Expat Guru

As much as I am disappointed with the Sony Vaio P, I am in LOVE with the Xperia!

I had been looking at the Experia for a while, and the best I found was about $1500 in Costa Rica, and $800 Plus via Amazon, which after taxes and shipping would have easilly hit $1000 or more. I found the Xperia in Guatemala for about $850, and the only real downside is that the OS is in Spanish. Now you are probably asking, “si, but dont you speak spanish,” and my answer is, have you ever seen how messed up anything in Spanish from Microsoft is?

The phone has a slick user interphase, including Panels, an exclusive feature on this phone that enables you to change the startup screen on the fly. The phone has a solid feel to it that says QUALITY, and the style is oh so James Bond. Man, the keyboard, that slides out from under the touch screen is the bomb, and makes messaging on this thing about as pleasant as messaging on my Blackberry. The built in GPS system and other tools are very Bondlike, and provide everything you need to feel “cool and sophisticated.”

The office applications are not bad either, but I must admit that I like the way Documents to Go handles office files more than Microsoft’s own platform. Go figure… It is a little smaller than I originaly thought, but hey… in the world of shrinking cell phones, thats a feature. Each of my tech toys has a name, this one I have dubbed Lightsaber.

The X1 is a solid piece of hardware. My only complaints come with the Windows Mobile 6.1 OS. Microsoft could learn a lot from RIM when it comes to Blackberry OS. On the X1 there are occasional speed problems (especially in responding to dialogues, and the screen occasionally gets out of wack or misaligned, all solved by a quick reboot (so windows…).

So I know you guys have been dying to know what new toys I picked up on my latest trip. Well lets just say I got some bling, and I picked up a toy I have been wanting for a long, long time, but refused to be ROBBED in Costa Rica. That toy cost me about $600 less than the best price in Costa Rica, which shall be the subject of a rant very soon.

Perhaps the most exciting purchase I made…. At least at first, was to buy one of the new Sony Vaio P subnotebooks. I actually got the thing for just a bit more than the U.S. retail price, of $900. While I have not seen it in Costa Rica, I have no doubt that robbersetailers will charge double that when it becomes available.

At any rate it is not worth half the price I paid. With an underpowered 1.33 Mhz Atom processor, 60 GB Hard Drive and 2 GB’s of memory, the Vaio P is a Pig wearing lipstick. Even with a stripped down Windows Vista Home Basic install, it is slow as molasses in the winter. I think I could almost tolerate the ridiculously slow start times, and even the application launches that take an entire lunchbreak. What I cant tolerate is the windows screen redraws that are so bad, they make using the P almost painful. The other day it took so long to launch Outlook that I rebooted the unit. Even with a 4GB readyboost, it is still slow.

I I can not recommend this thing to anyone for anything other than a Starbucks companion (You know, read email, check CNN, etc.) It is perhaps one of the coolest looking pieces of kit I have ever used and never fails to turn heads the way my Macbook Air used to. (I should have kept that machine).

I think the Vaio P has the potential to be a great little machine, perhaps in Rev. 2. For now I cant really recommend that my Tech Bretheren invest in this. Oh and one other bone to pick with Sony, accessories… I mean $250 for a 250 GB hard external hard drive. $200 for a Optical Drive…. Eh… NO! And $90 for a leather portfolio style case that has room for…. Yeah just the P, not even the power cord, is ridiculous. Best to avoid the P series for now.

The IAOP Meeting in Guatemala was fantastic. Once again some of the top outsourcing professionals in the region came together for a couple of days of socializing and strategy sessions that are sure to continue to build excitement in the region.

I was honored with the opportunity to sit on a panel with a group of Industry Heavyweights, and to present a speech about the Call Center Industry in Costa Rica, and my own vision for the region. I am very proud of my role in building the contact center and BPO industry in Central and Latin America, but this was the first time when I have had a chance to sit with peers and discuss the history of the region.

Exciting to see all the things that are happening, including some pretty amazing growth in Guatemala. I am looking forward to watching that growth continue and giving it a gentle nudge when I can. I have not worked in Guate for a couple of years now, but hope some opportunities will come along to do so.

Got this in the mail last week….

Dear David,

I would like to take the opportunity to invite you to the IAOP meeting in Guatemala next month, that you are already well aware of.

