Costs Table

Bigfoot Crossing Sign

However, recently a friend of mine was driving up the same winding road and evidently there has been some changes to the sign since I’d last saw it. See new sign below:

Pikes Peak New Bigfoot Sign

It was a nice thought of this person to send this updated picture of the sign to me and best wishes to you if you come upon this sign the next time you drive up Pike’s Peak. Perhaps you will see more than just this sign.

Cable proposes that it divide out ESPN to its own premium channel (like they do for other premium channels), then of course, take the other less expensive channels that Cable pays pennies per subscriber for, charge subscribers the same price for those advertisement packed channels, and there you have it… Cable merchandizing. In one quick move, Cable successfully transfers the costs of its most expensive programming onto its customers, while at the same time boosting revenues for its middle tier programming packages which just got a whole lot cheaper to them. Once the transition is complete, cable can continue to raise rates on the remaining channels to boost profits and in the mean time, unload any channel that gets too expensive to be packaged to an a la carte channel.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the FCC actually said NO to something. No to certain mergers, no to raising rates, or even NO to a la carte. Frankly, the best and only possible a la carte should be the Internet. The last thing we need is Cable thinking it can now compete directly with that. FCC needs to let the programming be free – not free in the sense that you don’t pay for it, but free in the sense that it is unrelated with transmission.

One of the biggest issues with Cable in general is it is increasing becoming a complete vertical where transmission companies own the very content (programming) they carry. In this world, such empowered operators can increasingly apply pressure to shut down television stations and force everyone to watch via satellite, cable, or telephone operator (they all offer the same content). These very agreements also place the content that would otherwise be available for providers of Internet programming at odds with cable as it cost them many times more for the content which is owned now by competing cable. So, while cable will be happy to sell its content at a high premium to Internet based delivery companies, they know full well that it costs them a small fraction of that to carry that same content over their own transmission medium – a huge advantage. Also, cable places restrictions on certain programming – like it can only be watched online if that user also has a cable subscription.

In 2005, Comcast tried very hard to buy Disney (the owners of ESPN, among many other hot programming channels). Comcast landing NBCU is just as bad, and the FCC did little but rubber stamp it. In the end, this allows Comcast to sell NBC programming for a profit to other providers (to areas they don’t cover), and yet provide this content to their subscribers at cost – a huge price break for an operator that serves 23 million subscribers. However, since cable doesn’t compete with each other, all this means is the ROI for Comcast on the NBCU purchase is all that more shorten – all the while, the competition no longer can negotiate a competitive rate for the same content.

If content (programming) was actually free of transmission encumbrances or fallout, and any kind of anti competitive measures were outlawed, programming would be able to seek out any and all interested parties without worrying about loosing business. Then, you might see organizations like the BigTenNetwork freely offer the programming over cable, satellite, or other Internet based content delivery networks (CDNs) like Roku, Apple, Amazon or the like. Today you don’t see programming rushing to these CDNs because they are worried about loosing cable subscriptions. This is a big reason why Internet content has been slow to take off and perhaps even why folks like Netflix and Amazon don’t have 50 million subscribers. I’d like to see live TV, live sporting events, live anything – be carried over the Internet and available on whatever box users elect to access Internet content from.

In the years following cable’s lobbying against a la carte, we’ve seen the reverse happen to a la carte (when it comes to Internet), it has got more expensive, more limited – mostly due to unfair competition imposed by inferior cable offerings aimed at preventing these Internet services from taking off. FCC needs to be mindful of allowing the Internet content business to grow and ensure cable networks who own content either sell off those assets – preferably, or require them to open their books to Internet companies wanting to buy this content to ensure their not over paying for the content. Neither of these prospects will sound appealing to cable, but then again, FCC could just say, well, you invented packaged programming, lobbied heavily for it, perhaps you should just stick with that instead of going a la carte.

The best medicine for this dilemma is simply this – read a book, go for a walk, go see a movie at the theater – the key word being “go”. Get out and do something rather than sit at home a watch cable programming. If you do enough “go” -ing you will soon realize there is more to life that what is happening on the latest show who’s sole purpose is to get your attention so that you can be pummeled with ads vying for your hard earned money. Going for a walk doesn’t cost you anything, and arguably it brings you more pleasure.

Interestingly, if cable started losing subscribers it would put pressure on the operators to do what is currently unthinkable – lower prices. Same thing goes for cable programming… If fewer and fewer people watched these programs, supply and demand would rule the day forcing all the economics into a downward spiral.

CB came upon a huge patch of mushrooms near a thicket on the south west corner of forested area and was down on hands and knees picking them when all the sudden several deer came bounding out of a thicket (just to the north of him) and ran right by him (seemed more concerned about leaving thicket than avoiding him and his dog). At that point, he peered into the thicket and thought he saw a dark object of some sort but it wasn’t moving. He took his eyes off it for a moment and then looked back in the same location only what ever was there previously was no longer there (dark object was no longer there).

Thicket of trees in the spring

CB then had an uneasy feeling come over him and so he left the mushroom patch and made his way back to his cabin but making a conscious effort to keep extra distance between himself and the thicket – which took longer to traverse. One other thing observed was that his dog was unusually quiet and didn’t seem himself until after he entered the cabin.

Location: GEO [42.825841, -92.490319]
Time of Year: Spring 2011
Weather: Windy

Although I’m a big fan of the county’s fair, I’m disappointed in their interest to abandon its current location and wanted to express my concerns about what the fair would be giving up in seeking its relocation to the outskirts of town.

Location, Location, Location

Having resided in southwest Waverly (adjoining the fair’s current location), I was delighted to have the fair so close by and still enjoy walking through the barns with my children. It’s the rich history of the fair’s current location as well as its ease of access to the surrounding residents that keeps me coming back. I even didn’t mind that week of the fair where parking in front of my house wasn’t always a given – a small price to pay to have the fair that close. Clearly the fair would miss this “convenience” traffic of the neighborhoods surrounding which should be greatly enhanced due to the city’s current sidewalk projects ongoing – a huge improvement!

Instead of this ultra convenience, citizens would need to drive out to the new location, probably pay to park their car, walk across large dusty gravel parking lots, and probably pay to enter the fair. Having to jump in a car isn’t as simple or kid friendly as walking down the street or biking to the fair.

Current Fair Grounds Have Untapped Potential

Not only is its current location ideal, but it’s also got a lot more potential than is currently being used. The current buildings are dilapidated and need updating. Re-architecting the current space including changing the landscape and location of buildings would yield not only smarter use of the space, but also greatly enhance other events like the bird swap, heritage days, farmer’s market (better location for it), etc. The fair could also look at getting involved in those activities as a way to further expand and improve the overall space. I’d love to see such a re-architecting include an outdoor amphitheater within the fair grounds (perhaps the southwest corner along the backdrop of the golf course) that could be a huge draw for them and a great addition to the city.

Ideally, if all the current space was better used, and modernized, to the point where there wasn’t any more space to grow, the city might propose to relocating some area of the golf course (2 holes on the north east corner) – similar to what it did for the hospital. This area of the golf course would offer the fair some interesting landscape features to build around – perhaps a great location for more permanent structures to house other activities throughout the year. The cost of repurposing these would be far less expensive to the fair than building from scratch on new (un-serviced) ground.

Focus on Quality not Quantity

The last thing I’d like to see is the fair build a bunch of cheap unsightly pole barns for events and animals and worst yet to have all this out in the middle of nowhere where the slightest breeze brings a chill to what would otherwise be a nice family evening out.

