Tech Tourist 2.0

Today, I was asked about my thoughts on the new Apple iPhone 3G S.

I'm disappointed to not see an iPod Touch with a camera. Basically, I think the iPod Touch should be an iPhone without the phone option. Obviously this is a deliberate decision. I think a lot of people would decide to keep another phone, and supplement it with an iPod Touch.

Obviously the iPhone 3G S is a must have phone for me. I take pictures with the iPhone all the time, and having a higher resolution camera with auto-focus is a compelling improvement. And video will be great too, especially if I can upload it to flickr, and tweet it, just like I do with pictures using our FlickrTweet service. Video will make the extra memory in the phone important.

Not being able to tether with AT&T remains annoying as hell for the time I'm in the US and very mobile, but with limited Internet connectivity. Without tethering, I am confined to Wifi locations for serious work on my laptop (although thanks to Google, this covers all of Mountain View).

The compass in itself is rather boring (even for me with my navigation compass-using background - I just came back from a week sailing in Thailand, plotting our course all the way), but it will probably add some marginal benefit to navigation accuracy, directions and the intuitive user experience. It, along with voice, is probably designed to help kill the in-car GPS navigation system category.

I'm starting to think I need to have a mobile.me account even though it is priced very unfavourably. The features to find and/or wipe an iPhone seem compelling. Although perhaps not enough in themselves to justify the cost, it does start to tip the balance.

The extra speed should be nice. I find I wait ten or twenty seconds at times for the camera app to open.

Of course, most of this stuff I'll just get to use occasionally when I am in the US. Most of the time I will be confined to an iPhone that I can unlock. I will be most interested in seeing if an unlock for the iPhone 3G S becomes available. As an alternatie, it might even be worth a visit to Hong Kong to get a premium priced unlocked iPhone 3G S when they become available there. 

The Swine Flu has caused a lot of panic. It is now best referred to as H1N1 because panicked and ill-informed people and governments have been avoiding and killing pigs under the false impression that they spread the disease (it is only spread by humans - so it would be more effective to avoid and cull them).

Monday April 20, 2009 -- Oracle has announced plans to by Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion, a 42% premium on last week's closing price.

This has immense implications for the open source database industry because Sun owns MySQL, which dominates the free open source database market. It could be worthwhile to Oracle to simply shut down MySQL or at least subvert its use in favour of Oracle databases. Even though MySQL is open source, and others can use the code to make derivative open source versions (fork the code), Sun and Oracle's ownership of InnoDB could give it effective control over MySQL since this is the database's primary storage engine.

REF: http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13523522&source=features_box_main

Is Joyent down? I can't reach http://joyent.com, http://support.joyent.com, or their emergency phone number, 415-289-0806. Maybe it's just me? I first noticed when our website went down, and it could also affect some of our clients!

It is weird. People in Canada and Silicon Valley could reach our site, http://eastagile.com, hosted on Joyent. But we could not reach any of their infrastructure from Vietnam. Then a friend pointed out that a large number of fiber lines were recently cut in Silicon Valley by vandals, and that traffic was being rerouted in the meantime. It might be that the routes from Vietnam were affected by this.

Ten days ago I reiterated my view that "The dollar will collapse and US interest rates will have strong upward pressure" (see US Economic Prospects: These are the Good Days. March 10, 2009). And this seems to be happening, faster than I expected.

And within a few days ago, the first sign of these movements took place, with the US starting to buy up long term debt, causing the US dollar to decline for the week by more than 5 percent against a basket of currencies. This has been the largest decline since 1985. And according to Reuters, a fall of 5.2 percent at the close later on Friday would [would] make this week's dollar plunge the biggest since 1973 when the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates was finally abandoned.  This decline may also signal an equally significant currency regime change and shift in long run US economic role and fortunes.

From the US government perspective, this is a good move, assuming they also see the same crisis on the horizon. Essentially, they are shifting borrowing that would be short term (e.g. 90 days) to long term debt. This would make a lot of sense if they thought that short term rates would increase substantially during the term of the long term debt, and not have much prospect of falling again. It is an unprecedented opportunity to profit from intertemporal (between time periods) arbitrage -- an opportunity of which few others can take advantage.

By the way, if you haven't read it already, you should see Wired Magazines excellent article about David X. Li's Gaussian Copula Function, and how its misuse to measure risk in Credit Default Swaps (CDS) has been a key factor contributing to the current credit market crisis. 

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant?currentPage=all d

According to the Economist's Economic Intelligence Unit, Vietnam may have 0.3% economic growth this year. That makes a lot of sense given what is going on in the rest of the world. But it is certainly a slap in the face to Standard Chartered's 5% growth estimate, and official Vietnamese government assertions that things would soon get better.

At a conference in Hanoi this week, estimates were all over the map. But all agreed that the government estimates were too high.  A lack of reliable and timely data was one reason reported for a lack of consistency in estimates.

Believe it or not, the United States is in a relatively good economic state right now. When the rest of the global economy improves, that's when things may start to get really bad for America.

