Whenever I travel outside of the UK, I don’t have a clue how much Orange charges me for calls or texts.  Data is a complete mystery all together.  After coming back from Japan I was hit with a £140 data charges bill which I am still trying to track down.  So in the meanwhile I try to refrain from using data.

This is why I was delighted to be using a Vodafone SIM in France last weekend.  The minute I landed, I received a text hat read:

Welcome to FRANCE.  Calls cost 75p per call + your home rate (including bundles mins) to make and receive.  SMS’s are 11p.  Daily cost for data is up to £4.99inc VAT per 25MB allowance.  We’ll text you before we charge you again.

Now this is what I called great user experience.  It doesn’t matter if £4.99 a day for data is a lot or not (I don’t think it is).  At least I know how much it’s going to be.  Plus the fact that Vodafone will text me if I go over the 25MB allowance is just great.

I was also travelling with an O2 phone and I received a similar text that read:

Calls to UK/EU are 35ppm (18ppm to receive). Text is 11p.  Data £3/MB.

Well, it’s great to receive the text from O2 (Orange did not even send that), but just look at the data charge of £3/MB.   So if you are using  25MB you will be paying only £4.99 with Vodafone but whooping £75 with O2.    For a 10 minutes call you will be paying 75p with Vodafone but £3.50 with O2.  That’s 4 times more for you.   I’m not sure how I would feel about O2’s “We’re better, connected” message when I get hit with a £75 bill, that’s for sure.   I haven’t checked ‘3′ and will look into it in a couple of weeks when I am away again.

I am still waiting for regulators to clamp down on these ridiculously high tariffs that have nothing to do with reality.   The EU has already done some steps with regards to voice and texts and I am waiting for their move on data charges.  Till then we will continue to be hit with hundreds of pounds in roaming charges.

When we booked our flight tickets to Tokyo a few months ago, I wasn’t quite sure how this holiday would turn up.  I try to be cautious about promises to visit “the most amazing place” and doubted whether Japan would live to the hype.   It did.  Japan is such a fascinating and unique place to visit.   I am also glad I ‘graduated’ to travel in Japan after having already experienced China and Singapore, which in retrospect appear in a different light. 

Here are 16 thoughts about Japan, one for each day of our travels there.

Uniqueness
It is logical to assume that the more countries one visits, the less likely they are to find something novel and unique.  Japan is guaranteed to be different.  Whether it’s its culture, food, architecture, entertainment, transportation, or people; Japan feels like nothing you have seen before.

Not just temples
We wanted to have a mixture of cities, history, hiking and sun and followed the itinerary below.  The only change I recommend is to substitute a night in Osaka for an extra night at Shirahama.
Days 1-2:  Tokyo
Day 3:  Honke Bankyu Onsen, Yunishigawa
Day 4: Nikko
Day 5: Hakone and Mt. Fuji
Days 6:  Takayama
Day 7:  Shirakawa-go
Days 8-10:  Kyoto
Day 11:  Hiroshima
Days 12-13:  Osaka
Days 14-15:  Shirahama
Day 16:  Tokyo

Meet the Japanese
It is hard and problematic to generalize about 127+ million people, but everyone we met was nice, welcoming and courteous.  Privacy and personal distance is well kept but not in the cold–don’t-look-at-me manner you encounter in London.  For some obscure reason the Japanese overwhelming courteousness is only detracted by the tendency to jump queues or push in line to the elevator, a behavior which I found rather amusing.
Compared to our travels in China, we found it harder to interact with Japanese.  At our last night in Tokyo we met two Chinese couples and before we knew it, joined their table and were invited for a drink.  This does not really happen with the Japanese, regardless of your proficiency of the language.  In that sense, Mandarin is more useful in landing you a free drink and a great night out…

Language barriers?  Not really
I got a bit lazy practicing my (very) basic Japanese when I realized that in most places English is understood.  Knowledge of Japanese is helpful when buying train tickets, making hotel or restaurant reservations and ordering food.  Knowledge of Japanese is mandatory if you want to have a chat with locals in onsens, sushi bars, train or elsewhere.   You will have a better time if you speak some Japanese.

Onsens
Onsens are natural hot-springs spas, usually separated for men and women.  They’re everywhere and they’re great.  We visited three or four onsens and each was different than the other.  In Osaka we went to Spa World, an in-house “spa palace” with dozens of different themed pools.  For ¥1000 ($11) it’s a non-brainer.

