The King's Big Stick

Governor Spitzer. What were you thinking? Why would you ask a hooker to travel from New York when Washington is full of Whores. But I don't want to talk about him. I want to talk about evolution.

In my mind a pimp is a Snoop Dog looking guy in a purple suit, a wide brimmed "Starsky & Hutchesque" furry hat and a 400lb bald side-kick OR a Heidi Fleiss/ Joan Collins style madam. Looking at the screen grabs for the Emperor Club VIP site, this looks like a really we designed site, unlike the Google Ad links I get on the margin of my Plaxo page for Shanghai massage parlors.

So I am interested in seeing if some enterprising investigative journalist is going to report who is behind this business. A business that provides side income to struggling students, out of work models and busy New York business women who just don't have the time to date. Will it be a college professor at Harvard? Will it be a pimply faced computer geek, running the site from the basement of his mothers suburban bungalow in Queens? Or will it be an advertising exec misappropriating the resources of his company to make some money from all the girls he meets at product launches and fashion shows?

My question is as we enter a new post-Bush era, who is the pimp in our society?

<<BREAKING NEWS>>
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/spitzer_emperors_club;_ylt=AoJ_i.Vs6NlX3mFrQ6d2nGBH2ocA

My question is answered. Thank you Adam Goldman of Associated Press.

"Mark Brener, 62, and Cecil "Katie" Suwal, 23, are accused of running the agency.

Brener, an Israeli native with an expertise in financial consulting, recruited the prostitutes and marketed the club, and Suwal, who graduated from the prestigious Blair Academy in New Jersey, handled its day-to-day operations, prosecutors said."

A Jewish financial consultant and a co-ed boarding school graduate. This is what pimps have become? Internet marketing, recruitment, administrative management? This almost sounds like...nay... it does sound like a headhunting company. Has Fuzzy Bear thrown in his street
corner for an MBA, a downtown office and Powerpoint presentations?

I read also that the sum of money paid by Spitzer was for partially for services rendered as well as for future services. Are we talking pre-paid cards? Is there opportunity for RFID technology providers in the sex trade. Will we be able to use our Octopus Card for my train fare, a sandwich and a blowjob? The future of the worlds oldest profession looks bright.

If we extrapolate further... can I accumulate miles or rewards points?, and if so did Gov. Spitzer use those points to pay for the extra room at the Mayfair. (What a value proposition, the more I cheat on my wife, the easier it is for me to afford it.)

You know folks. All this stinks of legitimate business. There was no talk of drugs or violence. It was an out of work musician...(I was almost on the money there) and a married man who happened to hold public office. The Emperor Club simply put them together. Both client and
worker are screened. The call girls travel internationally as well as interstate. This simply looks like a case of supply meeting demand.

I know I know, think of the family/ think of the children (who incidentally is 4 years younger than the call girl) but at the end of the day, you give a man enough money and power, he's going to cheat anyway. Isn't it better that the woman is paid in cash rather than affection?... the only real victim of this crime are the guys that can't afford $5,500 per hour of gratification.......

Photo Storage Sites (Who do you use?)

I have about 40-50Gig worth of digital photos that I have on a portable HDD at home. These are photos of my son and daughter mostly and I am terrified that a power surge will blow up the last decade of memories for me. Short of burning this all onto DVD or printing them I have been seaching cyberspace online photo sites. I know that nothing is safer than managing my own backup but for convenience sake it would be nice to have something online, so that if ever I decide to take a long trip down memory lane or I decide that my work is good enough to show off then my images can accessed from any computer. And of course if it's for free then all the better.

Here are some of the sites that I have found and a little about them.

Flickr.com: This is the obvious one. Sign in with your Yahoo sign in and upload from a photo manager, the New Windows live photo manager or from a browser. The downside is that there is a monthly bandwidth limit of 100Mg and will only display the last 200 photos you uploaded. They do not specify a size limit but at 100Mg per month you can only upload 1.2Gig per year. Their Pro account at $24.95 per year gives you unlimited storage and bandwidth but Flickr is more of a 2.0 site than a serious photography storage service provider.

