from the hip

The US believes itself to be a - or perhaps even the most - technologically advanced country in the world. This is a myth, blatantly false. Internet usage, Internet speed, mobile telephone use, Internet phone speeds, and so on, are all among the many areas where the US is increasingly lagging behind the most advanced countries in the world. So is banking and financial services.

I am astonished by the lack of efficiency and the poor customer service of American banks. Here are some real life stories that really shock me, from banks that are all among the top 5 US banks. Here are the cases:

1. Electronic transfer between two customers in the same bank

A friend transferred 1200 dollar to my account. In Scandinavia, the money would have been on my account instantly, as it is a within-bank transaction. Here the bank took 24 to take the money out of my friends’ account, then printed a check and mailed it to me. So, 3 days instead of instantaneously. And unnecessary paper and mail service and postage, all of which, I am sure, customers pay for.

2. Electronic transfer between banks

I paid for something using Paypal. And there wasn’t enough money in my Paypal account, so Paypal withdrew money from my banking account, as they should. However, it took 4 days for this to be processed by the bank. Again, I guess, a check. In Scandinavia this would have taken 1-4 hours, as it is an interbank transfer.

3. Deposit lost by the bank

A friend of mine deposited 800 dollars in her bank. She got a receipt. After a few days she noticed the money weren’t there. She calls the bank. They could not find the deposit, but would investigate. Six weeks 5 long calls, talking usually to two or more people each time, she finally gets the 800 into her account. Now she finds that in two separate cases the bank had given her overdraft fees of 35 dollars that she would not have gotten had the money been where they should. Again she calls. Two calls later the fees are dropped. During this ordeal, the bank never contacted her - she always had to initiate contact.

Now - how it is possible to lose a deposit? How is it possible to not honor a customer’s receipt immediately? Why didn’t be bank get back to her quickly and fix it all? Who made the mistake here - the bank or the customer? It is simply the worst customer service I have ever heard about!

These tales, and others, are so shocking that I wonder how US banks can get away with it? Are American banking customers totally undemanding? Or are they ignorant - don’t know how things are done outside the US and what they should rightfully demand from a modern bank? Do regulatory agencies and consumer organizations not care? Are American businesses unconcerned with banking efficiency? And especially about the banks - do they not care about efficiency? Do they not care about customer service?

It’s easy to fix! Send some guys on a plane to study how it’s done overseas. Buy the software. Do the changes. Get with it! You are lagging by at least a decade!

Or do you just not give a shit?

The little, otherwise relatively liberal country of Denmark, known perhaps especially for its liberal attitudes towards pornography,  may well be one of the most control-oriented states  in the world as far as the Internet is concerned.

Since 2005, the Danish state has monitored everything everybody has been doing on the Internet. The Danish newspaper Politiken writes:

According to metroxpress, the state is monitoring everyone’s behaviour on the internet as a result of legislation that requires all user names and passwords to be lodged with the State and University Library and the Royal Library. The libraries file everything from children’s scribblings on Arto.dk to love letters and profile pictures on Dating.dk.
The technology is known as Internet Harvesting and the Net Archive currently harvests all Danish sites four times per year.
However, some news, dating and other social network sites are harvested daily, according to Eva Fønns-Jørgensen of the Net Archive at the State and University Library in Århus.

Code release
“Danish sites have a legal duty to provide access codes and we have been harvesting text, pictures and audio since 2005,” she says.
At the moment, researchers are the only ones allowed to see the extensive personal material grabbed through Internet Harvesting. But 70 years after the death of, for example, a person with a dating profile, all information comes into the public domain.

The thinking behind this is that people themselves have chosen to place materials on the Internet, and that once it is one the net it is publicly available.

So there we go. Public nudity and liberal rules about pornography. But Big Brother is watching. And letting others watch as well!

1984 has come and gone.

See also: Inventor of the Internet warns against ‘Big Brother’ systems that track the sites you visit

I have downloaded and  tested Chrome. It is fast, has a number of great features, and looks great. However, it has bugs!

Chrome is not fully CSS and HMTL compliant. Like Internet Explorer it does not display all settings like they should be displayed. For instance, Chrome does not take into consideration “max-width” and “min-width” settings. This means that web pages that are fluid, but has set max and min widths so as to limit line widths will not display properly.

There may be other bugs as well, but those were the ones I noted.

This means that web programmers now have to find and implement “fixes” and “hacks” for yet another non-compliant web browser if they want pages to display properly.

Ouch!!

The Icelandic band Sigur Rós has recorded a somewhat unusual music video for a song entitled “Gobbledigook”. The video has lots of nudity (what is known as “frontal nudity” in the US). As a result, it will be banned on MTV and has been removed from YouTube.