Ryokans
One of the traditional accommodation options in Japan is the ryokan, somewhat of an upscale Bed & Breakfast (& Dinner).  Rooms are Japanese style which means sleeping on a futon laid down at night on the tatami floor.  If you’re coming all the way to Japan you should definitely spend a night or two in a good ryokan.   They usually have their own onsen or other public hot bath and depending on where you are staying (and how much you are willing to spend), offer delicious multi-course meals.

Beach time
Try searching for “best beaches in Japan” and you’d hardly find an answer.  We researched long and and finally booked two nights at Shirahama, Kansai and were delighted with our choice.  We found a beautiful white-sand beach, nice hotels, great sun, fresh sashimi and not too many people.  Japan might not challenge the beaches of the Philippines or Thailand, but if you’re there already, there are definitely nice beach to consider.

Bullet Trains
The Shinkansen, bullet-train service is unbelievable.  The 250-300 km/h speeds feel like a safe rollercoaster ride.  They are so efficient and pleasant to ride that it would be hard to get used to air travel again.   It would be a blessing if Shinkansen type trains would start challenging low-cost airlines travel in Europe but given the price point I am not holding my breath.   If you’re a train-buff, the Modern Transportation Museum in Osaka makes a nice visit and opportunity to play around with some train models not found elsewhere.

Mobile Phones
By far Japan has been the most mobile phone-obsessed country I have been to.   Interestingly, in over two weeks I spotted just a couple of iPhones and a few Samsung phones.  All the rest were vanilla flip-phones which look pretty much the same.  I expected massive use of data but didn’t quite expect the ubiquitous use of phone cameras by everyone, from five year olds to an elderly grandmother.

Food, Food, and Food
Be it restaurants, groceries, markets, food stands, deli shops or vending machines, it feels like the majority of retail space in Japan is dedicated to food.  Quite a surprise when you consider how rare obesity is and how slim everyone around you is.

Sushi
Even the local supermarket offers better sashimi than most London restaurants.  We had sashimi or nigiri almost every night.  Ordering is easy: all you need is to point to the fish in front of you, or better off, ask for the same dish that someone else has ordered.  After sampling more than a dozen different options, we still preferred Tuna and Salmon over everything else.  Our best meal was at the Kozue restaurant at the Park Hyatt in Tokyo.  It is a must.  The set meal was worth every penny and I cannot wait till my next visit in Tokyo to revisit it.

The Japanese Sweet Tooth
There are sweets shops everywhere, selling a variety of bean-based and rice-based candies.  In the large cities you can also find beautifully done gourmet European-style patisseries.  Now this is the deal.  Imagine spotting a chocolate brownie, mousse or tiramisu which looks as good as a million dollar sushi roll.  You get excited, pay the bill and bite into it, expecting the best desert you have ever tried.   And then you realize how bland it is.  What can I say; we have tried hard but could not find a single shop to offer even a reasonable decent croissant.  It looks like a great opportunity to open a sweet shop where the deserts would actually taste as good as they look.

O-Sake, Umeshu and Whisky
Alcohol is as unique and good as Japanese food is.  We settled in most nights for various types of umeshu, plum wine and especially like the brown sugar (kokuto) type.  We also tried a drink called Half Moon but could not find it anywhere outside of Kyoto.  With such a variety of sake (rice wine), beer and whisky Japan offers great drinking as well as eating.

Service
Service is just great, especially if you compare it to what you’re used to in the UK or the Continent.   There’s no tipping in Japan but given the average price of meal you can assume it is already included in the bill.

Prices
Traveling in Japan is as expensive as traveling in the UK or Europe.  Rates for 4* hotels start at $150.  A meal for 2 people in a mid-range restaurant was usually around $20-40.   Transportation is expensive.  We purchased a Japan Rail Pass, but otherwise a three hour bullet-train from Osaka to Tokyo would cost you $150.   It is possible to enjoy Japan on a lower budget, but transportation and decent hotels and restaurants would still cost significantly more than in neighboring China, Thailand or Philippines.

Lucky August
Almost every single day was warm but not too hot (25-30°C) and sunny.  We maybe had a day or two of brief rains.  None of the warnings about 40°C Tokyo came true.   On our last day, we got on the last flight to London as all other flights got cancelled due to a typhoon.  Overall, I guess we just got lucky.

The IE8 team just blogged about how Internet Explorer 8 will be integrated into Windows 7’s new taskbar.