Snapfish.com: I see the HP logo on their site and it is designed with an e-commerce feel to it. It is an online storefront for photo printing products but if you make one purchase per year (365 days) they will provide unlimited storage and bandwidth. Still it feels like keeping your vintage wine at the local pub.

dotphoto.com has a similar model to Snapfish but with a more vague commitment to storage. They do not specify a limit (not that I can find easily) but seem to avoid using the word unlimited. They say they will store your photos indefinately as long as your account remains active. To keep your account active you have to log in at least once every 30 days.

Winkflash.com is another online printing business but without restrictions. They will provide unlimited storage and bandwidth indefinitely. The thing that makes me worry is I only found Winkflash because I found a free unlimited photo hosting site called Clubphoto.com. Winkflash either acquired or inherited Clubphoto's member photos when it went belly up. This makes me a little concerned about a business model that obviously didn't work for one company already.

Kodakgallery.com once again falls into the online printing business model again but by far they have the most confusing interface and have the same "one purchase every 12 months" policy as the others. they can also store video but for no longer than 30days and have an file size limit of 15Mb for images and 150Mb for video. Incidentally they are really slow in China.

The other problem I have about these sites that would like me to purchase is they are generally US based and being based in Shanghai for the moment, it doesn't really make sense to buy anything from them.

The next 2 sites are more Flickresque.

Picasaweb.com is a google site that offers 1 Gig photo storage and unlimited bandwidth (I assume as they make no reference to bandwidth at all in their site). It has a nice clean interface and unlimited albums. This is the one I currently use, but in the last 6 months I have used a lot of my 1Gig already and it seems that the upload options lower the quality of the images because the default image size is 1600 pixels. You can rent more storage space for $20 per year for an additional 10Gig (that you can use in conjunction with your Gmail account) or $75/ year for 40Gig, $250/ year for 150Gig or $500/ year for 400Gig. Not too expensive but still, I'd like to upload full size images in case I want to print a poster sized image of my left nostril.

Photobucket.com similarly provides a similar low res storage solution that provides 1Gig for free. The problem with the free account is that images cannot be larger than 1Mb. Fortunately there is ample bandwidth of 25Gig. This is great for online low res images. The Pro account does support higher res images of up to 5Mb, unlimited bandwidth and supports video files but it does not unlimited storage at 5Gig. The good thing about this site is that it apparently links to myspace, facebook, blogger and some other social and blogging sites. Really this is a great solution for bloggers but probably less suitable for photographers.

The final two sites I will mention I found because my cousin and my friend (who are photography enthusiasts) use them to showcase their work.

Smugmug.com is a paid service that charges $39.95 per year for unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth. The interface is clean, attractive and designed to show off photos. There is a Power User account for $59.95 per year that allows you to customise your page further and a Professional account for $149.95 per year that lets you really create your own site, watermark your images and actually sell the images.

Pbase.com is also designed for the photographer in mind, although it may be more expensive in the long run. For $23 a year you get 500Mb of storage space. For $60 a year you get 1500Mb and then you can purchase more space in 500Mb increments. So for those using the site as a alternative backup option this may not end up being such a good choice but I get the feeling the photographic community on Pbase is better than Smugmug.

So that's what I have found and I will continue to be indecisive about my options until my 1Gig is used up on Picasaweb. I've taken the time to write all this in the hopes that someone will read it and then comment about how they store & showcase their images online......

Happy Snapping

"Made In China" to "Made By China" is a long road

People copying things from other peoples websites is not a new thing. In fact it is quite common for phishing sites that make an exact duplicate of the paypal login page to try to steal usernames and passwords but sometimes I ponder why people would bother to copy something as trivial
as a flash intro. My company Avail Corporation has maintained a fairly ordinary website for the last three years. It serves it's purpose of listing the events that we are running and providing some contact information of our office in Asia.

I came across a competitor company that came up recently, purely because they decided to copy one of our successful brands, The Asian Tourism & Attractions Summit (Incidentally they named it the Asia Tourism Property and Attractions Summit....very clever) and found on one of their other events had actually plagerised our flash intro that can be found on my
company's website www.availcorp.com. (you can go to
http://www.globaleaders.com/en/2008/cos/cos/top.swf to make a comparison).

When I first saw it I was annoyed and my mind went into China bashing mode. But then upon further consideration I realised that this was not a China problem but one of a particular company with little scruples that can be found anywhere in the world. I also saw the humour in what they did. My industry is one with comparatively low barriers of entry. To be a success in conferences you need to be creative, original and understand the markets that you are targeting. It is obvious that this China company that copied my flash intro is none of these things....I
will explain why.