Your contribution as a speaker/panelist on this event would be much appreciated. I am envisioning a presentation titled something like:
“Central America: How it all got started – Plus, the Costa Rican Story”

It would be really great to hear your stories about setting up the Acer call center in the 80s in Costa Rica, and just your viewpoint of the last 20, then 10, then 5, and perhaps just the last 2 years of what’s been going on in all the countries and the region as a whole. Your bird’s eye view of it all is something that very few of the conference attendees has, and I think they will benefit plenty from hearing about it.

We can only offer that you come pro bono, but we hope that it is an opportunity that leads to other opportunities for you. We are hoping to have another very succesful chapter meeting like the innagural one in Managua that you attended.

in hopes of your response,

Estuardo

PS: Chris Disher, the Chair of our Central America Chapter, is copied on this email.

–
Estuardo Jose Robles
Business & Economic Development

This is quite an honor. I will be sitting on a panel with some real industry heavyweights. The meeting is April 23rd in Guatemala city. Hope to see some of you there. IAOP or the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals, is a worldwide organization of professionals in the outsourcing industry.

I am loving my new Blackberry Javelin (8900). A month and a half or so ago, I purchased a Blackberry Pearl from ICE, the Costa Rican phone company. I did not want a Pearl, but typical of Costa Rica’s phone monopoly, the Pearl was the only phone they had available. It grew on me, and I finaly got used to using the miniscule keyboard, and predictive text input, but got fed up with switching from English to Spanish every time I had to send a message to someone who did not speak English.

I really never liked the form factor either.

While visiting Honduras last week, I picked up a new Blackberry Javelin, the replacement to the curve, and I have to tell you, it is all I wanted and hoped for. The phone is sleek, light, with a beautiful big screen and the interface is clean and easy to use. I love it, plain and simple.

Of course, when dealing with ICE, there is always a DOWNSIDE to the story. There is currently no data roaming available to users of Costa Rican Blackberrys, UNLESS they have AN OLD account with ICE. According to them, this has something to do with the provider of their new GSM network. So tell me fellow Blackberry fans, what the hell is the point of having a state of the art “berry,” when I cant use it while traveling?

The new website for the Utopia Group is up. After a couple of years of inactivity on our other site, I decided to create a simple and informative site developed by me on my Mac. It is a simple, text based site that seeks to inform those interested in our services, rather than wow them with Flash presentations or graphics. Please feel free to provide feedback.

Crossposted to my personal blog

Today I set out to get some work done on my/our internet presence. Part of my problem has been that we started the Utopia Group with no REAL Web Strategy. The domains were purchased and the not much more than setting up email accounts was done on most of them. The Grupo Utopia Site is woefully out of date in terms of the amount of business we have done, and the things we have accomplished, including playing a MAJOR role in the development of the contact center industry in Nicaragua in the last two years.
The domains I have collected over the years, including:

Grupo Utopia
Solutions Costa Rica
Contact Centers Central America
and my Own personal domain: David Scott Anderson dot net…

Have always been whimsical creations, with little thought to what purpose they would serve. I have invested hundreds of dollars in web software, but I suck as a designer, and getting good web design work done here in Costa Rica is like pulling teeth of a Polar Bear…. OR costa a small fortune.

The Grupo Utopia Website has been my flagship site for years, but it is, as I said, out of date and honestly it has been hard for people to remember the address for email. So some changes are coming, including moving the company site to Utopia Group dot Net. I am also breaking my personal blog, which was at one time one of the top blogs in Latin America, out of my Business Domain, and giving it its own site, (URL to come, as it is in development).

Today I did a little work on cleaning up my domain mess, registering some new ones, and doing a little strategic planning which should show some results over the coming weeks.

And if they do, I will be first in line to buy one…

Future Plans

George Wedding
An open letter to Apple, Steve Jobs and staff:

“…Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter…”

– Thomas Jefferson, 1787

As a former newspaper editor and photojournalist, I am increasingly worried about the sudden collapse of the newspaper industry across America during this sobering economic downturn. In Democratic societies, the free press, long referred to as the “Fourth Estate” for its essential role as an unofficial fourth branch, serves as a watchdog on the three other branches of American government: the executive, legislative and judiciary, as well as on society itself.

Sadly, we may be on the verge of a democratic society without the vibrant free press that Jefferson once described as so essential. Print journalism is failing — and it is an industry that is desperate for a modern delivery system.

