down the avenue

The Valley of Happiness

The May issue of Atlantic Monthly cites a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research which suggests that happiness and psychological well-being decrease as we approach our late 40s, after which we become happier again.   Life apparently is a big U-shaped valley of joy. 

500,000 Americans and Europeans were selected for the study, which was published in January 2007.  According to the results, American men are least happy at age 49, American women at 45.  Maybe AARP should change their slogan to "Happiness Begins at 50."

By the way, Europeans are getting progressively happier while Americans are becoming less happy (is it all dependent on currency exchange rates, or just that they don't have King George leading their countries?).

As a 45-year-old American male, I thought about the downward slope of the next four years and decided that if I am entering the shadow of the valley of happiness, pastures are nevertheless rather green and my cup still runneth at least half-full. 

Great Gadgets for Moms

Client Retrevo's Alka Gupta was on this morning's Ronn Owens show in San Francisco's ABC KGO studio.

With Retrevo being the only site solely dedicated to all things consumer electronics and Mother's Day coming up this weekend, Alka talked about the kinds of things that women want in a gadget, what is important and why. She also had a host of consumer electronics gadgets that would be great for Mom this Mother's day. She was in the second part of the segment so if you want to tune in, click here and scroll the bar half way across to listen in.

In the last few weeks alone, Retrevo was also on KUFX-FM/KFOX-FM: the Greg Kihn Show (top rock music station in the Bay Area with over 300K listeners), KVUE.com, KBAY/KEZR FM, KEZR-FM: Marla Davies morning show, and KSCO-AM.

Note that Retrevo did not have any sponsorship, advertising and other connection to the vendors that were discussed. They were simply chosen based on their design, price and whether they'd make a great gift, particularly for moms who want gadgets to be simple and easy-to-use.

Some of the suggestions included the Plantronics Discovery 925 Bluetooth headset, which looks like a piece of jewelry, the Flip Video, which comes in an array of fun colors, and is small enough to fit in a purse or pocket, key chain photo frames, floating rose lights, webcams, and the new Canon SD1100 which comes in blue and pink as well as silver.

Ronn Owens remains a fabulous radio personality and has had a number of high powered guests on his show; Barbara Walters is slated for this month. In a format which explores everything from politics to popular culture, current events, personal issues and just plain gossip, his program is the ultimate electronic town meeting.

Before our segment, State Senator Carole Migden, the incumbent was on to discuss the issues. Many of the most colorful personalities of our times have been guests, including Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Barbara Bush, Desmond Tutu, Walter Cronkite, Burt Reynolds, Lauren Bacall, Caroline Kennedy, Huey Lewis, Summer Redstone and Barak Obama. Enjoy!

Brunch

Girls brunch in back garden - flowers blooming, sun shining. Must do more of this.

Mothers Day Event for Women Without Mothers or Kids

Sunday is Mother's Day, also a day for women without children or mothers. Free and open to women from all traditions, an event will be held at the Congregation Ner Tamid, 1250 Quintara Street in San Francisco on Sunday from 11 am to 1 pm and 2 pm to 4 pm. The morning session will be for women without children and the afternoon session will be for women without mothers. For the latter, if you have a photo of your mother, bring one to share.

The idea is to bring women together and celebrate the joys and/or sadness of this facet of our lives. They'll honor the thousands of year old mythological, cultural and historical annual celebrations of women, peace and creativity. Ilene Serlin, PhD, Pres-Elect of the San Francisco Psychological Association, will moderate.

Japan Knows its Electronics & its Toilets

As I walked around the biggest electronics store I've ever seen in my life in the "Electric City" district of Tokyo (also called Akihabara), the strains of a familiar song kept jumping into my brain.

It had happy Japanese words and was repeated over and over. What was that tune?

OMG: It's the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" with new peppy words that sounded like they were saying this is a happy place to shop. It's the theme song of Akihabara, which is a huge Times Square-like district devoted to electric necessities and toys ,and it has me wondering: is the Battle Hymn based on some ancient samurai tune, or did they rip this once solemn song from the public domain?

On weekends costumed anime characters wander around. The rest of the time, people with bullhorns shout out the latest sales.

Imagine the biggest Fry's you've seen. Add seven stories to it and high end products with testing rooms and then multiply it by 30 buildings and you have Akihabara. Don't forget to throw in a handful of goofy restaurants where Japanese women in Merry Maids costumes will bat their eyes at you and talk to you, if you buy a $20 cup of coffee (no pictures allowed, the signs say).

