#1 – Farm Stories – thank god Facebook has put an end to Farmville auto posts
#2 – Agatha the astrologer
#3 – Treasure Isle
#4 – iHeart

doubleTwist is a freely downloadable application to “transform your phone for free. Your music and videos on any device. In seconds.” (from an advertisement seen on BART). Using one easy to use application, they aim to syncronize and transfer digital media (video, audio, photo) between the desktop and “hundreds of devices” (as advertised on their homepage). For this review I used a Blackberry Tour device which doubleTwist correctly identified as a BlackBerry 9630. However, the Tour is not officially listed as a supported device, which might explain some of the feature limitations and inconsistencies I mention below.

Overall, my experience wasn’t great. I would be persuaded to switch to doubleTwist only if they at least provided feature parity with the Blackberry desktop manager. Even for those device owners without an OEM software solution (such as the Palm Pre and Android), while doubleTwist would be a possible choice, I’d argue that the experience is not that much better than manually sync’ing the media files.

Getting set up
Downloading (612KB executable) the client was very simple. Installation was noticeably long (took a few minutes) as the installer downloaded additional application files to the desktop (which don’t appear to be cached). The installation failed midway due to a “connection time out” and was aborted. Re-starting the installation caused the application files to once again be downloaded from the network and took a few more minutes, this time to successfully install.

Upon application install, the user is prompted to log in or sign up for a doubleTwist account. The sign-up process generates an eMail with a click-through link to complete the account setup. Login is required in order to launch the application.

After firing up the app and connecting the Tour, clicking on the device on the left nav brings up a view to select which media kinds to synchronize with the device and to select the root directory on the computer from which to look for each kind of media. Clicking on the “Sync” button starts media synchronization with the device. The application UI and customer flows bear strong resemblance to iTunes.

Media root location preferences (“General” tab for the device) were persisted. However, my choices of the specific folders to sync for each media kind were not persisted when I exited the app, disconnected the device and reconnected the device. The sync option is only enabled if you check a folder to sync. Unchecking a folder simply means “don’t sync this folder the next time”. It doesn’t un-sync the folder, which is a customer experience limitation. The only way is to delete the sync’ed media files manually on the device.

Music
In general, doubleTwist has a weak integration with iTunes. DoubleTwist only permits synchronization of playlists. There is no way to select albums or tracks, short of drag-and-drop. Playlists are synchronized in their entirety; track-level selection information (through checkboxes) in iTunes isn’t honored. Adding a playlist on iTunes while DoubleTwist is open doesn’t cause DoubleTwist to refresh the view. Nor is there a way to force the refresh, short of exiting and re-starting the application.

The social networking feature is interesting and curious but I did not test it – the feature is probably pushing digital music’s legal envelope. When friends send audio files, it is placed in a doubleTwist friends folder (according to a forum post) if I have a doubleTwist account, or I get an eMail from which I can play the content.

When the device is being sync’ed, the progress bar doesn’t indicate which track is being sync’ed. As a result, you don’t know exactly which tracks have been sync’ed and which haven’t. At the end of the sync process it told me, for instance, that 18 files have been synced but I didn’t know which files have actually been sync’ed. I have a deluxe album purchased through iTunes with 13 audio and 5 video tracks (Lucky Dube, Retrospective). Sync’ing just the videos (music sync option was unchecked) nevertheless caused 18 files to be sync’ed, which indicates even the audio tracks were sync’ed. Curiously, doubleTwist created an empty playlist called “Lucky Dube.pla” on my device in the Music app.

Videos
Videos can be sync’ed to the device by selecting a folder and copying all the videos in that folder to the device. Select a folder through Edit->Preferences. Then, the subfolders can be selected to sync to the device. No further selection options are available. For example, there is no way to choose either an individual video or a subfolder. The only way to achieve syncing at subfolder level is to modify the top-level directory under Edit->Preferences and then choosing the folder to sync via the device option. Secondly, there is no way to remove a video that has been sync’ed to the device. I learnt later by reading the forums that you can drag and drop tracks from the desktop library (within DoubleTwist) to the device folder, in order to achieve sync’ing of individual files.

