Ok, so I know that everybody has some kind of “Google should buy X company, what’s wrong with those guys!?” opinion, but I still would like to add my $.02. To that end, a couple of weeks ago news popped up that Plaxo was putting itself up for sale (see here for more).

That news (and some updates to it) got me thinking, it would be great (for me at least) if Google actually went and bought Plaxo.

I remember Plaxo from a few years back when it started. I think they were trying to market themselves as an online backup for all your addresses or something like that, I’m not sure. It seemed like everybody knew about them because once you joined, if you didn’t pay really careful attention to all the choices and check boxes, they would end up spamming everybody in your address book. I remember getting several emails from the service, followed by apologetic emails from friends that vowed never to use it again (though to be fair, my girlfriend said all you had to do was pay attention and there was no problem — but who pays attention when something is installing, you’re just clicking yes until it finishes, right?). Recently, after hearing that they cleaned up some of their annoying ways and were trying to reposition the company as a social network, and after some prompting, I signed up. Honestly, I haven’t had much use for it yet. I have it keeping in sync with my contacts from Address Book (the program), but I already keep those contacts in sync with my phone, and I back up my computer pretty regularly, so I don’t really worry about losing any info (sorry to all those people I told that I lost your info, you were just a victim of some regular pruning). It’s nice to have people’s contact info constantly up-to-date as they change it, but I don’t really talk to any of the people in my address book that use it anyway. All of the social networking aspects of it are just lost on me, because I just don’t see the point — I already have myspace and facebook. I don’t want to keep tabs on everybody in my contact list like that, and I certainly don’t want all of them keeping track of me. Plenty of them are just work contacts that I would like to keep as far away from my personal life as possible (something Google should keep in mind as well). Right now Plaxo is just sitting there, using up processor space on my computer.

I use Google’s products pretty extensively though, and one of the glaring problems that connects all these services is that the contact management sucks on all of them. This is the case even with the product where contact management would matter the most — Gmail. They rolled out some new updates to the contact manager in Gmail recently, but honestly, it still sucks. I hate that it automatically adds everybody I email to my contacts, which has had the effect of making me give up and stop bothering to prune the list anymore, since it’ll just get messy again in a few weeks. The unpredictability, with some addresses showing up in Gmail, but not showing up when I want to email a story to someone in Reader or share a document, and showing up in a different, seemingly random, order each time, is irritating as well. And, (probably a good thing because of gripe #1, now that I think about it) it doesn’t sync with addressbook, all I can do is upload new contacts one by one. It would be nice to add an address to my phone, sync it with my computer, and have all my contact info living in perfect harmony. The extra step of explicitly adding it in Gmail is getting to be too much for me.

Google buying Plaxo would help me out a lot with this whole contact management thing. I recently signed up for GrandCentral (another Google service), and I have no desire to import all my contacts into it, so I’m just doing it one by one, as I need them. Having Plaxo be the back end to GrandCentral and every other Google app immediately shores up this glaring weakness in Google’s products. Plaxo’s sync service seems to work pretty well. I don’t know if Google has any pressing need for Plaxo’s 20 million (according to the company) subscribers, but it seems doubtful, since I thought the number of Gmail users was well past 50 million (I may be making that up, couldn’t find a link for it) and on its way to catching up with Yahoo!’s 200+ million. There is also bound to be some overlap between Plaxo and Gmail users, but imagine how much that could help grow the GrandCentral service if all of a sudden Google has some pretty detailed (and constantly updated) contact information from each one of those subscribers. That would be much better than Google’s own mish-mash of email addresses that you only ever sent one message to and contact info that is only filled in every now and then. Makes it very easy to offer all of those people a permanent number with GrandCentral, doesn’t it? I could be wrong, but I think it could integrate quite well. Is it that Plaxo is asking for too much money? I’m not a financial guy, so I can’t analyze it very well from that standpoint, but from strictly a product/technological standpoint, I think the two could be better than the sum of their parts.

Full disclosure: I own some shares of YHOO in my retirement account and about $1.50 of GOOG as well. Yeah, I know, I’m practically Warren Buffett.

Ok, so I have definitely been slacking in the posting department for quite some time now, but with the new year upon us and 28 years behind me, I’m trying to refocus and do some of the things I keep paying lip service to but never quite end up finishing. So expect my number of overall posts to increase this year.

You can also expect them to start addressing some of my interests a little more. Yes, that does mean I’m going to start talking about technology more. But it wouldn’t be me doing it if I didn’t try to make things a little more unnecessarily complicated. SO, if you don’t feel like hearing all that technology stuff, then go ahead and continue checking the blog on myspace. That’ll keep just having all my random thoughts whenever I manage to get them to coalesce into coherent sentences. If you want to get everything — random thoughts and other, more business/technology oriented thoughts — then you need to check out littlelazer.blogspot.com. If you happen to be one of those odd people that only want to hear the technology stuff, then you need look no further than thetechlean.blogspot.com, because that will have all you need.

There you have it. Hopefully all of you will only go to littlelazer.blogspot.com so that you can see (and comment) on all of it. But at the very least there should be something for everyone. Hope I see a comment from you soon.

