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In the spirit of the playoff stretch, I thought I would briefly mention how awesome the MLB app on the iPhone is.  The MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM) group has done a great job over the past several years.  Since I’ve moved to the Bay area in 2005, I have been able to watch or listen to nearly any Red Sox game through my computer with MLB.tv (though I barely take advantage).   The limitation is you can’t watch in-market games (so if you are in the Bay area you can’t watch the Giants/Athletics) or nationally televised games.  But the quality is superb.  MLB was clearly ahead of the pack, but now Hulu has made the internet TV watching experience more mainstream.  This year, the service cost $79.95 for the season (you can sign up now for the remainder for $14.95).

What is extremely interesting is their iPhone app.  The app costs $9.99 (slightly steep, but worth it if you are a baseball fan), and has game tracking, video highlights, live audio, etc.  But if you are an MLB.tv subscriber, it lets you watch games live, on your phone.  And it works on the 3G network (which is huge), without much choppiness.  In fact, here’s an image of a Sox game via 3G:

Anyways, I thought I would mention it on my blog because I love showing it off.  It looks like they are running a promotion, so if you download the app, you can buy individual games for $.99 (without being an MLB.tv subscriber).  It’s definitely my favorite app on the iPhone, just wish I had time to use it more!

There’s been a large movement online towards consolidating identity.  Single sign-on (SSO) online has been a goal for a long time, starting with Microsoft’s Passport and then the OpenID and Open Stack movement.  Facebook Connect, in its short life, has probably done a lot more to enhance the progress.  It’s not yet ubiquitous, but many sites support Facebook Connect to not only provide identity and authentication, but to let users interact with their friends through the site.  Google has a product as well, Friend Connect, which is a more open version (supports OpenID) though less popular flavor of the same thing.

What’s fascinating is how this movement is happening with the telephone as well, in a seemingly parallel track.  Convergence will happen sooner than we think.  I’m terrible at remembering numbers – but pretty soon we won’t need to.  That’s what makes Google owning GrandCentral (now Google Voice) fascinating – at some point, the phone number (at least the way we think of it today) will be superfluous.  The Palm Pre already connects to Facebook, Android phones to Google.  The phone number will essentially become the device ID.

This why owning the digital identity of the individual is so important to Facebook and Google.  At some point, reaching individuals via phone will be based entirely on a digital identifier, i.e. SSO will apply to phones, and our digital identity will be the conduit for communication.  It may be our email address (like it is with online payment), or our Facebook identity.  There are pros and cons of both, and clearly both companies want to be in the middle.  By being the broker of communication, they will become the telecom companies of the next generation.  A lot of this is obvious, but my hope is that it’s done in an open fashion.   I’m just looking forward to the day where all I will need is an online ID and that’s it.

Last week I attended an event here in the Valley with Aneesh Chopra, the CTO of the US.  Not too long ago, I was heavily involved in politics (worked on campaigns, etc), and technology was rarely talked about, so I was extremely curious about what he would have to say.  Turns out I learned a personal lesson as well.

As we all know, change can take forever in political organizations, as well as in large enterprises.  What struck me as refreshing from Chopra’s talk was the administration’s efforts to tackle short-term problems initially, with a broader vision in mind.  That way, at least some progress can be demonstrated.  The example he gave was that by September (90 days after they announced the idea), they would develop a new website that will allow immigrants to check their application status online.  While not fully satisfying his broader goal of immigration reform, it does represent a non-trivial first step to get there.

I took the lesson as something I should consider myself.  Oftentimes in our lives when we seek change, whether it’s personal or professional, we try to aim for the ultimate goal and get frustrated when we fail to achieve it quickly.  While I think we must have longer-term vision, I think having specific, short-term goals to get there is extremely helpful and helps us feel like we are making progress.

Anyways, I know this is off-topic, but I have been thinking about this recently, and trying to figure out different areas of my life where I need to define some short-term goals that will help me achieve my vision.

I blogged about this before, but I thought it was relevant to cover again after reading Paul Krugman’s brief post and listening to all the controversy (fear) on a single-payer system (please see the definition if you are not familiar – essentially single-payer means the government becomes the insurer, i.e. it pays the health care professionals).  Lost in all the arguments is how the government is already picking up nearly half the cost of health care already (46%), more than what insurers pay (41%).  Sure this is substantially less than most other countries, but it’s still relevant as part of the conversation.