The current fairgrounds have a great feel to them with all the open green space and trees within a conveniently sheltered location that is maintained by the city (at no cost to the fair). How nice would it be if this space was re-architected to include nicely paved footpaths, buildings which compliment this open-air natural feeling (like the shelters in Colman Park for example), expanded concessions areas, etc. It would be a space that not only would take the county fair up a notch esthetically, but also become an ever more attractive location for foot traffic when the fair isn’t going on.

Bottom Line

Beyond my personal location preferences, one other real concern I have about the fair relocating has more to do with its solvency after it relocates. Relocating the fair to the proposed location doesn’t come without some pretty big risks and some assumptions that could jeopardize not only the fair but also Waverly’s softball. What if the fair attendance drops, the fair gets rained out, or the economy takes another turn for the worst. One or two bad years would likely prevent the fair from building out as they plan or could potentially bankrupt them. Now all the sudden we’d need to bail them out in addition to further fund their relocation. Without the fair, its unlikely softball could self-fund the new location (softball has plateaued and isn’t expanding) but without softball, the fair would be hard pressed to go it alone.

As a taxpayer, this adds up to more city and county taxes to pay for what has yet to be divulged or promised in return. Such cost/benefit would be hard to justify – I mean we already have a fair and softball diamonds so, how would pouring more money into this change things? Clearly it would take years to get beyond what we already have – all the while taxpayers would need to fund this exercise. It would also be preferable to better understand what risks are truly at stake (e.g. what happens if the fair can’t pay its bills, etc.) prior to any commitment of funds. I tend to dream big, but wouldn’t it be great to see the Bremer County Fair be totally non profit, completely satisfied with working within its location to make it the best it can be, and thankful in terms that what ever it can’t reinvest back into its location to further improve it the fair returns with gratitude back to the city and county.

The current location of the fair not only makes sense, but it’s an unbeatable deal for the Bremer County Fair financially to not only thrive, but also expand. Clearly this is also an unbeatable deal for the city and county taxpayers. The key lies not merely in looking for space to expand, but rather in reinvesting and re-architecting what it already has to make the county fair not “even bigger”, but “simply the best” – as its quality, not quantity, in the end that matter.

Currently CHTR splits its billing services for its 5.5mm subscribers 60/40 between Convergys (CVG) ICOMS (Integrated Communications Operations Management System) solution and CSGS. CHTR is consolidating solely under CSGS for all billing services starting 2010. CHTR is listed as CSGS’s 4th largest customer representing around 10% of its revenue and signing the remaining half of CHTR billing needs is believed should generate as much as a 8-10% increase in CSGS revenue in the coming year.

Chapter 11 for CHTR actually GOOD news for CSGS!

CHTR turning to Chapter 11 has already turned negative on CSGS shares as the market has taken the position that CSGS will stand to loose the 10% of its revenue which CHTR represents. However historically this has not played out. For example, when Adelphia entered a similar situation in the early 2000s its first priority during reorganization was focusing on billing and revenue management – the result was a significant uptick in business for CSGS. During this time Adelphia dropped all its billing related consulting projects redirecting much of the related cash savings to CSGS for off the shelf products. CHTR evidently is proceeding in a similar fashion – canceling all its billing consulting projects and has approached CSGS for comprehensive solutions. However for CHTR to benefit fully from CSGS solutions, it needs to convert all its subscribers to CSGS which it has decided to do. The result will be an uptick in consulting projects with CSGS in 2009 in addition to the previously mentioned bump in subscription revenue in 2010.

CVG’s loss is CSGS gain – times two!

CHTR decision to abandon CVG coincides with a recent CVG decision to abandon its service bureau based business and move to a software model – it is believed that CVG is actively shopping its service bureau division. Meanwhile, CVG should see better than expected revenues from CHTR for the coming year which includes charges for normal services plus de-conversion charges for helping move these accounts to CSGS. Starting in 2010, CVG’s revenues from CHTR will go away completely. CVG is also looking at the potential for a small gain from the sale of its service bureau business. However, CVG and CSGS are similar in size (Market Cap: CVG – $840mm versus CSGS – $511mm), so CVG losing a Tier 1 customer (even lowly CHTR) will hurt. There are also potential opportunities for CSGS to attract CVG’s service bureau customers who don’t want to change hands – it is believe that CSGS is actively selling these operators. We believe Oracle (ORCL) might be the sleeper here having continually bought billing businesses over the years – they will likely make a serious bid for the CVG division.

Loss of DISH as a customer is over stated

Amdocs (DOX) has had people permanently placed at Echostar (DISH) for the last couple years in an effort to secure this business away from CSGS and last years decision by DISH to only extend the service contract with CSGS for one year further lead the market to believe that CSGS would stand to loose DISH as a customer in 2009. However as DOX’s revenue predominantly comes from services (about 30% product and 70% services), it is believed that DISH would have some measure of pause before going with DOX considering its history. Previously, DISH spent more than $60 million in going deep with another predominately service revenue company in Siebel (now part of ORCL) which eventually got shelved as after all that money spent there wasn’t much product to show. It is believed that while DISH is more than happy to leverage DOX expertise placed onsite, it really has no interest to spend time and resources for a major conversion of its billing system. DISH is finding itself in a commodity business as the low cost option with no bundles to offer – so unless it can find a billing system significantly cheaper than CSGS it is unlikely to switch. Worst cast, even if DISH decided at the end of 2009 to not renew its contract with CSGS, CSGS is in so deep with DISH it could take a couple years (or more) for DISH to untangle itself during which time CSGS could double dip with service revenue plus de-conversion charges.

Data center migration

CSGS’s migration to a new data center will cost it as much as $18mm (half of which it will incur in 2009 with the other half in 2010). The move comes after several years with no cost reduction from it existing data center provider – First Data Corporation (FDC). While CSGS will take a small hit this year and next, the savings of migrating will pay off long term. It also sends a message to its new data center provider that CSGS wants it to remain competitive – if not it will pay to move its business elsewhere.

Revenue growth for 2009

The major sources of revenue increase in 2008 will continue to improve in 2009. CSGS is continuing to reap benefits from the acquisition of Prairie Voice in 2007 as it continues to rework its packaging of services and integration. CHTR will also be a significant source of revenue growth in 2009 (especially professional services tied to the conversion) leading up to a 8-10% bump in 2010. The big wildcard for CSGS is whether it can diversify its revenue and become a $700mm or larger company. Clearly its recent acquisitions are opening doors for it in other markets and CSGS is focusing on providing value to industries outside of cable and satellite. Meanwhile look for CSGS to sign smaller deals with WildBlue, BlockBuster (BBI), and advertisers.

CSGS is also a pretty safe play out of the aspect that Cable is a fairly conservative industry right now, so an opportunity for CSGS to grow revenues in a meaningful way under these market conditions should be attractive news for investors. We also know that CSGS is one of the most frugal billing service providers with a history of running very lean (staffing wise) and being risk averse.

The Iowa flood has proven to be a veritable gold mine for local service industry, where even the least effected house is costing around $7-10k to repair (not including loss of personal items which will take years to replace – if at all). On the top of the list of items replaced are all necessities (requiring immediate purchase) including: new circuit breakers, new water heaters, new washer and/or dryer, new furnace/AC, and new ductwork. In addition, 5-10,000 businesses will need circuit breakers (most electrical service panels are at ground level or in the basement). Many cities are also using this event to force homes up to local electrical and building codes. Many other items like shelves, deep freezers, tools, and other personal items lost will create a pending demand for such items for several months to come. Additionally, Iowa utility companies like MidAmerican have been promoting higher efficiency upgrades by doubling their rebates for flood victims. MidAmerican has also taken this opportunity to swap out all gas meters which have been submerged with new American Meter Company AC-250 meters.

