This is Tech

• United Kingdom supermarket chain begins using child face recognition to help prevent selling alcohol and cigarettes to minors
• The New York Times peeks into the emerging world of online social-networking for pre-teens
• The Wall Street Journal’s tech blogger wonders if trends in business IT spending have bottomed out or will continue spiral downward
• The first space lawyer!

Image via Wikipedia

I am writing this quick post from Virgin flight 373 to San Francisco. This plane is tailor made for the tech set. First up, a power plug for my laptop. This means I am working at full brightness instead of scrimping to make my battery last through the flight. This has been a pet peeve of mine about other airlines for a while. If I can add AC power to my car, I don’t see what has taken airlines so long to make this upgrade.

Virgin has live satellite television in every seat. I am watching some MTV reality show called Parental Control, where a kids parents hate his girlfriend, so he gets set up on two blind dates with a girl that each of his parents pick for him. I am getting off track here, but it is hilarious.

The individualized touch screen entertainment system they have lets you rent movies, listen to albums, radio stations, and play games. This is the most enjoyable flight I have been on in a while. Oh, and did I mention it was only $185 round trip from Seattle.

The United States has moved up 3 places to 4th in the rankings of the World Economic Forum’s “Networked Readiness Index”.

Covering 127 economies, the index is meant to measure not only networking infrastructure, but all aspects of a country’s use of information and communication technology to benefit its citizens, businesses, and governments. Because of the study’s broad scope and focus on innovation, the report is considered the most authoritative assessment of a country’s ability to innovate and compete in the global market.

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Amazon is adding fulfillment to its impressive list of web services. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, SimpleDB and Simple Storage Service are the back-end behind a large number of young lean Internet startups. Amazon announced its new Amazon Fulfillment Service (Amazon FWS) yesterday. While Amazon’s original web service are targeted toward those building web applications, the fulfillment web service, and Amazon’s fulfillment program, have broad application to retail businesses generally. Outsourcing warehousing, shipping and handling take one more burden off of small businesses allowing them to focus on more important things.

What is exciting about Amazon’s web services is that they are affordable for small companies with limited budgets, but scale seamlessly to enterprise levels. And as Matt Hulett mentioned in his Startup Whisperer blog last week, Scale is Sexy. Amazon’s fulfillment system is also nimble, meaning that if your product gets a surge of good press, Amazon can will ship the burst of orders without blinking, and then go back to your standard order flow once things settle down.

The new web services interface means that you can programmatically trigger shipments, and run a completely automated fulfillment process built into your retail software or web site shopping cart.

Pricing for Amazon fulfillment service is below. The use of web service is free.

Seattle locals know that small TopPot Donuts makes an amazing doughnut. If you are outside of Seattle, you might have had a TopPot doughnut at your local Starbucks. TopPot has been supplying Starbucks for some time now. Starbucks typically carries TopPot’s old fashioned (in plain and chocolate) and apple fritters. According to this Seattle PI article, Starbucks will be rolling out TopPot doughnuts in its stores nationwide starting in April.

It is safe to say that Starbucks has fairly well saturated the US market. In my building, we have a Starbucks on the 40th floor so people don’t have to take the elevator all the way to the Starbucks in the lobby.

So when you have multiple locations in the same building, and some of your stores are across the street or caddy-corner to your other stores, where do you go from there? You either increase in-store sales, or expand into other areas (or both). If you have read Howard Schultz’ biography of Starbucks, “Pour Your Heart Into It” you know that Starbucks’ focus originally was on great coffee. Now that Schultz is back in charge, you can expect that focus to continue. This is evidenced by the recent retraining of all Starbuck baristas on how to pull the perfect shot. So if Starbucks is refocused on great coffee, it wouldn’t make sense to try to expand to new product lines within the existing stores. The answer, dedicate some resources to building a second brand.

