Since Carlos was a policeman in the town this was relatively easy to work out, and we were soon let back into the DR.

Trash in the street in Cap Haitian

Relief! It was a great feeling to be back in the DR, in a country I understand and language I can speak. And I was very happy to have pulled off this trip successfully.

All in all this was one of the absolute best trips I’ve taken to date just because it was so interesting.
I’d encourage you to visit Haiti, but be *extremely* careful right now. The whole time I was there I only saw one other tourist and he was riding around seemingly unaccompanied in public transport which I thought was a bit careless. If you have any questions feel free to post them in the comments.

A haitian castle, near La Citadel

Or just think about what people say about how important first impressions are..

So given this, why would Obama accept as his first major appearance as a presidential candidate with McClain to be in front of a group of christians most likely opposed to his views and asking questions which won’t paint him in a positive light?

No wonder there’s some negative publicity coming for Obama since!

Why make an uphill battle when it isn’t necesary?

This has come together from a bunch of libertarians, and is funded by Peter Thiel ($500k), who cofounded Paypal, is an early investor in Facebook and is now one of the top fund managers in the US. He’s also someone I have a tremendous amount of respect for.

Those who know me well know that I’m a huge fan of Ayn Rand and believe that Objectivism is a very important philosophy, especially for entrepreneurs. I was impressed to learn that Peter Thiel is also a big fan of Objectivism, and this may be why he is funding Seasteading.

Many libertarians I’ve met believe libertarian principles of society will truly work if they were given the chance. But since that chance never arrives, they never truly know if their system works.

Well, I’ve lived in an almost-libertarian state since 2001 – in the Caribbean, called the Dominican Republic. Here we have a weak police force, rule of law which isn’t very strong, and almost anything goes.

As a result, there are two principles which govern day to day life here:
1. how well connected you are (where your family comes from, who your friends are)
2. how much money you have

Thats it. So if you have a problem with your neighbour playing his music too loud, you can count on the two principles above if you want to sleep in peace. If you get into a car accident and kill someone, those two principles will determine your survival if the family of the deceased comes after you.

It *does* work.. to a degree.. but its scary sometimes and it means you need to stay on your toes. It also means that if you aren’t well connected and you don’t have money, then you are screwed if a bad situation that comes your way. Many would-be expats leave countries like the Dominican Republic after just a few months with lots of horror stories. Not understanding these two simple rules is the reason why.

I am sure Peter Thiel and the founders of seasteading have great intentions with the society they want to build. It will be great for them, since they will have both money, and connections (after they have the fame of building this libertarian society). But for regular people who are living in it as regular citizens and have neither, life on a seastead won’t be much fun.

Libertarians have some really interesting ideals and we should listen to them. But a fully libertarian society like seasteading will not be one that respects the rights of all its citizens, and will not reach the visions of the founders. After 6 years in the Dominican Republic, a place I do enjoy living in, I now know this first hand.

I was testing today to see if I could export my friends data from facebook. I found a facebook app called FriendsCSV which exports your friend data into a CSV file. (I was hoping to get my friends email addresses so I could update my local addressbook, but unfortunately wasn’t successful.)

However, the list was ordered by userID, which shows us when each person first signed up for facebook. I have an interesting list of technology early adopters in my facebook friends list, so now you can see who among the people I know were the first people to join up for facebook.

Are they the early adopters for everything? Probably not. But this could be an indicator.

uid name
18699 Jeremy Lizt
207923 David E. Weekly
1804892 Dan Caron
2355827 Adrian Bye
2412239 Roy De Souza
2712652 Ryan Allis
5405110 Dave McClure
5518735 Philip Kaplan
10504714 Rachel Rofe
15919445 Josh Verrill
30501653 Shea Mercado
293500033 Rob Jewell
502547440 Steve Case
502551963 Jason Fried
503833014 Michael Dell
503917182 Jeff Walker
504429203 Shawn Collins
504503972 Brad Feld
504671433 Missy Ward
505770460 Ian Schafer
506522975 Drew Curtis
506612494 Mark McWeeny
509883712 Rich Schefren
511065669 Martin Toha
511450156 Tony Gomez
517362434 P.V. Kannan
518405285 Robert Woolford
522502851 Kenneth Chan
524608482 Adrian Broughton
531251626 Joseph Sugarman
534496019 Ian Clarke
537819151 Brad Geddes
539955444 Michael J Filsaime
540913772 Elizabeth Lloyd
548039325 Peter Bordes
555548055 Jim Lillig
555701882 Nordine Zouareg
556706692 Rick Mirsky
556773177 John Lemp
557337551 Paul McDonnell
568107541 Danielle Hickey
576990711 Jay Weintraub
579502151 Brad Powers
581352212 Scott Rewick
584390757 John Linden
596878413 Shawn Casey
597753367 Mark Romanelli
611936413 Drew Kossoff
613808617 Hamlet Batista
618922830 Tellman Knudson
619970378 Kevin Needham
621051098 Paul Galloway
626891799 Christa Foley
626905960 Anne P. Mitchell
627163850 Jordan Finger
630446728 Thomas J Mather
632101727 Chris Graham
634114999 Bogdan Ravaru
635189079 Marlon Sanders
635865713 Matt Hill
636220459 Tony Hsieh
637196863 Scott Mitchell
638082643 Aaron Gravitz
639647779 Matthew Bye
641347608 Armand Morin
641370732 Matt Moog
643779771 Stephen Pierce
644015054 Bill Tai
645509376 Frank Addante
647317290 Scott Richter
652000627 Matthew Wise
655020670 C. David Gammel
662256670 Alfred Lin
668996161 Michael Bastin
672260158 Gary Swart
682753031 Jim Banks
685935774 Joel Sanders
718967101 Brady Whittingham
727295442 Ernie Ghiglione
727468816 Mike Hill
736139388 Jason Cohen
746128676 Keith Baxter
749890391 Michel Fortin
750272398 John Marshall
756444818 Brian Burson
757820219 Keith Richman
760688974 Scott Cohen
774825083 Lucas Morea
801352121 Jesse Willms
831575436 Khalid Shaikh
846825550 Justin Champion
1005010460 Advaliant MediaTrust
1014101939 Eben Pagan
1070147743 Tim Erway
1200702082 Mike Litman
1490700453 Jenny Fine

Its interesting to contemplate because ebay has been such a standard powerhouse on the internet.  But they may not be in the future.

There was some interesting posts on Digg today, linking to this article on the consumerist “It’s Now Completely Impossible To Sell A Laptop On Ebay”:

http://consumerist.com/5007790/its-now-completely-impossible-to-sell-a-laptop-on-ebay

Go read it.  Its about how pervasive fraud is now on ebay, making it very difficult to sell things.

And this post on Digg really made me think (excuse the language; I’m posting as it was written):

+287 diggs   by RevJonathan 9 hours ago
Dear Google,
Please make an eBay competitor for fucking fuck’s sake.
Thanks,
View 10 replies to this comment (most popular has 49 diggs)

http://digg.com/business_finance/It_s_Now_Completely_Impossible_To_Sell_A_Laptop_On_Ebay

People trust google more and want google to make a marketplace that actually works.  This whole market is wide open again.

I think this is fairly easily solved by Ebay.  Yeah, I know, I’m a consultant living in the Caribbean and don’t know anything.  Well try this out:  ever heard of the concept of a “distributed trust network“?  No?  Ok, what it means is that trust can be distributed around a network of objects.  It was the basis of Google’s success – before google existed, search engines returned results based around text on the page.  Google looked at links to pages and used those to determine the overall relative importance of a page.  It was a major breakthrough and is now known as “pagerank”.    A site like Linkedin is based on it – I am able to see people 3 degrees of separation away, and know that there is some level of trust since they are friends of friends of friends.  They’re the backbone of friend of a friend sites like myspace, facebook and hi5.  We use the same principle in the real world all the time when we ask a trusted friend for a recommendation.

Distributed trust networks are a foundational concept on the internet.

Ebay never bothered implementing a distributed trust network on its feedback mechanism and its time they did.  Basically this means applying some kind of social networking – “friends trust each other” network for feedback, both for buyers and sellers.  Therefore if a new user comes on to the system and has 100 positive feedbacks, but they are all from overall untrusted people, it has little value.  If a new user joins the system and is immediately trusted by 10 really important people, it will have far more weight.

If Ebay can’t find a way to do this, the entire ebay ecosystem will move over to sites like facebook, where trust is implicitly built in.  We *know* who our friends are.  And maybe our “trusted” friends will include 5 levels deep, so we can get a variety of things to purchase and sell.  And if one of your friends starts selling fradulent things on it, you’ll hear back about it.  Just like in the real world.

And do you want to go adding friends on facebook that are Nigerian and want to buy laptops? (per the above link).  I don’t, nor do I want to introduce them to my friends.

I recently interviewed the founder of Shopit, Matt Hill.  He is tackling this exact market, and may really have something on their hands.

An example:  you can sign up to my list on the top right corner.  If I include in my (hard to find) privacy policy that I reserve the right to resell your name, you could legally start receiving viagra advertising in your email just for joining my list.

So I asked why that is allowed?  He suggested it was to enable commerce and is MY PROPERTY as the list owner of that data (ie your email addresses).  So I asked him to give me an example of where it is good for consumers for that to happen.  He said it was very good for commerce.  I asked again where its good for consumers.  He started giving me an example of being a camera site and how they might resell their list to someone making some new camera equipment and that it would be good for me to find out about the new product by being emailed a promotion.

I wasn’t impressed.

FTC:  Its time you stepped up and fixed the spam problem permanently.  Stop allowing people to resell email lists.  Email is NOT the same as postal mail lists.  The only reason we don’t get 5000 times more spam is because technology is doing a decent job at blocking it.  Thank god for google mail, they block around 2,000 spam messages daily from getting into my inbox.

