How to build your business around the 90/10 rule

“There is a 100/10/1 “rule of thumb” with social services. 1% will create content, 10% will engage with it, and 100% will consume it. If only 10% of your users need to log in because 90% just want to consume, then you’ll end up with the vast majority of your users in the logged out camp. Don’t ignore them, build services for them, and you can slowly but surely lead them to more engagement and potentially some day into the logged in camp.”

– Fred Wilson

from Don’t Forget Your Logged Out Users

via swiss miss

AIDS is cured, here’s why

It’s the 30th anniversary of the AIDS epidemic and the world agrees we are at a turning point.

The disease that affects 34 million people around the world (1.2 million in the US) can be cured. The drug cocktail that virtually erases the effect of HIV and allows folks to live a long life is coming down in price. What once used to be $15-30,000/year is now around $3-4,000/year.

A dramatic drop and still not low enough, but as the Economist reports, some rich African nations are starting to purchase them en masse. Especially after new studies are showing that transmission of HIV while on the drugs is reduced by 98%. Meaning that with a coordinated effort a country can stop the spread of the disease, prevent death, and begin the arduous process of removing it from society.

This puts AIDS in the same realm as TB, Measles, Tetanus, Diptheria. All diseases cured by coordinated massive efforts to remove the outbreaks from society. Yes, those use a vaccination but the process is the same and both require a mobilized, organized effort.

That is the turning point. The problem is no longer a disease raging out of control that will kill anyone who contracts it. Now, it is more like diabetes where life is definitely harder for those who have it but imminent death.

For more details and research, plus learn how countries are responding to this, check out the Economist Podcast (search in iTunes), listen to the audio version below, or read the feature article linked below.

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The 30 Years War
Hard pounding is gradually bringing AIDS under control

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AIDS is cured, here's why

It’s the 30th anniversary of the AIDS epidemic and the world agrees we are at a turning point.

The disease that affects 34 million people around the world (1.2 million in the US) can be cured. The drug cocktail that virtually erases the effect of HIV and allows folks to live a long life is coming down in price. What once used to be $15-30,000/year is now around $3-4,000/year.

A dramatic drop and still not low enough, but as the Economist reports, some rich African nations are starting to purchase them en masse. Especially after new studies are showing that transmission of HIV while on the drugs is reduced by 98%. Meaning that with a coordinated effort a country can stop the spread of the disease, prevent death, and begin the arduous process of removing it from society.

This puts AIDS in the same realm as TB, Measles, Tetanus, Diptheria. All diseases cured by coordinated massive efforts to remove the outbreaks from society. Yes, those use a vaccination but the process is the same and both require a mobilized, organized effort.

That is the turning point. The problem is no longer a disease raging out of control that will kill anyone who contracts it. Now, it is more like diabetes where life is definitely harder for those who have it but imminent death.

For more details and research, plus learn how countries are responding to this, check out the Economist Podcast (search in iTunes), listen to the audio version below, or read the feature article linked below.

—

The 30 Years War
Hard pounding is gradually bringing AIDS under control

—

Amazon is a buy, $AMZN

I’m not an stock analyst but I do like to trade and my specialty is tech. Specifically, trends in the industry and I think Amazon (AMZN) is trending for three reasons: warehouses, cloud, and e-books.

Amazon’s core business model is to dominate the 174 billion dollar e-commerce industry. The growth for which is incredible, a rate of 15% per year with plenty of space for growth; e-commerce is only 4.5% of retail commerce (pdf).

Definitely a good situation to be in, but with so much money to be made the powerhouses, like Walmart, Target, and Best Buy, want in. In response Amazon is making an agressive move with what I call, warehousing.

The official title of this program is Fulfillment by Amazon, which I think is a cagey way of understating their moves. They don’t want to alert the competition. The program involves Amazon building huge warehouses to store and ship goods. At first it was just to sell their own goods but it has since expanded to every seller.

Now anyone can list their products on the site and send them to an Amazon warehouse. The retailer will hold them until they sell then quickly package and ship.

It’s working really well. It makes selling even more easier, which is hard because I think Amazon has the best/easiest model for selling goods on the web. It  just invites more and more to join and continually expands Amazon’s offerings. This increases the fees they get for each sale and corners the market (eating Ebay‘s lunch). It’s working so well that big box retailer, Target, is selling on Amazon, in essence forcing others to partner with Amazon rather than compete.

On a side note, is gives Amazon a small risk. In good times they ship and sell, while working hard to be an efficient warehouse that keep costs down on packaging and shipping. In bad times they could be left with large staffs, full warehouses, and bleeding money. Definitely, something to think about.

That risk requires Amazon to be agressive and keep on selling, which is exactly where they need to be (hungry). Which is exactly what I look for in a company to invest in.

