Dear Keystone XL opposers: I consider myself an environmentalist who is deeply concerned about the future of our planet, and yet I can’t help but think your opposition of this project is somewhat unfounded. Here’s why.

I think this country’s dependence on oil is greater than you think. Yes, that can be changed and yes, there are alternative, renewable energy sources. The problem is that none of those solutions are viable at the moment. Right now, all we can hope for is to slowly reduce our oil consumption and move to the alternatives. But it’ll take decades, whether we like it or not.

Now, having said that, we need to ask ourselves how much liquid, easily extractable oil still remains worldwide. Based on what I read, I think the answer is: not enough. Without counting the tar sands and other unconventional oil sources, I believe this country will experience a severe “peak oil” event not too long from now. Most major oil wells worldwide are currently drying up, which means that, if you consider China’s seemingly infinite appetite for oil, the US is going to have a hard time procuring oil in the next couple of decades.

Without unconventional oil, I believe we are heading for a potentially disastrous scenario in which oil prices rise dramatically (think several times what they are today), bringing disastrous results if it happens too soon, at a time when the country still runs on oil. You’d likely see severe economic collapse at that point — and it would happen long before we’d see any global warming or other environment effects. I’m talking massive price increases in transportation, food, you name it. The infrastructure in this country isn’t even close to being able to run on anything other than oil. At least not yet.

Bottom line: Projects like the tar sands and Keystone XL are ugly and dirty, but it’s too late to stop them — we’re addicted to oil, and abruptly interrupting its supply would have catastrophic repercussions. Think of Keystone XL as a bandaid — something to keep us going for a few more decades until we can truly solve this problem.

I think that’s why Obama is supporting it. I think the administration has done the analysis and somewhere in Washington there’s a file that says that without these types of solution, this country is at risk of a real economic meltdown. This will happen when liquid oil availability runs low, regardless of whether it’s for political reasons to do with some of the least stable OPEC nations, or due to simple supply and demand reasons. Basically, I think Obama has no real choice.

At the same time, I do think it’s hugely important to invest in alternative energy technologies. That’s how we’ll get out of this problem: Not by blocking oil-related projects, but rather by pushing and supporting alternative, renewable energy technologies. These two things need to happen simultaneously.

Many experts agree that the iPhone’s competitors sell primarily on price. Make the iPhone cheaper than all Android competitors, and Android would be pushed to the sidelines.

Ever since the iPad came out in April 2010, I’ve been hearing the same mantra whenever I talk about the iPad: Apple’s got about a year before they start losing market share. There’s no way they would maintain their dominance of the tablet market, and they stand to lose market share very rapidly, just as they lost it with the iPhone. Eventually the iPad would become just another speck in the tablet marketplace.

My first impression has been that this is probably true. After all, how would Apple — a premium, high-end brand — retain such a significant lead in the ultra-price-sensitive consumer electronics industry, and particularly with tablets — a product category that every major manufacturer has got their eyes on? That’s almost like Porsche aiming to outsell Toyota.

But I believe the iPad is different. It’s different because with iPad, Apple seems to take a somewhat different approach. Rather than pricing it as high as they could afford to (which is clearly what they’ve been doing with most of their products), they’ve priced this one in preparation for a fierce pricing battle with their competitors. It looks as though with iPad, Apple finally compromised and went with minimal margins, determined to maintain long-term market dominance.

Now, many experts agree that the iPhone’s competitors sell primarily on price. Make the iPhone cheaper than all Android competitors, and Android would be pushed to the sidelines. How many consumers (not counting developers/early-adopters/tech-geeks) do you know that would intentionally pick Android over iPhone, if it weren’t for the price difference? I don’t think I’ve ever met one.