I tried sync’ing the same folder I had sync’ed earlier and sure enough, DoubleTwist went through the motions of downloading the videos to the device. The Tour only displayed one copy of each video so it must de-duplicate the content, possibly because the same files were being overwritten.

Pictures
There is an option to sync pictures and videos with the device. You can select folders from the desktop from which pictures and videos should be sync’ed with the device. doubleTwist seems to resize the content to fit the device although I haven’t been able to find details on the resizing process. Unfortunately, there is no way to browse or fetch the photos and videos captured through the Blackberry Tour’s camera. This is a serious enough drawback that will force me to use the media management features built into the Blackberry desktop manager. In that case, doubleTwist becomes less relevant or differentiated. I’m not sure if the limitation is due to the fact that Tour isn’t an officially supported Blackberry device.

From the desktop application, there are options to publish photos and videos to Flickr and YouTube, as well as download videos from YouTube into the doubleTwist library on the desktop. I only explored the YouTube download option which worked quite well. Downloading the video was as simple as dragging and dropping the YouTube video URL to the desktop video folder. By then sync’ing the video to the device, I was able to play it on the Blackberry Tour.

The Art of Happiness by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler

“I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness” – Dalai Lama

That is the fundamental premise of the book and a topic that Howard Cutler and the Dalai Lama together explore and explain to the reader.

Happy people are found to be more loving, forgiving, sociable, flexible, creative and able to tolerate life’s daily frustrations more easily than unhappy people. They are also able to rebound quickly from health issues.

Making the right choice in daily decisions involves choosing happiness and sacrificing some pleasure. Identify what makes you happy in life (purpose of your life) and use that as the criterion for making daily decisions.

Happiness is a state of mind that remains, despite life’s ups and downs and normal fluctuations of mood, as part of the very matrix of our being. That is what we are all ultimately seeking.

Do not compare with others who have more. It is important to be contented and appreciate what we have.

Identify and cultivate positive mental states. Identify and eliminate negative mental states.

If it is natural to want to gain happiness, why aren’t we human beings innately learning to reject negative behaviors and naturally becoming happier as our life progresses? The Dalai Lama alludes that this will be true only if we educate ourselves and learn from our experiences.

I’ve had a BlackBerry 8703e through Verizon Wireless for almost 3 years and was largely satisfied with it. The device has been rock solid and stable with no misbehavior. Enterprise eMail worked flawlessly and I could access the intranet at work. The battery had become significantly weaker and I had endured it for almost a year since I was waiting to upgrade. I tried the Storm eagerly but while its soft keyboard with tactile feedback was a significant improvement over the iPhone/iPod experience, I was not yet ready to wean myself off a physical QWERTY keyboard.

BlackBerry Tour holds promise with its elegant design and multimedia capabilities. It is significantly smaller, lighter, sleeker, shinier than the 8703. The keys are closer and are etched so you can feel them in the dark. The etching is on one side of the key so you end up pressing it down on the other side, which takes a bit of getting used to. The alt key is on the left side and typing the numbers 4 and 7 are somewhat of a challenge since they are pretty close to the alt key. People will bigger hands will find it really difficult. The trackball is quite sensitive. Horizontal scrolling takes getting used to and for some reason, I am finding it easier to use on one hand than the other.

The bedside mode wasn’t available on the 8703 and it lets you control the radio, LED and display settings. I dont know if the device is intelligent enough to stop checking eMail messages in the bedside mode. That could extend the battery life. Speaking of battery, I’m noticing that it takes significantly longer (than the 8703) to fully charge the battery, even when the phone is plugged into the wall socket.

It was an easy transition for me and I was up and running in no time. One of the first things I did was to register the phone at work for enterprise service and install the BlackBerry App World client to check out available third-party applications. This is been written about in the media and while the selection is fairly small compared to the iPhone app store, there are still hundreds of applications available. Curiously, google maps and TwitterBerry are not available on the App World but they can be downloaded directly from google and Orangatame’s website. Instant messenger clients are very handy and messages can optionally be integrated right into the email client.