Amazon’s Web Service

Now lets switch to another focus, the cloud. A popular topic these days and everyone is making a play. But all the plays are for cloud applications. Not Amazon, they are building real estate that the applications will run on. The program is called Amazon Web Service (AWS).

Through investments of 100s of millions that have baffled Wall Street they have created incredible economies of scale. Like server capacity for $0.12/hour and storage for $0.12/GB. Offerings so cheap they are irresistible. It’s a play to undercut everyone on the market and it’s working. No one else on the market can compete and if they wanted to it would take years to build.

To which the common stock market analyst quips; there’s not much money in $2.99/ month hosting fees. True enough but if you add up several million of those and combine it with a rapidly growing personal website market it changes the story. Remember, in the future everyone will have their own website and they will be paying someone to host it.

I’m barely touching the surface too. Corporations, all of them, are going to need computing power. They can build it themselves (and many will) but a large majority will outsource it. A billion dollar market and Amazon will dominate that as well.

Take a look at their product listing, it’s impressive:

This is kind of like buying Manhattan Island before the settlers arrive and then renting out each acre. It’s an endless supply of money.

E-Books

I saved e-books for last because the topic so popular that everything tends to get ignored. In a nutshell, Amazon made its bones as an online bookstore but that industry (paper books) is on the decline. You can buy nearly any book for a couple of dollars and that means very low fees for Amazon to profit on.

In response they created the Kindle to spark the e-book industry and got lucky. The Kindle hit at a time when, really, no one else was competing in the e-book market. Add in that, thanks to the iPhone, app stores are the key to building the market. To which Amazon responded perfectly. Their push to get every book they can on the Kindle is legendary and the fights have been fun.

Now millions of books are available on the Kindle and it is bringing in billions for them. Some reports say it is now 10% of their sales and generating $5+ billion in revenue. Great numbers but what is more important is that Amazon took its primary business, reinvented it, created a hugely profitable industry, and is dominating it.

Add up all three of these major moves and I think Amazon is well positioned for the future.

Next I will make my first attempt to gauge the P/E earnings on the stock and determine my own target price for the stock!

Among the Ancients

Of all the literary themes out there trees happen to be one of my favorite. One of the best authors in this genre is, surprisingly, fantasy giant J.R.R. Tolkein. In his series of novels, The Lord of The Rings, he goes on endlessly about trees giving them an entire culture and personifying them with eyes, mouths, legs, wives, and even a flock (of trees) to shepherd. He is fascinatingly descriptive and beautiful, and, unfortunately, none of that made it into the the movie versions.

In some ways Tolkein was a vanguard, ahead of his time, as modern science is revealing just how important trees are to the environment. In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond discusses how entire societies failed due to mismanagement of trees (cutting too many down). He digs into the research uncovering how trees and tree roots tie together entire ecosystems and without them catastrophic events happen like wildfires, species extinction, desertification, and more.

If you dig into the tree world you quickly realize that one particular group is the CEO of the forests. The boss, the elder, and the strongest. Trees that in every way dominate the ecosystem. They are the old trees, well old in terms of human beings. In their world they are simply several hundred years old and considered middle age.

A grouping of these trees together is called an Old-Growth Forest. Among the characteristics of these groupings are an incredible resistance to forest fires, copious amounts of wildlife (including rare and threatened species), and even an ability to affect weather patterns. It is quite common for developments to pave into these old forests only to find that fires suddenly become a problem or see the land turn dry and become a desert.

If this fascinates you or if you just want to visit an Old-Growth Forest than I have the book for you, Among the Ancients, Adventures in the Eastern Old-Growth Forests.

The author, Joan Maloof, has personally visited each one and brought back meticulous detail about how to get there and what to look for. I want to call it a field guide but it is more than that. She provides narration and descriptions in the middle of the “turn-left here” moments.

Take this description:

“The webs I saw were a few inches across and not the type strung between branches; instead they were like webby sheets attached to ridges in the bark. As I looked closer I noticed, somewhere on each of these webs, a circular hole receding from the surface down toward the trunk like a funnel. This was the work of a funnel-web spider”

“The sheet of web isn’t sticky like a most other webs; it functions more like the head of a drum. When a small insect causes the web to vibrate, the spider senses it an zooms out of its funnel hole. He captures the insects, bites it, wraps it in silk, and drags it down the hole. Some types of spiders spin a new web every evening, but the funnel-web keeps the same one all year, making repairs as necessary.”

It’s a beautiful description of the funnel-web spider and it instantly brought me back to my own adventures in nature. I can picture that strong white funnel web and the spider sneaking around behind it. It offers such a tantalizing view into the abundant wildlife in old-growth forests. Places where you can find creatures beyond your wildest imagination.

The book covers the entire east coast (South, North, Mid) and I have read through all the adventures in my native Mid-Atlantic neighborhood, and I can’t wait to go through the other regions. A few brief glances at them have offered delightful glimpses of exotic creatures and forests.