With all the interviews I do on meetinnovators.com, I am exposed to smart "genius-like" people very frequently (we do one interview per week).  So I've started to get some strong feelings about "geniuses".

"Geniuses" are normal people just like you and me.  They just happened to have hit the things in my post about internet entrepreneurship.  That is, using their natural abilities in their market, filling a market need, passion for the market and focus.  And there's one more thing they have: good strategy.

But, its a tricky balance.  Once that good strategy goes away so does their success.  Strategy is critical. 

An example:  Microsoft's strategy isn't working as well today as it used to.  The stock is far below its levels of 2000.  Fake Steve Jobs has a great summary of why Microsoft is going downhill

But does this mean Bill Gates is or is not now a genius?  No, its just that his strategy isn't on track like it used to be.  Locking users into various platforms worked great in the 80's and 90's, and today it doesn't.  Google doesn't lock users in, ever, and people love it.

It takes a magical balance to get things to work properly.  Once you have it, you have to ride it as much as possible.  But it doesn't last forever.  And even if you get it, you still won't be a genius in my book.  You'll be a smart guy who got it right.

- be competent in the market

- for there to be a market need

- be passionate about the market

I think these three things are critical.  When I talk with entrepreneurs who are having problems, invariably one or two of these are missing.  And when I look at the things I’ve done that haven’t worked, its due to the same reason.

I’ll add one more thing:  you need to have absolute focus on what you’re doing.  As an example, google generally has focus, Yahoo does not.  Bill Gross from Idealab didn’t have focus; he spawned lots of fascinating business models, including what would become the revenue model for Google and yahoo, but didn’t focus on it, so he couldn’t take advantage of it.

I’m skeptical of guys who are running unfocused business models.  So even though I hear great things, I’m very curious to see if Ken Chan and Next Internet can really deliver.  I suspect they will end up overworked and stressed and have a lot of businesses which end up not being as great as they hoped.  Ken is effectively running an incubator with 6-8 companies simultaneously.  Ken is a nice guy and I talk to him quite often.  So I definitely look forward to being proven wrong!

The problem is that new value only surfaces for a short time.  Several entrepreneurs are likely working on the same problem at the same time.  If you don’t have the right combination of competence/market need/passion/focus, one of the other guys will overtake you, you can’t do it with a team of employees, no matter how well they are compensated.  The entrenpreneurs spark is critical.

So is Amazon selling their customer list to third parties now?  Or did Shoplet.com obtain this through other means?

Given that I highly doubt Amazon would sell their list, I suspect shoplet got it via other means.  I hope they get caught.

UPDATE:  Amazon wrote back and it turns out they share email addresses with companies when you buy through Amazon marketplace.  I bought some tape or something via shoplet from Amazon.  Apparently this is against Amazon’s terms and conditions and is being investigated.  Here’s the specific part from Amazon’s T&C (their customer service response was very thorough, btw):

“Contact between parties must be courteous and limited to transaction
details.  Facilitating inappropriate or unsolicited contact is a
violation of our Community Rules.”

I was a bit astounded by the amount of violence described in the book however. Medellin was a really, really, really violent place.  It was almost a war zone.  Pablo Escobar had a Colombian presidential candidate killed, among thousands of others.

Yet, I lived in Medellin 5 years after Pablo Escobar was killed, in 1998 for almost a year!  And I lived to talk about it. 

I'd finished my time at AIESEC International and didn't really want to return to Michigan State University to finish 2 subjects remaning for my undergrad degree.  I talked with the chair of my department and he offered for me to finish up in a Colombian university since I had spent some time there already.  So I enrolled at EAFIT university in Medellin and took some classes.

Reading the book and learning about just how much violence there was made me rethink if what I had done - I had no idea things had been so incredibly bad.  Brutal killings were happening on the streets of Medellin virtually daily in 1993.

While I like to travel to offbeat places, when I lived in Medellin I felt it was very safe.  The overall level of violence in the country had gone down dramatically.  People were travelling between major cities through 12 hour rides in buses, which meant that kidnapping was not happening.  And there was no violence in Medellin itself.  My rule of thumb is to always do what the locals tell me, even if its counter intuitive or things feel safe.  So I just hung out with the local people all the time, stayed in the cities, and didn't visit the Red Zones, which are dangerous parts of the country to the north, near Panama.  I actually met some Canadians who travelled all through the red zones by bus and said it was great fun travelling there and they had no problems at all.  I thought they were crazy for taking that kind of risk, the locals would never have done it.  I don't know any stats on the risk of travelling through the red zones, but my guess is that if you travelled through there on 100 trips, 99 times you would be safe, but one time you would be kidnapped.

I talked with my father about it yesterday (I'm at home in Tasmania for christmas right now) and it turned out he was pretty concerned that I had lived there.  He was worried that he'd get the cut off finger in the mail and have to pay a large kidnap ransom to get me out.

But it really just didn't feel unsafe.  At the time if you stayed in a large city like Medellin and didn't go out into the surrounding countryside, you were perfectly fine.  There wasn't bombings and there weren't people being killed.  Of all the thousands of people I met when I was there, I met one girl who's mother was a mayor in a surrounding area of Bogota and was killed as a result.  I didn't meet anyone else directly affected.  I would never have stayed there if I'd been seeing any kind of violence in the city.  There just wasn't anything any different to any other city.  I'm even hearing about carjackings in Sydney, Australia now, because people can't steal cars as much with good self-locking systems. 

Before I moved to the Dominican Republic I was considering moving back to Colombia instead since I knew the country well.  But people there told me how it was then (2001) unsafe to travel by bus between cities due to so much kidnapping and the only safe way to travel was by plane.  That was a pretty big sign for me that violence was on the increase and I decided not to go back to Colombia.  I also wanted to be closer to the USA for business travel.

I really enjoyed my time in Colombia, the colombians are some of the most hospitible people in the world.  If you get the opportunity to visit the country, I would recommend it.  Don't spend time in Bogota, its cold and not very interesting. Go to Pereira, Medellin and Cartagena, they are all very fun cities to visit.  Just make sure you ask the locals about the security situation and follow their advice to the letter.

So the local situation in Medellin is variable.  But if you go there at the right time, it will be safe to live there.  Just be careful and do what the locals tell you.

Gracias a mis amigos colombianos!

The full slides are here: http://www.slideshare.net/highcontext/innovation-technology-and-risk

Its annoying, isn’t it.

My mail has normally recieved 70-80 spams/day.  In the last 2 weeks its increased to 500-1000/day.   I used to be able to filter these by hand, I no longer can do it.  This means if a mail accidently goes into my spam folder I will no longer catch it.

So I found a simple technique for dramatically reducing false spam positives.  I’d love to see this automated in gmail.

Gmail has the ability to search folders using the command label:<folder name>.  This also works for the spam folder.. label:spam

So, when you select it to search on the spam folder, you can put in critical keywords for you, such as your name, your business name, or any other keyword which will almost always identify you.  This will return a search showing the spam emails containing those keywords.  It will immediately identify false positives.

If you choose keywords which are not commonly used in spam AND are always represented in your important emails, you immediately will save critical emails from being lost.  In my case, spammers often know my first name, sometimes know my last name, but rarely use the two together.  Having both in the body of an email is definitely worth going into my inbox.  They do not know my company name, nor do they know my business name.

Right now I can run this query by hand.  What I’d love to see would be a google-news style alert based around keywords to automatically move mail from the spam folder into my inbox.

For extra points:  I’d love to have google do a contextual analysis (adsense-style) on my email to identify uncommon keywords for me from my email and automatically whitelist those messages too.

I know spam assassin and other services allow keyword whitelisting – but thats hard to do.  I also hear outlook can do it, I’m not sure how.  But I’ve never heard of it built into a mainstream web client like hotmail/yahoo/gmail.

Even if you’re not getting 1000 spams/day into your junkmail, you eventually will, trust me.   Given the rate of spam growth, this method will probably become the only way to keep good mail out of the spam folder in time.

He’s exactly right.  What has been happening over the past 10 years is that the most aggressive marketers with no ethics have been making a fortune online by ripping people off.  And as the internet becomes better organized and more able to route around these people, its starting to change.  It’s a slow change but it is finally happening and is great to see.

As a business this means is that you will have less chance of being scammed and more chance of seeing true value from your partners.  And as an end user, you will be able to trust more of the advertising and applications you see online.

An extreme example is the Olympic champion skiers in Australia (who I’m ashamed of), that made a fortune promoting spyware online.  Once people found out how they made their money there was a huge uproar.  This is finally becoming harder and harder to do.

If you’ve been ripping off your customers and/or partners in the past, its time to change, or you will be left behind  – we’re leaving you behind!  Eben made a trivially simple, yet profound comment at his seminar, which I’ve never heard anyone say before – he wants to work with people who care about their customers.  It sounds so minor, but still is a large percentage of internet business today (including where a lot of Google’s revenues currently come from).

Let me also be clear that this community is very different to the fluffy web2.0 people who don’t generate any revenue.  There has to be both VALUE and REVENUE.  That’s been quite hard for a lot of companies except for Google.  Finally its changing dramatically.

He also had some very interesting attendees.  You can see below a picture of myself with a former Mr Universe, Nordine Zouareg.  I couldn’t take a normal photo with a Mr Universe, so I had to fight him. 

Specifically I am referring the brokerage fees that CPA networks and brokers charge (around 20%) to push offers to fill the internet demand for remnant inventory, and the inefficiencies and expenses that are put in place by having so many humans involved in making web advertising work. Over time these people will be replaced by technology, just as many industries have been overturned in the past by modernization causing blue collar workers to lose their jobs.

The three biggest sources of traffic for a typical network are:

a. Email marketing

b. Pay per click traffic

c. Web inventory such as banners and text links

We’ll talk about these one by one.

CPA search marketing

Pay per click marketing is changing. Google has just announced it is going to offer a CPA model. At the moment it is possible to make a decent living by being good at PPC arbitrage of CPA offers. This works right now because Google and Yahoo have focused their business model around selling clicks, rather than selling actions. They do this because this is their version of branded CPM advertising – they can generally get more for it.