Annoying UX with IE8 and W7

I have been using Windows 7 for a few months and whilst the new taskbar is miles better than Vista’s, it does have one major drawback: users simply cannot easily open new instances of IE if they already have an existing IE window open.

The blog suggests several ways to open a new instance if one is already open:

You can right-click on the IE icon and select “Internet Explorer”

You can drag up on the IE icon with the mouse and select “Internet Explorer”

You can shift+click or middle+click on the IE icon

If IE is in the first position (next to the start button as in the diagram above), you can press “Win + 1” and this will launch a new instance (same as Vista).

So bottom line, if you were used to simply clicking the IE icon to open a new window – the default experience in XP and Vista – you now need to either use your keyboard, click-move-click or use the center-button (which my laptop lacks) just to open a new instance or center-click. 

 This is quite a miss in user experience.  I bet most users won’t get it.   My suggestion: if all IE8 tabs reside within the same window, how about simply opening that IE window?

Can you name one successful mobile software start-up, e.g. one that sold for $100m+ and generated nice returns to its VCs?  If you cannot come up with a name, you might agree with a VC partner I recently met, who claimed that Mobile has so far been the graveyard of VC money.   With that in mind, I went crawling the web for the successful mobile exits.

The mobile telecoms industry is one of a mere few trillion-dollar industries, like automobiles, tourism and military.  It generates more revenues than either the advertising, TV, Internet or software industries.  Is it conceivable that despite its size it did not produce a single YouTube, Flickr, Hotmail, Skype or a Facebook?

I tried hard, but really could not find a single big exit for a mobile start-up. There are only a few that could be considered runner-ups to the titles “successful” but each has its issues:

• AdMob is still private but going after the big prize of the #1 mobile advertising network.  They might make it to a $100m+ sale but with CPMs plummeting they will have to hang in there for a few more years at least.
• Zyb generated a nice return to its VC but was still only a $49m deal.
• M:Metrics at $44m, was not a huge deal either.
• Loopt is still private, well hyped and with zero revenues, despite ABI’s dreamed-up target of $3bn for this segment.  With Google Latitude zero rating location-based-services, I doubt if their revenue model will stand.
• JumpTap has with already raised $73m in funding since ‘05, so I sure want to see how they drive a 3-5x return with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft buying operator deals for nine-figure sums.
• Don’t get me started about MVNOs like this one, or this one or any of these ones.
• Others like Shozu, Amobee are even further away from becoming the next big thing.

Unless someone can come up with a start-up which I have missed, it does indeed look like Mobile has been a graveyard for VC money so far.

Whenever I get a chance, I try to watch the talks and videos on TED.  They do an excellent job finding fascinating people to speak about their work, present new ideas and share their passions. 

I just watched this 2006 (it’s never too late) presentation by Hans Rosling about “developed” vs. “developing” countries – a terminology which Rosling shows how inadequate it is.  Aside from the thought-provoking data, he uses a visual analysis tool which is available online at gapminder.org.  It is one of the best graphical tools I have played with and will inspire anyone who wants to present complex data analyses in a clear, no-words-necessary format (my collegues at McKinsey would surely appreciate it).

Easily visualize complex data

Here’s an analysis I run, comparing cell phone penetration, internet penetration and country size between1980-2006.  It took me two minutes to create and I am guessing one could spend hours more exploring the data.

Now, if only the next version of Microsoft Office and Excel could help me create 4-dimensional charts like this (with the time variable), that would be awesome.

I have played around with Google’s Street-View when it launched in the US more than a year ago.  At the time, I wasn’t too impressed.  The resolution of most photos was pretty low and aside from being a novel feature it was just that: a feature.  Live Search’s bird-eye view gave me all I needed when it came to end-to-end navigation.  That’s now all changed with the UK (and European) Street-View which launched yesterday.

The prime enabler is the resolution.  It’s just amazing.  It feels like Photosynth but transformed to the real world.  It’s relatively easy to navigate the roads although there are a few UI glitches which hopefully should be fixed.   The speed of loading the images, zooming in/out and navigating the map is excellent. 