Before you try and argue with that one, try and compare smartphone market share by price. Rather than comparing overall iPhone vs. Android sales, compare $600 Android phones vs. the iPhone (which sells for roughly $600 to operators). You might be surprised to learn that the (admittedly few) iPhone competitors selling at that price range are selling at insignificant quantities compared to the iPhone. In other words, there’s a reason why Apple is making all this money: They are successfully selling their amazingly-expensive iPhones in massive quantities. They may not hold the largest market share, but they are by far the most profitable player in this business.

What would happen if Apple were to give up their “Apple tax”, and compromise on lower margins in an effort to achieve and maintain market share?

The question I’d like to ask is: What would happen if Apple were to give up their “Apple tax”, and compromise on lower margins in an effort to achieve and maintain market share? I believe that is what’s happening with the iPad. Let’s take a look at some numbers.

The Average Selling Price (ASP) of the iPhone is around $630, and iSuppli estimated its Bill of Materials (BOM) at around $180. The ASP of the iPad is also around $630, but can you guess its BOM? Around $250 for the entry level model.

In other words, with the iPad Apple clearly chose to forego some of their profits in order to achieve extremely competitive pricing. And here’s the other point: While a 40% gross margin may sound generous, it is based on the extremely aggressive pricing Apple gets from its manufacturing partners and component vendors due to Apple’s massive manufacturing volumes. This means that for most of Apple’s competitors, competing with the iPad on pricing is going to be damn near impossible.

So the question remains: Assuming the iPad remains one of the cheapest tablets around, what would possibly entice consumers to choose their competitor’s products?

I believe the answer is that unless competitors release products with significant functional advantages, or alternatively, with significant pricing advantages (highly unlikely, in my opinion), Apple will easily maintain its market dominance, at least for the foreseeable future.

Nokia likes to push their massive sales volumes as evidence of their market domination (110 million units in Q3 of 2010), but that number only proves that Nokia is only selling low-margin commodities, and that their competitors have taken over the lucrative high-end sectors of the market.

Comparing the average handset sale price of Apple vs. Nokia is quite interesting. Based on latest figures from both companies, it looks like Apple is getting an average of $635 per unit, while Nokia is bringing in a measly $78. In my book, this means Nokia is now officially a low-end player.

I’d also completely ignore their smart-phone market presence figures, as they are clearly bogus. They reported 24 million smartphones sold this last quarter. Truthfully, I’d like to know the average sale price of those units, but I’m guessing it’s well below $200, and that they are absolutely NOT smartphones, and are therefore not comparable to Android and Apple devices sold in that same period. I believe Nokia has actually lost the smartphone battle a while ago, and are now holding on to low-end Symbian devices that are not in any way comparable to iPhone and Android devices.

How many real $400+ smartphones has Nokia sold from it’s high-end portfolio? I’m guessing it’s an embarrassing number.

Still, it’s clearly too early to write Nokia’s eulogy just yet — can it reinvent itself and get back in the game? Time will tell.

I’m always amazed by how easily the press and my favorite, respectable bloggers tend to naively buy into certain announcements without even wondering whether or not they make sense. Case in point: Amazon’s recent announcement about them selling more Kindle ebooks than good old hard cover books.

Sure, that’s an impressive and important milestone, but people seem to be reinterpreting it to mean that “Kindle books are now outselling hard cover books”, or, even worse “Kindle books are now outselling paper books”. That’s amazing to me because that’s not the case. Kindle books are not even close to outselling hard covers, and certainly not paper books in general.

• Kindle books are now outselling hardcover books within Amazon, but we need to remember that Amazon is the only store offering Kindle books, and it has many competitors in the US that also sell hard covers. Hence, hard cover books are still outselling Kindle books, probably by a lot. If we want to get a feel for how close the Kindle is to surpassing hardcover book sales overall, we need to know Amazon’s market share in worldwide hardcover book sales.
• Hard cover books make up a relatively small portion of total book sales due to their high price. Paperbacks general outsell hardcovers many to one.

Bottom line, Kindle is making great progress, but is nowhere near outselling paper books. Not in the US, and certainly not globally. I’d guess it’s currently not even at 10% market penetration in the US.