However, this causes huge inefficiencies in the system, because it is time consuming and complicated to figure out how to drive lots of PPC traffic, enabling therefore arbitrage opportunities.

Since Google has now started offering a CPA system, and Yahoo certainly will, this will change dramatically. Advertisers will be able to add a bunch of creatives into the system, along with a list of keywords and a CPA they are willing to pay. The system will then automatically test the base keywords you inserted, along with an extra list of keywords google generated itself. It will test them all against the various creatives you made; keeping pricing under a certain CPA you have set. The entire system will be fully automated, and the current arbitrage which is possible today will go away. Google and Yahoo can make quite a lot of money by making this change, given the average network commissions and the money made by PPC arbitrage players. Google has already switched and it is just a matter of time before Yahoo does as well.

Notice I don’t mention clickfraud – I don’t believe this impacts Google and Yahoo moving to a CPA model.

Email marketing

Email marketing is an area which is going to change on two fronts. CANSPAM is a law with many loopholes, one that allows people to send as much mail as they want under certain (not very restrictive) limitations. A lot of mail is being sent which does not provide true value to consumers, its simply mass market monetization that is driving volume, a process I really disagree with. At some point a new email law will be passed which requires something like “at the time of sign up, the sending FROM address must be displayed clearly so the consumer knows where they will receive mail from”. And brokering of email data will be exclusive only. You join one list, you unsubscribe from that list, period. It’s only a matter of time until something like this is legislated. Don’t think so? A few years ago the telemarketing industry was doing great – now its been decimated with the FTC’s do not call rules. This kind of thing can happen literally overnight – look at how the online gaming industry has been affected recently.

Secondly, deliverability is going to get much more difficult. Right now, most ESP’s can get mail delivered almost anywhere except major ISP’s such as Yahoo and Hotmail. Reputation management is a new trend in email which will change this dramatically. Reputation management means that every IP address which is sending email is certified by an independent third party as to how that IP address is being used to send mail. It provides a lot of data to email receivers on exactly how that IP address is being used. If you’re certified and your reputation is positive, a lot of your mail will automatically be delivered. If you’re not, you’ll get blocked as spam.

Right now reputation management is being used by the major ISPs to confirm mail delivery – but once this is rolled out more widely across internet mail servers, mail blocking will improve dramatically, and those who are sending bulk co-reg data will find their deliverability falling through the floor.

Behavioural targeting

Thirdly, behavioral targeting is going to get much better. This has been talked about in the past, and never seems to truly work properly but it is starting to get much better now. Networks like Blue Lithium and turn.com are making a lot of progress with targeting and collecting a lot of data on their userbase. Reports I hear about Blue Lithium in particular are that it performs extremely well.

Impressive things are being done on the advertiser side to take advantage of behavioural targeting. For example, Think Partnership has a new product called Second Bite which saves shopping cart abandoners. If you decided not to buy a product and half completed your shopping cart, Second Bite will work to get you to finish your purchase. Think Partnership is just starting to buy banner inventory to save the cart purchase. What this means is that you can be browsing the web and you’ll see a banner saying “hey – come back and finish your purchase on <onlinestore.com> and get a 10% discount”. Once this kind of inventory is brokered out to major behavioural networks, no general interest CPA offer will be able to compete with the CPM’s they will be able to pay to save a purchase. Sure, this is a narrow application, but many more clever targeting applications of behavioural targeting will appear, increasing CPM’s across the board.

In addition, client side behavioral targeting will increase. By this I mean that users will allow more data to be mined from their computers locally, and some of it will be passed back to the network. In an extreme case, imagine if Microsoft made its Windows OS completely free – but in return for being able to mine behvioural data from your machine. This data would be fed back to online targeting networks such as Blue Lithium, to target web advertising more accurately. No popups or any other nasty applications would be included. That could be a huge value add for consumers – with free software AND better advertising. Yes, this has huge privacy implications, but over time these will be worked out – the ECPM increase from accurate targeting will be too valuable, and consumers will not mind their data being mined in aggregate.

That’s not to say that everything is bad. Some areas of the CPA and brokerage industry will continue to work well. These include:

1) Coupon and affiliate sites. Publishers that are actively going out and finding links to promote on their site for consumers will continue to make money and want to use CPA networks. The human interface in this instance provides tremendous value to consumers since the publishers truly understand what their market wants.

2) Newsletters. This will become the standard for email marketing as the more aggressive forms of email marketing will be made illegal. This is similar to coupon and affiliate sites where publishers will actively seek out links to target their audience due to their understanding of their market.

3) Web and chat spam is going to increase. Right now we’re seeing quite a bit of spam on myspace, and given the progress people are making on defeating CAPTCHA mechanisms, this will only increase. If the postings cannot be effectively blocked by computers, then more of it will be done. Unfortunately CPA networks will see more volume from various forms of aggressive webspam as time goes on.

The branding industry will have some impact on these, but it likely won’t change much from the way it is now – some inventory will be sold at higher ECPM’s for major brands, and the rest will be remnant inventory. Of course the big question is how high the ECPM’s can get for behavioural targeting and whether they can beat branded advertising.

Some people will read this article and be thinking to themselves “no, he’s wrong, this has always worked, and it will continue to work”. The reality is that the internet marketing industry has been around for a very short time, and we really don’t have any data points to compare against long term. The right way to think about it is “where is the true value for consumers and advertisers”. If your business model doesn’t provide true value to all stakeholders, then at some point what you are doing will stop working.

If your business model depends entirely on brokering, you may want to consider how you will operate in a few years time once the above become reality.

A good way to think about whether your business will be around in the future is simply by answering two questions:

1) By running my business, am I creating true value for all my stakeholders (customers, employees, consumers, partners)

And

2) Am I keeping up with the very latest trends that might affect my business, including industries that are not directly related to my daily focus?

For number 2, you can say you’re doing the right thing because you’re reading this. J

Does this mean that all CPA advertising and lead generation will go away? Of course not. These are very fundamental models and the backbone of internet commerce.

Just watch out if your business model is entirely focused around brokering remnant advertising. If this is your primary business, make sure you stay on top of your strategy. You don’t want your company to be made irrelevant like has happened with generations of blue collar workers in the past.

I recently found that there’s an updated biography published about her life.  It talks about how Enid’s father was pushing her to become a musician.  Everything in her life was being directed towards that goal – by her father.  But over time, Enid was finding that she didn’t enjoy music as much.

Then one day she decided she wanted to teach writing.  Once she started at it, everything changed.  And she wrote about it later that it was like putting a “round peg in a round hole”. 

Too many people in life do things they don’t enjoy.  I think thats a great way to say it – we all need to spend more time ensuring that we’re round pegs in round holes.  Just like my favourite childhood author did.

Its a self-help/development movie which talks about the “secret” to building wealth.  Oprah is a huge fan, among many others, and its selling very well.  In the end its an updated version of Napoleon Hill’s “Think And Grow Rich”.  The basic idea they express is that you should focus your mind on your goals and visualize achieving them.  They presume that limiting beliefs are the core reason people fail in business.

Its junk.

Actually I’ve been a big fan (in the past) of Think and Grow Rich.  But by the time “The Secret” came along, I knew better.  Some of the biggest scammers I’ve ever met spend their time dreaming up big plans, which have no basis in reality, their skillsets or resources.  And then to achieve their big goals they have to resort to a lot of dishonest marketing and ripping people off.

So what is better?

I’m in the fortunate position to talk with many successful entrepreneurs.  And something I’ve noticed is that the really successful entrepreneurs are Ayn Rand fans.  They’ve all read Atlas Shrugged and have spent a lot of time thinking about her philosophy.  I’ve also noticed that most “The Secret” and “Think and Grow Rich” fans aren’t very successful.

So my advice to you is that if you’ve been spending a bunch of time on The Secret or Think and Grow Rich is to throw them away and read Atlas Shrugged.  Its a little heavier reading, but you’ll notice a big difference afterwards.

I have.

An outliner is a very simple program for handling lists.  Ever used Microsoft Word in outline mode?  Thats where you can indent a bunch of ideas, below each other.   For example

Point 1
    Point 2
        Point 3
    Point 4
        Point 5

etc.  The key thing in an outliner is that you can keep indenting this as deep as you want, and open and close them so you can gain different levels of visibility.  The other key point is that beside each item you can add “notes”.  So I might want to add a couple of pages of text to point 1, and its very easy to do it, similar to how you might add comments to a cell in excel.

Thats all an outliner does.  And using is has become my most critical application, even more important than my email.  Yes, I’d rather lose all my email data than my outliner data.

Here’s why:  Because it allows indenting, you can file your ideas any way you want.  I’ve got about 6 major categories, including topics like “Quarterly goals”, “personal goals”, “client goals”, “lists”, passwords” and “people followup”.  These are the topics I access most frequently.  Then inside these are a ton of lists all nicely filed away.  I can easily manage projects inside it, capture new ideas, and everything is organized.

What has been really interesting was to learn that in fact a lot of things I work on are actually just lists.  So as I started using this tool, all kinds of lists are now kept in my outliner.. Books to read.. TV shows to watch..  Restaurants to try locally.. Things to do on my next trip to New York/LA/Santo Domingo/Australia..  My packing checklist..  New words I have to look up in the dictionary.. Ideas I’ve had.. Articles to read..  All of it just goes into my outliner and is neatly filed away.. ALONG with my current goals, and an organized project plan of goals to achieve.  So each day I simply pick out a couple of tasks that need to be done and work on them for that day.

