thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

There is a major meltdown of customer service expectations taking place over the way the launch of the new 3G capable iPhones are being mis-managed in New Zealand this week.

Go over to iPhone data plan aggregation to read some of the debate (around 50+ comments so far on a site that management might actually read.)

There is also a firestorm over at various other tech and media sites which I don’t read myself but maybe you do.

The background issue is that mobile data is still too expensive for most people to use and even worse it still only runs at close to dial up speed according to the Check your coverage link - in my area here are the results (If it is very slow why does anyone actually care about data on a mobile phone?)

2G/2.5G coverage in your area - Best (Green graph)

“This location has a very strong signal, so you will definitely experience excellent quality for all services. Your mobile data connection will be as fast as a dial-up connection.”

The TV interview being referred to is  TV 3 Campbell Live here If you didn’t see it already you should.

While Mark may not have seen the exact plans referred to by John Campbell it is sophistry to imply that the management and marketing teams didn’t research all of the pricing models available and he was well aware that pricing comparisons would be made.

Vodafone then made a judgement call on pricing models and it has backfired in a big way.

A few weeks back much was made of new data plans also at Rods site see 1-a-day/ and apparently these plans simply don’t apply to the iPhone. Plan choices are very restricted and quite inflexible.

To quote Bruce Hoult (Comment by Bruce Hoult at 9:40 am on 9 July 2008)

“Also that “$1 a day” casual data rate Paul Brislen was so happy about a few weeks ago, where everyone in the thread was talking about “that will go well with the iPhone”? It seems the iPhone is the ONLY phone you can’t use those with. Vodafone’s iPhone FAQ clearly says that if you don’t buy a data plan then you can’t use the internet AT ALL, and that the $1 a day is not available. Wtf???”

My conclusion is that if you get an IPhone at present the only reasonable way to use it without major data expense is on the WiFi networks like CafeNet or Tomizone* if they are available in your area.

*Been trying to locate hotspots at Tomizone there is a google map like interface but it’s very clumsy and slow and really hard to use on an almost dead connection anyway.

It would be much easier if I could navigate to a city or even suburb and do my searching at that level.

Speaking of data speeds I have a more fundamental local problem. My existing broadband connection is almost dead.

The obvious culprit is school holidays and the fact that yootoob is way more interesting that most NZ television.

In fact my internet connection has slowed so much that I can even complete the recommended speed test. Try it yourself although that site may have crashed out (won’t work anymore on IE 7)but Firefox 3 is OK.

Have a look at this screen-shot. It is quite typical and this test eventually got timed out.

I won’t say at this point who my ISP is but let’s just say I’m making plans to get service from a different company. It has simply been too hard to upgrade to ADSL2.

I can still get speeds of up to 1mb during the day at up to 3mb at midnight but that is not terribly useful when most of my work involves accessing web based software applications.

If you look closely the test immediately before this one got to a download speed of 1.7mb downstream which is sad but usable.

On a brighter note: If you are one of the 5000 or more people in NZ who already have an iPhone (or an iTouch) for that matter can you please tell me how this blog site looks on your screen.

I’m running a series of filters that are meant to detect iPhone / iTouch and display accordingly.

Hopefully it works and normal internet speeds will be restored soon but switching suppliers is not an easy thing. It seems like a huge opportunity for customer service people to excel and I hope they do.

(TBC in a later instalment.) Hope and trust your day is going better.

Update 6pm: Telecom announces a new 3G broadband device which looks promising on many levels. Maybe number portability could work in teh opposite direction and telecom will get lots of new customers from this.

“Telecom’s 3G mobile broadband network was upgraded with rev a technology last year which means Telecom’s cell sites now have the ability to deliver average download speeds of 800Kbps and 300Kbps upload, resulting in an experience much closer to DSL broadband on customers’ mobile devices.”

Now higher data speeds and capped rates with SMS warnings and a 30 day money back consumer protection all sounds like a breath of fresh air. I never thought I be pleasantly surporsed by a new Telecom product but I am.

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TED just released news (June 2008) that there have been more than 50 million downloads of their videos.

Ashley Highfield of the BBC mentions that iPlayer has now had more than 75m video downloads (as at May 2008) so clearly we are moving into a new era of accelerated video and this has major benefits right across the spectrum.

Keep reading for more about both stories.

The Johnny Lee short clip (at #10) is one that everyone should watch.  It highlights a surprising twist to a technology product which has much wider benefits and implications for product innovation. (5m40sec)

10. Johnny Lee demos Wii Remote hacks - from the top 10 list from TED

This is a brilliant example of a product taking a life of its’ own when someone else sees a new market for a new product and takes it there. I’d be guessing Nintendo wish they had though of this one.

