BusinessWeek reporter Roben Farzad recently traveled to Columbia to determine whether or not the “third tier” (globally speaking) economy there was ready for mainstream foreign direct investment and an “equity culture”. From an investment perspective, Columbia is the next frontier after the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China). Its stock market has increased 14-fold since 2001 with a still modest total capitalization of $59 billion.

The one-time murder capital of the world and former home to infamous drug cartel Pablo Escobar, Medellín (pop 2.4mm) is reemerging as the commercial hub of the nation. The president, Alvaro Uribe, unlike most South American leftist leaders, sits right of center and has an approval rating above 60% in his now second term in office. His government is very much interested in attracting growth through foreign investment and understands that this can only be achieved by driving the paramilitary drug lords out of the urban commercial centers, which he’s made good progress at so far.

The U.S. has incentive to stay on good terms with and help Colombia grow as relations with Venezuela and Equador continue to deteriorate. The U.S. has sent $5 billion in aid since 2000 - the 4th largest financial aid recipient of the U.S.

The Colombian stock exchange, called Bolsa de Valores, is merely 12 people sitting in front of trading screen in an office building in Bogotá’s financial district. The exchange closes at 1PM because all business that needs to be transacted for the day is typically done by then. With such a limited number of buyers and sellers in their emerging market, volatility is the norm. In 2005 the Bolsa was up 128% (second best in the world that year). It took a 45% dip last year when many emerging markets were hit - second worst loss in the world. It is down 5% in 2007. Bolsa-listed stocks can only be bought with pesos and there are no Colombian mutual funds available to foreign investors.

Some upcoming public offerings on the Bolsa include Procafecol, a local coffee producer (Juan Valdez), and $4 billion state oil company Ecopetrol, which will likely get listed on the NYX. The only Colombian stock currently listed on the NYX is Bancolombia, whose shares are up 20-fold in the last 5 years.

U.S. investment banks have been buying up companies in Colombia and Colombian companies are slowly starting to export their products to the U.S. to grow faster. The two countries are on the verge of a free-trade agreement, something president Uribe is pushing hard for.

Although murders and other violence is dropping, infrastructure in Colombia continues to degrade and is in need of billions in investment. Many investors are waiting for that to happen to open the floodgates for other markets inside the country. The government is hesitant to break from its old-world traditions of owning all infrastructure, though. They are having trouble raising bond money because they can only deliver 6% returns instead of the 20% they yielded 10 years ago. Critics say there is plenty of private money waiting to fund the infrastructure projects if the government could just adopt an equity frame of mind instead.

The lengthy article has some great descriptions of his personal interactions in Colombia and some more detail on its violent history and how much better it is now. Extreme Investing: Inside Colombia

By Adam Jackon

Many services here in the US that were once expensive are now progressively becoming less so. Broadband Internet access seems to be in a race to the bottom, largely thanks for fierce competition between providers. Local and long distance phone service is much more affordable now thanks to competition from VOIP.

Conversely, some services that were once free or cheap are lately becoming more expensive. Television, for instance, used to be either free or very inexpensive for the average American household. Now its probably the largest monthly bill in the household behind the mortgage or rent payment. Admittedly, television has gotten a lot better over the years: more channels, better picture, DVR capabilities. I think the price increase is justified. Celular service, if not increasing in price, seems to be maintaining its premium pricing as time goes by. Sure we can TXT and PIX each other now, but does the service really need to be as expensive as it is?

Before we get into what this cellular provider of the future might look like, let’s establish what sort of technology we’re dealing with in the average American’s cell phone here in 2007.

Phones these days are location-aware. Even if you’re not using or paying for the service, the phone always knows approximately where on the planet it is, provided there is cellular coverage. The accuracy is even good enough to build a driving directions (GPS-like) service into the offering. Blackberry’s and other devices offer this - for an additional usage fee, of course. Cellular location technology is much better than GPS, though, because you don’t have the line-of-sight issue. GPS units must be able to “see” the satellites that give it geographic positioning information. If you try to use one indoors they’re useless. Modern cell phones use the cell towers for this information and thus will work anywhere that the phone work gets a signal.

They may not be doing it now, but cellular service providers are able to easily track where their users are, geographically. We know this because some of them even offer a “track your kid” feature as an add-on service. The location sensors in the phone beam the location of the kid to the cellular provider’s servers, which host a map that the parent can watch to track the location of the child. As long as the child’s phone is on, the location is known. I’m not going to get into the (very real) privacy implications here. Instead I’d like to think about some potential service offerings that could defray cellular operational costs.