The Tour has a built-in 3.2 megapixel camera with options to control image size, autofocus (although the focus area is quite large), color (normal, B&W, Sepia), image stabilization and built-in flash activation. The image quality is decent for a camera phone but noise is clearly visible even on images shot in broad daylight. There is also a video camera, again of very good quality and handy. Audio quality is quite clear and crisp.

Since I had shot some pictures, videos and voice recordings, I decided to install the Desktop Manager application to synchronize to the desktop. During the application install, unfortunately, I selected the Enterprise Server option. This screwed up my email accounts by setting up my hotmail address a redirector for work email. As a consequence, I stopped being able to send or receive eMails through my work address. This morning, I spent 45 mins on phone, first with Verizon Wireless help staff then first-level RIM support. Finally, I was put in touch with second-level support who diagnosed the problem and tried resetting the security token. That didn’t solve the problem and I had to go back to my IT to re-send service books. Unfortunately, to re-activate enterprise services, my device was wiped clean and I lost all the contacts I had updated recently. The applications I installed were intact since they were presumably installed on the flash card, not native memory.

Fully charging the battery took roughly 130 minutes with the radio turned ON and bluetooth turned OFF and with no phone use during charging except a couple of times when I checked the battery status to time the process.

Voice quality on the Tour seems inferior to that on the 8703. People at the other end have commented that the voice seems very distant, on both bluetooth and direct from the handset. The microphone on the Tour is located on the face below the keyboard and left of center. In comparison, the microphone on the 8703 is located on the front face. When held with the left hand, I suspect the Tour’s microphone has a more difficult time picking up the signals. Switching hands seems to improve voice quality, presumably because the microphone ends up closer to the mouth.

Blackberry desktop manager has good integration with iTunes (via the Media sync application) to import playlists and sychronize them with the Tour. The app is intelligent enough to skip over DRM-protected tracks. It doesn’t honor the track selections in iTunes playlist and syncs the entire playlist to the Tour. I wish RIM had paid more attention to improving the usability of the desktop application. For one, there are way too many password prompts. Synchronization causes the device screen to flicker often between the clock view (default when charging), a screen that (I think) says “Connecting to Computer” and a screen that shows a pictorial representation of a computer and the Tour sychronizing. On the positive side, the desktop manager un-syncs playlists when they are unchecked on the media manager.

The BlackBerry Media Sync application can move images and videos produced on the device to the computer and MP3 files from the computer to the device. It skips over MP4 video files on the computer (I follow a few video podcasts). To copy those to the device, I have to switch to the Roxio Media Manager application. The applications should be better integrated – there is no reason why the customer should know which application to use for which files. The Media Manager provides options on converting the videos so they are optimized for the device.

On the whole, I have been generally happy with the Tour. With the ability to play podcasts on the phone, I see myself using my iPod Touch less often. I have started on a project to shoot a picture a day on the Tour and share them via twitter. BTW, with TwitterBerry installed, you have the option of directly uploading the images to twitter from the device. However, due to the EDGE network and twitpic’s bandwidth, it is nearly impractical to upload the images this way. I’ve found it much easier to email the image from the device and uploading it to Twitter from the desktop. It would have been a huge win if the Tour were WiFi capable.

With so many hundreds of billions of dollars being pumped into the US economy over the past 10 months one would expect, based on conventional wisdom, an increase in inflation rate. However, there has been a disinflationary trend since July 2008 and inflation rates have been in negative territory since March 2009. How can this be possible?

Currently, there is a real risk of deflation, which is more difficult to manage through monetary policy than inflation. The government’s expansionary fiscal policy through increased spending should be expected to raise interest rates and raise inflation by putting more money is consumer’s pockets. The reality is exactly the opposite.

According to the DAD-SAS macroeconomic model, at equilibrium inflation and potential output (GDP) are defined by the point where the positively sloped aggregate supply curve (SAS) and negatively sloped aggregate demand curve (DAD) intersect. When the equilibrium is disturbed, actual output could either be higher (if DAD curve shifts to the right) or lower than potential output, causing a corresponding output gap. A negative output gap will cause a downward pressure on inflation rate and shift the SAS curve to the right/down until output (GDP) is once again at its potential, or at equilibrium.