Flood damaged appliances and water heaters in Waverly, IA

Here are some initial results, but numbers in Waterloo, Cedar Rapids and Iowa City which are all much bigger cities are just now coming into focus…
Nashua – 50 homes flooded
New Hartford – 35 homes destroyed, 80 flooded (15.5 ft crest – 2 ft above historic level of 13.5 ft)
Vinton – (23 ft crest – 4 ft above historic level)
Waverly – population 9,347 had 600 homes flooded, 36 basements collapsed, 16 houses condemned (19.1 ft crest – 2.5 ft above historic level of 16.8 ft)

Necessary Upgrades:

Market: Each home will need a new water heater that go for between $300-800
That’s: (50k) x $400 = $20 million
Market: Many of the homes will need new washer and dryer that go for between $400-800
That’s: (30k) x $500 = $15 million
Market: Each home will need a new furnace and AC that go for around $3,000
That’s (50k) x $1,500 = $150 million
Market: Many of the homes will need new duct work that go for around $3,600
That’s (30k) x 3,600 = $108 million

Some interesting plays as a result of the flood:

Whirlpool (WHR) – makers of water heaters, washers, dryers, lots of products of interest in the space affected by the floods. WHR should see a spike in sales in Q3 of this year as a result of the flood and the makings of an above average Q4.

AO Smith (AOS) – makers of water heaters – more narrowly focused, but brand is very popular. While AOS has been on a short run, its recent earnings don’t yet reflect the flood impact. We see AOS likely to report incredible 3Q results (which will be impacted by the Iowa flood) as all the distribution centers in and surrounding Iowa have been completely bought out of water heaters and new water heaters are being purchased directly from the manufacturer. Q4 will see some residual restocking of water heaters by distributors, but during Q4 sales should fall off significantly. Also makers of “lime free” water heaters such as those sold by Sears could also be big sellers.

Circuit Breaker Names:

Market: Each home and business has about 20 circuit breakers, which go for between $10-18 each
That’s: (50k+10k) x 20 x $18 = $22 million

Schneider Electric (SU) – Offers Square D brand circuit breakers and electrical panels
Eaton (ETN) – Makers Eaton and Cutler-Hammer circuit breakers and electrical panels

Total market: $207 million this quarter just for IOWA

Other states are having similar water problems, so this could all add up to a banner year for the above companies!

Other potential benefactors could be Home Depot (HD), Lowes (LOW), and Walmart (WMT) as individual losses ranges from high ticket items that will be replaced by insurance to non-paid replacements (things not covered by insurance). Red Cross, FEMA, as well as community churches have been providing recovery money to help people replace some of these personal items which should have been purchased before the end of 2008.

So what is left that is left to buy from the flood of 2008 that hasn’t already been purchased? Mostly storage items, cloths, things you keep in the basement, old Christmas gifts never used, college text books, etc. Some attempted to wash and dry these items to save them, but most just disposed of them. WMT and to a lesser extent Target (TGT) will see a strong beginning to 2009 – at least in the midwest.

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Along the same lines, the following chart describes the bottom of my list in terms of the companies with the fewest job openings with respect to the number of current employees. Some of these probably come as no surprise, while others you might not expect to see there. These companies appear to be acting overly conservative which might be a good thing or potentially slow their recovery.

[TABLE=5]

Though this exercise, one particular company popped out as interesting to me. Not just because it came in near the top or the bottom but because of the type of job openings listed. The jobs listed by this company were not only extremely technical but clearly something is in the makes as you just don’t see companies trying to hire this focused of a technical group that often.

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Having just returned to my hometown after spending the last 15 years living in Kansas City, Boston, Twin Cities, New York, and Philadelphia I’ve seen a lot of things. I was held up by gun point in Kansas City, someone stole a new bike from me in the Twin Cities, my maid robbed my apartment downtown New York, and my wife and I witnessed several shootings around our apartment in Philadelphia’s Old City (in fact we called 911 so many times they probably knew our voices). Interestingly, in all these places you could sense that with so many people around you need to be on your toes or you will get taken advantage of.

Waverly’s slow pace and small town friendliness has the appearance of safety but obviously looks are deceiving. Interestingly, you hear all these stories about Waverly like people who never lock their homes or always leave their keys in their car. Yet I leave a garbage can (of all things) outside and it gets stolen. Not just stolen off the street, but to get to it someone would have to have walked across my back yard to get to it“ a pretty conscious act of stealing.

With Waverly’s early morning garbage pickup, I’m not inclined to go out and buy a new garbage can rather the oldest, rustiest, junky one I can find is probably the safest bet if I need to leave the garbage can out the night before pickup. It is disappointing to think that people would steal such a thing and taint our recent move to town. I wish I could just blame kids, but I struggle to think of any who would have any interest in a garbage can so we are talking about an adult. What is perhaps more worrisome is that if someone is so determined to steal that they would walk across your backyard to get something as insignificant as a garbage can, they are probably trolling around looking for other opportunities to steal. 

While Waverly does have a lot to offer, clearly it’s not quite as safe as one is lead to believe. I certainly don’t find comfort in leaving any doors unlocked“ especially after there have been strangers walking around in my backyard, nor should you. The difference between Waverly and large cities like New York or even Philadelphia is that there just aren’t enough people around to police the place. In fact, very little goes on in the big city without any witnesses. In Waverly, too many people keep their blinds pulled and there aren’t enough people out walking around to aid police so thievery is alive and well.

The problem with modern day computers, is once they are manufactured and an initial OS is placed on them, they must be connected to the Internet before they can be updated. Even in the short duration of this update, an unprotected PC can quickly acquire numerous viruses negating some of the benefit of applying future updates to the PC’s OS. In various tests on the Internet, an unprotected PC can become infected in as few as 12 minutes but no longer than 20 minutes. Interestingly, ~20 minutes is about the amount of time required to complete an initial update of Microsoft Windows XP or Vista upon purchasing it new.

Thereafter, the challenge of keeping the OS free of bots and viruses represents a near futile battle. Most virus software is at best only 60-70% effective. In light of this, how does the average person keep their PC free of viruses and bots. First way is to have extensive protection on email – the principle transport of viruses.

The other way would be for the PC to have two disk drives. One drive for the OS, and the other for the user applications and all their data.

In this way, the image of the principle drive (containing the OS) could be backed up such that if it ever did get infected, the user could easily restore their original factory image without changing their applications, configurations, or data. Similarly, a user’s data could be backed up separately such that this information could be more carefully screened for infectious material.

Using OS disk isolation, would solve a great many things for PCs. Currently all applications and user data are woven together with the OS creating a honey pot that is very attractive to serious hackers. Essentially breaking a single PC’s defenses likely yields a significant portion of other PCs as well. If the OS were isolated from applications and user data (using two disk drives – one for OS and the other for user data and applications) a single OS update from Linux, Microsoft, or Apple would have significantly more impact that it currently does.

The key is the separation of OS from user data and from the applications the user elects to install and use.  Today, all these are co-mingled on a single disk drive making it increasingly complex to identify a virus or bot from an actual component of the OS - not to mention doing something about it (like removing it). In fact, the most damaging code looks harmless until all the pieces fall in place. There is also very little protection about what applications are run at start up or run when certain applications are launched. This would be easier if OS and all its associated applications where separate and distinct from user applications which arguably should be certified by the OS manufacturer before they can run on the OS. Just another way to keep foreign applications from gaining OS cycles.