Why is this Story Important and Significant?

The Johnny Lee story  demonstrates clear examples of what Kevin Kelly (in 1999 book New Rules for the New Economy and still worth reading.) Snips and comments on 4 of these rules follow.

• 1 - “Embracing the swarm, - competitive advantage belongs to those who embrace decentralized points of control” we can be anywhere on the network and still have an impact.
• 7 - “From places to spaces, - as place is replaced by multiple interactions with anything, anytime, anywhere (space) the opportunities for intermediaries, middlemen, and mid-sized niches expand greatly.” Think of the multiplier effect that YouTube played on this research project.
• 9 - “Relationship tech, enhance, amplify, extend, augment, distill, recall, expand and develop relationships of all types.”  With this amplification comes the opportunity for new people to tilt the paradigm of existing products and take them into new markets in new and exciting ways.I’d love to see a chart on how many controllers there were before Johnnies invention and now how many they are compared to the number of Nintendo consoles being sold.
• 10 -”Opportunities before efficiencies, - there is far greater wealth to be had by unleashing the inefficient discovery and creation of new opportunities.”

Sharing new ideas and researching new product innovations in a public way kind of like “research powered by video” goes counter to most of what we have understood about value creation and intellectual property management.

The web has changed everything and that is only going to accelerate if we understand what it is that we are looking at.  Best of all, many of these change cycles happen in real time and cross- pollinate at a furious and ever increasing rate.

So What Did Mr Lee Actually Do? (If you haven’t watched the video yet.)

Building sophisticated educational tools out of cheap parts, Johnny Lee demos his cool Wii Remote hacks, which turn the $40 video game controller into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen and a head-mounted 3-D viewer. Researcher Johnny Lee became a YouTube star with his demo of Wii Remote hacks — which is almost more interesting than what he actually did - is the speed at which it has been picked up globally.

To understand Johnny Lee, just take a look at his personal Projects page. Aside from his Wii Remote hacks — voted the #1 tech demo of all time by Digg — you can see all the other places his mind has turned: typography, photography, urban renewal … to say nothing of his interesting sideline in Little Great Ideas, like the hypnotic “___ will ___ you.”

When he’s not hacking Wiimotes, Lee is a graduate student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

So the question is where else will video take us and what else is happening in the kind of television world that most people inhabit?

The Future of Online Video
A discussion panel [Ashley Highfield (first 11.5mins) , Christian Vollman (Germany), Antonio Campo, Dall'Orto] led by Matthew d’Ancona on the future of online video (35mins) Interesting that Ashley notes that BBC programmes are now available on the Nintendo Wii which is seen as a significant connected device now.

And check the numbers - BBC iPlayer has now had 75million downloads.  This really is the mainstreaming of quality video online when you factor in TED and the 4663 channels on Miro (Note: Miro includes much of the same content.)  YouTube is still a backbone but will be surpassed by other providers who have much better quality content very soon.

Now that broadband is more pervasive there is huge growth in the on-demand audience for quality video.

Ashley passes on some reports and stats that BBC can do as a public broadcaster and it is the trends that are significant on market share . This is great news for more specialist programming and offers a glimpse into the future trends that are shaping growth in other markets.

It will also ultimately have positive funding implications for programme makers looking at online broadcast platforms and potential audience numbers and revenue models.

Media7 in NZ looks to have a great future for example as it leverages outside experts and applies resources from a larger channel to get results way out of proportion to its actual current size. If you have taste-makers and media influencers in the same room anything can happen. When the audience amplifies that broadcast then you’re cooking with gas.

See also Zeitgeist Europe 08 video channel. Or here if you have a  login.

According to Youngblood the conference is now an:

“annual 2-day conference, which began in 2006, and is by invitation only for around 400 of Google’s strategic partners in the EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) region. This year’s Zeitgeist was held at The Grove in Hertfordshire, an impressive English estate about 40 km’s North-West of Central London.

Thankfully, it wasn’t a trade conference and Google products weren’t pushed down your throat as you might’ve expected, although there was some obvious tie-ins with certain products like YouTube and of course very strong branding throughout the event. The agenda was somewhat TED-like with a diverse mix of technologists, politicians, scientists and entrepreneurs as speakers.

from Youngbloods blog

Seems like Coin had a great time entertainment wise but glossed over  the really significant parts but since it was a closed set and I haven’t watched all the video it’s is hard to tell.