Expansionary fiscal policy will shift the DAD curve (causing a positive output gap) to the right and put an upward pressure on inflation rate. This will decrease the output gap until actual GDP is once again at potential. The result is a permanently higher inflation rate. This is the theory based on which we expect to see high levels of inflation given the high levels of government spending. The actual data indicates exactly the opposite. So, lets analyze what could have happened.

What we are missing in the above analysis are high unemployment rates (9.1% as of May 2009) and consequently lower levels of household incomes, lower levels of corporate investment and a shaken consumer confidence. All these factors cause the DAD curve to shift to the left and apparently the leftward shift has been greater than the rightward shift expected from the stimulus-based spending. Based on the recent disinflationary trend, we can infer that the actual GDP is below potential GDP causing a negative output gap. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that we’ll end 2009 with actual GDP 8% below potential. In order to return to equilibrium, inflation has to drop further (reducing the negative output gap). The greater fear now is deflation, not inflation.

I sprinted across a grassy field on a swelteringly hot day, perhaps feeling lighter that a load has been lifted off my shoulders. My legs started to buckle and as I dove down to take a spill, curiously the feeling was that of elation, not a dread of getting injured. The moment I hit the ground, the football clutched in my arms begins to roll away and dark figures who had been chasing me eagerly lunge forward to retrieve it. As I recovered my balance, I heard a scuffle and trash talking about the exact location of the line of scrimmage. My teammate dropped the ball and a player from the opponent kicked it back towards us, farther away from our goal. In retaliation, my teammate kicked it closer to the goal claiming the other team was cheating.

There was a reason why grown-ups were squabbling like kids…and having so much fun! We had just taken the final exam in Macroeconomics at the end of a grueling first year of EWMBA program at UC Berkeley’s Haas school of Business. How time flies! It feels just like yesterday that arrived at Downtown Berkeley’s BART station for the orientation event in the middle of August 2008. It was a nice and sunny day, yet I was shivering in the cold breeze as I waited for the shuttle from Doubletree Berkeley Marina to pick me up. Today is already Saturday, May 16, 2009.

Preparations for this momentous game started three weeks ago with the forming of MFL (multi-cultural football league). The “helping hands of Haas” took tips from Prof.Wilton’s Marketing class and in a customer-focused, entrepreneurial fashion, organized a clinic for newbies to football meant to cover basic rules and familiarity with the game as well as throwing and catching practice. There was a strong turnout today despite the weather and we had enough players to form 4 teams. After 90 minutes on the field and then bidding goodbyes to everybody, as I drove back home, I reflected on indelible memories of the past year.

I had previously written about my experiences at the orientation last year and how I was the first person to be cold called by in class by Prof. Nondorf. (Un)Fortunately, cold calling wasn’t a regular affair, except for Prof. Schultz’s Organization Behavior and Leadership classes and Prof. Spiller’s Ethics class. Prof. Weil’s Accounting class was a one-of-a-kind experience, with his use of comedy, protagonists and personification of accounting concepts. There was some cold calling but he did that in a methodical fashion so you could see it coming.

Prof. Su very effectively ran supply-chain simulations in his class on Operations. Prof. Spiller and Prof. Schultz conducted in-class exercises to illustrate concepts. Prof. Wood and Prof. Wilton chose long-running capstone projects in Macroeconomics and Marketing to apply all the concepts learned in class. Prof. Livdan held a quiz every class in Finance and Prof. Gonzalez handed out homework every week in Microeconomics. Mr. Rittenberg effectively brought his acting skills to the Leadership Communications class.

Prof. Gonzalez chose to save the best for last – spending the last two hours of class after the finals to discuss the current economic situation and delving into MBS, CDOs and CDS. Prof. Wood very effectively used contemporary news articles to supplement class discussion topics on Macroeconomics. We learned a lot about Ritz-Carlton from Prof. Wilton, about buying a home in a recession from Prof. Livdan and about the Chicago White Sox from Prof. Weil.

The amount of reading material was significantly more than I had anticipated. Prof. Spiller’s were the most dense, with topics culled from erstwhile and contemporary philosophers. Prof. Schultz also handed out quite a bit of reading material but he made it a point to discuss each paper in class.

