Joe Baker

Well, I'm back in California. After seven years in Washington, DC, I'm back in California. While I really enjoyed DC, it feels really good to be back in California. Particularly in August. In a city with the motto, "Climate Best by Government Test."

I'm still settling in. I've got an apartment with a chair, an end table, a Thermarest, one plate, a knife, 3 forks, and a pan. Judy is still in DC with the cats and all the belongings. Once the house closes, she'll join me here.

Seth Godin points out that the typical family in the US spends $2000 a year on telecommunications. While long distance costs keep dropping, people are paying for landline, cellphone, dsl, etc., etc.

Chris Anderson posts an interesting entry on his blog, The Long Tail.  O'Reilly has compared the prints sales of books  to distribution through its Safari online book service.  Print sales are much more skewed to a few hits.  The top decile of books (ordered by print sales), accounts for half of all print sales, but only one quarter of online sales. Access through Safari has a much longer tail.  29% of Safari access is to books generating only 9% of print book sales.  Interesting potential support for the Long Tail theory.

Skype has announced
free calls to all landlines and mobile phones within the US and Canada, at least through the end of the year.  Skype has been growing much more quickly outside of the US (100 million users total, 6 million in the US) and it clearly wants to boost its US/Canada share of the market. We've been using Skype and Vonage a lot at N-TEN, and they are helping to keep phone bills down.

It is great to see more pressure put on phone costs.

Mobile Africa (by way of Timbuktu Chronicles) reports that internet usage in Africa grew by more than 400 percent last year, but from a very small base.  There is still only a 2.6% penetration of the African population, and roll-out plans are limited.  Mobile voice users grew by 66% in 2005.

Idealware has posted a new report on accounting packages, reviewing QuickBooks, Peachtree, Fundware, The Financial Edge, Mas90, Dynamics, and more.

Last week, I visited Sydney, and got in as much outdoor swimming as I could. I swam at the Andrew (Boy) Charlton Pool (above), which is adjacent to the bay and full of salt water. The next day, I went to the local North Epping 50 meter outdoor pool. The Australians love their swimming. Most of the lap swimmers look like they’ve done serious time on a swim team. Blue skies, big pools, and fast swimmers. It makes me feel like I’m back in Southern California.

The Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney is rife with fruit bats. There are thousands hanging in the trees. They've led to a lot of fighting between the botanists (who aren't happy about the dying trees) and those who more concerned about protecting a threatened species.

I've been at the Connecting Up Conference in Adelaide, Australia for the last two days. It has been fascinating to see the nonprofit ICT perspective here. Australia has a huge NFP sector for its population of 21 million: the most often-cited figure is 700,000 organizations, but most are staffed purely by volunteers. [The numbers drop dramatically when you limit things to organizations that employ staff (380,000) or that have deductible status (20,000)].

Broadband Internet access is surprisingly low here. Overall, Internet access is at 68%, close to the US, but only about 28% of Internet users have broadband access. The cost of access is high compared to the US, and most care providers are older and don't have Internet access at home, so are not very comfortable with computers.

From Modern Mechanix by way of BoingBoing.

I just received my copy of "Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes."   It is another excellent resource from Andy Goodman, the author of "Why Bad Ads Happen to Good Causes" and the "Communications Toolkit: A guide to navigating communications for the nonprofit world."  All three books are great sources of information for nonprofits on how to communicate effectively.