Don't Mess With My Yo Yo

The state yo-yo championship is coming to San Francisco. $80 yo-yos? A yo-yo boom every seven years? According to SF Chronicle writer Steve Rubenstein, "TV contracts and corporate sponsors, are one reason yo-yo championships are held in museums instead of coliseums." Get real! It's been downhill since the spelling bee started appearing on ESPN. Shouldn't it appear on KQED? The spelling bee isn't a sport! Plus who wants to see a yo yo from the third deck?

Forbes Picks Yay Area for Best City for Singles

The Bay Area, New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago round out this year’s top five “Best Cities for Singles” according to Forbes.

I don’t necessarily agree because I live in the Bay Area and…well we don’t need to get into details.

What is amusing about this is the methodology. Factors include coolness, cost of living alone, culture, job growth, online dating, nightlife and singles. While these categories aren’t ridiculous, there is something wacky about the criteria. For example, one factor of cost of living is the cost of a Pizza Hut Pizza. Or the online dating category (led by Houston) is based on the number of active profiles on Yahoo! Personals. Or finally the singles category carried twice the weight of any other category but is defined by anyone above age 15 that has never been married.

Maybe I should conduct my own survey based on my own criterion: coolness (number of persons doing the hyphy dance, ghost riding the whip or wearing stunna shades), cost of living alone (rent, gas, cost of a good Philly cheesesteak and least amount of gold diggers), culture (who’s on the beach, side shows and good concerts), job growth (career growth opportunities, above market value pay and signing bonuses), online dating (active single profiles on MySpace , Facebook or even Craigslist for some of you), nightlife (how many cool places to drink, how late alcohol is served and options for getting home without driving drunk) and singles (number of women of legal drinking age that don’t have kids or dudes not paying child support).

Ban on Styrofoam in SF

Starting today, San Francisco require city "food vendors who sell prepared food to use compostable or recyclable to-go containers." It's a good idea but how well will this be enforced? I imagine compliance to be similar to SOX compliance. Yes, I know. It's a low blow. Deal with it.

Armando Sucks and the Fans Let it Be Known

I actually didn't mind the signing of Armando Benitez but like most of Brian Sabean's moves, it sucked. I'm not saying this because I'm an A's fan. I use to work for the Giants. I'll admit it. When I first got out of college, I was a freelance sports writer but I also needed some extra money since I was making more money expensing my miles than the articles I was writing. Getting back to Benitez, the Giants should have traded him in spring training instead of waiting until now. Or else a guy like Sabean can only get a middle reliever and be forced to pay more than 93% of Benitez' remaining salary for year...about $4.7 million of the $5 million owed to the finger pointer. But the fans are happy, they basically booed Benitez out of town.

Okay, I'll be honest. I wasn't too happy that the A's got stuck with Jason Kendall and his salary for Arther Rhodes...but Billy's still got a much better track record than Sabean.

The Real National Women's Day

Today is International Women’s Day that has been commemorated by the United Nations and designated by many countries as a national holiday. If you read my previous blog posts, you may know about my disapproval of Valentine’s Day but this is something even I can appreciate…well maybe not completely but the basic concept.

Inspired by a hundreds of years of women wanting equal footing including a sex strike against men to end war in ancient Greece, “the idea of an International Women's Day first arose at the turn of the century, which in the industrialized world was a period of expansion and turbulence, booming population growth and radical ideologies,” according to the United Nations.

Right here in San Francisco, the Charter of the United Nations, signed 1945 was the first international agreement to “proclaim gender equality as a fundamental human right. Since then, the Organization has helped create a historic legacy of internationally agreed strategies, standards, programs and goals to advance the status of women worldwide.”

However, I want to shed some light on some interesting facts about modern day inequality for women.

In San Francisco, we have heard, seen or read many times about the Asian massage parlors, brothels and backrooms of businesses that are known to exist in our backyards. Many of the sex slaves are Korean and it’s disgraceful to see crime of this nature being carried out against our own people. Even more shameful because of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s recent comment that there was no proof Korean women were forced into prostitution, despite countless accounts by survivors even today.

Sex trafficking is an $8 billion worldwide business with more than 800,000 sex slaves and forced laborers with many more unaccounted for.