Now the breakthrough part of this is when you can sync it with a handheld device.  I have run into quite a few problems with this aspect, and finally found that Bonsai, for the Palm works great.  So all my data is always with me wherever I go.  For those that are experimenting with this, I used to use LifeBalance, but the notes are too short, only 2kb, so you lose a lot of data.  I also tried MyLifeOrganized, and while their desktop version is awesome, I had problems switching to windows mobile.  I actually switched back to Palm just to use Bonsai, and their software both on the desktop and handheld is great.  If you’re not syncing your data, then MyLifeOrganized is the best outliner I have found.

Now, the next thing to know is that the most effective way to use these is to learn about Project Management.. But we’ll talk about that another day. 

This sometimes takes a little while to realise – you may be stuck on a task and its unclear why you’re not getting further along.  You have to wake up at that point, and brainstorm how to break it into a smaller checklist.  Once you do that, its amazing how the most complicated things to get done suddenly become trivially easy!

I had this explained to me many years ago by a friend on my AIESEC International team, Ante Glavas.  But it didn’t really sink in back then.  More recently, Alan Weiss, the expert consultant talks about this in some of his materials.  Alan Weiss is also partially where my previous posting came from, about doing more by doing less.  He turns out a lot of work, yet his goal is to finish each day by 2pm.

BF Skinner, the person who came up with the (controversial) topic of classical operant conditioning was also extremely productive.  He used to write for just 25 minutes or so at a time, and always take forced breaks where he’d reward himself.  He wrote an insane number of books.  I mention BF Skinner, because his methods of classical operant conditioning and providing rewards made him very productive and they can for you too.  Getting good rewards is critical to maintaining motivation.  Don’t shoot the dog is the classic book on this topic, and you can read my review of it here: http://www.adrianbye.com/favourite-books/#dontshootdoog

This has happened to me too, and I suspect it happens to everyone who works independently from home.  Here’s what I learned through experience (and what I suggested to my developer):

One of the biggest causes of demotivation is TOO MUCH work, and not getting things done.  You make a big checklist of things to do for the day, and by the time you’re 2/3 of the way through the day you’ve only done 2 items, with 12 more remaining.  You don’t feel like doing the other items because its too much work and you’re already behind anyways.

This pattern can set in place for days at a time, very easily.  For some people I suspect it can last even longer.

The trick is to do less work each day, especially if you’re really demotivated.  All you need to do is make a list of 2-3 things you can get done that day.  And do them.  And finish the day early.

Then, come back the next day and do 4 things.  Slowly increase the load.  But always make sure you’re scheduling far less things than you think you can actually do.  The important thing is to gain positive momentum, and get things moving forward day by day, and finishing the day on a very positive note, since you accomplished your goals for the day.

This is a form of positive reinforcement, which is talked about in “Don’t Shoot the Dog” (see my review here: http://www.adrianbye.com/favourite-books/#dontshootdoog)

 http://www.google.com/search?output=googleabout

I compared the search results to the normal google and they’re the same.   Pretty interesting, I haven’t seen google that way for a long time.  I bet this doesn’t last for long.

 I found out about it here: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/05/secret-google-search-url-that-removes.html

My perspective on Cuba may be a little unique because:

• When I visited, I was staying with normal Cuban families, spending 100% of my time with real Cubans and zero government intervention
• I have lived in the Dominican Republic for 5 years and understand Caribbean culture
• I am a huge fan of Ayn Rand and objectivism
• I truly wanted to learn about the Cuban system and what makes it work.
• I speak very fluent Spanish • I’ve traveled to over 50 countries and lived in 6.
• I’m an Australian citizen with no family ties to latin america

Dominicans and Cubans have a similar background and people, but the two countries took sharply different political directions in the 1960’s.  Today the DR is a totally free country, almost to the point of being a libertarian’s paradise.  You can do anything you want here.  And Cuba is a socialist police state run by Fidel Castro.  Since Cuba is a police state, by publishing this piece means it will not be a good idea for me to return to Cuba until the socialist regime is gone.

Initial impressions

When I first arrived in Cuba I was pretty impressed.  The streets are cleaner than the DR and people are very well educated.  I also felt Cubans have a higher level of integrity than Dominicans.

Economically speaking compared to the DR, it felt like the top half and bottom quarter of income earners were removed, and all that were remaining was from 1/2 to 3/4, ie the lower third quadrant.  This meant that everyone was lower middle class while not working very hard.  I found this idea intriguing because in the DR there is true poverty, and if that could be eliminated completely, it seemed like it might be a reasonable tradeoff.

At this point I was rather unconvinced by Ayn Rand and really felt like I had some investigations to do.

The Cuban mindset

Cubans don’t like the US.  A large part of that is due to the propaganda they are constantly shown (see further below).   Their view of the USA is like an episode of the TV show COPS – very violent with lots of crime, drugs and gangs.  Cubans have a much softer view of the world and value empathy over almost anything else.  Even though they don’t like their current economic situation, most of them still like Fidel and would like to see him succeed.  Quite a few Cubans told me they want “the best of both systems”, i.e. they want the economic power of the USA, combined with the humanist policies of Cuba.  While the two systems seem fairly contrary to me, it was pointed out to me that Canada and Australia might be good examples.

The turning point

After my second day in Cuba, I had spoken to a lot of people and seen a lot of impressive things.  I was starting to be really convinced that the Cuban system is better than the capitalist system in the DR which leaves so many people in poverty.  Then came the turning point.

I was chatting with a taxi driver and he told me that NOBODY likes the Cuban system and anyone that says they do is lying.  He said this is especially true for someone owning a casa particular, because they are working as an entrepreneur to earn tourist dollars.  He said that if they were truly happy with the socialist system they would be quietly earning their $20/month working as a good socialist.

This statement really shocked me, and caused me to go back and talk to some more people.  Thus you have the conversations that follow..

Conversations with Socialists

When I arrived, I was surprised to meet some people who told me they are socialists.  I’ve never really sat down and talked with someone with those kinds of views before and I was expecting people to be telling me how bad the Cuban system is.  But it turned out they still think their socialist system is the best.

With each one as I was talking with them, I got the feeling that they were being intellectually dishonest.  They were tying themselves up in so many knots trying to defend a system that just doesn’t work.   I was also impressed how each of them were incredibly nice people and truly wanted to share their views with me.

In the early days of the founding fathers in the US, Ben Franklin talked about how he wanted an educated US population so they would make good decisions for democracy.  I found it surprising how such educated people as these would still support an obvious failure such as Cuban socialism.

1. The Marxist philosophy teacher One of the most interesting was a former philosophy professor.  She had been teaching Marxism at the university for 37 years but was now running a casa particular (having tourists stay at her house, a common business in Cuba).  When I mentioned I would like to record her talking with me, I was surprised to find out that she was uncomfortable with being recorded.  I found later this was fairly typical with Cubans as they don’t want to get in trouble with the government.

She explained to me that socialism is currently not working well in Cuba because of the US global trade embargo.  Not only is the US blocking all business with Cuba, but they are also blacklisting businesses in other countries that try to do business with Cuba.  According to her, North Korea is actually doing really well and we are being fed misinformation by our government.  And Venezuela is also another country that is doing well.

She told me that Cuba worked well until 1990.  Once the USSR collapsed, things started to get quite difficult.  She said that things have started to get better again recently, possibly due to the help of Venezuela.

She was firmly convinced that once the US lifts its global embargo against Cuba that socialism will work perfectly.

I asked her about the contradiction of her running a private accommodation business while having spent 37 years teaching Marxism philosophy.  She told me that she is forced to do it in order to survive.  She said that the government has legalized businesses such as these in order to generate more revenue for the country, that she doesn’t like to do it, and hopes to stop in 7 months time.

The Marxist philosophy professor

What struck me from this conversation was that what defines failure of the Cuban system?  So if the US drops its embargo and socialism STILL doesn’t work properly, what does that mean?  From my conversations with her, I felt like there would be yet another round of convoluted explanations of why Cuban socialism was still the best.

2. The two 80 year old socialists in their mansion

I was pretty amazed by the massive houses in the Vedado area of Havana.  They are huge and have been totally neglected for the past 50 years.  I was really interested to see how they looked inside.  The taxi driver who was showing me around managed to talk his way into one of them.  So we got to spend an hour with two 80 year old brother and sister that have been living together in the same house since the early 1950’s.

They and several other siblings rented the house in the 50’s for 79 pesos/month, before the Cuban revolution.  The taxi driver was shocked at that amount of money; apparently it would be $2000 – $3000/month today.

From asking about Cuba before Castro’s revolution there were clearly many problems and change was needed.  The elderly brother and sister told me they were both happily socialist and that things were much better now than they were before.  I found this interesting since they had clearly been part of the upper class before, and were now living in a house which had not been improved since they moved in 50 years ago, including having the original refrigerator.

They told me that while they first rented the house, that once Castro took over he made a law that everyone could only own one house.  So if you owned 6 houses and were renting them out, you had to pick one for yourself and the rest would be seized by the state.  And, as residents of the house in 1959 paying 79 pesos/month, they became the owners.  It’s unclear what happened to the original owner, but it’s assumed they moved to Miami.

3. The socialist taxi driver

Later on in the week I caught a taxi, and was surprised to learn that the driver was a proud socialist.  Since I still had some questions I wanted to ask, I paid him (!) to sit down with me to talk things through.  He was very proud of the system in Cuba and wanted to explain things clearly to me.  By this point in the week I was getting a bit tired.  I’d also had a mojito or two so I started asking some very direct and probing questions to him.

We went to an outdoor café.  About 5 minutes after we arrived at had sat at our table; the police came and spent 15 minutes questioning him.  It turns out they were concerned he was drinking alcohol during his taxi shift (he wasn’t).  He was surprised when I told him that random police questioning wouldn’t happen in the US or Australia.

One of the things he told me was that socialism is great because there is no poverty.  So I showed him this photo:

He was shocked when he saw it, and explained that there was a deposit paid by the government on bottles and cans and most likely the guy was collecting them to make money.  He was a bit embarrassed by this.  I also mentioned that I had seen an aggressive car window washer (as is common in Latin America).  Now, I have to admit that while in Cuba I only saw one person doing this, while in the DR you will see about 5 at every traffic light.  Nonetheless, in the land of supposed eliminated poverty, these things do exist.