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I first thought of this almost a month ago, but I’m just now getting the time (or rather, making the time) to write it down. Luckily it stuck with me and I didn’t forget it in the meantime.

So a good while back (back when she was still my girlfriend), one of my ex’s went away for the summer, travelling abroad.

Of course when she came back, she came bearing gifts — several of which were for me.

I open the first gift: a club soccer team jersey! Wow, real dope gift. I later found out that it’s basically the most popular team in the country. I’m a big soccer fan, so of course I love it.

I open the next gift: the country’s national soccer team shorts and the Olympic volleyball team jersey (it was difficult to find a national soccer team jersey). Nice, I really like watching that country’s team play. I probably would have ended up trying to buy that stuff myself over the Internet at some point — ok maybe not a
volleyball jersey, but the volleyball jersey was nice, and besides, it’s the thought that counts, right?

On to the next gift (yes, 3 gifts, crazy nice and unnecessary, AND she got my brother something too): a hat and scarf with the logo of the same club team from gift 1.
—Ummmm, ok. Kinda odd, since I already got two really good soccer/sports-related gifts, but whose turning up their nose at more gifts, right? What kind of gift snob does that, right?……….right?

These three gifts made me couple of different ways. The majority of me was just happy I got some gifts from another country — after all, I’m not 100% ungrateful bastard. But then there was this other nagging thing in the back of my mind that I couldn’t make go away.

Disappointment.

Here’s my girlfriend. Supposed to know me better than anyone else. She goes away and all she brings back is a bunch of soccer-related stuff? Is that really all that I’m about? Is that really all she gets from me? I could’ve sworn I had other interests. I like art, I like music, I like computers, gadgets and technology. What about that stuff? Anything else?

Basically I was disappointed because those gifts just made me feel simple and one-dimensional. It was an even more bitter pill to swallow because I always fancied myself a jack of all trades — someone that could do anything well if I felt like it. A young Gordon Parks or something like that. And just like that, reduced to sports.

Fast-forward to early September, 2007. Cascais, Portugal, tail end of a great 2 week vacation with my girlfriend. I’m taking a shower (come to think of it, most of these posts come to me while I’m in the shower), going over the past 14 days in my head — thinking about where we went, what we did, and what we bought. Specifically, I started thinking of the stuff I had bought for myself. And at that point I realized that, somewhere along the trip I unwittingly decided what my personal souvenir from every city on this vacation (and probably all future vacations) was gonna be — club soccer jerseys.

Hmmm. This is surprising.

So was I just being wack there? Was she just able to see right through me and figure out exactly what I didn’t even know I wanted, years before I could figure it out on my own? Or did she just not know what else to get me? I can’t let myself think I was completely wrong. But that was definitely an interesting turn of events.

I was reading this article a week or so ago in the New York Times about aid organizations in Africa. Basically the gist of the article was that this big African hunger relief organization, C.A.R.E. has decided to forgo millions dollars of money, and a bunch of other organizations were (lamely) trying to defend their refusal to make the same choice.

I apologize for waiting so long to write this that the article is no longer available on the times website, cause it was a good article, (here’s the Time.com article about it). I would put up a link to a pdf with the full article, but I’m fairly sure that would be illegal (if you really want to read it, let me know, I’m sure I know somebody that pays for Times Select). The way I understood it, the way things were currently working was that the US government would buy all the surplus crops from US farmers. Then, they would give the grain or whatever other crops to these aid organizations. The aid organizations would then sell that food in the African countries in order to generate funds that they use for their operations.

So according to that article, C.A.R.E. is the largest single recipient of that kind of aid, and they turned it down because they felt that it was harming the very same thing they were supposed to be helping – the African economy. They felt that the system had a lot of inefficiencies (they only recouped 70-80 percent of what the US spent buying and shipping the food) and that it undercut the African farmers that were trying to sell their own crops but couldn’t afford to sell it as low as the prices that C.A.R.E were selling it at.

This reminds me of an interview I read a while ago with this Kenyan economist (at least I think he was, my memory sucks) who was saying how the best thing all these developed countries could do for African countries was to just leave them alone, because their kind of help only really hurts the population and makes them more dependent. At the time I didn’t really feel him, because i generally think that things are way more nuanced than people usually make them out to be, and situations dealing with countries and economies and the developed vs. developing world especially so. After reading this article though, I have to say that I am feeling his point, and I MAD respect C.A.R.E. for making this choice.

Let’s look for a second at who benefits from this current arrangement: the U.S. agricultural businesses benefit, because this guarantees a floor on the prices for their goods, since the U.S. government will buy up any surplus they have; it’s probably neutral for the government, because they are doing the buying and transport, but 180 million dollars is honestly like some spare change the government forgot in its pocket (the FY08 federal budget is 2.902 trillion dollars) and didn’t care about, and it gets to look like it is doing a whole bunch to help starving Africans; it helps the aid organizations, because its basically the equivalent of donations and keep them in business, hopefully doing what their mission statement says; and it helps people that have enough money to buy the food; it also probably indirectly helps people that benefit from the relief organizations’ services too.