Regardless, we are a major online video explosion with video everywhere and getting better all the time.

Enjoy. Now go ahead and get enhancing, amplifying, extending, augmenting, distilling, recalling, expanding and developing all those relationships that will help us all create new value and true 21st century wealth.

As Kevin says “A network is a possibility factory”.

I was down at the swimming pool this morning when a new T-shirt caught my eye. “Shift happens” said the shirt. (in a manner of speaking

By serendipitous coincidence I was thinking about the future of education and some recent conversations with educators at a number of schools.

For children and young adults school is the workplace where they spend the most time. As a parent I’m vitally interested in how that time is spent or invested.

One of the stories I particularly liked was about lunch at a particular school. One of the school traditions is that the children can’t serve themselves - they can only serve each other.

That vignette is worth any number of homilies or placards on the wall; because what people actually do is always important.

And at a school how they communicate and encourage students in a particular direction is also of great interest.

As I live in Auckland I was interested to check out a feature article on “The Best Schools” in a recent Metro article.

That feature offers up three summary questions in searching for the best secondary (high) school. These were listed as:

1. How good are the teachers?
2. How safe is the school?
3. Does it offer enough of what your child needs to make the most of their secondary school years?

I particularly liked this masterpiece of understatement at the beginning of the article.

“The major indicators of academic achievement are related to the home. Children with articulate and educated parents and a home culture that values learning are likely to do better than others, wherever they go to school.

What you’re looking for; therefore, is a school whose students do significantly better than others from similar backgrounds. A school that “adds value”.

Predictably the star students featured in the article are all wonderful reflections of their parents and their schools but upon closer review it does seem that analysis is a bit limited in scope.

I would be interested to know a bit more about the bigger picture. How the school is helping to equip students for a world that is transforming and changing at an accelerating rate. As a parent I’d like to know a bit more about educational philosophy which is a bit harder to measure on a chart.

And given that we all live in a techno-savvy world know I would have included a survey of school websites and what they might reveal about the depth of school experiences available.

For a great example of what some 7 year olds can do - have a look at Learning N’ Stuff which gives a fascinating snapshot of actual life at school complete with homework and useful links like Spelling City to make homework even more fun.

To me it is like a glimpse into the future of education in a way that bonds parents, teachers and kids right across the spectrum. Top work CS11!

Also found this paragraph by Maree Conway on Thinking Futures which in turn highlights a relevant video on some of thewider issues. It was in the context of tertiary education but all of the same factors apply right down to preschool.

“Drivers of Change
The future of universities is being influenced by a number of major drivers of change. There are ones we know well: globalisation, demographics, government policy on funding higher education, and the impact of IT developments on learning delivery. There are other drivers that are less well acknowledged.

This is a now well known video on You Tube - Did You Know? or Shift Happens. It demonstrates how things change, and we can’t assume everything will stay the same.”

The presentation comes from Shift Happens who note the universal importance of some of the themes and issues raised so far.

“We believe that the themes of Did You Know? are global in nature and apply to schools and children around the world. We want all children to be successful.

We do not view the growing importance of India and China as negative but rather as additional opportunities for everyone in the world.

We do not mean to gloss over the very real issues that countries such as India and China face, and we recognize that globalization and “flat world” factors have downsides just like other societal shifts.

We prefer, however, to focus on the positive benefits and on doing what we can to help children learn and grow so that they may become successful digital, global citizens.

We’d like your help. Everyone must be involved in the conversation if we are to come up with a system of education for our children that prepares them for the 21st century.”

(Check the suggestions area for some more ideas on discussion and next steps. Like “What implications does this have for our current way of doing things?”)

So what are you thinking about on the topic of educational futures? How important is school anyway and what are we all doing to add value along the way.

A little planning can go a long way - as Dwight Eisenhower once said “Plans are useless; planning is priceless.”

Related posts that you may also enjoy

• Professors can’t dance - mind/body rocks - Mind body
• One wiki or two? Education waking Up Wikis in education
• Changing the world with Dave Eggers. Dave and Valencia 826
• Uses, not innovations, drive technology
• Creativity & Innovation Linked Ken Robinson

This morning I was reading some questions over on this post. Another related question is what are the public policy impacts of having a tax on a tax (GST on excise for petrol) and shouldn’t that be sorted?

“We think we have it bad in New Zealand paying $1.88 a litre. Converting that to gallons, so we can make a UK comparison, that equals $8.50 a gallon. In the UK motorists $12.76 a gallon, or 50% more than us. And they are closer to the oil fields….

