Ultimately, I’ve decided that Thunderbird is off my list of good products and I’ll have to stick with the standard Mail product from Apple.  Very disappointing.

First of all, the guy who found the phone had an obligation under the California Civil Code Section 2080 to try and return the phone to its owner.    He obviously figured out he had a prototype on his hands, so the only owner could be Apple.  According to the Gizmodo piece he even rang them to give it back but couldn’t seem to get past their help desk ticketing system.  So at this point, he’s in the clear.

What happens next though, is where I think the police and DA are interested and no doubt why Apple is now calling it “stolen property”.  Under Section 2080, the finder is supposed to return the property to its owner WITHOUT COMPENSATION.  By offering the phone to Gizmodo at a price, the finder has breached the civil code.  Whether the item now is “stolen” or not is up to a court to decide.  The legal trick here is, the law requires he try and return it within a “reasonable period of time”.  How long is reasonable?  Call Apple up and telling them he has their property seems like he’s done his best.  Again, a judge will decide probably what’s reasonable.

As for Gizmodo, this is where it gets interesting.  If the item is deemed to be stolen and they paid for it, then Jason Chen will certainly get done for possession of stolen goods.  He paid for an item that he knew the seller could not have legally been in possession of.  If there is no charge of theft against the guy who found it, then Gizmodo aren’t off the hook – they could still be staring down the barrel of the California Trade Secrets laws.  The DA could make a case that they coerced the finder into selling them the phone and therefore they had misappropriated trade secrets knowingly.  

I think that’s what the police are looking for - they are trying to fill in the gaps between this guy finding the phone, trying to give it back to Apple, Gizmodo getting involved and how he ended up taking money for the phone.  The warrants name Jason Chen and not Gizmodo, so it certainly looks like the DA is going for him personally, which must lead one to believe they are going down the theft path.

This whole thing by Gawker about journalist rights are completely not in question.  The DA would NEVER want to take that on.  This is about a simple, but very high profile case of an “alleged” stolen prototype.

So, if we’re entering this phase of activity on the Icelandic seam perhaps the airline industry should actually ADJUST!  Already there are reports that airlines are in financial trouble because of a disruption that’s lasted less than a week!  Not a very resilient industry.  Someone, be it Boeing or Airbus or even one of the engine maker, Rolls Royce or GE needs to come up with something innovative here.  They need to come up with some kind of engine filter that catches fine particulate matter before entering the engine chamber, but is porous enough to allow proper airflow through the engines.  I’m thinking about something like the equivalent of a lint catcher in a clothes dryer, but on an industrial scale.

On the other hand, this may create all kinds of upheaval in the travel industry and telecommunications.  Suddenly that fast rail train from China to Europe doesn’t sound so silly.  What about large scale ocean traversing catamarans for carrying passengers from New York to London in four or five days – a sailing trimaran has done it just over three and a half days.  This could also be the catalyst for a wider scale acceptance of video conferencing as a means of replacing long distance meetings.  

In terms of the airlines, well, perhaps this is their extinction moment in Europe – natural selection moving into the world of commerce.  The simple truth is that not all airline will go under.  Some will and that’s probably a good thing.  Europe has a complete glut of airlines offering lower and lower discounted airfares.  The survivors will be able to raise their prices for travel within Europe.  Everyone will benefit from this because it will lighten up the airspace issues they are currently having in Europe and also we should start seeing higher capacity numbers.  That is of course unless the European governments dip into their seemingly endless supply of debt and bail these dinosaurs out.

So goes the old saying and this week maybe more than any it applies to our friends over at Twitter.  Less than a week before their inaugural conference, Chirp, they make an announcement that they are buying Tweetie and rebranding it Twitter for iPhone.  There’s a whole debate about whether Fred Wilson (who has a great blog at http://avc.com) signalled it earlier in the week or not, but who cares, that’s a moot point.  The point is, Twitter grew considerably off the back of some really great work by independent developers making awesome clients on every platform.  Companies like Tweetdeck, Twitterrific and Seesmic have pushed the envelope in social network aggregators largerly with Twitter at the centre.  Then, in one single swoop, Twitter cuts them off at the pass – not only are they buying and rebranding a competitor (thus making it the “official” client for iPhone and eventually Blackberry as they announced) but they are going to give it away for free.

This move not only means that these small independent companies will now have to compete with Twitter, but in many respects, Twitter has made it much more difficult for them to earn a living doing it.  Of course, this doesn’t bother Twitter who have their non-advertising, advertising platform coming, “Promoted Tweets” again by the looks of which, none of their developer community will get a taste of revenue-wise.  Eventually, this concept will go “in stream” and it will be interesting to see how that plays out, I doubt it will help developers.