Take a look at the two graphs below (I’m taking the top 22 countries by population that spend at least $1,000 per capita on health expenditures, which excludes BRIC and developing countries).  The first one compares (as a percentage) where the money for health expenditures comes from – government, out-of-pocket, or private/insurance.  The US clearly has the largest percentage coming from private/insurers.

The second graph looks at raw expenditures per capita.  The US doubles nearly all other countries in spending, as we all know (this is slightly self-selected as I only chose countries with over $1,000 in spending, see my earlier post for a more complete picture).  Yet it’s clear that the US government spends nearly as much or more than other countries spend combined (government, out of pocket, and private/insurers).   Correlation does not mean causation, but clearly the intricacies of our current employee/insurance-based model adds significant overhead to the overall system.  But are there other inefficiencies in the system that lead to the high costs?

Opponents of single-payer argue that our quality of care will be poor if we move that way, but what is the evidence of that?  Our health care as currently setup is not the best in the world (perhaps it’s in the conversation).  But only two countries listed here have insurer’s paying over 15% (US insurers pay 41%).

My personal hope is that we slowly begin to move away from our overly complicated system and begin to adopt a system that resembles other countries’ (albeit better).  This won’t happen quickly- half the “stakeholders” (or special interests) in these negotiations would be severely hurt by reducing costs, as inefficiencies to us mean profit to them.  The Obama administration is making progress (I would rather we do it right slowly than rush into a poor solution) but we must all continue to educate ourselves, keep an open mind, and avoid the knee-jerk reactions from phrases that opponents throw out to impede potential improvements.

Health Expenditure Split (by % overall)

Health Expenditures Overall

I was listening to the Forum on KQED (our local NPR affiliate) yesterday, and they started talking about gas prices and vehicle demand.  One of the guests on the show discussed consumer behavior, and how it changed as gas prices changed.  Specifically, she stated that compact and hybrid vehicle sales dropped with changes in gas prices – she was adamant about this.  So I looked around for some data and found the following post somewhat useful.

In the article, they claim hybrid sales dropped 45.5% in April 2009 (year-on-year, compared to April 2008).  Pretty shocking headline.  They even show the percentage of hybrid sales of total vehicle sales, but it’s quite useless.  So I took their hybrid data, and compiled it with two government sources, NIPA for auto sales, and EIA for gas prices.  Looking at the raw data, I can see how the KQED guest could look at hybrid sales and be quite disappointed at consumer behavior:

Hybrid Sales Compared to Gas Prices

However, it’s critical to measure the percentage of hybrids COMPARED to auto sales.  That seems like common sense to me.  Here’s the graph:

Hybrid Percentage Compared to Gas Prices

The second graph paints a significantly different story.  Auto sales increased in early 2008 as gas prices began to increase, and then dropped as gas reached its peak.  Not sure what explains the drop in hybrid sales – though it could be an anomaly, or it could be that non-consumer sales persisted through the peak and most of these are non-hybrid sales.  Either way, it doesn’t seem like there’s a ton of correlation between the data.   We often hear about how consumers react to market conditions with immediacy – yet in this case, it’s just not true.

PS – if you’d like the raw data, please email, happy to send it over.

Update:  Thanks to a coworkers suggestion, I derived the correlation coefficient between the two graphs.  For the entire period, the correlation between the percentage of hybrid sales compared to gas prices is .64, or moderately correlated.  However, the hybrid market was not mature in 2004-5, so it’s a bit inaccurate.  Comparing to 2006 onwards, the correlation coefficient is .25, i.e. there’s no correlation whatsoever.

I won’t often plug personal things, but I’ve been helping put together some of the panels for TiEcon this year, and spent a ton of time doing it, so I’m just letting you know.  TiEcon is focused on bringing entrepreneurs together – last year there were over 4,000 attendees.  That’s the largest entrepreneur conference in the world, and it’s right in our back yard in Santa Clara.  If you are remotely entrepreneurial, this is a must-attend event.  Some of the speakers include Tony Hsieh (Zappos), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Brad Smith (Intuit) and many more.  The panelists (there are a ton of parallel panel discussions) include numerous venture capitalists (including one of my partners at Opus), lawyers, bankers, and successful entrepreneurs.  There are many ways to network (i.e. Power Connect), which you don’t often find at conferences.

I volunteered as a co-chair of Business BootCamp – a series of 6 workshops that will leave attendees with specific skills and tools.  The workshops consider the practical aspects of managing a company such as funding, cash flow, building teams, scaling sales networking and creating buzz.   And the workshop leaders are all great and have experience leading sessions like this in the past.