The thing that made me start to question this arrangement came from the mouths of the people involved. Peep some of the quotes from other organizations:

“Sure it’s self-interest if staying in business to help the hungry is self-interested,” said Avram E. Guroff, a senior official at ACDI/VOCA, which ranked sixth in such sales last year. “We’re not lining our pockets.”But while Catholic Relief Services and Save the Children, which ranked fifth last year in such sales, agree with CARE that the system is inefficient, they also say they will not stop converting American food into money unless Congress replaces the lost revenues with cash. They help poor people with the money, they say.

Those two quotes alone were enough to make me agree with C.A.R.E. I don’t trust that these organizations don’t even acknowledge the possibility that there might be conflict of interest for them. I think its fairly obvious that American organizations coming in, selling huge quantities of food at cheap prices might screw over the local farmers. In that first quote, it really sounded to me that this guy was hiding behind the people he was supposed to be helping and trying to make it seem like his organization’s interest directly align with those of the people in the countries it operates in. Sure they would like to be able to buy food at reasonable prices, but that seems to pay no attention to sustainability. He completely dodged the question, in my mind. Nobody claimed he was trying to line his pockets, but he tried to make it seem like just because he was trying to help people, there was no way what he was doing could be wrong. I can’t put my finger on exactly why, but that second quote just feels wrong, saying that well if they stop doing that, then they need to give us cash. Where did that sense of entitlement come from? These are charitable organizations, so they obviously survive on donations, but when you’re that dependent on the government, whether you’re a person, business, or organization, there is a problem.

As noble as the aims of these organizations seem to be, what happens to them if the people of the country can feed themselves? At that point, they’re obsolete. On the other hand, as long as the people can’t grow their own crops or develop businesses that would help their economy start to survive on it’s own, those organizations have a purpose and there is a need for them to be there, collecting money. The fact that you have these huge agricultural businesses (let’s not pretend these are poor individual farmers) and these charitable organizations all lobbying for the same purpose means that they basically can’t lose. That’s a lot of money lining government pockets, so at that point, I think whether or not it actually does these countries a disservice becomes practically irrelevant.

What C.AR.E. has decided to do instead is to find ways to help farmers and other people in those countries find ways to start their own businesses and develop markets for the products they can produce. I have to say, I have never been one to support unchecked capitalism, but over the past few years I have become a much bigger supporter of the free market (checked and stopped form its worst excesses by the government of course – we can all dream, right?). The idea of people selling their own crops and having their own self sufficient economy is way more appealing that these organizations depressing their growth.

Maybe that’s an unrealistic ideal, because it requires a lot more intensive and personal work that just throwing money and food at people, and maybe a lot of people suffer in the mean time, while things get off the ground. But there has to be some kind of middle ground, that helps people eat right now, while at the same time working toward them no longer needing that help at some time in the future. Basically, I definitely fuck with C.A.R.E. now and will be donating money to them when I can afford to give to anybody, because that was a ballsy move, giving up a good chunk of their income because they felt it no longer aligned with their goals. I respect that.

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Someone forwarded me this NY Times article yesterday. Basically it has 4 or 5 stories of people/couples in New York City and what they went through in order to buy a co-op, condo, or house. Go ahead and read it, I’ll wait…………….. Done? Ok.

I have no idea whether that article was supposed to just be informative, whether it was supposed to show how difficult it is to buy a place in NYC, or whether it was supposed to be some inspirational stories of how people managed to overcome the odds. I think it was supposed to be an inspirational story. If so, it failed.

Basically, that article gave me some serious doubts about moving back to NYC. I’ve been up in the air about that for the past few years, but that article put me on the non-NYC side of the fence for now. The type of deprivation and scratching and clawing they had to do really kinda sucks (except for the couple that quit smoking – that was good). And it’s not like their self-imposed deprivation ended once they bought the house either, they still gotta make those monthly mortgage payments. They should do some follow-ups after a year. One person used her credit card to make up the last 6 grand she needed — not exactly the best recipe for success, hopefully she manages to knock that debt out real quick. I want to find out what happens to her. I didn’t have to go through anything close to that out here and honestly, if I had to do that kind of stuff at 25 to get a house, my ass would still be renting right now, until I fully appreciated the value of owning a house. I will freely admit, I’m just too lazy for that right now, even if it would encourage some good habits that I should have.

The article also confirmed something that I had been thinking about the difference between living here and living in NYC, because I always wonder how my friends there can afford stuff when it seems expensive as hell just to rent a nice apartment (unless you get lucky or know someone). I think I would be able to live in NYC on what I’m making right now, but the difference between living there and here is that here I’m actually able to save up money, not a whole lot or anything, but something. I’m already not the most fiscally sound person (steadily improving though) and I have a feeling that living there would just do me in. Maybe that’s just cause I’ve spent just about the whole time I’ve considered myself an adult outside of the city though. If I was there I might have figured it out. There’s also a difference between living in Manhattan and staying in BK, I guess. How do y’all NYC people do it?

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