Having a remote image, could represent a single image for all computers that remains the same and could be updated by the OS developer (Apple, Linux, Microsoft, Sun, etc.). So, rather than providing initial access to the entire Internet, the default for NEW PCs would be to first “phone home” for their current remote disk image and update themselves to the absolute latest disk image (which contains all the latest patches etc.). Until they obtain this latest and greatest image, the PC would represent a closed shop (no active ports) and would be otherwise useless to the outside world. Upon upgrading its image, the PC’s disk image would look like any other image of any other PC out there, the PC would recognize its other hard drive and allow loading of 3rd party applications and user data. However, no other data or applications would be allowed to write to the OS disk. Only the OS manufacturer could update this disk.

While such power given to the OS manufacturer is risky, it pales in comparison to the risk of co-mingling OS, applications, and user data as we all know what results when that happens. With great power comes great risk – so users must give up some control to get back some kind of security and OS stability.

MPEG4 is just now coming into prominence, but already the “licensing” cost of doing business in MPEG4 is beginning to play out. Vendors and operators alike are finding that doing business with MPEG4 requires more than just equipment and know-how, but also technology licensing fees. Long gone are the days companies pioneered their own technologies which allowed operators to simply buy their equipment from Cisco or Motorola and deploy it.

Today, the broadband service model is supported by critical standards that empower the industry to sell the latest volley of advanced services. However with building such equipment or operating a company that sells services using such equipment comes some degree of “subscribing” (so to speak) to standards inherent in the equipment or services.

While the adherence and commitment to standards based technologies have brought about greater cost savings and economies of scale for manufacturers and operators alike, such savings may well come at the expense of increased exposure of such manufacturers and operators to additional licensing fees and suits. Certainly, the the publically announced use of such standards in products and service has made identifying such “use” much easier. As a strong proponent of standards, I’m troubled by the outlook of what such exposure will have on the advancement of not only standards in general but also broadband services that use them. Could this lead us back to an area where proprietary technology once again rules?

It seems reasonable, that beyond basic connectivity and basic language of service integration which absolutely requires standards, all services cannot merely be of identical composition of one another (for competitive reasons). Rather, beyond these basic building blocks, they must largely be proprietary. Question is, for vendors, how proprietary can you get while on one level adhering to standards while customizing your product to meet individual operators desire to be “unique”?

On the other hand, if no proprietary technology exists, can one or more standards define enough “flexibility” for vendors and operators to differentiate themselves to the point where a Verizon looks significantly different than AT&T, than BT, than Comcast, etc.? While clearly, near term this is the case, but long term I’m not so sure. I believe that once a dominant design materializes for offering broadband services which is superior and everyone adopts it, it will be the applications that differentiate services not the network or the content – as all that will be ubiquitous. Meanwhile, as new standards like IPv6 see wide spread adoption few differences will exist among broadband service providers.

I draw an analogy of broadband services infancy the the power grid. In the early days, there was many different ways to do this, but eventually, a dominate design surfaced and it was quickly adopted. Now pretty much everyone uses that technology and the only thing that separates the small players from the large ones is the sheer scale. However from a users perspective the outlet, wires, and basic service look the same where ever you go – only the applications (what you plug in) is all the differentiates.

My wife and I wanted to purchase life insurance for our daughter, start a 529 savings account, and start a policy for my wife. As both my father and brother have made life long careers out of the insurance industry, I first contacted them to gather well respected advice. Both my dad and brother have sold me insurance in the past and if laws didn’t prohibit them from selling it to me again (albeit out of state), I would have just had my brother do the whole thing and be done with it. However, I couldn’t do this so my first option was to seek out the insurance company my brother works for  – New York Life (NYL) .

New York Life’s website is a mess, and contacting an agent is not straight forward. I ended up going through several levels of menus and then leaving an email clearly explaining my needs and including my full contact information. After waiting for 3 months with no answer, I went to the extent to leave a voice mail. However, 1 month later, I called my father to ask who else he would suggest I talk to in light of New York Life’s failure to return either my email or my voice mail. He suggested Northwest Mutual Life (NML) might be a good alternative – it was his experience that they were a good company with a long history in the business.

Things started out great with Northwest Mutual Life , I was able to leave a voice mail for an agent who contacted me within a couple days. They guy who contacted me (Josh) seemed a little green on the phone and when we set up our first meeting he showed up with someone else (Trevor) who seemed to have a better understanding of things. After explaining exactly what I wanted, they proceeded to try to sell me other things. I stayed firm, and asked we proceed along the lines I requested. In the second meeting I asked that they bring all the materials they needed to complete the requested insurance and 529 accounts and I would make sure all parties were present to sign the documents to get things going.

A week later, this meeting took place and we signed all the items, gave checks to the agents to start the policies and initially fund the 529. The agents made clear that the checks for the policies and 529 went to different places and thus needed to be two separate checks. My wife had blood drawn as required by the insurance and in the mean time Trevor called to ask how we wanted funds in the 529 account invested among some limited selection of funds. Some time later, the policies had all come back and the two agents presented the policies to us. We asked about the status of the 529 and they said all that was needed was to set up the automatic funding so we completed some form that allowed money to be drawn from our checking account to fund both the 529 and the policies. This form was completed at this time.

A month later we heard from New York Life via email which asked how they could help us, albeit more than 6 months after we sent the email. I elected not to respond as it was a little late!

A year later, I asked my wife if we had received any statements from Northwest Mutual Life. While we could see that they were drawing money from our checking account, we also noticed that it wasn’t the amount we specified. We also noticed that we had never received final paperwork from Northwest Mutual Life on the 529 for tax purposes. I called the phone number I had for our agent (Josh) and left a message. I ended up leaving successive messages for the agent over a few weeks but never hear from him – mean while Northwest Mutual Life continued to draw from our checking account. After over a month of not hearing back, I asked my father how to handle the matter. He had seen that some life insurance agents actually pocket initial checks and mislead customers so he encouraged me to contact the home office of Northwest Mutual Life immediately to ask for help. I did just that.

The home office introduced me to the manager of the local branch office as well as transferred me to someone in Wisconsin to help resolve the 529 which seemed to be another matter.

Turns out Trevor had now left the company, and while Josh was still with the company he was no longer taking calls and claimed to have no recollection of our talking to him or ever meeting us – which was strange as it was our impression that he was our “agent”. Northwest Mutual Life had no record of us ever requesting a 529 through these agents and because we paid $250 with a money order rather than a personal check we couldn’t show them a cancelled check for the down payment. Essentially this was Northwest Mutual Life’s way of saying, sorry but this is now your problem and we will not help you further.

Northwest Mutual Life local branch office asked if there was anything else they could help us with – to which I suggested that a year end statement would be a good start. They said it was company policy to not send any statements to policy holders unless it was absolutely necessary. The three envelopes we received from Northwest Mutual Life during the last three years of the policy were all notices that our policies were being assigned to yet another new agent – we have had 3 agents in the past 3 years and have only received one account statement for the policy – but for that we had to beg.

The only policy I have with Cuna Mutual which Josh and Trevor had a chuckle about when I presented it, sends out quarterly statements like clockwork.