If you are a nature lover or if any of this has grabbed your attention then the book is definitely worth checking out.

More information about the book can be found at Ruka Press, a local Washington D.C. based publishing company committed to environmental principles in book publishing.

 

A Poem: Signs the economy is picking up

Last week the bells were sounding alarm
The jobs report was down
Housing is still in a depression
The pundits are starting to talk double dip

But what about my report
Pennies on the ground
15x more pennies on the streets
I’m hauling in the copper

Strength in the economy?
Bums are now only taking silver
Drunks are letting loose their cents
Parents are telling children pennies are trash

How will you decide
Pennies on the ground
Fancy-pants wall street reports

A penny saved is a penny earned

Women Who Wiki Workshop

There’s an old proverb: Action is the proper fruit of knowledge – which is why 1X57 is offering a free workshop (drawing upon our days of running training for the Intellipedia Sabbatical) in DC next week for women and girls to learn how to edit and contribute to Wikipedia.

Less than 13% of the Wikipedia editors are female. Sue Gardner, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Executive Director, shared Nine Reasons Why Women Don’t Edit Wikipedia (in their own words).

The reasons listed are not insurmountable. In fact, individually they’re all fairly easy to address.  Much of the solution lies in knowledge and awareness. But a solution is needed because a user-contributed encyclopedia primarily built by the contributions of twenty-something, single, white males inherently leaves gaping holes in shared knowledge. Or even worse, inherent biases.

Teaming up with DC Web Women‘s Girls Rock On the Web, JESS3 (who will be hosting the event at their office in DC) and Andrea Baker and Kirby Plessas who will be our Guest Gurus, we have a sold-out event.

The invitation with full details is here: http://growwiki.eventbrite.com/

We also created a page for the workshop in Wikipedia itself and added the event to the scheduled future Wikipedia:Meetups list.

 

Get some magic pixie dust

From Kathy Sierra:

The real pixie dust is when you ask yourself, “how can I help my users get more comments on THEIR blog?”. You want to be the guy who asks, “How can I help my users get more followers and fans?”

What prompted me to write this is the latest magic pixie dust buzzword, one that I am passionately against: gamification. Applying principles of game design to non-game activities can be done carefully, artfully, and with wonderful results. We use principles of game design in our programming books…But the current crop of “gamification” experts are doing nothing more than “pointsification/badgification”, taking the most superficial, surface mechanics of games and applying them out of context to areas where they are, as I have referred to it, “the high fructose corn syrup of engagement.”

Be the one people talk about NOT because of your latest gamification and WOM (word of mouth) campaign, but because it is obvious to your users and those they influence that your brand, product, book has made them better at something. Something they care about…Give people an experience that leaves them feeling a little better about their own capabilities.

via Gaping Void

What’s a major worth?

Despite PayPal co-founder, Facebook funder, and venture capitalist Peter Thiel telling us we’re in an education bubble, a recent study and report by Georgetown University may suggest otherwise, with the bubble existing for only certain majors.

The Center on Education and the Workforce What’s It Worth report analyzes 171 majors in 15 categories. It tracks earnings by majors and provides key break-outs on questions of race and gender.

One key finding shows a 50% median salary difference for those obtaining a Bachelor of Science degree (Engineering, Computer Science, etc) versus a Bachelor of Arts degree (Humanities, Fine Arts, Psychology), with the former providing the highest median earnings.

The top 3 majors with the highest median earnings are: Petroleum Engineer ($120,000), Pharmacy/pharmaceutical Sciences ($105,000); Mathematics and Computer Sciences ($98,000). Lowest median salary majors include:  Counseling/Psychology ($29,000); Early Childhood Education ($36,000); Human Services and Community Organizations ($38,000); Social Work ($39,000).

Select findings can be found at: http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi/hpi/cew/pdfs/whatsitworth-select.pdf

 

What's a major worth?

Despite PayPal co-founder, Facebook funder, and venture capitalist Peter Thiel telling us we’re in an education bubble, a recent study and report by Georgetown University may suggest otherwise, with the bubble existing for only certain majors.

The Center on Education and the Workforce What’s It Worth report analyzes 171 majors in 15 categories. It tracks earnings by majors and provides key break-outs on questions of race and gender.

One key finding shows a 50% median salary difference for those obtaining a Bachelor of Science degree (Engineering, Computer Science, etc) versus a Bachelor of Arts degree (Humanities, Fine Arts, Psychology), with the former providing the highest median earnings.

The top 3 majors with the highest median earnings are: Petroleum Engineer ($120,000), Pharmacy/pharmaceutical Sciences ($105,000); Mathematics and Computer Sciences ($98,000). Lowest median salary majors include:  Counseling/Psychology ($29,000); Early Childhood Education ($36,000); Human Services and Community Organizations ($38,000); Social Work ($39,000).

Select findings can be found at: http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi/hpi/cew/pdfs/whatsitworth-select.pdf