In the UK the Labour Government taxes petrol so much that over 65% of the price at pump returns to them. We consider the 35% in taxes and levies here in New Zealand excessive. Is the government investing that money back into research on alternative fuels, or does it return to the general coffers?”

The writer used the imperial gallon measurement of 4.546 litres to a gallon when doing the pricing calculations. These comparisons can be confusing when comparing with U.S as their liquid gallon is only 3.785 litres.

When the U.S consumers complain about $US4 per gallon they are talking about $US1.05/litre which equates to about NZ$1.35 per litre (at exchange rate of .7793 on May 3 National Bank)

Most of the difference is tax. In the U.S federal tax is 18.4c per US gallon (or 22c per Imperial gallon) which equates to NZ$.89 - however we’d need to translate that to $NZ cents per litre. Note: this is about NZ$19.6cpl compared to NZ$70cpl+) if my math is correct.

The real point is that in the U.S taxes on petrol appear to be much lower than in Europe, U.K or NZ.

Add in the overall decline in easy supplies and the oil companies are getting more profit because they mostly aren’t spending that on exploration or drilling costs it’s all chasing a declining supply.

In August ‘07 I wrote a series on this when oil was $70 per barrel.

In NZ most readers will have noticed a debate about how GST is added to petrol prices as an additional tax so that Government gets about 42%* of the fuel price at the pump rather than the 35% that was mentioned in the reference post. (*although as overall base prices go higher the excise rate stays the same but the GST element rises so overall tax percentage is not so easy to calculate.)

Regardless of the justifications used by the government; charging GST on the landed costs & margins and including the excise tax in the base calculation does exaggerate the inequity.

Effectively petrol is in the same category as tobacco and alcohol when it comes to tax and public policy which is plain wrong.

Given the typical distances and congestion of NZ roads most families can’t easily reduce their drive to work costs (in the shorter term) except by changing jobs or moving house if they have to be physically present at their place of work. While public transport is improving it is still not that useful either.

Add to this the element that petrol prices rises get added in to almost everything in our supermarkets as transport charges eventually and the overall effect is much more dramatic.

Sure some people can get public transport but that is not so easy for many and this shows how the calculations compound. Note: they use September ‘07 prices so some ratios have changed slightly since then.

For many years the justification on the excise tax was as a roading charge yet most of the money went into a consolidated fund and only recently has it started to be actually used for roading projects again.

In fairness it is actually very hard to find out the excise tax on petrol because it is hidden away in the 3rd schedule of the Customs and Excise Act 1996 at 99.75 and is expressed as 42.52c per litres plus 8c per g of Pb (lead calculation)

Here are all the taxes / Auckland is or will be different soon due to extra local authority taxes. (from here.)

“Excise tax 42.524 cpl
- ACC levy 7.330 cpl
- Petroleum Fuels Monitoring Levy 0.025 cpl
- Local Authorities Petroleum Tax 0.660 cpl”

What do you think about petrol and tax policy? Perhaps the excise tax should be increased if the GST calculation is changed? What If it can be shown that the extra tax is used on alternative energy options?

Perhaps some clever reader might be able to tell us why this old Treasury working paper hasn’t been updated - and what “marginal excess burdens” actually means in real terms. It seems that the debate so far is light on real world impact calculation. The actual pdf of paper is here - for some reason not linked to the abstract.

And definitely the GST should be calculated on the excluding excise taxes and other levies listed above.

See these related posts in an early series last year on this blog.

• (1) Green futures and the last oil shock
• (2) Why Alternative Energy Can’t Save Us from Peak Oil
• (3) How to Survive Peak Oil by Acting Locally - 7 ways
• (4) Some Conclusions on Peak Oil - Urgency Needed

See also

• NZ Energy Strategy
• and NZ Energy Strategy- Transport Summary

On Friday a new and helpful law for NZ based businesses comes into effect.

“On 2 May 2008 the Limited Partnerships Act 2008 will come into force.

The Act has been introduced to promote sustainable growth* in New Zealand’s venture capital and private equity industries. (*my emphasis)

Limited Partnerships are a form of partnership involving general partners, who are liable for all the debts and liabilities of the partnership, and limited partners, who are liable to the extent of their capital contribution to the partnership.”

and …..

“Features of Limited Partnerships include:

• separate legal personality
• an indefinite lifespan if desired
• a list of activities that the limited partners can be involved in while not participating in the management of the Limited Partnership (safe harbour activities)
• tax treatment for Limited Partnerships.”

for more on this and the new R & D (15%) Rebates scheme check R&D Tax Credits and Knowledge Hunting which are some notes I made at a recent event.