My advice to those seeking life insurance is to FIRST reach out to people you know. I would definitely NOT recommend Northwest Mutual Life. They call themselves the “quiet” company (perhaps because once you sign up with them you never hear from them again) and if you inquire about your purchase its hard to find anyone around who will admit they either know you or remembers helping you in the past. In my book, these guys still owe me $250 – yea Josh and Trevor, we are still waiting for our check back (please include interest from 2005).

Some of the best insurance I’ve ever had is my current policy handed by Cuna Mutual and home, car, and term life insurance from a super State Farm agent in Saint Paul Minnesota (Chris Budzius). It is hard for me to believe that in a “pure” service industry like insurance that a company could get by with really poor customer service. While I believe there probably are super sales people who work for Northwest Mutual Life who have worked there for many years and never miss a beat in taking care of their customers. The problem is, with no quality control in hiring new agents, and no follow through at the home office you end up with overall very poor customer service throughout the company. Quality customer service cannot just be an individual thing that bubbles up to the top – rather it’s a corporate wide vision that is clearly evident in everything a company does.

I’m surprised Northwest Mutual Life didn’t just make things right with us in spite of their agent and internal communications troubles. However, they pushed that responsibility onto me to find the source of the missed communication and fraud rather than taking any responsibility or initiative to find out what happened, correct their internal policies or educate their staff, and make good with the customer. I still may file a claim to the consumer protection agency on this matter.

File a complaint to:

Federal Trade Commission (Bureau of Consumer Protection)

Note, individual states also have their own consumer protection agencies which could also be of use to you in similar matters.

Living in the big city certainly kicks ones “life speed” up a notch to the point where you seemingly are “very busy” but the question is “Busy doing what?” This is about what in the city consumes so much time to cause everyone to be so “busy.” The big city with all its attractions, theater, glitter, and meeting places is a huge time suck.

Nothing happens quick in the city. In New York City for example, going from uptown to downtown can take anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes. Anywhere else, in 15-30 minutes you can be in a different town or go from the city to the country. In NYC, it takes you from one area with skyscrapers to another less than a mile away. So, its a “big deal” if you can save 5 minutes taking a taxi as opposed to taking the bus or train and saving $15. However, in most cases public transportation is faster, only less glamorous – so arriving in a taxi (from a class or style perspective) is better than just walking up. In fact if you even look as though you had to hurry to arrive on time you receive “style” points for still making it on time.

Everything in the city is delivered. Dry cleaning is delivered, food of any type is delivered, even MacDonald’s delivers in the city. Because people want to save time, they have their groceries delivered. The same people can save time not cleaning up the kitchen if they have their food delivered.

All this time it takes to get places has a big impact on when things happen. Few people in the city for example eat at 6:00 pm. In fact, if you want dinner reservations anywhere just ask for 6 pm and you you can get in (many places don’t even open until 6) you will have your pick of seating. The normal eating time in the city is after 7 pm and among young people it can be much later than that – 8 or 9 pm is very typical. Why so late? Because people are, well, “Busy.” They have to meet up for drinks after work, go home and find something to wear, walk their pet, buy groceries, or run some other errand. By the time all this gets done, its easily after 7 pm which is just enough time to rush somewhere to go eat.

When people talk of living in the big city they are quick to point out all the obvious benefits: sites, theater, variety. Interestingly, if you ask many of these people when is the last play or museum they attended you would get the once in a blue moon response. I believe the tourists make up a great portion of the visitors to these attractions as the local residents either can’t afford it or can’t be bothered with going because it chews up too much time.

Going out to meet friends is big and to most single people in the city, that activity makes up a large portion of their non-working hours. Going out with friends can be as simple as meeting some place different, going for a walk in some cool place, meeting in a bar you have heard good things about, or just talking on the phone or Internet when there is nothing interesting on.

In the end, “busy” becomes more of a convenient excuse for the city’s ability to speed up time such that the precious hours each person has free each night after work magically evaporates in the midst of doing the simplest of things. Busy is the socially accepted excuse for people in the city to avoid meeting people they don’t like but are uncomfortable telling them as well ending an unwanted call or terminating an unwanted encounter.

The safe bet is that many IPTV service providers of today will find this service not only very expensive to initially deploy, but also increasingly expensive to maintain. My belief is that many initial IPTV services will find margins so tight that they will fail to claim enough market share to successfully compete and will end up shutting down within the next 18 months – thus flooding the market with fairly new and yet still usable equipment.

Paying your competition?

Unlike a pure data service or even a voice service (both of which telephone and municipalities know intimately and have good margins to work with), video service is a completely different animal. Offering video services means repackaging content (aggregation) so it means if you are mom and pop telephone company offering a new IPTV service a large portion of all your proceeds will go to the content owners leaving you with little extra to continue building out and improving your product to make it more competitive or unique within the marketplace. Due to consolidation within the cable industry, many new IPTV providers will actually be paying cable operators who own content they want to run on their network.

Second round players will have the edge

As these fire sales happen at IPTV early adopter service providers, the groups that buy up all this equipment on the cheap will be the ones to watch. Larger operators (who may also have the very same gear) would be wise to slow their orders as this time approaches. An operator who can get outfitted with IPTV headend, buy mass market content from HITS, NCTC, or some other larger content aggregator service provider could make a reasonable profit because of their much lower up front cost required to launch the service. Only they have to pinch pennies and be willing to continue to invest a bulk of their proceeds back into making the service better to stand a chance.

The backlash of this lull will be hardest on equipment providers like IPTV STB manufacturers (which there are just way to many of right now) as well as those who manufacturer IPTV headend equipment who will have to endure 6-12 months of dwindling sales before this fire sale inventory clears out and makes way for new sales. Only, the new sales will come from those providers who stayed the course with IPTV – so early deals with smaller service providers are not likely to represent sustained growth. One could argue they represent misleading growth indicators that may backfire when these services fail.

My point here, if there is one, is that offering video services are not for everyone and no matter how simple vendors make it, the business just cannot sustain that many service providers. The same goes for offering voice services or any other service.

The real winners of IPTV roll-out is unquestionably the content providers. Instead of a handful of companies buying HBO, now you just doubled or even tripled demand for the same content. Once more, since these NEW service providers got to have it (instead of the other way around), there is less room for negotiation and more room for margin – and lots of it!

The virtual PC is less a pipe dream and more reality today. Thanks in part to advanced web programming like AJAX and ultra flexible style-sheets (CSS), a web page can come to life with nearly any feature of a full fledged application running on a fixed computer terminal. In spite of the naysayers, Application Service Providers (ASP) have been providing virtual applications to businesses since the late 1990s and the range of applications is rapidly expanding. Online services like SalesForce.com is a virtual sales application allowing companies to manage a large sales force and all its current and prospective customers and remote sales employees virtually – previously PC installed applications like ACT were how sales people kept track of sales leads and customer contacts but they lacked the integration with company operations and networking to be truly functional.

While enterprise is increasingly abandoning physically installed applications on PCs in favor of virtual applications hosted on the Internet, the question becomes – at what point does the need for installing applications on a PC become outdated? One could easily argue that the PC is more portable, and because it is portable it doesn’t lend itself to a virtually hosted application service. So, having traditional applications installed on ones PC allows it to roam with all the capabilities it had when it was online, Right? Unfortunately, the answer to that is no!

The Internet has become so ubiquitous, that many applications installed on your PC can’t help themselves from not wanting to extend their reach out into the Internet to provide even more functionality. In my opinion, the claim about the virtual applications not being completely portable and therefore not usable 100% of the time is bogus. Very few people take there PC’s on walkabouts, and if they do, chances are they will want Internet access where they are going.