Of course, it then all depends on how the developers themselves react.  Seesmic CEO, Loic Le Meur has come out with a video response on his blog ( http://www.loiclemeur.com/english/2010/04/fck-you-naysayers-twitter-did-not-fck-us-and-just-rocks.html) giving his point of view.  According to Loic, all is good, he still trusts Twitter and they rock.  Well I say to Loic, read the title and first line of this post – less than a week ago, @Ev and @Biz basically rushed in and took a big drink of your milkshake with out giving you so much as a heads up.  Only a fool would be so quick to trust these people again.  Compound that with the fact that they’re now talking about going after URL Shortners (which is a nice little analytics business in my opinion).  Keep your head up Twitpic!  I also think everyone should go back and re-read some of the stuff that Dave Winer (http://scripting.com and @dwiner) was writing about Twitter a few months back.  He pointed out that perhaps having a private company owning the “platform” wasn’t such a good idea and everyone would be better off with something like RSSCloud as an open standard and companies fighting it out in the tools area – I think Dave’s predictions about where this could head look quite prophetic now.

Ironically, a month ago, Arrington was lamenting on TechCrunch (http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/15/twitteruh-oh-not-another-do-no-evil-company/) about @Ev saying how Twitter’s guiding principle was “to be a force for good”.   I don’t necessarily think sandbagging your “partners” in business is being a force for good.  I also think through the prism of hindsight that Fred Wilson saw this PR trainwreck coming and tipped the public to what was coming to protect his investment in Twitter when clearly the management team had severely dropped the communications ball.  

I have a healthy respect for the Twitter guys.  They are two time winners with Blogger and now Twitter.  However, they are now in a new position for themselves – they’ve take a boatload of VC money and to justify their ridiculous valuation they now need to start showing potential acquirers or the market some real revenue.  Nobody values a business making $20m a year in revenue at $1b for long.  I think the next twelve months are going to be interesting for Twitter.  I don’t think it takes much management nouse to spend a bunch of money, innnovate very slowly and give your service away for free.  The challenge will be having built up that massive user base working out a practical way to monetise it at such a level as to keep the valuation high and keep the shareholders happy that a profitable exit is still a likely scenario.  These challenges over the next twelve months will show us how clever these guys really are.

To answer the question, Adobe have release a statement and it is posted on Delimiter at http://delimiter.com.au/2010/04/15/australian-cs5-pricing-adobe-responds/

The statement basically says that they set pricing in regions based on market research, local conditions and their distribution model.  As they didn’t bother to explain it much beyond that, let me have a crack: Adobe are saying, “Adobe can’t be bothered setting up a business of substance in Australia and creating local employment beyond crappy marketing jobs.   However, as fate would have it your economy doesn’t suck, so our market researchers tell us you’ll pay more.”  I think that sums it up nicely.

The statement then goes on to tell us what exceptional value they are delivering and how ACTUALLY, the price isn’t more expensive, its actually CHEAPER!  Here’s how:

• Yes, if you buy one overpriced Suite and move to the Master Collection, that uplift is 20% cheaper than the current smack they deliver you for uplifting to CS4;
• The price of Design Standard is cheaper than it was in CS4;
• Upgrade costs are 5 percent lower; and most importantly,
• They continue to “innovate”!
  

What’s more surprising than even anything is how the carriers have been able to maintain the secrecy.  Surely, if they are going to be offering network access to these devices with the new micro-SIM cards in the next two to three weeks, they must know something, but not a single leak.  Have Apple thrown bags over the heads of senior carrier executives, whisked them off to a darkened room in Cupertino somewhere and chained them to a desk?  

My feelings is that all of this secrecy is bad for us poor consumers in Australia.  We almost always pay a “premium” for Apple products, I reckon we’re going to get slugged this time.  My thinking of course is very simplistic (when isn’t it), if they were going to be offering on par pricing with the US and hot 3G coverage deals, they’d be trumpeting those facts to whip up a further feeding frenzy.  Right now they seem to be wanting all of the good press in the US on the device itself to be their main promotional tool.

So, they’re either going to be late and we won’t see the devices until June (they’ll quote overwhelming demand in the US or something to spin it) or we’re going to get hammered on price and late next week they’ll make an announcement about the iPad’s arrival on April 29th or 30th.

I think sometimes in our own self-depricating way, most Canadians underestimate just how massive Toronto really is.  The GTA is the fourth largest urban centre in North America behind New York, Los Angeles and just behind Chicago.  The GTHA (Great Toronto/Hamilton Area), otherwise called the Golden Horseshoe has over 8m people.  Expand that out to the Quebec City-Windsor Corridor and toss in the Ottawa Valley and you’re talking about 18.5m people in an area where everything is less than a two hour flight away.  Oh, that’s just on the Canadian side of the border too.