Our flash intro was something that we did in 2005 simply because we were too busy to focus on making our website flashy. We hired a web design company to put the entire site together on a shoestring budget so that we did not have to create a new site for every event that we did. Simple and informative was what we aimed for. I think we achieved this but it was certainly not a site that would win any awards.

My company's catch cry is "It is not enough to aim...you must Hit!" simply meaning that planning to do something is not enough, you must actually succeed in your plan. On our flash intro we split that line up so that it starts with "It is not enough to aim.." shows you some images of participants at our events taking action to guarantee their success and then ends with "..you must Hit!" In typical non-creative, un-original fashion, with a lack of understanding of the meaning of the line, they managed to copy only the "...you must Hit!" part of the phrase, which by itself is meaningless and pretty much illustrates the quality and intelligence of their management. In fact, our flash intro is so simple that it probably took more time to copy ours than it would take to design their own and still managed to mess it up.

So on my part my lawyers have drafted for me a cease and desist letter that I have sent to them but in reality, It makes no difference if they change it simply because I give my clients credit for not being fools. In fact I challenge this company to knock off more from my site so that I can further illustrate to my clients that your company does not have the intelligence or business ethics to be original.

To my friends at the Institute of Global Leaders, I wish you the best of luck and hope that one day you may have something of your own that you can truly be proud of. Until then, there are many more conference companies with much better design features that you can rip off.

Myanmar - Behind the toolshed of the global sandpit

It has been a while since I posted anything but it is Saturday and 3 times a year China reshuffles the week to make a 5 day holiday in to 3 days, so alas today I am at work, and since I know that nobody actually reads my blog I (and blogspot.com is blocked in China) I feel at ease in writing opinions that may actually be unpopular.

So I am watching CNN last night about the plight of the monks in Myanmar, and how they are taking this opportunity to plug their i-report feature on their website (which of course over time will render journalists obsolete in all stories except ones about dogs that can surf). They are receiving and broadcasting footage and images of the 100,000 monks on parade.

Myanmar, I have learned has a military control government, and the reporting has centred around how they are suppressing the protests by force. The world is outraged. It must be because I even got an invitation in facebook to join a group that supports the monks in Myanmar. The situation is so serious that even the nuns are getting involved http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070924/asp/foreign/story_8353365.asp (which the military really should begin to worry about if Buddist nuns are anything like the Catholic nuns that I grew up with.)

All I heard from the global press was condemnation of the government and the plight of these monks.

Analysts have asked about the effect of this on China,(http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/28/news/letter.php?WT.mc_id=rssasia) the US have slapped sanctions on Myanmar and even Condoleezza Rice has expressed "empathy" which is probably as much as you are going to get from her.

They even went so far as to put "visa bans on 36 members of the Myanmar junta and their families" http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/Story.asp?Article=195311&Sn=WORL&IssueID=30193. (I would be interested to see how the US will react to 10,000 visa applications from monks seeking refugee status in the US.)

So in these turmulous times, I often ask the question, WHAT STARTED ALL THIS? Was it because a leading Monk official was brutally beaten the arrested after expressing displeasure at the mistreatment of small children? NO

Was it because of actions by the government to ethnically cleanse the population of buddhist in Myanmar? NO

I was perplexed. What would cause 100,000 monks to hit the streets for 3 day in protest to a Military Government?

The answer (based on this informative FAQ by AP http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jnzM3FXBGZw5zPlnoYD4fwP8xaHw) was rising fuel prices!

I don't think you understand the importance of that last statement so let me emphasise the statement again in UPPER CASE.

RISING FUEL PRICES

Is your blood boiling? Are you up in arms? ........... no?...... neither am I.

I appreciate that this may seem insensitive and my statements may have a certain "Let them eat cake" feel about them but is there no better atrocity to protest over than INFLATION?

I could go on but I won't. I am sure that I am once again misguided and I am sure that there are many many more issues that led to this tipping point but of all things that could potentially throw a nation into turmoil and potentially overthrow a government and cause all sorts of global condemnation, please tell me is more than price fluctuations of a commodity that in the last 50 years gone from $2 per barrel to $60 per barrel.

Incidentally, what is the price of Myanmar produced opium based products these days?