One could equate the same claim about the limitations of the electric car, its only limitation was that it only had a range of 100 miles (which was later doubled with new battery technology). However the limitation was said to limit people enough that they wouldn’t buy it. Interestingly, when a study was done on commuting, it was found that the average amount that US citizens commute with a car was only about 40 miles a day – less than one quarter of the eventual range of the electric car using the latest battery technology.

So the point is, if you just look at the exceptions to the rule. The people who commute 250 miles a day. The electric car will never work for them. Why? Because they are in need of a reality check – why would anyone commute that far just to work someplace would be my question.

Similarly, when you think of applications hosted remotely, it makes a lot of sense and saves a lot of real dollars to do this – again, because people can mostly count on the Internet being there (its like you are never that far away from a gas station – similarly, you are never that far away from the Internet).

My question, has less to do with whether or not virtual PCs will work… Clearly they do, and they work very nicely. My question is where will they store the data. Will virtual applications be consolidate user data under one roof or will this data be spread among best of breed application providers – and if the latter, how will users take control of their information. How will this data be protected, and if a person stops using a service (for whatever reason) what happens to their data – is it warehoused or is it dumped. Who has the rights if any to this data and who holds the keys?

Yet with all these amazing accomplishments, there are comparatively few examples where the US Government has made a bold statement that clearly spells out its position about something very sensitive without forcing the nation, its people, or its companies to fall in line. The call for renewable energy need NOT be something this great nation establish by creating a bill and passing it through congress to make everyone comply.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if rather than requiring anything from anyone, that the US Government decided not to politic this issue, not call on its people, and certainly not to establish a committee to look into this issue but simply to just move ahead and quietly do it. The statement must be bold. Not just install a few solar cells on the white house (sorry Jimmy Carter), but something much bigger than that. Something so big that as it its people began to piece together the size and scope of the action that it would make a very strong policy statement that would show the world its commitment to what it not only believes in but something that would make its people proud to live in this country.

What could this country do to that effect regarding this subject. There are so many things it could do, but just to name a few:

• Place an internal moratorium on incandescent light bulbs, such that every new bulb replaced in every government building MUST be a compact fluorescent.
• Install solar panels on every government building with the objective to cut the daily peak power consumption by 1/2.
• Promote ways to reduce its employees use of non-renewable forms of energy by providing financial incentives for employees who take public transportation, car pool, or purchase and or operate a hybrid vehicle.

Being bold should NOT mean the president gets up in front of a group from the press and announces these measures. Rather being bold requires the “results” to do the speaking for themselves. Sure one day the results could come back to those who were instrumental in putting the plan into action, but it is this form of selfless service that make this country great. Every good deed shouldn’t require a press conference, nor should it require an act of God to make it happen. We have responsible individuals in office who collectively represent over 200 million people. When you think of it that way, everyone of them has the ability to champion such a bold move.

At some point, everyone in their life does certain things because its right. These people don’t do these things because they are expecting congratulations or a ticker tape parade… Rather, they do these things out of their own need to feel like they, themselves, have done something good and by doing it and feeling the satisfaction of doing it is their only reward. Furthermore, if this reward were all they ever attain that this would still make them entirely happy, satisfied, content.

This nation could still lead the world in their use of renewable energy, perhaps the transformation is already taking place and we just don’t see it yet. One can only believe that as amazing as the US Government has proven it can be that even as this is written bold changes are taking place.

One thing is for certain, if such bold changes were in the works, it would be followed by a landslide of those wanting to be like them – all of which would come without diplomacy but rather good old “Lead by example!”

For the same money as flying and driving to Iowa we could just as easily vacationed in the Keys or St. Lucia which would have also been nice. Perhaps that would also be more in line with what people in the big city view as a “real vacation”. Only one doesn’t travel to Iowa in lieu of traveling to the Keys or St. Lucia as they can’t compare. Sun, ocean, and fun just doesn’t compare with dusty roads, an occasional smell of some animal’s excrement, and generally fresh but otherwise not so fancy food.

However with that said, there are some things you can get around my home town that you just cannot get anywhere else. Besides the many friendly faces of nearly 100 aunts, uncles, first and second cozens which primairly are the reason to visit frequently, Iowa does have some pretty amazing eats… You just have to know where to find them. For example you can buy the absolute best bratwursts at “Orly’s Locker”:

Orly’s Meat Market & Locker
105 N. Main Street
Clarksville, IA 50619-2017
(319) 278-4514

My Take:Their standard brat (not the spicy one) is a local favorite and if you are anything of a connoisseur good luck finding one as good as theirs! Our daughter who loves brats but rarely speaks wolfed down two of them while constantly saying “Me-Yum-Me” (meaning give me more) after finishing each ration. If you bribe Orly’s you might be able to get them to pack a batch in dry ice and overnight an order to you. But beware, as if you are able to get them to do this you might just be hooked and have to order loads more!

There is also something to be said about walking through the corn field, picking out the best ears of corn you can find, walking back to the house and husking it out in the grass, then cooking it right up. Fresh sweet corn (just picked) is absolutely tough to beat and if there is one thing that the state of Iowa does not have any lack of it is totally awesome sweet corn. Nearly every farmer grows a few rows of it right up near their house. In fact, if you see a small patch of corn near a house with an electric fence just inches above the ground that is stretched around the patch – the farmer is probably a serious sweet corn fanatic. These same farmers generally put up (freeze) 50 or more quarts of corn each year. So while you buy lame stuff from the store the rest of the year, farmers get to continue eating the best in the world when ever they want.

In the country asparagus grows wild along the road and if you love asparagus, you can find it to your hearts content. Just drive along the road in the spring and look for the familiar deep green bush growing up above the weeds in the ditch and you will find arm loads of it. Our favorite is creamed asparagus on toast. Especially when you have fresh white bread from the local bakery. One can easily make a meal out of it!

In the spring, mushrooms, the morel type, grow wild in the woods – usually around dead elm trees. All you need is a good walking stick to help you push aside the ground cover to check for these beauties. It tends to be feast or famine with mushroom hunting as you can look and look and get skunked, and then you can happen upon a monster patch where you pick and pick and pick (buckets full) which makes all your hunting worth while. Bring them all back, clean them with fresh water, roll them in flour, and cook them in butter. They make a great addition to any breakfast, lunch, or dinner!

Another favorite is a pork fritter at “Pete & Shorty’s”:

Pete & Shorty’s
113 N Main Street
Clarksville, IA 50619
(319) 278-4538

My Take:You won’t have to take your hat off when you go in and you need not expect anything  glamorous, but the pork fritter is as good as there is and unless there is a riot or Clarksville Days going on, you won’t have to wait for a table!

When you are not grazing on all this food, take a float down one of Iowa’s many rivers. Canoing in Iowa is very popular as most of the rivers are easily accessible by car, and if you can get someone to help you shuffle vehicles, you can have a car waiting where you plan to take out. Along the rivers you will get to see wildlife, forget about the rat race and the sounds of the city, and take time to hear breeze blow through the trees and the water curl around your paddle. 

While this is just a sample of what you can do and eat, there is one other average joe place you need to know about when you go to Iowa. That is my absolute favorite pizza place called none other than “The Other Place”:

The Other Place
821 W Bremer Ave.
Waverly, IA 50677
(319) 352-4742

My Take:Simply Great Pizza! Having lived in New York City and had the best pizza that city has to offer (still the best thin crust pizza I’ve ever had) and also having tasted Chicago’s finest downtown at Uno (finest deep dish, period!), for a small town in Iowa to have pizza this good is uncommon! But you just have to try it out for yourself. Order the combination, you will not be disappointed – Oh, and a beer too! The “OP” as it is called locally is a great place to have a beer or a meal but just don’t forget to at least try the pizza – its very special.