Basically, I wanted EVERYTHING there except the maids. The new tube amplifiers for iPods are genius. An iPod never sounded this good. I went back three times to listen, just waiting for the day I can afford one (a great system would be $3,200). They make the music sound "anarogue," as one of the jazz cafes I visited, that played only vinyl records boasted.

And, oh yeah, the toilet seats.

They may not be a big conversation piece in the States, but 70 percent of the homes in Japan have heated toilet seats with built in nozzles that shoot warm water at your private parts.

It seems that every foreigner who tries them thinks about buying one, and there are big toilet seat sections in the Akihabra stores with directions and advice in English for foreigners. There was a steady stream of them in Akihabra, including a Russian cardiac surgeon I talked to, asking about toilet seat voltage.

For a minute, I thought that this could be my fortune, bringing the greatest toilet seats the world has known back to the U.S.

Then, I found out San Francisco entrepreneur Scott Pinnozzotto has done even better, building his own Swash seats for Brondell, and selling them at Bed, Bath and Beyond.

There goes my shot at the anarogue system.

Newspapers Last Stand, Onion Says

The Onion reports that newspapers, breathing their last breath, can still cover something important: the story of newspapers breathing their last breath. READ ALL ABOUT IT.

As a reporter, blogger, and fan, it's distressing, of course, not only to see the industry under such fire from outside, but to be employing such mediocre management inside.

After reading two days of Kentucky Derby coverage, I'm particularly bothered. Not one of the 13 papers I checked, reported anything but that Eight Belles--the Kentucky filly that was shot in the head on the Derby track Saturday-- was "euthanized."

I even heard people who heard the term assume that the horse was given a painless lethal injection.

Sorry. In trying to make everything safe and inoffensive, our publications have become spineless. None told it how it was. And many, including the New York Times, lambasted NBC for being too slow to report what happened to the horse in its live coverage.

As if that vindicated the print media, being a bit less lame than the broadcast counterpart?

The truth is, the shooting of a horse like that, which would bring charges of animal cruelty if anyone else did it, should open a broad debate on the cruelty of horse racing.

How is it that Michael Vick gets sentenced to years in jail for dog fighting, but these horse murderers walk scot free?

It's economics.

A horse that can be treated off the field and have its legs fixed, won't bring the insurance dollars of one that dies during a race.

In Europe, horses aren't allowed to race until they are three, and their legs are fully developed. Here it is 18 months, and you see what can happen.

These are some of the questions people should be asking today, but with "euthanized" journalism, the real issues never come up.

The Japanese Mind: An Inch Wide, Two Miles Deep

So says my friend Andrew Morse, who covers Japanese companies for the Wall Street Journal.

Morse gave me an awesome tour of Tokyo, including a series of small bars in districts tourists rarely find. The bars seat nine or 10 people, and each has a specialized theme.

We saw three that did nothing but play blues music; one that only played the music of the Who; one that just played old jazz on vinyl records.

They were glorious, my favorite things about the spotless, thriving city of 12 million. You could walk in and communicate with music, the universal language, even when there was no common verbal language.

At one bar called Bar Comforts, the owner picked up a guitar and jammed with me on harmonica. All by telepathy. Then, he played the music of harmonica player Little Walter, on whom he was an expert.

That's when Morse made his comment about the Japanese mind.

"He won't know other music. He won't know rock, or reggae. But he will know everything about the blues. And maybe just a small piece of the blues, like 1938. But he will know everything about that. One inch wide, two miles deep."

I had some further proof of the Japanese love for music when I visited Tower Records there (it survives there; Japanese still buy disks and don't steal the music with downloads). There were two obscure Delta Groove albums I wrote bios and liner notes for, displayed prominently: "Command Performance," by the Legendary Rhythm and Blues Band; and "We Can Be Together," by Sean Costello, who died in mid April.

I've never seen them displayed stateside and had to buy them with the Japanese writing. I can't believe I had to travel 9,000 miles to find some great Delta blues.

I'll take the two miles deep, if it means that you get into what you are into with this kind of passion. Even, if it means you have to dress up like the Mariachi on this page.

Ala Carting of Video on the Net: What Meaneth?

Writes Mark Cuban this week: Ala Carting of Video on the Net - Will it lead to disaster?

He tells us about a report by Craig Moffett of Bernstein Research entitled "And Now for the News...The Emperor Has No Clothes."

From the Report:
Ironically, we are headed down the same self-destructive road for other kinds of traditional media,as well. Five years into the video-over-the-Internet revolution, we have learned two things. First; consumers won't pay for content on the web, so it will have to be ad supported. And second; it won't be ad supported.