TopPot seems like a logical choice for this experiment. TopPot has a similar history to Starbucks. Both are Seattle grown, and both focus on the quality of their products. There are synergies between donuts and coffee that would allow TopPot to sell Starbucks coffee and vice versa. The acquisition would vertically integrate Starbucks with a supplier, which would likely create some economic advantage as they bring some of their baking in-house. TopPot is still small enough to be affordable to acquire, but has a well established brand in Seattle. Starbucks competes directly with doughnut makers already (e.g., duncan donuts on the East Coast). TopPot could allow Starbucks to undermine these competitors differentiator. Lastly, as a publicly traded company, Starbucks needs to keep its investors (and the market) sold on the future growth of the company. The more Starbucks locations that open, the harder it is to grow further. A second brand would make it easier for investors to envision growth.

The advice, Starbucks should buy TopPot and use their considerable experience to build it into a national brand. Once established, spin them out into their own publicly traded company. Starbucks in uniquely situated to do this, and TopPot is still small enough to make them the perfect affordable candidate.

Weblog “The Technium” is running an interesting article on what it takes for artists to be successful within the long tail of the Internet. The Technium’s premise is that it take one-thousand true fans to make a living with your art. It is well thought out and an interesting read.

Excerpt below:

1,000 True Fans: “Other than aim for a blockbuster hit, what can an artist do to escape the long tail?

One solution is to find 1,000 True Fans. While some artists have discovered this path without calling it that, I think it is worth trying to formalize. The gist of 1,000 True Fans can be stated simply:

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

To raise your sales out of the flatline of the long tail you need to connect with your True Fans directly.  Another way to state this is, you need to convert a thousand Lesser Fans into a thousand True Fans.”

Curious what your blog traffic is worth in advertising dollars? Pay per click or impression based advertising takes a lot of visitors to add up. Nic Duquette at Snarksmith.com has a nice analysis of what it takes to have a profitable weblog.

What Your Blog Is Worth: “What’s Your Blog Worth? Converting Your Livejournal Into Cold, Hard Cash
by Nic Duquette

If you’re reading this essay, you probably have an Internet connection, and if you have an Internet connection, you probably have a weblog. We will therefore dispose with the formality of defining what a blog is for technological neophytes and proceed directly to the question that has been on your mind since the very first day when you wrote that the music accompanying your frowny emoticon and paragraph about your significant other was Tom Waits — can you make money doing this? Maybe even enough to quit your job?

Everybody wants to be paid to blog, even people who make obscene amounts of money in jobs that are equally or even more pleasurable pursuits than lonely HTML opining. However, not everybody could afford to quit work and blog full time; since most bloggers read other blogs solely while they’re at work and supposed to be doing something else, there’s an economic categorical imperative against everybody quitting work to blog, at least until linking becomes an informal currency, which is actually just a small cultural leap away.

So the natural question becomes: Do you have enough readership to attract advertising, and if you do, is it enough to live on? To answer this question, I looked at the avertising rates on Blogads, a blog advertising collective used by sites of very diverse voices and readership. From this page I obtained three-month advertising rates, number of currently running ads, and ad prices for the entire Blogads family. I then converted the three-month rates times the number of ads for each site at each price level into one annualized number per site. I also took the pageviews and multiplied them times 91 times 5/7, which should give approximately the number of pageviews the site gets on a weekday. (If the site gets significant traffic on weekends, this number will be exaggerated — but hey, close enough for blog work. If you want to be really accurate, multiply your weekly traffic numbers by 5/7.) I plotted this estimated annual revenue against estimated weekday pageviews and got the following chart:”

For Nic’s full analysis, check out his full post at www.snarksmith.com/essays/blogcash.html.

(Via SnarkSmith.)

Compare Wholesale Mortgage Rates [Tools]: ”

Mortgage Professor has a great no-frills online tool for tracking the wholesale mortgage rates. Just go here, Select your geographic area, and time period to look at. Choose whether you want your data in chart or table format (I suggest table, as the chart data isn’t as up to date), and what kind of mortgage you want to look at. You can further sort the results by FICO, loan purpose, loan size, type of documentation, or size of down payment. The data comes from Amerisave. A great way to check out mortgage rates, and how strong you have to be to get them. Plus, you can use it to compare how much of a markup your broker is charging.

Mortgage Wholesale Rates [The Mortgage Professor]

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(Via Consumerist.)