As one travels in Iowa you begin to feel the wide open space. As far as the eye can see there is open farmland with a sprinkling of farmhouses and machine sheds. While much of Iowa is not so flat, but rather gently rolling hills, if anything it just allows one to see that much farther. We city dwellers find that in visiting Iowa we need to always do some adjusting as our eyes have grown too used to focusing only 3 or 4 blocks. In Iowa one can see the horizon in all directions. At night, its like the sky opens up and steps closer so you look up at the stars and see this huge sky with uncommonly bright stars while you are enveloped by a seemingly white noise of crickets, frogs, owls, etc.

In terms of doing things in Iowa, one could still say it amounts to “nothing”. Least nothing that a person who has lived their whole life in the city could comprehend or ever fully appreciate. My belief is that if one can get a little creative, there are an unlimited number of things to do in Iowa or the country. Best of all, you won’t have someone tailgating and impatiently honking their horn so they can race up to the next stop light that was and still is “red”. In Iowa, everyone just takes their time so the pace is a little slower, they talk a little slower, and frankly things happen a little slower… However in spite of all that, one must say that the people are a little nicer!

Miss driving down the road and waving to all the farmers… Who unless they didn’t see you, always wave back!

While a majority of the people today would be more than satisfied with having the super highway that close to their doorstep, the speed bump that takes place at termination will become an increasing issue in the near future – especially as these single HDTV homes become multiple HDTV homes and other devices within the home begin reserving bandwidth.

The concept of the Passive Optical Network Gateway (PONG) is just an idea at this point to provide a solution to simplify (and dumbify) the installation of standard Optical Network Termination (ONT) while removing the potential for a traffic jam. My belief is that current forms of ONT are just too complex. First of all, ONTs must be powered which causes countless problems in running wires directly into one’s fuse-box during installation (or worst – having to plug something in). Next it must remain powered – meaning it requires some kind of battery backup rated for some number of hours of operation. Only the backup time in many cases only applies to life line phone service rather than data or video service.

A PONG, would also greatly impact the aesthetics of optical termination. Today’s ONTs are very large bulky boxes. In fact their physical size calls attention to themselves as not only is this house “special”, but also here is the box singly responsible for all this home’s telecommunications. My belief is that ones home telecommunications system should be as inconspicuous as possible – invisible would be ideal! Why? Because you don’t want people messing with it and if such a nerve center is calling attention to itself than that invites problems of the kind that nobody ever wants (tampering, theft, cutting). Ideally, all telecommunications should be buried and enter ones home in the same way water and sewer does – which prevents anyone outside the home from accessing it. Today’s outside the home termination boxes are just too risky and place too much faith in the good intentions of people that no one other than authorize service personnel will access it. The reason for this is that they are made with the preconceived notion that parts inside them will eventually fail so service people need access to them – that is why they are placed where they are and why everything within them is modular plug-n-play (for easy swapping out of failed modules). My belief is that ONT should be made so simple as to limit the chance of failure as well as keep it virtually invisible to everyone but the home owner.

The challenge of passive termination using PONG includes power for the return laser, connectivity, and justifying the need for a gateway between the home and the fiber. As PONG is just an idea, my intention here is not to have all the answers but will attempt to provide some details here.

Because PONG is small and compact, the power needs of it should be naturally small too. Today’s ONTs require 12VDC and draw 15 WATTS of power. A PONG should operate on on 9 volts and incorporate Rapid PHY Selection (RPS) such that its normal operating mode is “low power” and it only switches to high power when devices within the home have something to communicate on the fiber. The combination of these along with using low power silicon should allow a 9 volt battery to power the PONG for a year if the house is completely with out power and has nothing to send – and perhaps something like one month of ongoing telecommunications.

Connectivity wise, the PONG would act as a telecommunications bridge from fiber outside the house to the highest available capacity wire within the home – coaxial cable. This form of termination would allow a small amount of coax within the home to act as a backbone for high speed transport which can connect high bandwidth consuming devices such as the Television (TV), media center, residential gateway, etc. while maintaining backwards support (non-interference) for any signals carried on the coax from an over-the-air TV antenna. The PONG would also support popular home networking protocols like Multimedia over Cable Alliance (MoCA) and others (e.g. HPNA) as needed. The coax backbone would operate as an intermediate high capacity network that links devices to the fiber. Since coax is impractical to connect to a majority of consumer devices and the fact that it doesn’t reach everywhere within a given home, residential gateways and other devices like that would provide ultra secure offshoots from the coax to provide ubiquitous connectivity to consumer electronics (CE) devices that do not feature coax hookups or that require a secure network to operate. In this way, CE devices in the home can use wireless (802.11x), zigbee, power-line, or twisted pair to connect to one another or the Internet without worrying about issues of security or whether they sport the right type of connector.

The PONG’s gateway function, while critical to isolating MoCA and other traffic in the home from the fiber need not be a full featured firewall. Instead it should act just slightly smarter than a network bridge. However the importance of an intermediate network within the home that lies between the ultra secure home network and the dirty fiber network cannot be emphasized enough! Intermediate networks provide opportunities for homes to add other security processing equipment such as session boarder control (SBC) functionality to further isolate the home and protect the identity of its users from outsiders. It also provides the means for high bandwidth data to flow between devices with as few encumbrances as possible – so the media center can talk to the TV without adding stacks of security overhead to each transmission.

Fiber and today’s residential gateways would still have a place in such a network as they would facilitate the security on the wireless network or any other physical medium attached through them as well as protected assets accessed from the coax network through the gateway. However, on the coax backbone within the home or business the transceiver would act as the front line security for such a system (albeit with much less security). The important distinction would be that the amount of coax within the home would be minimum – merely connecting all the televisions as well as the gateway and potentially the media center. Beyond that, it seems reasonable that other technologies could easily facilitate connectivity to a home or business’s other networked devices.

The following itemizes those steps taken by search engines that lead to incorrectly listing content thus preventing me from finding my coveted needle in a haystack. Obviously, this list can also double as a list of things people can do to improve their content ranking no matter how good, mediocre, unattractive, or otherwise irrelevant their content is ahead of more relevant content.

“Connections”:

One of the more “gray” areas of search engine result rankings is that of how connected any given website or domain is with a particular search engine. Examples of connections include: advertising, content sharing, use of site search or payment gateway services, or other higher level partnerships. The extent of these connections can make no difference in a page’s position within certain search results or make all the difference in the world (for example all a given page to rank within the top 5 items listed in the search results). A lot of that has to do with the extent of the relationship. Search engines can typically get away with one or two anomalies within the first page and potentially have other “seeded” results occur in subsequent pages but in less sporadic fashion for (ah-hem) less money.

Advertising:

An indirect benefit of advertising is that it increases the global awareness of your website as well as the particular web page that is accessed via the advertising. While one need not pay to have people visit your web site, these paid links actually place your website in favorable standing with search engines. Since advertising can impact a whole domain, any other domains that are stacked on top of the first domain get the benefit of increased traffic.

Reputation:

Reputation is a pretty subjective factor in search results, but it represents the only realistic way that a webpage with only a sentence description of the content gets listed before a much more descriptive page with correct titles and external relevant reference links. Many times the most relevant pages on a given subject are not found within the first page worth of search results. Only the reason for this has nothing to do with the content of these lower ranked pages and everything to do with their less than well known domain.