In the cable TV network world, half of all revenues come from affiliate (carriage) fees paid by the Comcasts and DirecTVs of the world. The other half comes from advertising. But in the TV world, a typical half hour show supports an ad load of about 8 minutes.

On the web, early evidence suggests that consumers will tune out – click away – if they are forced to watch more than 30 seconds or so of advertising up front, and maybe another 90 seconds of advertising over the next thirty minutes. Hulu.com, for example, which has already been lionized by many as the future of TV, serves two minutes of advertising for every 22 minutes of programming(i.e. the programming duration of a typical half hour show from television). Assuming identical CPMs for web video and TV, and after accounting for lost affiliate fees, a 30 minute program on the web with two minutes of advertising yields approximately 1/8th as much revenue per viewer.

Are content producers prepared to reduce production costs...by 88%?

In fact, the actual economics of web-based video are far, far worse than this. Our 88% decline ignores the corrosive impact of à la carte on traditional video economics. In the public debate in Washington, the phrase à la carte refers to the idea that a few strong networks demand the carriage of a host of weaker ones, effectively subsidizing a much larger family of channels.

Start-Up Camp 2008 Recap

I went to the very first Start-up camp, which was held in Silicon Valley a few years ago. Industry pal David Berlind is behind the idea and since its launch, it has grown from a couple hundred attendees in a Silicon Valley office, to double that on a hotel floor to the Moscone this year, where they had more than 1,000 RSVPs on an open wiki.

Sponsored this year by Sun, Start-up camp, still in its unconference format, was held at the back of a very large conference center open-air room, the very same one where Sun's CommunityOne event for developers (not to be confused with CommunityNext) was held.

All of these sub-groups made up Sun's Java One event, an extremely large event designed to bring developers and consumers together to exchange information and ideas about the converging technology-enabled digital network that lets information flow between mobile devices, computers, televisions, and automobile screens.

There was also something called Base Camp, not to be confused with Start-up camp, although there were held in the same area. To be honest, I couldn't really understand what was what for several hours.

The idea is a great one: bring everyone and anyone who cares about technology mash-ups and entrepreneurship under one roof for a few days. While wonderful in theory, a shortcoming was that perhaps it was too much in one place at one time. It made things a bit confusing for newcomers (particularly if you were not a geek), and I could tell that I was one of the few right brains roaming the floors.

How do you know when you're surrounded by geeks you ask? Their idea of fashion is buying a baby sized t-shirt that says Java One on it and then waiting in an hour long line for another logoed t-shirt and a small logoed notebook that had a logoed pin attached to it. I watched in disbelief a couple hundred people (men and women) waiting in this very long line for a cheap cotton tote, a t-shirt and notebook.

This is not unique to Java One. I've been going to geek conferences for years and standing in line for freebees seems to be an obsession even if they are high paid developers who already have basements, attics and offices full of stuff.

Did I mention that geeks will nudge you (albeit politely) out of the way to grab a Dr. Dobbs or SD Times magazine? (I used to work with those rags years ago and am surprised they're still going strong).

It took me awhile to make my way through the geek marketing stalls to the Start-up camp area. There was no signage, so unless you found a Start-up attendee by accident (which was difficult to do in a hall of that size where the majority of attendees were wearing Java One or Community One badges), you were left wandering around asking yet another person with an official badge where to go. And none of them knew.

Last time I attended, the event was smaller, held in a hotel, the break out sessions were in separate rooms so it was easy to figure out where to go and actually hear the organizer and attendees speak. In a large room, where people are hovering at tables next to each other, the echo of the large room and close proximity made it very hard to hear what was being said.

Don't get me wrong. I 'get' Sun's involvement and why they sponsored Start-up camp. David's idea is a great one and it is growing in popularity and size. If I were him, I would have jumped at the sponsorship opportunity. Why not? It's a win win: Sun gets exposure to start-up entrepreneurs and through their sponsorship, those same entrepreneurs enjoy a free two day event where they can exchange great ideas and learn about everything from finding a co-founder and setting up a website to legal issues and marketing your product within tight budget parameters.

Speaking of, on day one (Sunday), there was a session advising start-ups on how to get 'press.' Mashable covered the highlights. On this panel that discussed "Rules for a Successful Media Launch," included Matt Dickman, Vice-President of Fleishman-Hillard, Jyri Engestrom, Entreprenuer and Google employee, Christina Kerley, a Marketing Specialist from ckEpiphany, Inc. and Adam Metz, a Partner at theMIX Agency.