At the end of our conversation it was time to take me to my destination.  I was surprised to find out that he wanted to keep talking!  I was losing interest in spending time with socialists by this point, as I found them quite wishy washy.  So I told him we could possibly schedule it another day.  I got the feeling that I had made some points that may have started him to change his views of the world.  I hope so.

Jorge my host, the [non] socialist

The last person that really influenced my views in Cuba was Jorge, the late 50’s psychiatrist, former director of a Havana hospital and the owner of the casa particular where I stayed.  His parents were strong supporters of the revolution, and he told me that as he was growing up he was a big supporter of Fidel.  He told me the story of how Fidel visited the US in the early days of the revolution and slept on the street in some political protest.  Jorge as a 10 year old boy also slept outside on the street so he could be in solidarity with Fidel at the time.

Today things are a little different.  Jorge told me he doesn’t like the socialist system at all, and that it has been a huge failure for Cubans.  But he also told me how most Cubans still really like Fidel and want to see him succeed.  I found this very surprising.  He told me that he really isn’t interested in politics or anything else; he just wants to live a quiet life with his wife and children.  And in order to get by he runs a Casa particular, hosting tourists.  This is in addition to his job as a psychiatrist at the local hospital where he earns a top salary by Cuban standards of $30/month.  This was the highest Cuban salary I heard of during my time in Havana, others made $15 – $20/month.

In my 5 days staying with Jorge and his family I paid them about $180.  And they had other tourists staying with them during this time as well.  Jorge told me he continues to be a psychiatrist because that is what he loves and was born to do – but that he runs the casa particular in order to pay the bills.  He is effectively working his day job for free because the money he earns from it doesn’t bring any real economic benefit to the family compared to the income he makes from hosting tourism.

And this is what bothered me a lot.  This guy is almost the same age as my father, also a highly trained medical professional, yet he’s running around fixing problems with my TV, emptying my trash and arranging my mealtimes.  I asked him to borrow a marker pen, and he was looking through his work bag for a pen – I was disgusted to see that he had just a couple of old ballpoint pens, hardly any paper and everything was old and in bad condition.  This is how Cuba treats its highly trained professionals?  A 12 year old kid in the US would have 100X better writing resources for going to school.

After all his years working for the Cuban system, Jorge has almost nothing, no savings or possessions.  He doesn’t need a lot since nobody pays for rent or healthcare in Cuba, but it became clear to me that once socialism is gone and capitalism comes in, that people like Jorge are going to have trouble adjusting – if you have zero savings or possessions, and you’re getting older and now have to pay for your healthcare, how will you do it?

Catching a ride on the bike-taxi

One afternoon I decided to get a ride on a bicycle taxi.  These are generally used by Cubans for getting around. I thought it might be a fun way to see some different parts of Havana.  But then something happened..

The bike-taxi I caught

After about 10 minutes he saw the police a block away

So, I had to get off and walk until we get around the corner, otherwise he could be put in jail.  Actually this kind of fear of the police happened 8-10 times during my week in Havana.

The Havana Capitol building

As part of my sightseeing, I decided to visit the Havana Capitol building.  I didn’t really have any idea what it would be like and assumed it wouldn’t be anything special.  I was shocked when I saw it:

This short video gives a better feel for how impressive it looks:

Inside it is absolutely magnificent:

This building was built in the early 20th century when Cuba was a democratic country.  They built it in just 3 years.  It’s a similar design to the US Capitol building and is actually a bit taller!  But the terrible, terrible thing about it is that the building has been totally unmaintaned.  Here’s an example of water seepage into the walls:

I walked away really sad to see such a strong symbol of our democracy being totally wasted.  And I am certain that it will be used for democracy again before too long.

The Museum of the [Cuban] Revolution:

The museum of the revolution would be better renamed as the museum of Castro propaganda.  I found that I really reacted strongly to it, more than anything else I saw during my time in Havana.  All the things being showcased as successes for the revolution was just total failures and they had achieved virtually nothing – yet people were still visiting the museum and being impressed by what they saw.

One that really bothered me was this sign, talking about how the Spanish colonials “tricked” the local indigenous people, implying that today’s Cuba held no responsibility for what happened in the past.

This one was also of the same theme:

I was really startled to see that Castro didn’t take any responsibility for settlement actions that happened before his time and just labeled it all as “before”, and therefore not his problem.  I haven’t heard about any Cuban land grants to indigenous people, so this felt rather disingenuous to me.

Another quote that really struck me was this one:

“No cause will be lost while there is one revolutionary and there is one gun” – Fidel Castro.

This would be true – except that as a guerrilla himself, Castro has made it virtually impossible for revolutionaries to stand up against him in Cuba.  It’s well known that anyone that stands up to the current regime gets in a lot of trouble and eventually vanishes.  He was treated far better by the government while HE was a revolutionary.

This display was just a typical piece of Cuban propaganda that you see everywhere, and is typically stupid:

“To Ronald Reagan:  Thank you cretin for helping us to STRENGTHEN THE REVOLUTION”

Examples of how Cuba doesn’t respect its people:

• A popular activity in Cuba is deep sea fishing. Cubans cannot go, in case they try to leave.
• I have to blank out faces of people or they may get into trouble by the government
• Monthly official Gov income in Cuba is $15-$35, monthly cost of living is $200 – $400.
• Public water turns on once per day and filling tanks in houses, providing water for the rest of the day.  I found it ironic that a centralized socialist system can’t even maintain a entralized water service and requires houses to maintain their own tanks for proper service.
• Since every business in Cuba is government run, Cuba is a bit like an 11,000,000 company run by CEO Fidel Castro.  This means that to succeed in business in Cuba, you have to succeed in politics. • The only people with nice houses are those in politics.
• The Cuban airline has a first class section in front of economy class in supposedly egalitarian Cuba
• Cuban citizens are second class citizens in their own country.  Because they depend so heavily on tourism, they take extra special measures to protect tourists.  If I walk up, hit a Cuban guy and then call the police, the CUBAN guy will go to jail with no questions asked.
• Dominicans travel freely across their island.  Cubans need a permit to spend time in Havana

Things that really stood out to me while I was in Cuba:

• There was lots of foreign technology (TV, computers, etc), but none of it was made in Cuba.  If there was no innovation outside of Cuba none of this would have reached the country, effectively meaning Cubans are parasites off the world economy.
• Why are there still so many 1950’s cars and unrepaired houses in the country if the socialist system did so well from 1959-1990?

Cubans cannot easily access the internet.  Here’s a screenshot of the tourist internet

This is the “ministry of finance and pricing” building.  The concept of a central pricing center just seems insane.

This bathroom has no running water so the bathroom attendant in the photo pours his bottle full of water on to your hands so you can wash them clean.  Yes, I’m serious.

Cuban propaganda

Walking around Havana you see lots of propaganda.  It falls into two groups – supporting the revolution and against the USA.  Here’s some examples:

”Bush’s Plan: He’ll take away the morning kiss, he’ll hurry up leaving for school and he’ll put an angry look on your face.  Thanks, now we live in Free Cuba”

“We can make the most just society in the world” (taken in a shopping mall)

“Working for the social revolution in America isn’t a utopia for crazies or fanatics.  It’s working for the next stage of advancing history”

Ayn Rand

Atlas Shrugged was the book that inspired me to visit Cuba and to see the results of socialism in action.  I found that about 90% of what she wrote about was correct.  Here’s some examples:

This philosophy foundation is typical for the terminology used in Atlas Shrugged:

“Fernando Ortiz Foundation.  Science, conscience, patience”.

Surely if a philosophy is so good it doesn’t require tons of patience?

Rand writes about men with convictions and values.  This is exactly what I saw in Havana, that the socialists are very wishy washy always making excuses for the failure of their system.

I found that Cubans get emotional about negotiating and money.  I was impressed that Ayn Rand made the dollar sign her personal symbol and my feeling is that she wanted to focus on disconnecting money from emotion and creating true value for value deals.

One thing that really impressed me was how most of the “builders” left Cuba in 1959 after Castro gained power, with the remaining leaving in the following 2 years.  This was the exact theme of Atlas Shrugged and was very powerful to see that it actually happened.  The difference was that John Galt wasn’t required – people just left on their own.

The only major difference I saw from Atlas Shrugged to the reality in Cuba was the lack of confidence that was demonstrated at the end of the book.  Everywhere in Cuba you are shown strong political presentations and a lot of confidence that the system works even though it clearly does not.

Anyone visiting Cuba should read Atlas Shrugged before they go.

Returning home to the DR

One of the things I noticed about passing through Cuban immigration was that as you present your passport and visa to the immigration officer, there is a closed door that you cannot pass through.  Only once they have reviewed all your papers do they open the door with a buzzer allowing you to pass.  I haven’t seen this anywhere else, certainly Australia and the US have open booths which psychologically feels very different.

I had a scary moment as the computers were blocked and the immigration officer had to get her supervisor.. But finally things were working, the buzzer sounded and I was allowed to pass.

I’ve always found it a bit cheesy that some people clap as the plane lands.  This was the first time I really felt like I wanted to do that.. I was VERY happy to be back in the Dominican Republic, a capitalist country with true freedom.

Why the US Embargo is a good idea

Before I went to Cuba, I felt that maybe the US should lift the embargo.  After I visited Cuba I became quite convinced it’s a good thing and that it should continue.  Maybe I’ve become a hardened Miami Cuban without even knowing Miami Cubans personally? 

The more pressure the embargo puts on Cuba, the higher the local cost of living becomes.  And this forces more people towards entrepreneurship.  As more people are forced into finding alternative ways to earn an income, the entire country will be gradually moved into a capitalist economy.  In turn, this will cause the socialist system to become irrelevant.  As the US Embargo helps this process along, I think its a good thing.