Then there is some reality.  Winnipeg with about 700,000 people is small by any standard and probably couldn’t support a hockey team.  That said, Raleigh, North Carolina is smaller with about 400,000 people, however the Raleigh-Durham area has over 1m.  I think Winnipeg is on the bubble, I’d say 700,000 true hockey fans are a better market than 1m college basketball fans for a professional hockey team – let’s face it, the Tar Heels rule that area.

Then there are people suggesting Saskatoon (hello Ice Edge idiots).  The place has 250,000 people.  To give you some perspective, the GTHL (Greater Toronto Hockey League) has 40,000 registered players under the age of 21.  Its just too small – same with Halifax.

As part of our look on reality, the other fact remains that the NHL is too big.  Phoenix can’t support a team in Glendale with 12.1m people in the greater Phoenix area.  Tampa Bay is a debacle.  Atlanta is no better.  Everyone remember the fun that was had with Nashville being sold to a fraudster named “Boots”.  And on and on it goes...

The next piece of the puzzle is that the number of players coming from Europe is diminishing.  The number of Russians playing in the NHL has declined remarkably, the Slovaks and Czechs aren’t producing first rounders anymore.  Many people are citing the impact of the KHL, but that’s nonsense.  Just look at the last Olympics – the Czechs were paper thin, the Slovaks were OLD, the Russians lacked depth and were ridiculously one dimensional and even the Swedes didn’t seem up to their standard.  All up, I think what we’re seeing is a talent pool that’s dying a slow death over there.

I do like what’s happening in the growth of the game in the US – they have plenty of good young talent coming through.  And Canada just continues to be a factory, like Brazil in football (soccer) and New Zealand in rugby.

So why not shrink back to a 28 team league – get rid of 50 marginal players and two bad markets.  At the same time shuffle the deck chairs and get into some good locations like Toronto, Hamilton, Quebec City and dare I say it, Hartford.  Here’s an interesting statistic for you – when Hartford moved to Carolina, they had more season ticket holders than one third of the current NHL teams!  That team moved because Peter Karamanos couldn’t get a free arena from the state of Connecticut.  Overall, the NHL game would be much better off getting back into some hockey markets instead of looking at loser situations like Kansas City and Las Vegas.

But what about the golden goose, US Television?  Its a myth – the NHL has never had nor will it ever have a massive US TV deal.  It does have a MASSIVE TV Deal in Canada.  Why not play to your strengths and expand your core market out to 11 teams of 28?  The NHL is currently in some kind of crazy revenue sharing deal with NBC where the NHL has to do the advertising itself.  What a lame setup that is?  Don’t they run a hockey league?  It is the height of hubris to think you can run an ad agency on the side and get good value.  Then there is Versus – need I say more?  This partnership is worthless.

I think the NHL needs to look to the future.  US Television networks are going the way of the music business and newspapers – the internet is going to kill them.  Why not follow the lead of the Indian Premier League in Cricket and do a deal with Google/YouTube?  Companies like Google, Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo all need content and give you a global distribution platform.  Build apps like MLB is doing where every pitch can be seen on an iPad.  Charge content subscription packages like Gamecentre which is an awesome service.

Its a no brainer decision really and I’d be surprised in they don’t do it.  Hockey is an attendance driven sport.  TV Revenue is not the main revenue source, so it makes sense to put teams in the best drawing markets.  Right now, the NHL is effectively giving away its US national TV rights – so why not negotiate from a position of strength?  Make the TV companies compete with the online companies.  Put it out there, offer global internet distribution rights OR US national broadcast rights.  If companies like NBC or whomever REALLY want the Winter Classic, great, then stump up with money or someone like Google or Microsoft or whomever can certainly chip a hundred million a year in for the right to carry the NHL exclusively everywhere outside of Canada.  Companies like Microsoft and Google are carrying $50b plus of cash on their balance sheets and they need content.  Not only that, they have the innovation capability to make the game the darling of the internet.  Be first, don’t be last!

I’m sitting online, Chrome has a few tabs open, one of them is the Sydney Morning Herald.  I’m reading something in another window, happily minding my own business.  All of a sudden a hiccup and some woman talking about a baby are blasting out my Macbook speakers.  I bring up all my windows to see what’s doing it, flip to Chrome and go through the tabs and there it is, SMH has just decided to start playing an RSVP video ad.  

Not good!  I have no problems with ads on content pages, everyone deserves to get paid for their efforts.  I have no problem with video ads either.  I do object to web pages that just start the video without my consent though and more importantly for everyone involved, it makes me HATE the advertiser.  So SMH and RSVP – you both suck.