I believe an affordable, 10-inch tablet iPod (the iTab if you will) might save professional journalism. A new generation of citizen journalists may fill some of the void being created, but a democratic nation needs trained, professional journalists as well.

Of all the media outlets, including television and radio, magazines and books, it has been printed, daily newspapers that have dominated this oversight role since 1776, largely due to their size, and (until now) the sheer number of local reporters, photographers, graphic artists and editors employed to produce and deliver the news. By comparison, local radio and television news outlets employ relatively skeletal staffs, and largely, can’t do much more than rewrite stories that appear in daily newspapers. Of course, there are many exceptions to this reality, but until recently, it is daily newspapers that have provided the real manpower that ensured the Fourth Estate’s oversight role in society.

As I watched a young couple buy a printed newspaper while in line at the grocery store the other day, I couldn’t help but think that all this is changing. With readership and subscriptions in decline, print advertisements collapsing and hundreds of news professionals being laid off nationwide, this industry is facing a crippling failure. Americans are losing a generation of reliable and essential professional journalists.

At the same time, we’re hearing scuttlebutt on a long-rumored new tablet product that may (or may not) be coming from Apple (I’m betting it is coming). Like the iPhone/iPod Touch, Amazon Kindle and to a lesser extent, Windows-based “netbooks” — a larger, tablet Mac could be the ground-breaking computing device that holds promise to save what’s left of the local news industry.

A low-priced tablet computer in a scaled-up, iPhone/iPod Touch form factor paired with appropriately designed news Web sites could be the “next Killer App” in computing — and the heir-apparent to desktop publishing and laser printing technology of the 1990’s. I like the name “iTab” because it fittingly combines the concept of the modern tablet computer with the traditional heritage of the crusading “tabloid” newspaper of a past era.

Interesting Open Letter…

Read the whole thing. Now not that I think newspapers will be in a position to subsidize this type of device. I mean newspapers are failing all over the U.S., but I think it may offer newspapers another option of getting the news out there in PRINT. My experience with the Kindle iPhone/iPod app demonstrates a world of possibilities. Microsoft and their OEMs have not had much luck with the Tablet concept, in fact I sold my HP, and another friend of mine, a Costa Rican Entrepreneur has had nothing but problems with his. An Apple engineered product:

Could prove to be a very compelling solution.
I always thought that Jobs made a huge mistake in discontinuing the Newton Product line, just when it was starting to show some promise. Apple’s inkwell technology, is far superior to what is available on the Windows side, and yet it is woefully underutilized using graphics tablets in my opinion. I spent $100 for one, and used it about three days before retiring it to my tech graveyard.

A Mac tablet is something I could get enthusiastic about, and perhaps might motivate Amazon to include a Kindle Reader for the Mac as well.

In fact, it is so damned good that I have probably blown about $200 in the last few days of using it. This despite the fact that I have a backlog of must reads that will take me the better part of the next six months to finish.

There are some very nice titles available. Here is a sample of my reading list.

Pro Blogger – Chris Garrett
Million Dollar Consulting – Alan Weiss
Who Stole My Cheese -Ilene Hochberg
Morals and Dogma – Albert Pike 33o
On Writing – Stephen King

Yes, the screen is a bit small, yes the platform is limited… For example I can not download Magazines and Newspapers. But its cool. Add the Kindle capabilities to my Audible account, and I am good to go on reading material. Which is a good thing, since finding English Language books in Costa Rica can be a challenge.

I gave up my iPhone a couple weeks back and moved to a Blackberry, but I bought a 32 GB iPod Touch while in Guatemala back in November of last year, so I am all good. Love the Touch.

One of the things I love about the Touch is that it gives me the same type of capabilities of my old Palm Handhelds (And isn’t that a sad story), with HUGE memory and functionality enhancements. I used to be an absolute Palm fanatic, until they pushed unstable operating systems, and unstable products (Think Palm Lifedrive… Which had HUGE potential, if it would only work for more than a couple of hours without rebooting.)

The touch has become a very cool multipurpose tool for me. Combine it with Mobile Me, and I have a fairly reliable Push solution for my Calendar, Email and Contacts. Its actually over the top cool.

But this is not about my iPod, its about Kindle for the iPhone/iPod. And what I can tell you is that I carry a pretty nice library in my pocket, along with a quite nice PDA and Music/Video player that simply rocks, and does not get knocked for a loop when the calendar changes.

This is a viral video that has been going around for some time now. I find it fascinating. Watch the whole thing.