Why do people say Cuba is a great place for a holiday?

I found this article by an orthopedic surgeon that visited Cuba and actually met Castro:

http://www.sportsmedicinedr.com/volunteer/cuba.htm

This seems typical of the experience some people have with Cuba.  They take a superficial vacation and come back saying “its a nice place, just rather poor”.

I am now strongly against this kind of assistance for Cuba.  If their socialist system is so good they shouldn’t need any outside help.  I am aware this is rather non-humanitarian, but I just found so much of the Cuban system repelling that I feel it needs to be blocked completely until it breaks down.

People taking a casual vacation to Cuba are helping the repressive socialist system to survive.  IMHO you should only visit Cuba if you are seriously interested in socialism and want to understand how it works.  Otherwise there are plenty of other Caribbean countries you can visit instead that would love your tourist dollars and aren’t police states that repress its citizens.

Summary

In the end I am quite convinced that socialism would be a great solution if it actually worked.  I think Castro has good intentions, but this doesn’t matter since what he has done is a total failure and has ruined the lives of 2 generations of Cuban people.  His famous quote of “history will absolve me” is garbage.  The Cuban system totally destroys technological advances, an area I spend my life in.

While what I have written may come across as rather emotional, I really feel strongly that this isn’t an over-reaction.  What is happening in Cuba is real and is ruining people’s lives right now.  This is something serious.

I also gained a huge amount of respect and gratitude for those who held off Communism during the cold war, and also our veterans from WWII.  People with “angst” just don’t realize how good things are today.  We have generations of soldiers to thank for the liberties we enjoy today.

From spending time with people that still believe a failed system is working, please make sure you ALWAYS think for yourself about what you are being told by your government.  A capitalist democracy isn’t perfect and needs a smart population that thinks for itself to run effectively.

And this is why, if I had grown up in Cuba I would either become a guerilla fighting Castro or trying to escape to Miami on a small raft.

So, as Forrest Gump said, that’s all I have to say about that.

If you want to see the photos that influenced this article, look here:
http://photos.adrianbye.com/Americas/Cuba-Touristic/4322172_C6GWG

Other articles about Cuba:
http://www.adrianbye.com/2007/05/13/how-twitter-can-help-overthrow-dictatorships
http://www.adrianbye.com/2007/05/14/things-worth-visiting-in-cuba/
http://www.adrianbye.com/2007/05/04/twittering-from-cuba/

Educational system

The education system in Cuba is good relative to other Latin countries.  I was very surprised when I visited at the level of education of the average Cuban.  I live in the Dominican Republic and have quite a few friends that were forced to stop studying due to financial pressures at home.  Additionally, the caliber of the Dominican university education is often not very high. 

Cuba is different – because the system is completely free, anyone who wants to can study, without financial strings attached.  And the quality of the education is good.  After 5 years of living in the Dominican Republic, I have a simple test to quickly gauge the educational level of Dominicans I meet.  When they ask me where I come from, I tell them I’m from Australia (as I am).  A less educated Dominican will immediately confuse Australia with Austria and ask me if I speak German or whether I like living in Europe.  Dominicans get this wrong about 70% of the time.  This didn’t happen once in Cuba – without fail, people knew that Australia is an English speaking country in the Asia pacific region.  They also often started asking me about Kangaroos, something I only see from the most educated Dominicans. 

The University of Havana

As a result of a good educational system, the health system is also quite good.  On speaking with my father, an orthopedic surgeon in Australia, he suggests that Cuban doctors are quite competent, better than most third world countries.  And from spending time in the country I can see that people are very comfortable with always being able to get quality health care.

What Cubans value most

If you’re going to visit Cuba, there’s a characteristic of Cubans you should understand, and it goes to the heart of the differences of Cuba and the USA.  Cubans value empathy above almost anything else.  They view it as very important to be able to understand what the other person is thinking and feeling.  An oversimplified version of the USA vs. Cuban differences is that the USA values success, while Cuban values empathy – i.e. its Bill Gates vs. Mother Theresa.  This means that Cubans are very nice people and will really want to understand your point of view.

Integrity

Cubans are Latinos, so they obviously have the Latin “manana” style, however compared to Dominicans I found that the Cubans exhibited quite a high level of integrity.  One time when I was buying food from a street vendor, I was confused by the local currency and overpaid by about 300%.  I had no idea that I was even owed anything.  The vendor called me back TWICE to give me fistfuls of banknotes as change (guess who felt like an idiot!).    This kind of thing happened a few times.

Cuban music

The music is mind-blowing – and I love the music of the Dominican Republic, since the DR is the birthplace of Merengue and Bachata.  In Cuba, I visited Casa de la Musica (there are two, one in Havana, and one just outside Havana in Miramar) several times and found them to be absolutely fantastic.  The caliber of the live salsa you can find there is absolutely world class.  Also when I visited Bodeguita del Medio, I found the live salsa there to be fantastic as well.  So be prepared, the Cuban music is amazing and it turns up in places you might not expect.

From Casa de la musica, Mirarmar (near Havana) When you’re out salsa dancing, you may see some Cubans dressed somewhat surprisingly. I didn’t expect to see this Cuban guy in a Havana nightclub:

(he asked me not to show his face)

Rum

The rum is also extremely good.  Since I’ve lived in Caribbean I’ve been a huge fan of Dominican rum.  So I brought back the BEST Cuban rum, Havana Anejo, aged for 7 years, and did a taste test with my favorite Dominican rum (Brugal extra viejo).  The Cuban rum won hands down.  It made the Dominican rum taste like gasoline by comparison.  Clearly I need to adjust my taste!

Safety

Cuba is very safe for tourists.  Tourism is one of their main sources of income and so they view it as a major priority to ensure all tourists are protected.  There are police patrolling all parts of the city, virtually every block or two.  These police are not corrupt and are nice to talk to, so any time you need directions they are the best ones to ask. This photo gives an example of how the police are – this policeman is friends with the little old lady and as they were greeting each other while I was nearby.  I asked to take a photo of them together.  It was completely spontaneous and you can see they genuinely care about each other.

One of the phrases which surprised me when I first arrived in Cuba was that I was told “you’re safe now, you’re not in the DR anymore, you’re in Cuba”.  And while that surprised me a bit, it’s actually quite correct.  Cuba *is* a much safer country than the DR. 

Airlines

If you fly to Cuba on the Cuban airline, you will notice some unusual air/steam coming out of the vents on the plane.  I have no idea what it is, but you can see how it looks in this short video: From memory, I think I’ve seen this on flights in eastern Europe as well; perhaps a reader can enlighten us?

Million dollar mansions

Another part of Cuba which I found to be fascinating is the suburb of Vedado.  This is the formerly rich suburb outside Havana, and it is filled with multimillion dollar mansions.  However these mansions haven’t been maintained for 50 years, and now they have normal people living in them – but in many cases the people are living like squatters, and hang their laundry out the front window.  It’s an extremely surprising thing to see, here’s a photo:

1950’s cars

You should also definitely make sure to take a ride in one of the 50’s cars.  I rented this car pictured below, plus driver for US$10/hr.

(this guy's face also has to be blanked out unfortuantely)

The Malecon

The Malecon is the wall separating the water from the city, and its well worth walking along.  What I love about the Havana malecon is that the waves actually come across the wall and spray the cars driving by… You can see this happening (somewhat) in this video:

I also went to another spot so you can see how the waves actually go across the wall (waves start after about 1min in the video):

Ernest Hemmingway

If you’re a fan of Ernest Hemmingway, there are two bars you should visit, both close together.  One is La Floridita, where you can drink a Daiquiri (and this is where they were invented).

This is a Daiquiri from their birthplace in Cuba

They keep a statue of Hemmingway in the bar The second bar to visit for Hemmingway fans is called El Bodeguito Del Medio. 

The awesome live band I caught playing in Bodeguita del Medio. This is where Hemmingway used to drink his Mojito.

(translation: my daiquiri in La Floridita, my mojito en el Bodeguito del Medio)

Hemmingway and Castro

Accommodation

The accommodation in Cuba is a little different to other countries.  You can stay in overpriced anonymous international hotel rooms which are the same as anywhere, or you can stay in Casa Particulares.  Casa Particulares are the personal houses of normal Cuban families and are much better.  Staying in these enable you to get much closer to the real Cuba since you can spend a lot of time talking with a regular family.  Most rooms cost around $25/night and include air conditioning and TV.  

The houses are reasonably nice inside with high ceilings and doors, although they may not have been well maintained.  It can be a good idea to give the owners some gifts (bring useful things from home) and they will be very happy you are staying with them.  The families do have to take some responsibility for you when you are there, I got the impression they may have some kind of legal obligation to ensure your stay is a positive one.

Some other things to know – don’t bring US dollars to Cuba, as they charge a 20% tax on all dollars changed in the country.  It’s much better to bring Euros.  And great tourguide book is this Frommers Ebook:  http://www.diesel-ebooks.com/cgi-bin/item/0470119489/Frommer's-Cuba-eBook.html

I found the DRM of the e-book to be complicated, so I would recommend buying a physical copy if you can get one that is very current. My last, and possibly most important suggestion would be that you don’t go to Cuba lightly.  This is a police state which treats its citizens poorly in order to generate hard currency – they really want your dollars and Euros. 

Your traveling to the country is one of the main ways for the Cuban socialist system to continue to function.  If you have a strong desire to learn about how a socialist country works, then by all means go.  But if you’re just looking for a Caribbean vacation then please go to any one of the other great Caribbean countries instead, e.g. the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Jamaica or Belize. 

If you'd like to see all my tourist photos from Cuba, you can see them here: http://adrianbye.smugmug.com/gallery/4322172_C6GWG

Firstly, if you’d like to see why I was in Cuba, visit here:  http://www.adrianbye.com/2007/05/04/twittering-from-cuba

You can also see my Cuban twitterings here:  http://twitter.com/adrianbye

I’ll have just a couple more posts about Cuba, then things will be back to normal, I promise. 

