Freelance Consultant's Diary

Since I was disappointed that there were not enough bloggers on business topics, my post ( Business bloggers wanted ) drew some interesting (and many) emails to me.  I am not sure if it had any thing to do with the fact that the bloggers were in the spotlight at the Boston convention (where not only did they receive press credentials, their reports were highly appreciated for their frankness), but one consistent theme that I heard from those who wrote was that they believe blogs are for the techies and they don't know how to get started.  I agree because it took me a while to make iProceed blog happen.  I went through several frustrating days of work before I could integrate Blogger and my server. I remember that even in 1999-2000 I had colleagues who would write down their email content on a yellow pad and then an EA would type it out and email it.  When the reply came, she would print it and then my colleague (a very senior level executive) would mark his comments ...

I didn't realize that I would be forced to write about another depressing economic report.  After discussing yesterday, how the gross tax receipts continue to decline due to continued drop in average income of Americans , there is more data this morning to support that American consumers continue to struggle as I had argued in my article on Impact of offshoring on American economy .  Here is what the GDP chart looks like: If we take out the 3Q03 data (which saw a jump due to increase in government spending due to Operation Iraqi Freedom), we are still looking at an improvement since the dismal numbers from 2001 and 2002, but nothing like the 90s and simply not enough to generate a robust growth in economy and jobs.  Here are some additional conclusions from the Department of Commerce data: The deceleration in real GDP growth in the second quarter primarily reflected a sharp deceleration in personal consumption expenditures and a deceleration in private inventory inve...

According to recently released data by the IRS, after adjusting for inflation, the income of all Americans fell over 9% from 2000 to 2002, the first time that has effectively happened since the modern tax system was introduced during World War II.  Other conclusions from the IRS data are: Individual income taxes fell 19%, more than three times the decline in adjusted gross incomes. Falling incomes, rather than tax cuts, appear to account for the greatest share of the decline in income taxes paid. During the same two years the number of Americans reporting no income or that they actually lost money for tax purposes exploded, growing 48%, to 1.7 million in 2002. Those who reported negative incomes in 2002 reported being $65.6 billion in the hole for that year, 12% worse than in 2000. Below is a chart that shows how our tax receipts have been declining (mostly due to lower average incomes): These are very sobering statistics and I had argued in an article on the impact of offshor...

I have been an early adopter of VOIP and have been generally satisfied with the Vonage package that I embraced a little less than a year ago.  It has turned out to be much cheaper than AT&T, particularly for international calls.  However, I have not yet said goodbye to AT&T (and I still continue to pay about $10 a month to AT&T just to be able to make long-distance phone calls), because VOIP is not 100% reliable yet.  International calls don't always go through when I want and the sound quality is not good enough to make a business call. Vonage appears to be the leader among the VOIP companies, but believe it or not, it has just 215,000 active lines after being in business since January 2001.  Other companies in this space are far behind. Why is paid VOIP telephony doomed? If you speak to any telecom company, they might not see any threat from VOIP, but that is because it is best to downplay any such threats.  In fact, during next one to two years, while ad...

A range of reports (from Nielsen Media and Research, Jupiter Research, Ipsos-Insight, comScore Media Matrix, Veronis Suhler Stevenson, TNS Media Intelligence/CMR, and PricewaterhouseCoopers) analyzed by Frank Rose point to some interesting (and disturbing for advertisers) trends in the 18-34 male segment: Continued shift from television to other entertainment outlets (particularly video games and the Internet) Going online and watching TV are equally popular in this segment for the first time The group is gravitating towards adult stuff, music, auctions, sports and consumer electronics retail What does it mean for businesses and their advertising programs? Good news:   As I analyzed in Developing a search engine advertising strategy , it is far cheaper to advertise on the Internet and such advertising can be more targeted.  Plus, you only pay for performance.  Television advertising, which was already quite expensive, continues to become even more expensive.  It woul...