The conference is next Friday and Saturday (May 15th and 16th).  I hope to see you all there.  Oh, and the best part – if you want to save $220, use the code “TIE-FRIENDS”.  Enjoy!!

http://www.tiecon.org/home

At this point we have all heard about the swine flu that’s starting to emerge around the world.  However, one label that has been thrown around without much thought is “pandemic”.   It’s an interesting development in our Twitter world where the signal to noise ratio has increased by orders of magnitude, and we tend to sensationalize and exaggerate (it’s like the old telephone game, except multiplied).  Information spreads, and it’s hard to know what’s accurate, but people continue to spread it.  Don’t get me wrong, I love Twitter, but if one were to go search twitter for any variation of swine flu, they would be terribly misguided and most likely freaked out.  Anyways, here’s the WHO definition for an influenza pandemic:

An influenza pandemic occurs when a new influenza virus appears against which the human population has no immunity, resulting in epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness. With the increase in global transport, as well as urbanization and overcrowded conditions, epidemics due the new influenza virus are likely to quickly take hold around the world.

Fortunately, we have not reached this stage yet (last count 20 official deaths according to the CDC, 149 according to Mexican officials, though it’s unclear why there’s such a large discrepancy).  It’s important that we keep some perspective.  Here’s a helpful illustration by WHO that gives some clarity as to where this rates:

My question is this – if we did not have tools like Twitter and Facebook, would the flu news spread like it did?  And if not, would that necessarily be a bad thing?  Or is it a good thing that we all know?  On one side, folks are probably doing things like washing their hands that they should always be doing.  The counter-argument is that misguided information often leads to normal folks to become hypochondriacs and burdening our health care system with unnecessary visits.

I love the way twitter has spread the flow of information, but in my opinion, there’s a a big problem with how we  separate the wheat from the chaff, and I think that if a startup can attack accordingly, there’s a huge opportunity.

UPDATE:  Just saw an extremely relevant XKCD cartoon, which would be funnier if not so true.

Amazon releases their earnings this Thursday, and while most of you probably heard about the controversy regarding Amazon (#amazonfail) last week, what you may have overlooked in all the hubbub was the astonishing 300,000 Kindle 2’s sold in the less than two months since it’s release.  That’s over a $100M in revenue from a single item.  Amazon is expecting to sell 800,000 overall for 2009 – over $280M in revenue.  Absolutely incredible.  Oh and don’t forget the Kindle leads to higher margin book sales through wireless delivery.  So it got me thinking, if there was a executive of the year award (I blame the NBA – it’s award season there), Jeff Bezos would have to be considered one of the frontrunners, right?  Just for kicks, here’s a revenue comparision against their biggest competitor EBay (I guess I have to continue with my proclivity towards graphs):

And stock performance (take with a huge grain of salt, very different companies, and BBuy is signifcantly bigger than the rest with their $40B+ revenue) over the past 6 years compared to Best Buy, Circuit City, Barnes & Noble, Ebay, and the S&P:

And while their commerce side is continuing to grow, their transformative cloud offerings, AWS, could dominate their revenue within 5-10 years.  AWS is currently recognized in the “Other” category on their quarterly reports (last figured at $131M in Q4 2008).    Anyways, who knows what will happen Thursday, but Bezos has definitely impressed me.

It’s not often you hear someone ask to be charged for something they currently get for free.  But I’m asking.  The reason is simple – advertising alone cannot sustain quality news publications.  I look at two of the more successful online-only news publications – Politico and Huffington Post, and both are supported by private investors.  That doesn’t scale long-term.  The WSJ, on the opposite end of the spectrum, has something north of 1M subscribers, each paying north of $100/year – that’s $100 million a year.  

I’m not sure why some of the newspapers continue to stay free.  Nando started in the early 90s as one of the first online publications and they were free.   But they closed shop in 2003.  Let’s look at the NYTimes as an example – they get 15 million uniques per month.  According to comScore (via Alley Insider) they had 173 million unique page views / month in October 2008.  Assuming some growth and round numbers, let’s say they get 200 million / month.  At a generous $20 CPM rate, that’s $4 million / month, or $48 million a year.  That’s not a lot of money.  They would only need to convert 480,000 uniques into paid subscribers (3.2%) to get to that total via subscriptions.  

And that actually assumes they would completely charge for the site.  Check out the WSJ Online, it’s actually pretty solid even as a free website.  They do a great job with mixing paid/unpaid content, and they use advertising as well.   In fact, check out the comparisions for the two websites:

Anyways, NYTimes and other online news publications, if it means you will continue to improve and grow as an organization, please start charging me.