War on Junk Mail

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2012/0507/technology-postal-service-software-war-on-junkmail.html

Nice Forbes article on the future of Junk Mail.  Who knew there were apps that you could use to photograph the junk mail that comes out of your mail box and those apps would e-mail it to MailStop, and MailStop would take it from there -- with just the photo.  And notify the advertiser to “STOP sending you their junk advertising”.

Competitor companies will do the same. Catalog Choice,  and PaperKarma,

Did you know that junk mail now accounts for 51% of the USPS total revenue?  Without it, can the USPS survive ?  Standard First Class mail falls 7% a year now due to e-mail and fax.  By 2020, our Standard First Class mail is projected to make up only 35% of postal revenue.

The article above, in Forbes, tells more, read it if you want to know more.  Will the mail box go the way of the telephone booth?  Stay tuned.  Add your thoughts to this Blog. 

Green Movement Takes A Big Step Here in SC

Today’s newspaper, The State, announced the first new Boeing 787 Dreamliner, to come off our SC assembly line in Charleston.  It is a great achievement for us, and maybe the most significant since the civil war started – also in Charleston. Reconstruction has been slow, about 160 years?

But, we have finally entered (or tiptoed into) the industrial age here in Carolina.  A 750,000 sq. foot assembly plant with 6,000 workers, building a product that will go all over the world. That is a significant turn-around from purely tourism economy.  Boeing has 854 orders for the plane, the fastest selling plane in their history. 

Plane sells for $193 million.  We got it up and running here in 13 months.  80% of the workers and materials used in building the plant came from SC. 

A good side-story here is how far the Green Movement has come in the past few years.  The roof of this plant has the largest solar installation in the South.  It will generate 20% of the energy for the plant.  The solar array is the size of 11 football fields.

But, get this: THE PLANT SENDS NO WASTE to landfills.  They even recycle food scraps from the dining facility.  This is remarkable for such a big-scale product and plant. And tells us all that Green is here to stay, it is good for business.

86 % Of Digial Photos Never Leave The Memory Card

86 %  of all digital photos we take never leave the memory card.  Why?

We are all time-challenged, and the task of doing something useful with the photos can be a little daunting (and we usually get around to it when we are very tired and don’t have the energy for it).

I have found that my best long-term satisfaction is creating a photo-book, where the printer uses their ink, not mine.  One of my good friends found some of these books on special for an incredible price. I was able to create two photo books of my family trip last summer – each containing about 100, full page sized photos, for maybe $65 total.  This would be about 1/3 rd. the normal price. 

Otherwise, I put most of my photos up on Picasa website, where I pay a little extra for larger storage, and as an insurance policy that they won’t go out of business (as Sony did) and lose my photos in the cloud.  These are little slide shows, and I can easily e-mail them to friends.  I can also e-mail single photos to friends using that system. 

Other recommended websites for storage and sharing:  Shutterfly, www.shutterfly.com, SugarSync  www.sugarsync.com,  Flickr  www.flicker.com.  While these are good, so far my tests with them haven’t pleased me as much as Picasa.  Picasa will also seamlessly move my photos to my Walgreen’s account for in-store printing via on-line ordering. I have quit posting up my photos on Walgreens site, as it had some working issues and I got frustrated with their system.  But they still do decent (cheap) printing. Try www.BHG.com/digital for some more ideas. 

Non-digital photos ?  BH says “send that box of old nondigital photos to a service such as www.ScanDigital.com, or www.ScanCafe.com.  For about 25 to 50 cents a photo, you’ll receive a disk of images.  These companies use high grade, professional copy techniques to get better results than “home copying” systems found in retail stores. 

Please post a comment on your favorite photos sharing site, or other ways to make digital photos more useful.  

Inflation Number Crunching (Current Newsweek)

Inflation, that magic word,  refers to a breadbasket of things, rather than to any specific purchase we might want to make.