Update: Blogger Jay Yarow has posted an interesting article which estimates that Amazon’s latest numbers add up to a 6% market share for Kindle books.

These are all essentially little pieces of plastic that typically cost below $1 to make, and are often sold at between $20-$50. The simple answer is that companies do this because they can, and because it’s just easy money. Their customers, in most cases, have already spent hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on the main attraction, and will be, almost in all cases, willing to pay an extra $50 for something they simply must have, even if that something is ridiculously overpriced.

The question I am asking is, how can a company gauge the true long-term cost of this model: Customer annoyance. How likely am I to start hating Canon after I find myself paying $200 for four lens hoods that should have been free to begin with? Is it enough to consider dumping Canon for their competitor? Probably not, but who knows, it might be the final straw for people who are considering such a move for other reasons. In Canon’s case, I believe their competitors have a similar policy so for them it’s probably a no-brainer, but in Apple’s case, they are selling overpriced connectors that are actually built-into their competitors laptops!

You might assume that in every major corporation, those values are identical: Making money. I think that’s absolutely not the case. Sure, revenues and profitability are key, but ultimately it depends on what matters most to the company’s leaders, and surprisingly enough, money isn’t always it. Take Steve Jobs, for instance. It seems rather clear to me that he doesn’t spend his days pondering what he can do to generate more revenue for Apple. He spends them thinking how he can make Apple “win the game”, deliver superior user-experiences, etc.

This is critically important because it helps us understand what drives the various decisions made by these companies. Take Google, for example. Clearly Google is a engineering-driven company, with an emphasis on technological innovations and openness. This hugely impacts their various product decisions, and is evident when looking at Android, for example. Android is open in a way that only makes sense to someone who places openness as a value. Unfortunately, openness and user experience often conflicts, which is why Apple tends to design their products to be as open as they need to be, but no more. That is why Apple’s products tend to be pretty closed.

The reason for the phenomenal success Apple has seen in recent years is just how amazingly focused it’s been, and just how right its values turned out to be. Apple focuses on user experience, and pretty much on nothing else. That has allowed them to produce, overall, vastly superior products compared to their competitors. It has also driven them to create smaller, focused product lines with clear differentiation.

For instance, Lenovo currently offers over 13 unique laptop product lines, each with its own configuration options. By comparison, Apple offers three such laptop product lines. They choose to compromise flexibility in favor of simplicity, thereby simplifying the customer’s selection process and ensuring a more enjoyable shopping experience.

When looking at Apple’s competitors, I see strong focus on revenue generation through massive technological investment, the creation of vast product lines to suit any type of customer, and investment in endless feature lists, in the belief that features ultimately sell products. This is how Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, LG, and countless other companies seem to think about their business. The reason why Apple is growing so much faster than all of these companies, is that their values just seem to make more sense.

Another example: Looking at the average Windows laptop, I find it mind boggling that Microsoft still allows their hardware partners (Lenovo, Dell, HP, and the others) to install all of their redundant software on top of Windows 7. A separate WiFi management tool, display settings tool, various control panel applets, product advertisements, you name it. Windows 7 includes excellent tools for managing all of these features, why on earth does Microsoft allow their partners to damage their customer’s user experience for their own selfish interests? Surely Microsoft is powerful enough to force (or incentivize) them to sell their hardware with plain vanilla Windows systems?

The reason, once again, is values. Microsoft is thinking of business relationships and politics, and placing that consideration ahead of user experience. It’s even possible that they might not see it as a compromise, but rather as a natural arrangement with their hardware partners. Apple takes the other extreme, completely hiding the existence of their various partners in their products (notice the lack of any kind of Intel sticker on Intel Macs, for example), because it typically makes the products simpler to use and nicer to look at.

My theory? Companies will continue to have a challenging uphill battle against Apple, until they realize that they need to rethink their core values, and place a far greater emphasis on user experience, placing it before other considerations such as feature lists, huge product lines to accommodate all tastes, and yes, even revenues.