Recently, a friend of mine and fellow USC Trojan alum went on a short-term mission trip to Thailand and told me about her experience firsthand. I hope to have a longer conversation and share some of her photos in a future blog post but for now, here are some sad facts.

Despite prostitution being banned, police don’t do a thorough job of raiding downtown areas. After noisy sirens from police cars went down a busy street in a tourist area, it was revealed that police were making sure there were no prostitutes. When the police failed to check the back rooms and up stairs, someone asked why they didn’t, the police avoided answering. However, the real reason was that the police own some of the bars that these prostitutes work in.

Looking at some of the young petite ladies, you might think the girls are underage. While some are, others are in their 30s wearing school girl outfits so they can look like a young teenager as these are the girls most attractive to Johns.

Mayor Newsom: Drunken Stupor or Cop Out?

The San Francisco Chronicle today ran a Page One, Above the Fold story on Mayor Newsom's confession of a drinking problem (read the statement here). People are allowed to make mistakes but regardless of your performance in your professional career (which I will not judge him by), you have to be accountable with some moral and professional standard. He forced Alex Tourk to quit his job, ruined his family and is prancing around town with a 20-year old. How's that for a role model? And I don't want to hear that he's not a role model. I VOTE FOR HIS RESIGNATION!

The Clear Card Challenge - Biometrics for Speed?

Mineta San Jose International Airport became the first airport on the West Coast to give flight passengers a speed card to bypass long security checks in airports. For about $100, you can pay for a clear card that holds information like your fingerprints and other information that will get you into the speed lane.

However, until advanced technology that doesn't force passengers to take off their shoes and belts become available, you may not be saving too much time. For now, applying for one will be like spending a day at the immigration office...except by the Transportation Security Administration. Hopefully by the time it gets up a little bit closer to home (Oakland and San Francisco), the technology will be up to date, even powerful enough to scan laptops inside a bag or process applications faster.

DEMO Gods, Angels and Demons?

Tonight at the Churchill Club event at the Hyatt in San Francisco, DEMO executive producer Chris Shipley led a session on taking an idea from conception to launch. She was joined by Brett Kilpatrick (Panoratio), Steve Larsen (Krugle), Srivats Sampath (Mercora) and Munjal Shah (Riya).

Riya recently launched Like.com. I already love this site, and I don't even like shopping.

Here are some tips that I picked up:

• Hire good people
• Start with good engineers
• Use beta releases as your market researcher (Unless you are an enterprise - Ugh thanks Brett)
• Add at least a few great salespersons

But here's a few tips from a PR perspective:

• Develop a solid consistent message
• Consult independent reviewers prior to a public release
• Hire a good PR firm to keep the momentum going after a launch
  

I've always wondered what idea I could come up with. Here's a few I jotted down on my way home...another long BART ride.

• High definition Internet
• Comprehensive news search
• UTD media and analyst contact database
• Excel that links to a database that is updated in real-time (yes, I used real-time)
• Video camera via a Web browser

One day, maybe one of these ideas will payoff.

iDon'tCare about the iPhone

When the Apple iPhone was announced by Steve Jobs at MacWorld in San Francisco recently, I heard about it in my office, the elevator, on BART and in just about every newspaper. If it wasn't getting enough publicity, Cisco pushed it over the edge by slapping a lawsuit on Apple for the name. This is hilarious.

I like my all-in-ones but honestly how many times have you really ever seen an all-in-one that works just as great with just as much capacity as a single product? Today Tech Chronicles posted videos with spoofs of the iPhone that I thought were pretty funny. Check it out.

Natali Del Conte's Secret New Project

I don't know what Natali's new gig is, but I'm dying to find out. I worked with her when she was in public relations and we're both Trojans. Fight On! I pitched her when she was with the SF Examiner and exchanged a few emails when she was at PC Magazine. But I haven't spoken to her recently. If you've been following the news, you saw Mike Arrington revealed last month on CrunchNotes that Natali left TechCrunch after three weeks. This was followed by a blog in the SF Chronicle that got Natali's side of the story. AppScout says she's working on a "top-secret tech-internet-video-blogging project." I'll probably end up finding out what her new gig is through some blog but maybe she will pick up her cell and reveal the big secret...