Club Troppo

It’s on again folks. Crikey subscribers on the group subscription I organise have begun getting presubscription emails. Whether you are a subscriber already or not, you can subscribe through this means and qualify for the discounts Crikey offer. 

Prices keep rising, and they’ve risen again this year. Here’s the schedule.

If you want to join the subscription, please email me on ngruen AT gmail.

Then in a few weeks from now I’ll shoot a list of names and email addresses to Crikey and they’ll follow up.

Group Subscriptions
3-5 Members – $125
6-9 Members – $115
10-19 Members – $105
20-49 Members – $95
50+ Members – $85

Post-postscript: Having sent a bcc email to all current group subscribers earlier today, we’re now at 53 subscribers with more dribbling in – so it looks like the lowest fee is assured.

A friend of mine, and a great contributor to Australian public policy, Mike Waller, a man who sketched out Australian competition policy on a single page and fed it up the line as an FAS in PM&C in the late 80s (or perhaps it was 1990), has wrenched himself from the policy scene (though not entirely, as he keeps his hand in with consulting and other occasional gigs) and joined a few others in setting up a company which will initially import Baufritz homes and which will ultimately build quite a lot of them here.

Baufritz homes are about the most ecologically fine habitation one can buy. Extremely energy efficient, made without nasty emissions, emulsions and things like that, they are exceptionally comfy. They are also quite pricey, but what do you expect for comfort?

One of the things that excites Mike is the fact that Australian homes are still built according to the craft model, with people turning up on site and building the house. There’s more prefabrication in units (with the efficiency gains having been captured and then some by the unions), but in houses there should be a lot more factory pre-fabrication with the ultimate building resembling a barn raising. This can reduce cost, and improve the quality and efficiency of houses.

Houses will initially be largely imported from Germany but will be progressively displaced by Australian production as scale rises. So drop into the new site of MGW Homes and let MGW know if you’re interested in buying one.

Look at this graph of the great tectonic shifts brought about by the GFC. Securitisation collapsed as a form of funding, and those in the official family ran round doling out gold plated assistance like free government guarantees to our banks (and next to nothing for our securitisers). The opportunity was taken up by just two of the four banking oligarchs, with the other two deciding to let the moment pass. ANZ was busy leveraging its government guarantee to buy Asian banking assets and NAB, well I’m not sure what NAB was doing. Perhaps they and ANZ invested wisely, but you’d work a long time to pick up the market share that Westpac and CBA managed to do at the time.

I know you’re all on the edges of your seats about how Kaggle is going.

The answer is “very well”. We’ve just announced the closure of Series A funding.

And you can read all about it in the New York Times, the Independent or Gigaom.

Further information from our newsletter below the fold:  (Continued)

I’m pleased to say that we have taken possession of several container loads of these items which Ken has suggested using as prizes instead of the Troppo Mercedes.

I’ve just got back from the USA and whilst there bought a SIM card for $60 which entitled me to one month’s free calls throughout the US to mobiles and landlines and to landlines in other countries including Oz.  Oh – and unlimited data – though not very fast after the first 100 mess which got used up in a couple of days. It was good value, and it’s got about two weeks to run. Anyone want it?

A while ago I blegged in search of a new smart phone. Well disposed to Android I thought I’d buy Samsung Gallaxy II S which had had rave reviews. Anyway, some people expressed curiosity about how things would end up, but I ended up taking Neerav Bhatt’s advice on the thread and buying a Motorola Atrix. It’s got bigger battery capacity and possibly better reception than other phones on Telstra.

So far so good, though it seems a bit clunkier than the more consumer/gaming friendly phones. Also the greater battery capacity seems mostly consumed in greater power consumption rather than longer life, but reception does seem noticeably better – not a small benefit. For a while I was crestfallen that it didn’t auto-reformat webpages on zoom, but I found a way to do that – I still can’t do it on iPhones or iPads though perhaps the cognoscenti can tell us how.

And of course there are those things that you’d need to hire the phone for a week or so to really find out before you buy – which I didn’t do. I can’t get it to auto-format when I’m zooming on Google Reader where I spend a lot of time – even though my last Android did that. Is there another browser I can download that will? Atrix seems to have some cut down Firefox as a default rather than the standard Android browser. A quick search on the Android market doesn’t turn up anything answering to that description however.

I had also imagined that the phone would synch with Outlook if I asked it to. Not a bit of it. I’m amazed and a bit outraged, but there you go. I have set up a kludge where I synch contacts in g-mail, but you need to be a paying customer of Google Apps to have it cross synch to Outlook – though Google release their Calendar synch without ties.