What it was like to use Twitter from Cuba

My visit to Cuba was a holiday, but also to learn about the country and how it works.  I decided to try to get Twitter working, a service for publishing phone text messages via the web and rebroadcasting both via instant messenger and also to other cellphones.  I was a bit nervous about it, since the Cuban government is very controlling about speech made from within the country.   From the Fodors guidebook about Cuba:

“Open criticism of the government or Fidel Castro is a major taboo.  Don’t do it, especially in open public places.  Thought police, community revolutionary brigades and reprisals for vocal dissent are an ongoing legacy of Cuba’s political reality.”

And, given Cuba’s worldwide political isolation, if the decided to hold you, they would not have to be in a hurry to let you go.  If that was not enough, this trip carried some risk for my returning to the USA, since the US is not entirely favourable about people visiting Cuba.  But I felt strongly enough about this trip that I decided I had to do it.

I was fortunate to get Twitter working via cellphone text messaging.  Unfortunately inbound communication to Cuba via text messaging didn’t work, so I wasn’t able to participate in the 2-way communication that normally goes on via Twitter.  Given that internet access was also difficult, I had no feedback to see if my twittering worked properly or if anyone was reading it.

I basically used Twitter as a mechanism to capture my notes.  Prior to using Twitter I was keeping notes in my Treo.  Once I started using Twitter I found it was easier enough to store what was happening there.

Since I came back I found that I had at least 30 people following along.  Its not a huge number, but given that this just happened on the fly and I had never used Twitter before, I thought it was a pretty good start.   Afterwards, one of my friends, Wes Trochlil wrote to me:

“Just wanted to let you know I really enjoyed your twitter from Cuba. It was actually kinda fun to get information in bite-size morsels.”

It turned out that while I had relatively few twitter friends, others were reading my posts via RSS and the twitter website directly.

The messages themselves cost $1 each to send.  I sent about 5 messages/day, totaling about 40 messages.  The cellphone cost $3/day to have the prepaid GSM chip activated.  So I spent about $60 to broadcast from Havana via Twitter for a week.

While you read this online from a free country, twittering simple thoughts from Cuba to a small group may not seem like much.  But when you’re living in a police state day by day, posting on the public internet, where there is no free speech, and people routinely vanish, its another story.

One of the hardest moments was when I visited the Museum of the Cuban Revolution.  Much of the exhibitions in the museum were incredibly dishonest.  Many of the problems that the Cuban revolution was trying to solve are still as bad as before, and many are worse.  While Fidel Castro has had good intentions, the actual results on people have been devastating. 

Anyways, after I left the museum, I wanted to post some strong commentary about what I thought on Twitter.  But I had to hold back.  This was quite a shock to someone raised in Australia and having spent many years in the USA.

So how can Twitter help free a country like Cuba?

The exciting thing about twittering was that I could do it from anywhere and it was relatively anonymous.  I didn’t tell people in Cuba about what I was doing, all they saw was me using my cellphone.  None of them knew I was posting on the internet in the USA with a worldwide audience.

I was free to move around, and post in real time.  So this is clearly a great way for people to communicate that are spread around the country.  While international text messages didn’t work, I’m sure that with some more testing, that could be solved. This would enable groups of Cubans to work together, to broadcast together in groups via twitter, and also receive input from outside the country.

Clearly government monitoring will be an issue – it is difficult to get any cellphone, let alone an anonymous cellphone in Cuba at the moment.  However this should change over time, and it should not be a difficult to program an encryption system for text messaging.

Why not just blog?

Blogging is a great approach for communication, especially for communicating thoughts in more detail – Twitter only allows 140 characters per message.  However blogging isn’t as mobile, and it isn’t as flexible.  With Twitter you can be completely anonymous and posting what you want online, and share that information with small groups. 

Twittering at $1/message is not very cost effective in a country like Cuba where the typical monthly income is $20/month.  However as with all technology adoption, this will drop over time.  The other major advantage to Twitter is that much of the third world is jumping directly to cellphones, skipping landlines.  Therefore the adoption of a service like Twitter will be much faster for cellphone users, and more likely to be adopted quickly.

Based on this, I believe that Twitter could one day be the killer application which helps free the remaining non-free countries left in the world.  Lets hope it happens soon.

I’m currently on vacation in Cuba.  A lot of people have expressed interest in hearing about this trip – but I wasn’t expecting to have any access to the outside world while I am here. Well things have changed and now I even have my treo cellphone activated with text messaging!

Internet access is difficult, so I’m going to send updates from Cuba to Twitter via my cellphone.  For those that haven’t used Twitter before, it basically works like a chat room, but for cellphone text messaging and IM.   I’ll be in Cuba until Thursday 10th of May.
 
This is fascinating to me to use one of the most accessible communication tools in the world (Twitter) from one of the least accessible countries in the world (Cuba).

The updates will just be things I am thinking and feeling as I backpack around.  You may find my perspective unique because:

- I am a huge fan of Ayn Rand and objectivism
- I am a strong supporter of the free software foundation, and follow all forms of community software, including the open source movement.
- I have lived in the Dominican Republic for 5 years and understand Caribbean culture
- I speak very fluent Spanish
- I am staying with normal Cuban families, spending 100% of my time with real Cubans and zero government intervention
- I truly want to learn about the Cuban system and what makes it work.
 
Already I have found this trip to be very profound.

You can get my Cuba twitter updates in several ways:

1.  Sign up for an account at twitter and add me as a friend.  Twitter: adrianbye.  You will get updates to your cellphone or via IM.  This is the best way.
2.  Get updates via RSS: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/1235671.rss
3.  Read them on the twitter website here: http://twitter.com/adrianbye

The twitter postings will just be short (due to cellphone text message limitations), but when I get back I’ll post more in depth (with photos) on my blog:  http://AdrianBye.com

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem I can receive text messages to my phone from the outside, so I probably will not receive updates sent to me via twitter.  Also, internet access is a hassle, so I will probably not check email until I return home.  But, if you want to reach me while I’m in Cuba, feel free to call my cuban cell: 011-53-5-295-9122.  Timezone is EST, same as New York.
 
Why am I in Cuba?

1.  I am a big fan of Ayn Rand, and I decided to come to Cuba to understand the Cuban perspective.  I noticed from reading Atlas Shrugged that the world portrayed really resembles Cuba today.  I also find it fascinating that Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957 but Cuba was turned to socialism in 1959.  I have a list of questions I’m going to ask people here.  Yesterday I met a lady who is a professor of marxist philosophy, so I plan on spending some time with her.

2.  Since I have lived in the Dominican Republic for 5 years, I want to compare and contrast the two countries.  Both countries come from a similar background, but went in dramatically different directions in the 50’s and 60’s.

3.  I have a theory that free software is similar to socialism in some ways, and works on the internet because there is no physical property involved.  This is a controversial statement to make, obviously. 

4.  I really like a song called “Ella y el” by Ricardo Arjona. Its about Cuba (in spanish).  I want to see what the cubans think of it..  

So, is what I’m doing legal?
As an Australian citizen residing in the Dominican Republic, I am not subject to the US restrictions for Cuba.  Will the Cuban government be happy I’m using twitter?  I don’t know, but hopefully it will be ok.   Life’s about taking some risks, right? 

Communication here is incredibly restricted.  Cubans cannot even get a cellphone let alone internet access.  I doubt many people have used twitter from Cuba before, so this is all rather new.

Its been funny hanging out with the Cubans – because I so obviously look foreign, they assume I’m another clueless foreigner.  But when I start talking with them, they think I am latino!

And, yes, I am taking lots of photos, but I can’t post them from here.  I’ll put them on my blog when I get home.

So far I have been impressed with many things about Cuba.  The streets are cleaner than the Dominican Republic, and the people are VERY well educated.  I have been shocked at the level of education of people I’ve come into contact with so far – from what I have seen so far, Cubans far surpass the educational level of Dominicans.

Obviously the country is in total disrepair.  A lady I met this morning who works in a store (government owned, of course) earns $23/month.  She has 2 years of college.  She didn’t quite know what to make of my treo cellphone.

Anyways, check out my postings on Twitter through May 10: http://twitter.com/adrianbye

Cheers,

Adrian

Back in the late 1800’s John D Rockefeller knew a lot about how Standard Oil operated.  Rockefeller was trained as a bookkeeper, so monitoring numbers came easily to him.  One of the more famous stories from Rockefeller is about how he once asked the guys who put solder to seal barrels of oil, to try to use a couple less drops, and see if the barrels still stayed closed.   They got the quantity of drops required down from 40 to 39, making a nice cost savings while still maintaining quality.  (They found that 38 drops caused the barrels to leak, but 39 worked perfectly).  Rockefeller was able to do this because he monitored his numbers very closely.

The CPA crowd are measureres – but are you truly measuring everything you need to in your business?  The standard CPA network signs up for a license to direct track and automatically everything is tracked.  This has worked very well for many networks as they got started.  But moving forward, as the space gets even more competitive, may require even more numbers to be tracked.

So what else should you measure, and how should you measure it?

The right term is KRA”s, or “Key Result Areas”.  You should take a look at your business from a distance and think about what your key result areas are.  What are the areas of your business which truly matter?  If you run a [commodity] business like a CPA network, maybe most of your numbers are managed within your affiliate network system.  But this probably also means you don’t have any competitive advantage.  So as your business grows, you should think about what the areas are which truly reflect the running of your business.

Then once you have all these numbers collected, look for ratios.  The accounting guys are great at this, they always express critical numbers as a ratio.  An example ratio might be dollars earned/clicks.   Then, if you look at this number every day, you have a clear handle on a key number for your business.  If this ratio changes dramatically, you can easily investigate further.