It is ironic that while the fundamental and increasingly desperate state of US finances, debt burden, and economic growth prospects would suggest  a collapse in the US dollar, and the US' ability to borrow, quite the opposite has happened. The dollar has remained strong. And the US has had no trouble borrowing unprecedented amounts and at exceptionally low interest rates.  In a panic, everything is relative, and while bad, everyone else seems worse off.  So there is a flight to the safety of the US dollar, and the one last apparent bastion of security, US Treasury Bills (lending to the US government).  But expect another irony: when things start to look better around the world, investors will have less fear and more alternatives. The dollar will collapse and US interest rates will have strong upward pressure.

Pacific Airline traffic is declining: Delta, the world's largest airline,  said its transatlantic capacity this winter would be down 11 percent to 13 percent compared to the winter of 2008, while its transpacific capacity would be down 12 percent to 14 percent. They are cutting capacity by an additional 10 percent in September following earlier cuts. (REF: reuters.) The number of foreign travelers entering Vietnam by air is reportedly down dramatically in 2009, although cruise ships tours are up (REF: vietnamnet.)

Vietnam's Economy is starting to feel the heat. For a long time the global meltdown had apparently left Vietnam largely untouched.

Even this year some employees of mine complained when I gave them pay raises of only 100% per year. I suspect we will learn that last year's double digit growth in wages has not persisted into 2009.  The real culprit is a lack of information that reflects the increasingly harsh economic reality. The Economist reports that the economy needs about a million new jobs each year just to provide work to new entrants into the economy. Yet last year about half a million workers lost their jobs, and almost as many may lose their jobs this year. That year saw 6.2% economic growth, the lowest rate in nine years. For 2009, the IMF, and many other observers outside the Vietnamese government, believe that economic growth will decline to 5%. Part of the problem is that the government is still trying to cover up the problem, and insists that it can achieve 6.5% growth. Either figure is a big decline compared to last year's government declarations that 2009 would see 8.1% economic growth, and expectations based on 2007's reported growth of 8.5%.

Local consumer demand has collapsed. Sales during the Tet holiday in January were down 50% from the previous year. Car sales were down 68%.  Clearly the downturn is affecting more than just rice farmers and labourers, it is also being felt by the middle class, and the rich (note that a basic car that would cost $25,000 in the US costs almost $70,000 in Vietnam after taxes, duties and shipping).

Vietnam's economic growth has been driven primarily by exports, and sustained by domestic oil resources. Domestic demand has largely contributed to a trade deficit. Yet exports fell by 5.1% year-on-year in the first two months of 2009, with electronic goods down by 13.7% and shoes by 7.3%.

REF: The Economist

Compared to the Global Economy, and the rest of the developing world, Vietnam remains relatively lucky. The World Bank has announced (recognized) that the global economy is likely to shrink in 2009.  Global industrial output could be 15% lower, year-over-year, by the middle of this year. And developing countries will find they have a financing shortfall of about $700 billion this year -- massive growth in rich world (e.g. US) borrowing, and restricted supply, are leaving little left for the economically uninfluential poor of Asia and Africa. REF: BBC

"Seriously? 800 diggs for one missing letter?" wrote capnawsome on digg.com, commenting on "my day in the sun" on March 2nd, 2009. The day ended up having 76,543 people view one of my photographs (see below) on flickr.com. And he was right, it was really just a trivial thing that I had noticed and laughed about, and blogged about here, back in November 2009.

I have been avidly taking photographs and sharing them with people since I was a teenager in the 1980s. Back then, I might have dreamt that almost a hundred thousand people might view one of my images. But I would have imagined it would be a beautiful moment caught with quick reflexes and a careful eye, brought to light after hours in the darkroom. The Internet (thank you) changed everything, and for better or worse the world gets to choose what it likes, and who it likes, when it likes, and for as brief a moment as it likes.

There really is no reason to complain about this moment of fame. Flickr lets me track how popular my photos are, and I have been miffed for several years that the perennial favourite has been a picture that I did not even take myself. It was a picture of a fake tsunami that I had received in a chain email letter just after the one that wiped out so many people around southern Asia on December 26, 2004.  That picture has been viewed 38,315 times so far. I'm pleased to see it more than supplanted by one I actually took myself, and wrote about. Perhaps one day, a photo of mine that I consider artistic will gain attention. But for now, it is just nice to be noticed. Thanks, digg.com. Thanks, flickr.com. Thanks, Internet.

P.S. One irony, that I think has been missed, is that this particular brand of insecticide claims to be much less dangerous than others (like Raid) on the market in Vietnam.

My bet is that foreign MBAs from top US schools are an exceptional bargain this year because they are effectively barred from jobs at most major employers in the finance industry. 

We all know that the best paying industry, finance and Wall Street in particular, is in the middle of an implosion and series of massive layoffs. And just about every big and important firm has received money from the US government as part of its bailout (even if just to show there was no stigma in doing so). But one important side effect of that is that any of these firms that have accepted money from the government, and laid off workers, is being barred by US immigration authorities from getting visas allowing foreigners to work for them.  This just hit the news with the headline that Bank of America has withdrawn all jobs offers from foreign MBAs. Naturally, this means more foreign MBAs trying to get jobs in other industries, increasing competition and driving down wages, especially for foreigners, in those places where they can work.

In the past, immigration authorities had responded to the recession by making some special allowances for recent graduates. The Department of Homeland Security had announced (April 4, 2008) that they would let recent graduates work in the country longer as part of their post-graduation practical training period. Normally, after graduating, students can work for just about anyone, anywhere, with not special paperwork, for up to twelve months. This had been extended to seventeen months.