I once read that, to keep things in perspective, one has to account for only the inflation from the year you graduated college to present.  For example, there has been 700% inflation since I finished college, therefore, to see if a pair of shoes is reasonable, or not, I only have to divide the price by 7 – if it then looks like a decent price, then, well, it is a decent price for me.  $100 tennis shoes, divided by 7, and that tells me it compares to a pair of $14.28 tennis shoes in 1965.  That still looks a bit pricey to me.  TV’s however, have come down, dividing a current TV set by 7 would give me $100 for a 42 inch screen.  They were surely much more than $100 the year I graduated, and big screens were not even available..  Graduation year 1965 (or thereabouts)

This week’s Newsweek Magazine is a special issue --- a blast from the past.  And in this issue is a 1965 set of prices compared to 2012.  Unfortunately they already claim to have multiplied the 1965 prices by “7” (or some number) to see if things have really gone up or down (in constant dollars).

                                                  1965*                     2012

                                            ------------               -------------      

Gallon of Milk                         $6.84                    $3.30           it has fallen by half !!

Issue of New York Times            .72                      2.50           4 times as expensive

Coffee                                         5.41                      5.50           no change, that’s curious

Share of GE Stock                     1.50                     20.20         

Newsweek cover price               2.52                      4.99          

Ounce of GOLD                      252.70               1,659.42          (was $35.12 in 1965)

Gas, one gallon                            2.25                      3.83          (if you didn’t adjust for)

 Chicken  $/lb                               2.81                      1.33          (inflation)

Tuition, room, board,

at four-year university            1,051.00           22,450.00     

*  prices adjusted for inflation

You knew there was a point to this Blog, didn’t you?  Now you see it.  College costs are appear to be out of control.  But are they?  By this chart, they are up 22 X  -- when comparing to inflation adjusted costs in 1965.  But, I remember tuition being more like $600 a semester in the 60’s.  Food was 22 cents a meal, and dorms were not that much (two to a room).   So I think their inflation adjusted costs for that item are out of whack.  After the inflation adjustment, I would think the 1965 college costs would be more like $2,500 X 7 = $16,800 (a year)  compared to $22,450 a year now. 

Please add your comments to this line of thinking.  Have you ever done the calculations to tie your value-system to your year of finishing college? 

 http://www.westegg.com/inflation/  an easy inflation calculator, this is a hot link.

My Son Explores Wireless Printing !!

My son, who runs a small business passes this along, so if you are in the market for a new printer for any of your computer-like devices read on.

He bought a new printer for his home-office 2 days ago. The old one died on him.  He got a HP Officejet Pro 8600 Plus. It’s a wireless computer and the setup for connecting to his wireless network at his house and it was so easy he couldn’t believe it.

The printer found his network and connected in the touch of one button. It came with an Eprint feature where the computer was assigned an email address that he can forward documents to and it will automatically print them. It has other Apps installed on the printer for various things. Then he accessed Google Cloud print. From his portable computer it went out and found the printer and added it to his list of printers on the cloud.

He has an android phone and a Gmail account so he added the Cloud print app to his phone and now when he wants to print something form his phone he just selects the item and hits "print" on the phone,  and no matter where he is, it sends the request to the printer and when he returns home the documents will be sitting on the printer tray. The Google cloud also lets him store documents to it for retrieval anywhere as well. "Pretty amazing where the technology is going", he says. 

I agree !!  Please add your comments and favorite printer recommendations.

The Best Microsoft Office Alternative

Everyone, well, not everyone, is looking for a good (cheap and functional) alternative to the rather over-priced MS Office suite.  After reading several recent reviews, I found one that interests me.  Kingsoft Office Suite 2012. 

It is truly compatible, opens MS Office documents and presentations, and saves its own in a compatible way for those using MS Office at the other end.  This article says competitor Open Office faces an uncertain future.  And Libre-Office is bogged down by clumsy and outdated interface, and other problems. 

 http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/249519/the_best_microsoft_office_alternative_youve_never_heard_of.html

Here is a hotlink to the full story if you are interested. 

