Mortgages

I just read this interesting tidbit on Ask Yahoo.

... According to a 2001 study by the Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), "nearly 40 percent of all residential properties in the United States, owner-occupied and rental units, are not mortgaged but are owned free and clear." For a country so often criticized for its debt, that's not a bad figure.

Despite that, this is also true:

Those who wish to learn more about the demographics of the average American homeowner (be it person or corporate entity) can skim the report's 368 pages of scintillating facts and figures. One factoid that stood out to us -- from 1991 to 2001, the amount of outstanding mortgage debt on single-unit properties rose from $1.62 trillion to $3.48 trillion.

It's really amazing when you figure that the $3.48 trillion is only financing 60% of the homes.

Fun Stuff at Work

Andy has been working on some new landing pages for the Step2 web site:

• Toy Kitchens
• Stock Car Bed
• Sand & Water Activity Center
• Wagons
• Climbers
  

It's really nice that we can do this stuff in the office. Our outside developer is wonderful, but I'd rather spend our budget on the heavy lifting. Andy has quickly become a valuable team member and learns new skills almost daily. He is just what we needed -- someone who likes to sell yet also enjoys minding the details of our online business.

The Ever Expanding Video Game Culture

Here's another cool article at Reveries about a new video "game" for the Nintendo DS that is specifically targeted at adults. This sure expands the use of video game devices to a whole new genre. I bet we'll see some news coverage of this being used as a therpapeutic device to stave off Alzheimer's Disease.

Lisa wants her own DS because she loves Jack's Nintendogs game. Who would have ever thought that the video game market would expand and morph into such a cultural phenomenon that spans all age groups? No wonder the toy industry is in shambles.

Nintendo’s latest videogame hit is not a shoot-em-up for kids but a brain-trainer for adults, reports Ginny Parker Woods in The Wall Street Journal (2/23/06). This success story — 1.8 million units sold — is happening in Japan, but Nintendo hopes to export it to America in April. In Japan, sales are fueled by the existing popularity of “brain-sharpening exercises” as well as the celebrity of Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, the scientist who developed the game, which is called Brain Age. In America, Nintendo hopes that the game will find favor among older consumers, perhaps most of all baby boomers anxious to keep their minds sharp and help ward off dementia.

Brain Age is designed for Nintendo’s DS, a hand-held gaming device that “opens like a book and has two screens … Simpler than most other videogames, Brain Age flashes questions on one screen while the player writes answers on the other. The player is peppered with a series of timed drills, allowing the game to measure the user’s ‘brain age.’ Twenty is the best, because that’s around the age at which most people’s brains are fully developed but still agile. Most users find that they are much ‘older.’ But by working through rounds of exercises … players can bring down their brain age and chart their progress over time.” Nintendo hopes that it will both sell a lot of copies of Brain Age, as well as the DS devices on which they must be played.

That strategy has worked really well in Japan: “Around a third of the people who buy games in the brain-building series are over 35, and another third are between 25 and 34 … Many of these older gamers have lined up to buy their first machines in order to play Brain Age, and the DS is currently sold out in Japan because production cannot keep up. ” When Brain Age goes on sale in the U.S. on April 17, it will feature various memory and reading drills as well as soduku puzzles. Nintendo hopes that the new game will get an extra boost when it introduces its new Revolution console which, because it eliminates the sometimes complicated keypad controllers, is expected to appeal to adults. As Nintendo president Satoru Iwata explains: "We have to get nongamers into videogames … to do this we have to completely change the nature of game play." ~ Tim Manners, editor

American Leisure

Pretty interesting coverage of a new article by Virginia Postrel in Reveries. She writes cool stuff that I should read more often.

The surprise is, Americans spend a lot more time — six whole weeks — on vacation today than they did in 1965, reports Virginia Postrel in The New York Times (2/23/06). It all depends on how you define “vacation” — because there is leisure time and there is leisure time. The difference between leisure and work is divided by that for which we might otherwise be paid (or pay someone else). Going to St. Lucia, for instance, qualifies as leisure because you probably wouldn’t pay someone else to do that for you. Cooking dinner, on the other hand, might be something you enjoy, but in theory you could just order take-out. So, the rise of microwave ovens and takeout dinners is one reason we aren’t “working” as much as we did in the past.

Based on that definition of leisure, economists Erik Hurst and Mark A. Aguiar have written a paper in which they calculate that “leisure had increased 5.1 hours a week, holding demographics like age constant. (Without that control, leisure has grown 4.6 hours). Assuming a 40-hour work week, that is like adding six weeks of vacation — an enormous increase.” That increase “is particularly striking for women … In 2003, women spent 11.1 fewer hours a week working at home than they did in 1965. The biggest drop, 6.2 hours a week, came in cooking and cleaning up after meals — not surprising, given the enormous growth in restaurant and takeout meals and the spread of microwave ovens. More women working outside the home created more demand for such conveniences, which, in turn, enabled more women to work outside the home.” As Dr. Hurst notes: “A women who was working full time in 1965 was also working full time at home, almost — 40 hours in the market, 20 or 25 hours at home.”

As for the men (the bums), well, here are the stats: "Ninety-seven percent of men ages 21 to 65 had jobs in 1965, compared with 87 percent in 2004. That drop accounts for about 60 percent of men’s increase in leisure time." In addition: "Low-educated men used to work a lot … Now they don’t work a lot," says Dr. Hurst. "If they’re unemployed, I would have expected them to do much more home production to offset the fact that they don’t have a salary." (There’s a reason they call people like Dr. Hurst "academics"). His research also finds that 40 year olds don’t work nearly as much as they did in 1965 and that "longer life spans mean more retirement years." Says Dr. Hurst: "It used to be that you worked till 65, and died at 66. Now you work till 65 and die at 80." Happy Monday. ~ Tim Manners, editor

What City am I?