1. Tracking the rate at which individual cell phones are traveling on surface streets and freeways is the most accurate possible way to monitor traffic congestion in real-time. In California CalTrans uses our FastPasses and assorted highway sensors to give a general view of freeway traffic speeds, but cell phones would be a much larger and more accurate sample and would transcend past the freeways onto congested surface streets. This data stream could be sold as a subscription service to be integrated with the very phones providing the data or with in-car navigation systems.
2. The social network possibilities here are endless. Have you ever decided where to eat a meal based on how crowded you thought the restaurant would be? What if you could jump online and see for yourself? “Restaurant X has a dining capacity of 120 and there are currently 145 cell phones in the building.” Sounds like there’s a wait - even after you count the staffs’ phones. The best part is that the restaurants and bars wouldn’t have any way of cheating and making their place look more full or empty than it really is.
3. Imagine a new social networking site thats let users create profile pages similar to MySpace and associate them with their cell phone. Users can choose whether or not they want their location to be known and who should be able to see it on a map, live. Maybe you only want your friends and not your coworkers to see it on the weekend. Better idea - maybe you never want your coworkers to see it. It’s similar to twitter or dodgeball but with far less effort and better accuracy. This social network would be much more compelling than existing ones because it dives more deeply into our offline lives. Collecting basic demographic data on cellular subscribers, combined with this rich stream of location data would yield such unique information as:
   • Which bars and restaurants are most popular and which days/times of the week/month. Consumers and competing bars would love to know.
   • What demographic frequents different bars and restaurants. I know some guys that would probably pay to see where all the girls were hanging out each night of the week.
   • Where do the different age groups tend to live? That would help make outdoor advertising more targeted and relevant.
4. I saved the most obvious and most irritating for last: targeted marketing. It doesn’t get much more targeted than this. You walk into a Target and you start receiving coupons for Walmart. You walk into Starbux and a $2.00 off coupon for Peets along with walking directions to the Peets down the block pops up on your phone. Annoying? Maybe. Profitable? Definitely. Maybe customers who don’t want the ads offers pay a slightly higher monthly subscription fee. Perhaps the cellular provider can ask the customer on the web, during signup, which offers he or she wouldn’t mind seeing. The service could, if done right, actually be a feature to some users who value saving money on purchases they’re just about to make.

The data the cellular providers have access to provides an unprecedented view into the offline habits of almost every citizen in the country. There are probably many more business models that could leverage this data that someone smarter than I will think of. The point, however, is that if a smart provider decided to build some new service offerings around these under-utilized assets and then use the new revenue streams to lower the cost of the basic cell phone service (maybe even to $0), they would be unstoppable in stealing market share from their competitors in a what has turned into an increasingly commoditized industry.

— Would you sign up with a cell phone provider if you could get free (or say under $20 / month) cell service if the provider was engaged in the businesses outlined above?

I took the bait and tried out MovableType4 Beta, the “other” and “original” blog software that announced a new, open source and feature-rich version (4 beta) today. I’ve been a faithful (but not necessarily happy) WordPress user for several years now. I really thought WordPress would’ve been further along by now (more AJAX, better drag-drop features, better in-line image handling, etc). I downloaded and installed MT4 because of the releases this morning eluding to some of these rich UI features being included.

Summary:

• The system is still written in Perl (CGI) so get ready to spend an hour installing additional Perl modules. I have a fairly recent version of XAMPP’s distro on my server which is usually sufficient for hosting LAMPP web apps … but not MT4.
  • You’ll have to add “Options +ExecCGI” to your Apache config and open up the permissions on all these CGI files before any of this works.
• Perl Modules installed, now I install MT4. The web-based installation was quick and painless.
• The Admin UI definitely has more flash and AJAX but is counter-intuitive.
• I immediately setup a new blog and attempted to import all of this blog’s entries to see how they looked. I figured MT4 would at least be good at that seeing as how they’re biggest challenge now is to steal market share back from WordPress.
• Before importing, MT4 suggested I setup my publishing paths (I’m assuming that means how the URL’s will be generated for my posts). Makes sense. So I clicked the provided link to do so and got this message (click to see the full screen):
  
  So clearly the software still has some serious bugs.
• I also attempted to configure other options for the blog but after about 15 minutes of screwing around, couldn’t find where to set them. Maybe I’m too used to WordPress, but after a few hours with MT4 I decided the software wasn’t worth the time and hassle.

I am hoping some healthy competition in the blog software space will make WordPress an even better product. I don’t think they have to worry too much about MT4 for now, though.

I’ve been using the formerly online-only task manager at www.RememberTheMilk.com. It has a slick AJAX interface and great features that allow you to add tasks quickly, prioritize them, set recurring tasks, maintain multiple lists, integrate with Google apps, and so on.

My biggest problem with them was that the service would go down periodically, leaving me unable to update my list. The recent rollout of Google Gears, Google’s framework that allows web applications to operate in the absence of an Internet connection, and RTM’s integration with it has solved all my problems.

RTM now lets me switch between online and offline mode without disrupting the usefulness of the application.

I’ve been off Microsoft Outlook for about a year now (thanks to Google’s Domain Applications which gives you mail and calendar). Now the task management problem is solved as well. Nice job, RTM!

Interesting NYT article about the effect the story people tell themselves about their own lives and how it affects their futures.  This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It) - New York Times

•  People seem to be a product of their own life story.  It influences how they see themselves in past, present and future.
•  People tend to remember facts more accurately when they’re told in a story (unlike this post which is most certainly a list)
•  The research was conducted on mostly 30-somethings who were asked to tell their life stories in two hours.
  • Those with mood problems had mostly good stories but with very memorable bad aspects like the pride of a college graduation tainted with the cutting remark of a classmate.
• “Generative adults” who are characterized by civic-mindedness and high energy levels associated larger traumas with wonderful recoveries.  IE: being down about a bad divorce but bouncing back and finding a wonderful new mate.
• Those who had reduced psychological well-being tended to see their moods and behavior problems as part of their own character as opposed to a villain to be defeated.  Those treating it as a villain and not part of their intrinsic person tended to recover more quickly and thoroughly.

This long article boils a lot of research down to the following logic:

• We all have our own life story that we use to formulate our self image in the past, present and future.
• That story is not factual, its shaped by ourselves and can be changed.
• If you can change your life story to a more positive one, you’ll expect yourself to have more positive experiences in the future.
  • IE: Instead of viewing yourself as a stupid loser for doing poorly in school, change the story to you being an independent thinker, unable to be constrained by the mundane and inflexible educational system.
• Feeling that you’ve made changes starts a momentum of change that allows you to feel real progress and improvement.