Summary below:

~ have a good personality that becomes central to the brand (Steve Jobs, Richard Branson)
~ have transparency with different audiences: press, users, consumers, partners, etc.
~ current trends. how can you use them to tell your story?
~ strategy behind press and marketing
~ first impressions are key. you have 5 seconds or less to convey how your different, & institute personality
~ create new tactics. if you don’t fit into an existing category, create one.
~ make a conversation centralizer, whether it be an aggregator on your RSS, or a network on Ning where others can engage in the discussions
~ jaiku example: get people to rely on your platform for their own success, because they’ll do marketing for you.

Most of the break-out sessions were more technical or logistical in nature, so it was great to see some broader topics discussed. This year, they also had a 'best start-up' contest.

They ran speed geeking sessions (geeky version of speed dating), where attendees would move from table to table and listen to start ups pitch their business idea. Each founder had about five minutes to convince each group of visitors that their business most deserves first place prize.

When time was up, Berlind would blow his horn (loudly I might add), and everyone would shift. Below, lead camp counselors David Berlind and Fritz Nelson (they're both great guys btw.....which one do you think lives in Los Angeles??)

The break-out sessions at an unconference is a cool concept for those outside the Valley and new to the idea. People simply write a topic or idea they want to lead on a piece of paper and throw it up on the board next to a date, time and location.

Start-up Board, where people post the sessions they want to lead

One of my favorite additions this year was THE BALL. You could climb inside this large see-through ball, cushion yourself in the middle and then have someone (in this case, the guy in the turquoise blue to the right), roll you down the floor. It's a low tech version of an amusement park ride, but at a high tech conference. Note to others: very very fun. A must try.

While I obviously found the logistics confusing, particularly compared to previous years, part of this comes from growth.

A few tips for next year to make it even more valuable for attendees:

--make location and times clear (include a map of the convention center and throw in a landmark (we'll be located in the far right back corner, behind the CommunityNext event in the same hall next to the large popcorn maker)
--move it to a smaller room or area to avoid the echo effect, which destroys intimate discussions, so critical for an unconference setting
--make sure wifi works well in the section of the hall where everyone is participating; many were taking notes in real time, some on their blogs or communicating via twitter. I brought my EVDO card to get by.
--up the energy. The horn helped of course and frankly, it wouldn't be Start-up camp without Berlind and his horn :-)

I should add a comment about the fun bean bag chairs; Sun's neon green chairs were a nice addition. In the main area near the escalators, they had bright orange ones as well. Here, they played catchy new age music with a beat. Had there been power, I would have cozied up with my laptop for the afternoon since I obviously don't get to work on a neon bean bag chair every day surrounded by dozens of really creative people.

Upcoming Web 2.0 Events

Mashable has an extensive, comprehensive post about upcoming Web 2.0 and technology events. It's a great list. A summary is represented below in logos only.

Once Upon a Time, I Lived on a Kibbutz

Returning to Israel after so many years was more than a rendezvous with nostalgia. My current life as a publicist, entrepreneur and blogger met the former me, a teenage girl with a pony-tail on an adventure that more than shaped the rest of her life.

This story is a very long one and not typical of my regular blog posts. For that reason, I've shortened the introduction - click on more if you're interested in reading the entire piece. It's a story of a journey back in time, back to Israel and the life I knew 23'ish years ago, hitching and living on the road and working on a far left Zionist kibbutz, a fact I didn't know when I first arrived.

My first experience in Israel was a coming-of-age story in countless ways. I never saw Israel as a new country full of immigrants who went there to find a better life for many of the same reasons the oppressed and the misfits flocked to the States at the turn of the century.

Nearly all of my encounters during that trip so many years ago were with misfits – misfits who were on a journey to find themselves and each other. They came from nearly every corner of the world, had a wide range of belief systems and religions, and ranged from 17 to 70.

It was because we were all escaping from where we felt we didn’t fit in only to learn we were escaping from - rather than embracing - ourselves. So while part of this journey was about coming of age, part of it was about tragedy and escape – for so many of us.

I lived on Kibbutz Zikim, which is south of Ashkelon along the western coast, only a half mile from the Gaza strip. 80-year-old Peter, who has his own remarkable story, offered to drive me back to my old kibbutz, warning me that kibbutzim today are not what they were and many are no longer in operation.

When kibbutzim were first founded at the turn of the 20th century, they were extremely popular as were the strong Zionist movements which formed many of these early Israel communes. Early fo