Found this at Blogthings (via Virginial Postrel).

You Are Austin

A little bit country, a little bit rock and roll. You're totally weird and very proud of it. Artistic and freaky, you still seem to fit in... in your own strange way. Famous Austin residents: Lance Armstrong, Sandra Bullock, Andy Roddick

What American City Are You?

Let's Hope It Isn't Really 'Our Final Descent' and Other Prayers

This entry from David Pogue made me chuckle:

"Oh, and what about when the flight attendant comes on and tells you that, 'The captain has just notified me that we have begun our final descent'? (Let's hope it's only the descent of the PLANE, and not my final descent, eh?)  

His whole rant on flight-attendant-speak certainly rings true. It reminds me of some annoying prayer language that I hear frequently. Phrases like "We pray that you would ______" or "We just pray that _____" really bug me. "Would" and "just" are out of place. Both usually sound passive and defeatist. Perhaps they are intended to connote humility. Instead, I think they suggest uncertainty.

If we're not sure enough of our petitions to pray them candidly, then maybe we should give them some more thought first. I think God can handle a direct request.

Online Transaction = No Offline Support

A story ran in Friday's Cleveland Plain Dealer about the fact that many online businesses offer little or no offline support.

When Manfred Ruhe couldn't use the three tickets he had to December's Trans-Siberian Orchestra show at The Q, he gave eBay a try.

The "world's largest online auction" wasn't exactly second nature to the 65-year-old Eastlake man. When prompted to specify how many items he wanted to list, he replied honestly -- three. Although he intended to sell the tickets as one package, eBay listed them as three individual items.

It was a rookie mistake, one that Ruhe soon realized and tried to correct. But when he went searching for a customer service contact on eBay's jam-packed Web site, he got lost in a sea of links. He couldn't find an answer among the "frequently asked questions."

And he couldn't find a phone number -- because eBay doesn't list one for the public.

"It's like they're insulating themselves from any kind of personal contact," Ruhe said.

With the convenience of e-commerce comes a trade-off: lack of personal customer service.

It is simply unbelievable that a company the size of eBay does not offer some level of phone support for paying sellers. Amazon.com is just as bad. Basically the only way to get a phone number is to Google for one and hope that it's right or pull it off of your credit card statement. (Merchants are typically required to list a phone number on credit card statements so customers can easily contact them to question a charge.)

It would be one thing if email support were the peak of efficiency. Unfortunately, response times are often too slow or nonexistent. Even more often, the agent that replies misunderstands the question, creating a seemingly endless loop of frustrating emails that unnecessarily prolong the problem.

The biggest exceptions to this that I have experienced are Road Runner and Go Daddy. Both make their phone numbers readily accessible alongside the FAQ's, email support links and other online options. Go Daddy takes it a step further by actually telling you the estimated response times for phone support versus email support and advising you up front that phone support is fastest (i.e., the best option).

Online companies create distrust when they do not make it easy for customers to reach them. In the long run, they are not saving a dime.

More is Less

I just listened to the Inside the Net episode with Jason Fried of 37 Signals. He made this very profound statement during the interview:

The [fewer] features you have, the bigger your market actually is. Every time you add something new to your product, in many ways you're actually reducing your market size.

Basically, this sums up the 37 Signals philosophy when it comes to product development. Although Jason is specifically referring to software, this statement often applies to non-tech products.

I've used Basecamp and Backpack for several months now. They are incredibly simple apps. I'm actually now using Backpack instead of a PDA for my business to do list. The main reason is the speed at which I can make adjustments. No more tapping and clicking just to keep my to do list up to date (which sometimes seems like it is changing by the minute -- see previous post). No, I can't set priorities or alarms, but the speed at which I can edit and make changes, not to mention the screen size of my 19" monitor versus my PDA, makes Backpack a much simpler solution.

No Wonder I Feel Like I Can't Get Anything Done

This is a few weeks old, but I finally got around to reading it:

Researchers studying a random sample of office workers and found they got an average of just 11 minutes clear time to a project before being distracted by an e-mail, phone call or verbal interruption from a manager or colleague.

It also found interruptions now took up an average of 2.1 hours of every working day, or 28 per cent of the average person's nine-to-five schedule, including the time to recover your train of thought following an interruption.

It took an average of 25 minutes to return to a task after being disturbed, according to the magazine.

Now, I am not prone to buying into a bunch of psycho-babble, but this particular statement describes exactly how I feel much of the time (emphasis mine):

Psychiatrist Edward Hallowell told Time that he had seen a tenfold rise in the number of patients with work-induced attention deficit disorder.

"They complained that they were more irritable than they wanted to be. Their productivity was declining and they couldn't get organised," he said.

Adult attention deficit disorder took hold "when we get so overloaded with incoming messages and competing tasks that we are unable to prioritize", he suggested.

I cannot not state it any more accurately than that. And all this time I thought it was just sleep deprivation.

Personal Revival Trusts

As reported in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) via The Week:

At least a dozen multimillionaires have left money to themselves in hope of being brought back to life. The immortality seekers have not only arranged to be cryogenically frozen after death, reports The Wall Street Journal, but have put their wealth in “personal revival trusts” that will be waiting for them when scientists resuscitate them a century or two into the future. Arizona resort operator David Pizer, 64, has left himself roughly $10 million and calculates that, through the magic of compound interest, he might wake up as “the richest man in the world.”

There is a way to live forever, but this is not it! This is.