Location:

Location of keywords is used extensively in ranking pages listed in search engine results. The following is a list of attractive positions in order of most attractive position to least attractive position: domain, add-on domain, URL, beyond “?” within URL (x.x.com/page?keyword=another key word), title of page, between the main header tag or largest font sized tag (<h1></h1>), multiple times within the body, within the body, within link resources within the body (especially those links with keywords in them that link to other web sites), and within ALT sections. The results of this objective analysis of a page often get trumped by other criteria.

Robots.txt

A small file called robots.txt is a key file sought after by search engines. This file which should be located in the root or main directory of your website provides guidance to search engines telling them which areas of your site NOT to index as well as which search engines (if any) should NOT index your site. If this file is missing, search engines will still scan your website but you will see lots of errors from search engines attempting to obtain this file that is not there. The significance of this file is that it can promote the search engine to engage in an activity called “deep crawl” which allows more of your web site to be indexed thus providing your site with more leverage in the reputation area. The same can be said of “favicon.ico” however this small image file is not required of search engines but is required by most of the popular browsers.

Penalty Box:

Building the perfect website and writing something that is pertinent and useful is more difficult that one is lead to believe. When websites or specific web pages break the rules or bend them slightly in order to trick search engines into obtaining a higher listing, it places search engines into a gray area where they must decide where (if at all) to place such pages in the listing. Some search engines penalize websites or web pages that use such tricks (e.g. repeating words) but this is a moving target and the most innovative websites are often one or two steps ahead of search engine software development.

Off-The-Page Factors:

Additional data is factored into where a page shows up in the results of a search that back-door most attempts by webmasters to continually tweak pages in order to achieve the highest possible positioning. One of the most common is called “link analysis” which studies how all pages link to one another in order to provide a more favorable listing position or less favorable position if it is determined that the content contains fictional links which attempt to boost a particular page or site’s ranking.

Why can’t search engines do a better job? The reason is the same as why email programs can’t do a better job with SPAM, there are just too many creative people out there with too much time on their hands thinking and building ways to reverse engineer inferior sites that trick search engines to prioritize their content over more relevant content. The other part of this is that there is clearly a financial reward for attaining high ranking for your web pages in terms of products sold, advertising, etc.

Oddly enough, it is the subjective data (relying on content produced by third parties) that provide the greatest challenge for search engines. While this is the very content that users visiting their search engines are seeking to find, it is also this content that is so laced with malformed and corrupt data that it represents an ongoing challenge to not expose and differentiate unrelated information in the search results. So the search engine’s task becomes one of walking the line between continuing to find ways to make money while providing search results that are either “good enough” or just less than what they can get away with in terms of manipulating the results. If you look at Yahoo, much of their search results real-estate gets eaten up by “sponsored” content. So rather than manipulating the results, they just give you less of it and more sponsored content. In the case of Google, there are fewer sponsored links but what they give up in sponsored links they get back in merely reordering the search results to best satisfy their paying clients.

Claw-Back the Untainted Search Engine

At some point, the results of search engines like Yahoo and Google become so cluttered with ads and irrelevant content from resulting business deals that their underlying utility and purpose comes into question. Just give me great search results and do it better than anyone else. The original Google was “just” a great search engine… But in growing up so fast (perhaps too fast for its own good), it would appear that “bigger” is forcing it to be more of a Yahoo to the point where other than the home page of the where searches are initiated, it would appear they are attempting to do the exact same thing.

In the technology talent business there are those who want jobs, those offering jobs, those assisting either of these parties, and those wanting to advertise to these parties. Individuals submit their resumes to multiple job sites, apply directly with individual employers, and reach out to executive search firms. Employers list their job openings with multiple listing services, engage with executive search firms, and also post their jobs on their own websites. Advertising is placed where ever there are consistent eyeballs related to jobs, job hunting, professional training, career counseling, and higher education.

What do they all have in common? They all have databases of talent (resumes) and also databases of jobs. Monster claims to have over 25 million resumes in their database. Executive search firms have anywhere from 40-100 thousand (or more) clients in their database. All together we are talking about information and resumes on over 50 million people - which represents a very small percentage of the overall population actively looking for jobs. Meaning we have only just begun to tap into this market. 

However, a major problem is brewing in this business. The problem is related to matching jobs with available talent or if there isn’t such a match, finding the right match. Finding matches can be accomplished by employers actively searching resumes, posting jobs for people to find and apply to these jobs, or automated services that attempt to relate qualified candidates with job openings and then notify either party. The common limitation of all these approaches is that they suffer from inadequate data and or follow through. Finding a suitable candidate for a job isn’t so simple and goes well beyond matching words found in resumes and job descriptions or even filtering by location which is the extent of many job sites. For example, a job posting seeking a software developer for company specializing in routers may overlook a candidates having development experience with Interface Message Processors (IMP)s even though the modern day router is a descendant of the IMP. It is this history of all things which make the task of matching job functions with qualified candidates unsustainable.

To solve such problems, you really need to understand the history of the skills you are seeking as well as the hierarchy of the organization the position is to become a member of. So finding hierarchical relationships among technologies within a given sector can provide clues in relating similarly skilled individuals even if the words they used to describe their job qualifications don’t match. Similarly, the hierarchy of job titles or positions within the company provided clues in relating job responsibilities with the areas of management or technical specialization.

This method would seem to go against more astute tools like latent semantic analysis (LSA) and other thesauri or natural language driven techniques to match similarities in different bodies of text. However, LSA is best applied to text that is bound by its roots within a given language (e.g. English) rather than that which can only be related through establishing each technology’s own unique historical evolution. The fact that each technology evolves independently creates problems for job sites in that this fact can limit the “technology window of applicability” for which their resumes within them will apply to currently listing jobs. So, essentially after some period of time technology (and the language used to describe it) will evolve rendering all the resumes within that window unusable or unmatchable to the language used by current job postings.

Its like the year 2000 bug inherent in all web sites containing static information. Eventually, like anything else it will become outdated. Only in this case, all resumes using a common word of the day will become a casualty of their use of an over hyped word that lost its momentum. Building a technology hierarchy can prevent these stale resumes from falling off into oblivion and its only a matter of time before real businesses begin offering this data (relationships) as plug-in brains for your search engines to find related words some number of deviations from their desired word.

If these relationships are built with any level of attention to detail we could see an authoritative source allowing us to determine not only the evolutionary hierarchy of a term but also who is responsible for “coining” the phrase or inventing the new terminology, when such terminology was introduced (what year and where), what discipline did it come from (is it software related, hardware related, etc.), what industry is it synonymous with (insurance, medical, educational, telecom, cable, etc.), and what it eventually mutated into (if anything). Search specific uses could also be implemented for example when searching for related words perhaps you only want to go back some number of levels (deviations) or years. In this way, the word list returned would be all relevant words that could be used to describe your desired skill within the time-frame you believe is still relevant to what your business deems usable. Since each business works at different levels in the technology evolution, it stands to reason that a company on the cutting edge would have a more narrow focus than some company who provides service and support for older technology. However both companies would find this “term evolution service” useful as it puts them in touch with real candidates with relevant skills that would not have otherwise surfaced as potential candidates.

Knowing what industry or discipline could also filter what extent of the term’s evolution is traversed. Ideally, where you submit your requests for information from (what company or what country) would provide some guidance here, however these could also be supplied in the request to help limit the scope of responses.