This launch enables users (and Google) to do things which were simply not possible before:

1. Navigation with visual cues: just yesterday I tried to direct my partner to a certain location which her TomTom failed to find.   I couldn’t do much to help her because I couldn’t see where she needed to go.  With Street-View, I can now just look it up now and give her visual cues like “it’s just past the petrol station with the big red roof”.
2. Looking for parking places: it’s just so much easier to know your surroundings with Street-View.  Users can actually read the parking restrictions on the signs and decide whether to take the car or the tube.
3. Checking the surroundings of hotels or restaurants: whenever we go to a new hotel or restaurant, I always want to check how they look from the outside.  Users can now easily do it with Street-View as well as check whether the place is located on a noisy street with buses and traffic or on a quite one.
4. Searching for a business’ phone number: some businesses simply do not have an online presence.  My dry-cleaning place, for instance.  But they do have a sign with a phone number and now I can simply ‘walk’ to the street and ‘look’ at their sign whilst still sitting next to my computer.   Combine that with OCR, and Google is sitting on enormously valuable data.  They can basically replenish their entire local directory by OCR-ing phone numbers, addresses and what not.
5. Advertising local businesses:  Google has not been able to monetise much other than search.  That’s probably not going to change with Street-View but it does offer fantastic opportunities for monetization.  Imagine a scenario of ‘walking’ the street and by clicking on a specific store being able to ‘enter’ its website, order products and the like.   It’s Second Life turned into Real (First?) Life, a vision that only companies with access to this data could achieve.

You can actually read the parking sign’s restrictions with Street-View.

All in all, Street-View has the potential of changing the way we navigate, find local information and probably shop online.  It’s a killer-app for Google and a great news for users and consumers.

TED just released an talk with Dan Arieli where he discusses “when do people cheat?”.  The gist: 1) people cheat in small increments (rather than in big quantities), 2) they are less likely to cheat when reminded of morals and ethics and 3) they are more likely to cheat when someone else in their peer group cheats but less likely to cheat when it’s someone from a ‘rival’ group. 

Even if it sounds common-sense you would better watch the entire talk to get the full story behind the research.

Safari 4.0. Please let me customize my Top Sites.

I have just downloaded the new Safari 4.0 released a few hours ago for PC and Mac. It’s definitely faster and retains Safari’s (Apple’s?) cool factor. It’s even faster than Google  Chrome which doesn’t work well with my work proxy.

One thing which I already don’t like about it is that you just cannot customize the new a-la-Google-Chrome Top Sites screen. That’s the screen that is displayed whenever you open a new tab. You would expect to have the option to add manually new tabs (like BBC News or FT or Windows Live Hotmail). But there’s no such option. Instead, there’s a tiny caption saying that new sites will be added as your browse. This just doesn’t make sense; why not just let users customize their Top Sites list?

Microsoft Flight Simulator. What's next?

I have been playing Microsoft Flight Simulator on and off for almost twenty years.  The BBC has just published a story about the upcoming end of its development following the latest layoffs at Microsoft.

This would be sad news for millions of avid users like me.  I have not come across any official statement from Microsoft and will update the post once there is one.

Update:
The Flight Simulator team has asked me to link to their public statement:

By now, many of you have heard that Microsoft has closed Aces Studio, the publisher of Microsoft Flight Simulator. This was not a reflection of the quality of the products Aces has developed, the sales performance of the games, or the quality of the team at Aces. This difficult decision was made to align Microsoft’s resources with our strategic priorities. Microsoft Flight Simulator X will remain available at retail stores and web retailers, the Flight Sim community will continue to learn from and encourage one another, and we remain committed to the Flight Simulator franchise for the long term.

Microsoft Game Studios is investing significant resources in many exciting and new areas of gaming and entertainment, including Windows games. We believe these future investments will push innovation, community, and collaboration to unprecedented levels and will provide more synergy with our ongoing investments in Games for Windows – LIVE as well as other Windows entertainment technologies. We have nothing specific to announce at this time, but stay tuned for more information.

We are humbled and proud of the passion and support that the Flight Simulator franchise has developed over its more than twenty-five year history. This includes you, the large community of flight simmers, as well as the vibrant third-party ecosystem that has developed around the game. We will continue to produce, sell, and support the latest version of Flight Simulator as we plan for future versions of the franchise. Thank you for your understanding of our decision and for your continued support!

I have just finished installing Ubuntu 8.10 on my ten-year old IBM T-23. It took about fifty minutes and involved a few error messages creating new partitions and formatting the harddrive.

My very first impression: what an ugly wallpaper.

My first impression: what an ugly wallpaper.

And what an ugly colour theme too; why choose khaki brown for a default theme? I did actually expect to be blown away by flying pinguins or some other Linuxish theme.  Maybe something to work on for version 9.0?