Over the next two years, we’ll choose from a pool of electives from both the weekday and weekend offerings. My cohort will graduate together but we will no longer all sit in the same classes. So, the memories from this past year are all more cherishable.

A number of inter-related factors led to the current economic situation.

Some say it started with Alan Greenspan’s wholesale de-regulation of the financial system starting in the early ’90s and continuing well into this this decade. Steven Perlstein wrote in The Washington Post in an early 2006 article that Greenspan’s policies at the Fed has left the financial system “more prone to assets bubbles, corporate scandal and financial crises”.

Fed also significantly lowered interest rates earlier this decade to pull the country out of the mild recession in 2000-2001. One one hand, it encouraged home ownership and simultaneously fueled innovation in financial instruments (so lenders can offer higher returns). There was little transparency in the composition and characteristics of the loans held in the pools sold as complicated securities and the power bestowed to credit rating agencies increased. The agencies (Moody’s included) are alleged to have gone from being watchdogs for investors to being lapdogs for debt issuers. At the heart of the issue is the question of whether credit risks were undetectable or whether they were ignored. Did the three top credit-rating agencies go easy on their ratings of risky securities to rake in huge profits, eventually leading to huge losses for investors?

When I first heard about Twitter a long time ago, my first mental impression was that of The Osbournes show on TV. I signed up but the thought of running a live commentary about my life repelled me.

I had read about the role Twitter played in defusing the terrorist attack and rescuing hostages from Mumbai in late 2008. A few weeks ago, one of my colleagues in Luxembourg asked me if I felt “the” earthquake in San Francisco. “What are you talking about?”, I asked. She replied that she learned about the earthquake that occured an hour ago through tweets from some of her friends living in the SFO bay area. I had learnt about a geological event right under my feet from somebody thousands of miles ago, thanks to Twitter.

The tipping point came last weekend when my GSI in a Leadership Communications class at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business presented a slideshow about twitter. She has authored The Twitter Book with Tim O’Reilly so I decided to check out her twitter site. As I explore twitter, I am starting to get hooked.

The usability of Twitter and its ecosystem has room for improvement. For a newcomer, the “What are you doing?” text field is confusing. “Who is asking” was my mental response. What I’m really being asked is “What is your tweet?”.

OK, so I know enough to read and write simple tweets. What I didn’t want to do is keep polling the twitter site to read the tweets. Since I use igoogle, I wanted to see how I can follow the tweets through a widget. Why isn’t there a google gadget from Twitter that I can use to track personal tweets? I dont know if I can trust any of the third party widgets with my Twitter credentials.

A day later, as I read Sarah’s tweets, I noticed they were posted through twhirl. Buried in the fine print at the bottom of the Twitter page is a link to apps and twhirl is one of them. Why aren’t these client apps more prominently merchandised on the Twitter page? In the normal course of events, I wouldn’t have trusted twhirl but I’m swayed now that I see somebody that I know using it.

Finding people isn’t easy – you have to know their name and they have to use their real name to be found. Twitter does provide integration with gmail, hotmail and yahoo address books but it would be even more valuable if Twitter can link to LinkedIn, Facebook or MySpace networks.

A feature to search by affiliation would also be very useful. For example, I should be able to discover the twitter accounts of my cohorts in business school. For Twitter to explode, the discovery model should be significantly improved.

With the economy officially in a recession and consumers cutting back on spending, marketers face a new challenge. Especially when one is trying to sell a commodity product such as laptops. How does a manufacturer not only keep its market share but demand higher prices in this environment?

Clearly articulating customer value proposition is key to the success of a marketing campaign. It should always be about the customer’s perceived benefits, not about the product’s features. When a product offers a unique value proposition, customers will vote with their open wallets. In chapter 10 of Marketer’s Toolkit: The 10 Strategies You Need To Succeed (Harvard Business Essentials), the author writes that “customers don’t buy features, they buy benefits”.

GE is selling a washer and dryer set for $3,500 by articulating low resource utilization (uses optimal amounts of water, soap and electricity) and that clothes last longer (stressing that the machines are gentle on clothes). Lexus is pitching their cars as having a “low cost of ownership”, alluding to its fuel economy, durability and resale value. See the article “How to Sell Luxury to Penny Pinchers” in the November 10, 2008 issue of Businessweek.