Apple App Store Hits 25 Billion Downloads

This is so remarkable since

1.      there are only 7 billion people on the planet

2.      Apps have only been around a few years

3.      there are 600,000 apps now in the App store

4.      already Apple has paid App developers $4 billion in commissions

According to Pew Internet report, of adults with a cell phone, more have a smart phone than a regular phone.  That number was only 35% just a year ago !!!  It is a landslide unparalleled in the consumer products business.

If you are counting, Apple has sold 410 million mobile devices.  And if you divide the downloads in the headline by the number of devices, you get 61 Apps per device.  I only have 30 or so, so I am behind the curve. 

One reason for this App explosion is one I quickly discovered.  Many Apps are faster and easier to use than the corresponding websites.  And are, well, better designed.

Source for this BLOG – May issue of PCWORLD magazine.  If you don’t subscribe, it is a bargain at about $10 a year (see Amazon magazine department, a great way to buy and manage paper subscriptions --- if you are careful).

Did That Robot Take My Job?

To quote Businessweek, Jan 9 2012 issue, the US produces more than one-quarter more goods and services today than it did in 1999.  But uses almost precisely the same number of workers.  Why?  We have become a lot more productive thanks to robotics and other automation techniques.  Magically, $2.5 trillion worth of stuff  (from 1999 to present) materialized out of thin air. No extra workers were needed.

Businesses have bought many new and modern machines, but not hired many new people.  Having run a business, I know people-costs keep climbing,  and adding or subtracting manpower is not as easy (or as flexible) as turning on and off a robotic operation.

But in 2011, American businesses added 540,000 workers.  That flies in the face of the above. Some say technology destroys jobs – but only some kinds of jobs – and it creates new kinds of jobs (robot repair and replacement?).  This is not much consolation to the 20 million people supposedly still looking for work.  How many of these were in construction?   Some cities have seen 70% or more of their small builders go out of business in the last four years. And big builders have been shrinking as well.  The counter point to that is, some medium sized builders have taken advantage of the drop in competition and are turning out more housing product than ever.  Maybe not at the normal profit per house, but they are moving dirt (lots) which is important. And dirt is much cheaper now than it was 4 years ago.

Automated kiosk’s, automated TV cameras, voice to text (Dragon and Siri) replacing old fashioned dictation, paralegals replaced by internet searches, each of these and many more contribute to job losses – or the lack of hiring.  But some economists think the flat-line demand is responsible.  American factories are working well below their design output.  They won’t hire until more orders come in.

Looming large, world wide, is youthful and productive populations elsewhere.  Today I read that half the population of India is under 25.  And India has 1.2 billion people.  India thus has 2 people under 25 for every person of any age in the USA.  Where will they find jobs for all these people as they enter the work force? How can these new people consume if they can't earn money?

iPad Note Taking App Worth A Look.

http://www.softwaregarden.com/products/notetaker/index.html

Click on link for full explanation.  Called Note Taker HD in the iTunes Store

By Software Garden.

A good and really tech-savvy friend recommended that I look at this app.  Dan Brickman, the designer, is famous for many things, but he designed the first spread sheet I ever used – in the 1980’s, called VisiCalc.  And, it was on an Apple product, the Apple IIe.  Younger readers will not recognize that number, but it was a breakthrough then like the iPhone was today.  First truly good looking and good working personal type computer.

You can write in large letters on the screen rather than trying to make tiny motions like a pencil. Note Taker automatically shrinks your writing so you can fit a lot of text on the screen. You just keep writing and Note Taker automatically adds new writing next to the old. To quickly correct mistakes, it has a multi-level undo button as well as an eraser -- just drag your finger over the page to erase the "ink" under it.   Price is $5.00 in the iTunes Store. 

iPad Owners Alert -- Are You Missing The Manual ?

http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/iPad_User_Guide.pdf

the official 150 page manual for iPad

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/14529/the-complete-list-of-ipad-tips-tricks-and-tutorials/

this is a website for iPads you have probably already found, if not it has a wealth of information and tips for iPad owners

These are hot links, just click and go !!  I just learned this today. They are not blue, but they are definitely hot links.