In the midst of a flurry of announcements from Apple, I’ve been particularly interested in the little 13″ Macbook Pro. I currently use the Aluminum Unibody 13″ MacBook and I was curious about Apple’s “7 hour” battery claim for the new model. The first thing I did once the Apple Online Store came back online was to check the battery size of the new model versus the old one, and ensure they kept the same size and weight.

The conclusion is that the new 13″ MBP is the exact same size and weight, but that its battery stores about 29% more energy than the Aluminum Unibody model it replaces (58 watts in the new non-removable battery, versus 45 watts in the old model’s removable battery). This means that the real world numbers for the 13″ MBP are going to be excellent — 7 hours is probably an unrealistic number, but 5 hours of real-world use is very likely.

The thing that makes me wonder is, how do they do it? Is it possible that 30% of the battery’s weight and volume is in its removable enclosure? Or has Apple perhaps learned some neat chemical tricks that allow them to pack a bit more energy into a given amount of space? Is that also how they managed to upgrade the new iPhone 3GS’s battery life the way they did?

There is something fascinating and voyeuristic in listening to countless unknown human beings share their emotions. Sometimes it’s superficial thoughts such as “I Hate Homework”. Other times it’s more significant thoughts such as “sleep well grandma, i love you forever”. One interesting choice made by twistory is that it doesn’t show user names. The messages shown on the screen are anonymous, which somehow makes it even more mysterious.

In a way, this is the closest I’ve seen to the notion of the greenish computer screens we saw on The Matrix — a computerized view showing you “humanity” as a whole. If that sounds overly dramatic when you look at twistori, imagine what this concept might evolve into in the future: a summary of the real time trends and highlighted messages from millions of people around the globe, filtering out the repetitions.

Drivel or no drivel, this is one capability we just didn’t have 10 years ago, or even two years ago, before Twitter!

In my never-ending hunt for apocalyptic novels of any kind, I’ve recently read One Second After, by William R. Forstchen. As a work of fiction, I can say I found it to be rather mediocre. Admittedly fun, but mediocre nonetheless. The reason I mention this is that I did find the issues raised by One Second After to be of critical importance, and it taught me a lot about a shadowy topic that truly threatens the safety of the western world: Large scale Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) attack.

What is an EMP?

For those who haven’t watched Tom Cruise in War of the Worlds, an EMP, or Electromagnetic Pulse, is a brief ultra-powerful electromagnetic surge that destroys virtually all electronics in its path (EMPs travel through the air, just like any other electromagnetic waves). EMPs were discovered sometime mid last century through nuclear tests conducted at the height of the cold war. As a side effect of the nuclear blasts, it was discovered that a ultra-high-energy surge gets released, and that this surge has a devastating effect on all electronics within its range: city power grids, phone systems, and almost any other electronic device within range gets immediately “bricked”. More importantly, when a nuclear weapon is detonated in high altitude, something called the Compton effect comes into play. This means that much more of the nuclear weapon’s energy goes into an EMP than it would have otherwise, resulting in a far more powerful EMP.

The end result is that a small nuclear device detonated in high altitude can cripple any electronics in a radius of over 1000 km, without causing any direct human casualties. Just to put this in perspective, the estimate is that two or three such devices detonated in the atmosphere could essentially cripple all electronics in an area as large as the continental United States. If losing all power and electronics sounds harmless or somehow minor, it is not. An EMP would disable all modern day communications, transportation, and electronics. This means no cars, no planes, no phones, no Internet, no computers, etc. Our increased reliance on technology, coupled with the the huge impacted area means that the potential effect this could have on a western society is absolutely devastating.