The movie may be interesting because of the nudity - it has both nude males and nude women. It may also be interesting because of lots of pubic hair - a new trend? In Iceland?

However, the most interesting aspect of this is the marketing aspect. We have seen Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton, and others using sex videos and nudity to become world famous. Is this possible for a band with a music video too? If it has lots of nudity?

Also, the media world is changing, and this video may well illustrate how relatively unimportant traditional media channels are becoming - even YouTube, when it chooses to censor. My bet is that this video will go viral, and that it will be one of the most viewed music videos this year.

It is still art? Who knows? However, the new album, which this song is from, is called “Nude”, so at least it reflects the title of the album.

What remains to be seen is whether sex sells, and whether the group will be able to reach their intended audience with this content or not?

We will see!

PS: Oh, and the video? You can find it on the homepage of Sigur Rós:  Here.

If you want to speculate in real estate, but lack the funds for it, you should not despair. Trading in digital real estate is considerably less expensive, but can still make you good money.

The number of real estate speculators on the internet is on the rise. The tricks of the trade are relatively few and easy to learn. The risks are limited, and the opportunities growing. There’s still a lot of land available on the internet.

Here’s what you do:

1. Find one or several great generic domain names. Domain names are the addresses of websites which follow ‘www’ and end with ‘.com’ or ‘.co.uk’. A generic name could be “vodka”, “weeklyflowers”, or “freeadvice”.

Usually, .com and .co.uk names are the best, as those are the most likely to be used on the internet and the ones most in demand.

So, a generic domain could be vodka.com or weeklyflowers.co.uk.

2. Buy the domain at some or other site that sells domain names, such as godaddy.com or sedo.com.

3. Go and park it. A number of services give you the opportunity to park your site. No programming is required. They will set up a standard page and add some ads to it.

And this is the first trick: Ever so often, if you have a good domain name, somebody will type that name directly into the browser window. Your site will receive a hit, and if they click the add (a percentage will), bingo - you make money!

This is what Guardian writes about a virtual real estate trader named Neil Stanley:

Neil Stanley goes to bed each night knowing he will wake up a little richer. All over the world, the clicks of computer mice are depositing a few more pounds into his account. His secret is that he was smart enough to ask: what’s in a name?

…

He is one of a growing band of cyber-speculators able to make a living from buying and selling domain names at a substantial profit. No effort or expertise in building websites is required. Instead, a PC with broadband connectivity and an eye for a popular generic domain is enough to draw traffic and unlock a fortune. Recently Stanley was involved in a deal which registered a domain name for almost nothing and sold it for $40,000 a few weeks later.

‘It’s amazing how many people go to the address bar and type in a generic name instead of going to Google,’ said the 44-year-old from Bath. ‘If you’ve got mortgages.co.uk, you’ve got a licence to print money. It’s an industry in its infancy and there’s a bit of a gold rush on at the moment. It’s amazing that the UK hasn’t really woken up to it yet.

‘The analogy is real estate. The internet got invented and all the land is being bought up. In 10 years’ time any word you can think of will be taken: all the real estate will be gone. If one day someone wants to build a skyscraper on it, you’ve made a fortune.’

4. And there’s the second trick: Go to an online auction site and offer your domain for sale, unless you intend to use it or want to simply let it remain parked. See if anybody wants to buy it. And while you are waiting, if you’ve picked the right name, you may make money!

Stanley acquired kids.co.uk and is planning to make it a non-profit site for children, but leaves the majority of his domain names sitting idle, or ‘parked’. This means that they are hosted by a specialist website as a simple, customised template containing relevant adverts. Every time someone visits the page and clicks on one of the adverts, the name owner and the website share revenue.

Sedo, or ‘Search Engine for Domain Offers’, claims to have the world’s biggest database of names for sale, with more than 10.5 million listings. Its total sales in 2007 amounted to £37m. In Britain it has overseen the sale of sport.co.uk for £135,000 and mobile.co.uk for £120,000. Sedo also ‘parks’ more than 3 million domains and paid out £25m to customers last year.

Other sites doing this are yourdomaintrade.com, godaddy.com, and others. And, to inspire you further, here are the 10 most valuable domain names auctioned by Sedo:

1 Vodka.com, $3m

2 Chinese.com, $1.1m

3 Website.com, $750,000

4 Telecom.com, $700,000

5 Annuity.com, $600,000

6 Gays.com, $500,000

7 Gibraltar.com, $360,000

8 Sport.co.uk, $265,000

9 Mobile.co.uk, $247,000

10 Fly.co.uk, $180,000

So, what do you say? Something to check out? A lot of people will make money on the information highway this way! It could be you.

See also:

Dell suit reveals lucrative trade in domain names
Domain names price list
Domain names forum
ChowCow forums