Let me be clear – you don’t want to over measure.  This is not about spending 5 hours per day looking at numbers.  You should be spending 5 minutes in the morning taking a look at the previous day’s numbers.  But it must be done each and every day. If the numbers need to come from a lot of different sources you can assign the collection of the data to one of your staff.  Perhaps a lot of it can be automated by one of your techs.  But those stats need to be on your desk every morning so you can see how your business is doing.

One of my clients is a call center.  They had found their business was starting to drift, and were unclear as to why.  When I started encouraging them to cmonitor their stats daily, rather than monthly, they quickly found a couple of holes, which were easily fixed.  This has since opened up all kinds of avenues into new numbers that should be tracked, giving far more insight into the operation of their business.

As they’ve continued digging into their numbers on a daily basis, they’ve identified a couple of other key holes. Yesterday I was talking with my client and they’ve just had their best week, ever.  They are now able to bring on 15 additional people with no additional cost.  This kind of monitoring may sound simple and obvious – but are you monitoring all the key numbers for your business on a daily basis?

Another client does a pretty good job at monitoring stats.  As they were testing a viral signup process for their site, they found that they could get some dramatic improvements by monitoring their stats.  In the beginning the signup process was wildly inefficient, and a mess.  After 2 months of monitoring stats each day and improving the process based on the results, dramatic improvements have been made and it became the most efficient signup process I had ever seen – making the site capable of generating more viral traffic than most others.

So monitor your stats.. don’t go overboard, find the key measurements for your business, and monitor them every day.  Over time, the dividends will be huge.

Credits:  Inspiration for this article came from Bob Parson, the CEO of Godaddy’s blog, and Dick Costolo, the CEO of Feedburner blog.

If you’d like to know more about measurement, sign up for my list at http://tastips.com

How it works

Basically we need to look to track actions by users and manage those users differently.

In the case of email, the most common action to track is clicks.  So if we mail to a large list and receive a certain segment of the list clicking on the creative, those users have indicated a certain level of interest in that particular topic.  Some people do this with opens, but via clicks is a far more accurate indicator.

Once you have smaller targeted lists that have responded via clicks, you can focus on sending targeted offers to those segments only, or broker that data separately.

Most ESP’s don’t support tracking clicks by category unfortunately.   And if you don’t track this, you’re losing a whole level of valuable data.  Lets say you’re mailing to an email list, but you also have full postal data on your users.  If you are tracking category clicks as you mail to your list, suddenly that postal data has a whole new level of information about it, which can be rebrokered offline at far higher CPM’s.  I’ve talked to a couple of direct mail brokers and they love this kind of data, since users have clearly indicated their preferences.

Who is doing it?

Larry Organ is a real pioneer in this space, with his company ConsumerBase.  I first read about Larry in Forbes magazine (http://members.forbes.com/forbes/2006/0327/052.html).  They had a rather scary article about how he was invading everyone’s privacy.  And while this kind of data definitely has some serious privacy implications, its not going to be as bad as Forbes made out.

Basically, Larry likes to add value to data.  Therefore he takes existing data, and adds a behavioral level in on top of it, by tracking clicks.  He’s systematized this so well that he’s even filed for a patent on this – which if he gets it, I think will be very valuable one day.

He’s been doing this for quite a long time, segmenting his data by different interest categories. Try his data out and see if it works for you – and let me know if it works well.  They have 20 million names all broken down by interest categories with full email and full postal.

Another company that is starting to apply behavioral analysis to email is Q Interactive.  They recently released an email service which does behavioral email follow-up.  Over time they build profiles on what users like depending on a number of different variables.  According to their press release, they use “more than 1600 unique segments, including self-reported demographic, geographic, behavioral and transactional data and category interests”.  So over time, Q Interactive is learning what users like, build profiles for them, and therefore do a better job marketing to them.

Behavioral email marketing can open up a whole host of ethical issues, as raised by Larry Organ’s Forbes article.  But over time these will be worked out.   And so, at some point we can expect Google to get into behavioral marketing – however it’s not going to be so easy for them.  They are extremely concerned about the affect privacy issues will have on their brand.  Therefore the door is currently open for many companies to enter the behavioral space.  Long term, we can expect Google to become involved since behavioral targeting is likely to become the way Google can complete with traditional TV – the ads for video will only really become effective when behavioral data is added, improving the targeting.

TV Behavioural targeting

How would TV behavioural targeting work in practice?  Well, you might be mailing to your list, tracking clicks by category, building up profiles of your users.  You then become part of a behavioral targeting network, feeding this data into the network.  As TV shows are being broadcast online, users will be shown ads during the shows.  The targeting for the ads will be done based on your email click data.  You’ll get paid extra for your data, and the TV shows will able to earn higher ECPM’s because the audiences being targeted will be far more relevant.  Today’s version of this will be for feeding data into the banner networks.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to do this kind of targeting to your list, a great book about it is called “Drilling Down”, I’ve written a review about it here:

http://www.adrianbye.com/favourite-books/

You’re also welcome to join my list at http://tasmaniaconsulting.com, where I talk more about this topic.

So remember, track your clicks!  They’re worth a lot!

I don’t like this market, since selling into it generally does much more harm than good – but it can be instructive for how other markets develop. Since the grant market has such a high ECPM the most competitive marketing methods are used to make the offers work. If your market is not using some of these techniques currently, they will be in the future, so this is your chance to implement them first and profit!

Stage 1: $19.99 ebook, 50% rev share for affiliates.

In the beginning there was little competition and the Internet had not seen an offer like this, so it performed extremely well. Publishers were happy making $10/sale, and everyone made good money.

Stage 2: $19.99 ebook, $19 monthly continuity program.

As the market became more competitive, the payouts were forced to increase to continue to drive traffic. A monthly continuity program was implemented, which was “forced” continuity, meaning the customers were signed up when they purchased the ebook. This allowed payouts of $25 – $30/sale. Obviously the level of risk in this model is much higher, since the model has now gone negative at the point of sale. The typical retention for this program was 3-4 months.

Stage 3: $2.95 trial offer?

Notice how we don’t have a low price trial to low price continuity program (eg $19/month). This is because the ECPM payout to publishers will not support it, and will force the advertiser to lose money too early.

Stage 3: $2.95 trial, $199 one time billing.

This was an extremely aggressive offer put where users were charged a cheap trial, then sent a package they were billed $199 for. This offer didn’t last long since the market was not able to afford a $199 package for grants information, causing a high level of charge backs and refunds. However while it worked, it was extremely competitive.

Stage 4: $2.95 trial (free + shipping for a CD), plus multiple continuity programs.

This is where the market is today. The user pays for a free+shipping program and then is enrolled in several ongoing continuity programs. The consumer is excited because they are receiving a CD perceived to have a very high value. Then one continuity program will start initially, and another one, or more, start several weeks later, without the consumer realizing they are being billed, sometimes using different credit card descriptors.

Lead generation

In the grants market, people generally have not been successfully reselling the leads to phonerooms. This may be partially due to legal regulations, but also because the market simply cannot afford to pay for high priced coaching programs. Most leads from a grant offer don’t command a very high resale value.

What are the lessons from this?

1. If your market is undeveloped you can gain a huge advantage over others by adopting these techniques.

2. If your market is relatively poor, a high price won’t work no matter how you do it.

3. In direct response marketing, we are always going to see extremely aggressive offers implemented. So someone in your market may try to implement aggressive multiple continuity programs. This type of advertising is unfortunate because it makes it extremely difficult for everyone else to compete since the competitor can purchase more advertising. But it may well happen, enabling your competitor to buy more media than you.

Many successful offers today receiving a lot of volume don’t follow all the points above. Making some fairly simple changes will see your ECPM’s increase dramatically. Watch and learn from the most sophisticated markets!

Since that time we have become used to large corporations in every part of our lives, for example, Microsoft, Citicorp, Hewlett Packard, Disney and Wal-Mart.

Is it changing?

The internet is changing some of this, and is flattening how we work.  Instead of requiring hugely human intensive businesses, online, we’re now working with small, highly leveraged teams.  And instead of large corporations, on the internet the teams are relatively small.  Look at what Markus Frind has done with PlentyOfFish.com, or the HotOrNot.com guys, or Drew Curtis with Fark.  All these guys control as much traffic as a television station with few to no employees.  Even Google, one of the very largest online corporations only has 11,000 employees, compared to Wal-Mart, which has 1,800,000.

The ease of working remotely and connecting with and working with people in new ways is driving this on the internet, and some of the freelancer sites are leading the way.  For example, Odesk, with its outsourcing model, is a company that can allow individuals to organize themselves into teams and work remotely together as an entire company.  This model doesn’t scale particularly well – it is hard to have people working from different locations and have them collaborate as effectively as a team based in a single office.

The few cases where this works is when the collaboration is very simple.  A prime example is a company named LiveOps.  LiveOps provides phone support for large companies.  So if you’re Dominos, and you want to shorten the time it takes to answer the phones, you route all your calls to LiveOps.  LiveOps in turn recruits work from home people to answer the phones.  Their workers like this because they can work on a flexible schedule. Because LiveOps has so many people, and the concept is simple, the model works incredibly well for both sides and can scale.  LiveOps ends up with a huge team of work from home phone operators based around the country and can shift volume according to demand, and companies needing phone support can easily route it all via LiveOps.

So while LiveOps can work as a mega corporation because it has a very simple model, I think we’re going to see more growth of small businesses interfacing with each other in the future not less, where fewer people control more of the information that is passed around the world.  A successful website is incredibly high leverage and that doesn’t require a lot of people.

So my question to you is, for the internet, are we heading back to the early 1800’s where small business ruled?

Learn about how the internet is perceived in the Caribbean, its quite different to the rest of the world. 

You can listen to it here:
http://adrianbye.com/moreinfo/alcatraz.mp3

This was broadcast in 3 US markets on the east coast.
You can listen to it here:
http://adrianbye.com/moreinfo/clearchannel.mp3

For more on Craig Peterson’s radio show, visit here:
http://www.tech-talk-with-craig-peterson.com