Imagine a situation where one day, without warning, all electronics shut down, all cars die, and essentially all technology becomes useless. Additionally, these devices would not be fixable — definitely not in the short term, and most likely not even in the long term. On the most immediate level, the meaning is that the only food you’d have access to is whatever is walking distance from your present position. Now imagine that unless you happen to live in an agricultural area, that food would most likely last for no more than a couple of days. Add that to the fact that no one would be coming — all form of government would come to an instant halt without communications… Starting to get the picture?

Just to give an idea, One Second After describes such an attack over the United States, and describes how within weeks after the attack starvation becomes commonplace and barbaric tribes are formed, looting and scavenging for any food they can get their hands on. I honestly don’t think that’s an exaggeration. Western societies rely so heavily on technology that at this point we’ve simply forgotten how to live without it.

How Likely is it?

The next question we must ask ourselves is, how difficult would it be for terrorists or rouge nations to carry out such an attack? Unfortunately, the answer is that it’s not that difficult. The fact is that it is within the means of any nation equipped with ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads. From the enemy’s standpoint this might be a far more effective use of their nuclear arsenal because it causes widespread devastation, unlike a conventional atmospheric detonation of a typical nuclear weapon, which can generally destroy a large city, at the most. Sure, the destruction of an entire city sounds unthinkable and horrifying, but it most likely wouldn’t defeat a powerful nation. A large scale EMP can easily disable even the largest and most powerful countries, possibly for good.

What Can Be Done?

While completely defending against EMPs is impractical, it turns out that there are relatively cheap ways for governments to prepare and minimize the potential damage. For example, power plants and communication systems can be hardened against EMPs. So can vehicles and commercial airliners. The point is that this is one of those things where governments can invest a little bit right now and dramatically minimize the potential damage caused by this kind of attack. At the very minimum, be prepared to the point of having the ability to recover from such an attack, should it ever take place.
As an individual, there is very little we can do, other than complain to our governments and drive them to action. My only advice would have been to buy EMP-hardened cars and radios, but those don’t appear to exist…

Learn More

If you’d like to learn more, you could give One Second After a read to get a more dramatized view of the potential consequences, with some decent entertainment value. Alternatively, if you prefer the raw details you could take a look at the executive report written by the EMP Commission. It’s not as dramatic, but it’s just as scary…

By now if you’re human and happen to be connected to the Internet, you’ve heard of Susan Boyle, that awkward, strange, overweight woman from Britain’s Got Talent who dazzled the world when she gave a stunning performance of I Dreamed a Dream from Les Misérables. Beyond the utterly astonished reaction of the judges and the audience during the performance, what was more interesting obviously was the online response. With nearly 100 million views and counting, Susan Boyle must be one of the fastest rises to popularity the Internet has ever produced.

But that’s all old news. The real question is: why? Sure, she’s a great singer, but she’s not that great. I mean, there are countless other unknown singers who sing amazingly well, I really don’t think that’s the issue here. The issue is that the audience and judges in the show so clearly misjudge her due to her appearance, and that while watching the YouTube videos, every single viewer of that video had the exact same reaction while watching it. In a way, this video should be titled “Watch How Your First Impressions Don’t Work”. I think the real fun part about that video is to watch the stunned faces — stunned by their own misjudgment.

I recently read Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, and I find Susan Boyle’s case to be living proof of his theories. In case you’re not familiar with that book, it talks about how people should (and can) make quick judgment of situations, and how these judgements tend to be more accurate or just as accurate as long term studies conducted afterwards. Gladwell contends that our instincts might be far more powerful (and certainly faster) than our conscious intelligence. Of course, Gladwell explains that our ability to perform these kinds of snap judgements is limited by our prejudice and predispositions, which is exactly what happens in Susan Boyle’s case. Our deeply ingrained stereotypes tell us one thing about her, yet our eyes and ears tell us something completely different. It’s just a powerful demo of stereotypes working on an almost universal scale.

Additionally, we are amazed by seeing how it happens to everybody else (audience, judges) at the same time. Bottom line, this is a fascinating little social experiment that reveals, yet again, just how stereotypes can be misleading.