The same issue of Businessweek also has an article about Dell’s customizable “designer” laptops and how it is planning to charge a premium price for this benefit. In chapter 8 of the Marketer’s Toolkit, the author talks about a “stage-gate” process of continuously prototyping and testing ideas to eliminate weak ones. This is exemplified in Dell’s approach to designer laptops. Senior management was wary of Dell’s initial test in this space when a limited edition laptop designed by an obscure graffiti artist, Mike Ming, was released. Market reacted favorably and offered a stage-gate validation to extend this into customizable designer laptops with a number of choices available to customers.

I must say the highlight of my orientation weekend was becoming the very first EWMBA student in the class of 2011 to be cold called by a professor in class.

It was a friday evening and I checked into the Doubletree Hotel at Berkeley Marina. Over the next three days, I would be participating in the new student orientation, for the 2011 class of Evening and Weekend MBA students at UC Berkeley’s Haas school of business. Soon after checkin, we were each handed a packet with reading material and told to prepare for a case study to be discussed the next day in the classroom.

Fortunately, I had recently re-acquainted myself with the rigors of classroom learning experience. One of the entrance requirements to Haas was to complete a pre-requisite course in Statistics, which I satisfied through UC Berkeley’s extension. I had to complete the course and receive a passing grade prior to the start of orientation. I had planned my study such that I was completing each of the 12 course units every week. As a result, my schedule over the past three months had been crazy. Good, I thought; a 5-page business case study to read overnight, no problem!

Friday night’s event was a welcome dinner, interspersed with addresses by the dean, associate director and an alumnus’s address, followed by informal networking with classmates. My day had started early in preparation to fly down to Oakland from Seattle. My wife dropped me at the airport and after the 2-hour flight, a shuttle ride on AirBART to the Oakland Coliseum station, a ride on the BART to Downtown Berkeley station, a shuttle ride to the hotel and finally a dinner reception, I was ready to put off the case study on Robert Mondavi’s winemaking business until the next morning.

Students were up by 8AM the next day for breakfast and after an hour-long talk on leading through innovation, we headed to the hotel’s parking lot for a team-building exercise. We were divided into 20 teams and each of us were given identical set of materials and an hour to design and construct a structure that would withstand the assault of really fast-flying tennis balls. The team whose structure has the most number of intact eggs within the structure, ranked by the height of the eggs above the ground, would be the winners. This was our first taste of team collaboration among the students. It was clear within a few minutes who were the doers and managers, visionaries and risk-takers, cautious and impatient types…and those commenting from the peanut gallery. No, the goal of the exercise was not to segment students but I can’t help mention. What really stood out was everyone’s creative energies, ability to disagree but commit, scramble as a team to win and still cheer competitors.

We then boarded a shuttle to Haas and, after what seemed like an eternity before the photographer snapped a few group photos of the entering class, headed to a 90-minute case discussion in the classroom. As prof.Maria Nandorff discussed the use of a case study as a teaching method, I remembered my recent meeting with a senior leader at amazon.com who had remarked, “always have an opinion on everything, take sides and be able to defend your position”. Thankfully I had heeded that advice while reading the case earlier that morning and I wasn’t at a loss when prof.Nandorff cold called me to discuss the key issues in the Mondavi case. It is not without reason that the senior leader offered me that advice. Successful leaders are those that make good judgements quickly even in an ambiguous situation. Quality of judgements can only be improved via experiential learning whereby one makes a judgement (takes a stand), evaluates the quality of its outcome and applies the learning into the next judgement. While this feedback loop can take a long time in a real-world situation, a case study discussion short-circuits the timeframe by offering nearly instant feedback on the possible outcomes of one’s judgement and alternate possibilities.

The rest of the afternoon was spent touring in and around Haas, followed by a rock-n-roll themed costume party dinner and karaoke. By sunday morning we checked out of our rooms and after a couple of hours of talks from the career services and the alumni association, we temporarily parted ways, with a plan to re-unite during the following weeks as classes get underway.