Also, someone gave me a Samsung Gallaxy II S to play with on a plane. The guy who’d just bought it loved it and I was seriously impressed.  It seemed very user friendly – and very thin which somehow more or less irrationally appealed to me. So I think I made the wrong choice, but I now have a new phone. I console myself with an analogy with Machiavelli’s suggestion that changing things is hard because the people you hurt hate you much more than the people you help love you. I notice the things that bug me about the Atrix, but I guess if I’d bought the Samsung I’d be noticing all the things that I didn’t like about it – perhaps its battery life is quite a bit shorter, which would be a pain.

Nevertheless all up, I leave you with the picture above. Only engineers could work out a docking arrangement in which you get to see the screen of the thing you’re docking with OR the screen of the thing you’re docking. In fact it’s worse than that – by the look of it.  If you want to look at the screen of your Atrix, you can’t operate your computer. I don’t think the UX guys got a look in. (Stop Press: on going through to the page on which this picture appears it says that the laptop ends up with a picture of the Android screen on it. Why the two couldn’t be side by side – or have an option for that is a bit beyond me, but there you go.  The review shows that the Atrix’s great merit is its power – it’s certainly fast.

The other part of the deal is Telstra for its better reception. They’ve already entirely stuffed up so many things, it makes me want to weep.  But it will all work out no doubt.

If anyone wants to come to an event put on by the Australian Business Foundation and Deloitte, on the new R&D Tax Credit – they can come along to an event in Melbourne this Friday. Details are below the fold. (Continued)

I’m thrilled to say that we raised over $30,000 for Africa. Troppo itself initially raised a little over $2,000 to which would have been matched the contribution I’d promised, but in the last day I also said to the fund raisers that if they could get some more funds in by referring their clients to the site I’d match them. They proceeded to come up with some substantial and one very large donations. This took me to my maximum exposure – which was bounded by half the amount needed to fund all the kids shown which took Troppo’s contribution to over $11,000 with the final result being over $30,000 for the kids of Kibera. Pretty good huh? And thanks to all for participating.

And of course it’s not to late to give. Just download this pdf for the bank details and follow the instructions on the previous post and off you go.

My first smartphone was an Apple iPhone.  I’m rather proud of being a technology laggard – it’s nice to have others at the bleeding edge.  Anyway, just before doing the Govt 2.0 Taskforce I thought I’d better get a bit hip and get a smart-phone and only one appealed – the iPhone – by then the latest version was a “2S” I think. Anyway I managed to leave it in a public place briefly and that was the end of it – for me anyway.  Someone had a second hand Android phone for sale so I bought it and have been very happy with it.  It was an HTC Desire.  I was happy with it until recently when it occasionally takes it upon itself to reboot – including when you’re in the middle of doing something.  At its worst it cycles through boot ups and downs until you take the battery out.  Not good. And HTC have been the soul of uselessness claiming that my phone has a British IMEI or whatever the number is called, so I have to take it up with an international HTC centre.  Which is more than I can be bothered with. So I need a new one.

Should it be an Android or an iPhone?  The Android is not quite as well integrated or designed, but it’s cheaper, more open and the most important features work better. The most basic thing for me is that the default browser in the Android is really excellent with by far the best feature that it reformats carriage returns as you zoom in.  Someone told me that the iPhone’s browser is built on the same open source platform as the Android’s one, but it doesn’t do that.  Neither does the iPad’s browser (nor the third party browser I’ve so far downloaded – Atomic). Completely beats me why they don’t do it, but there you go – Steve Jobs is the billionaire not me, so I’m sure it’s an entirely frivolous feature that I’m after – enabling me to read different lines by just moving my eyes, rather than scrolling left and right twice for each line.

The other thing which is really useful on the Android is the four button ‘global menu’ built into the hardware.  I’m not sure why Apple sticks to its one button solutions long after more buttons are so clearly demonstrated to be superior – but there you go.  The Android also synchs all things in the cloud, which is just much better than having to synch through the iTunes which is bad enough as music synching software and a joke as a synching program for a smart phone.

Anyway, I’m thinking of getting the Samsung Gallaxy II S which has had rave reviews.

Your mission, gentle reader, should you decide to accept it, is to answer the following questions.

1. Should I buy the phone I’m thinking of, or another one and if so why?
2. Where is the best place to buy it – presuming as I think I should that buying it outright is the best way to buy it.
3. Is there anything else I should know?

HTC